Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy

Now that the Home Guard had won the War Office’s attention it was determined never to lose it. ‘They are a troublesome and querulous party,’ moaned General Pownall to his diary. ‘There is mighty little pleasing them, and the minority is always noisy.’60 This constant carping was in fact their one reliable weapon. ‘The Home Guard always groused,’ acknowledged one former member. ‘Grousing is a useful vent for what otherwise might become a disruptive pressure of opinion. And in the Home Guard it was almost always directed to a justifiable purpose – the attainment of higher efficiency. “Give us more and better arms, equipment, instruction, practice, drill, field exercises, range-firing, anything and everything which will make us better soldiers”: that formed the burden of most Home Guard grousing.’61 Whenever prominent volunteers did not trust the War Office to act upon some particular request, they would simply go straight to the top and appeal directly to the ever-sympathetic Churchill. Pownall was well aware of which way the wind was blowing: ‘The H.G. are voters first and soldiers afterwards,’ he observed. ‘What they think they need, if they say so loudly enough, they will get.’62

Pownall had never been happy in his onerous role as the Home Guard’s Inspector-General. In October, Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Eastwood63 – a younger man championed by Churchill – took over the Home Guard and the changes continued to come. In November, Eastwood was ‘upgraded’ to the new position of Director-General and handed a more powerful directorate within the War Office.64 The first half of 1941 saw a marked tightening-up of Home Guard organisation, as well as far more active involvement by regulars in administration and training. The first anniversary of the force was marked in May with a morale-boosting message of congratulation from King George VI, who also invited volunteers from various London units to stand on sentry duty at Buckingham Palace.65 In November, it was announced that conscription would be introduced in order to keep the Home Guard up to strength. Under the National Service (No. 2) Act, all male civilians aged between eighteen and fifty-one could, from January 1942, be ordered to join the Home Guard, and, once enrolled, would be liable to prosecution in a civil court if they failed to attend up to forty-eight hours of training or guard duties each month. Once recruited, they could not leave before reaching the age of sixty-five (although existing volunteers had the right to resign before the new law took effect on 17 February 1942).66 This influx of ‘directed men’67 – the opprobrious term ‘conscript’ was avoided – changed the character of the organisation still further, erasing the last traces of the old LDV, moving beyond the original Corinthian esprit de corps and accelerating the transformation of an awkward political after-thought into an integral and well-regarded part of active Home Defence.

Some problems, however, proved more obdurate than others. One of these, as far as the men at the War Office were concerned, was women. Back in June 1940, the government – concerned, it was suggested, that other key voluntary organisations, such as the Women’s Voluntary Service, might in future be deprived of personnel due to increased ‘competition for a dwindling source of supply’68 – had ruled that ‘women cannot be enrolled in the L.D.V.’.69 The decision did nothing to deter the more determined of campaigners, such as the redoubtable Labour MP Edith Summerskill, who proceeded to form her own lobby group, Women’s Home Defence, and argued her case so persuasively and passionately that some of Whitehall’s frailest males branded her an ‘Amazonian’.70 In spite of the fact that Churchill agreed with Summerskill, and in spite of the fact that thousands of women had been contributing to the force from the very beginning as clerks, typists, telephonists, cooks and messengers, the War Office would hold out until April 1943, when, having exhausted all excuses, it finally agreed to relent and permit women to serve, in a limited capacity, as ‘Women’s Home Guard Auxiliaries’.71 ‘It was generally felt,’ recalled one Home Guard officer, ‘that these conditions should have been more generous and that women should have been treated with more consideration. To mention one grievance, they were not issued with uniforms and this, according to rumour, was for some political reason. They were without steel helmets and service respirators, although at “Action Stations” they worked alongside with, and [were] exposed to the same risks as, the men.’72

Weapons, or rather the scarcity of them, represented another persistent problem. Ever since the massive loss of weapons and equipment at Dunkirk, the production of standard military munitions had been fully taken up by the urgent needs of the regulars and nothing could be spared for the part-time force. Spirits did rise in 1941 when the Thompson (or ‘tommy’) sub-machine gun, a formidable weapon familiar to every film-goer from endless gangster movies, was issued, but soon fell again when it was promptly withdrawn and redistributed to the Commandos. Aside from a limited supply of outdated rifles, the Home Guard had to make do with bayonets, a variety of hazardous home-made grenades – such as the Woolworth or Thermos bomb (described by one disenchanted veteran as ‘just a lump of gelignite in a biscuit tin’)73 and the Sticky bomb (a glass flask filled with nitroglycerine and squeezed inside an adhesive-coated sock – ‘when throwing it, it was wise not to brush it against your clothes, for there it was liable to stick firmly, and blow up the thrower instead of the enemy objective’).74 Then there was the Sten gun, a cheaply-made but relatively effective weapon which was only made available at a gun-to-man ratio of one to four. It was summed up by one distinctly underwhelmed recuit as ‘a spout, a handle, and a tin box’.75 There were also such strange and cumbersome contraptions as the Northover projector, which cost under £10 to produce, fired grenades with the aid of a toy pistol cap and a black powder charge, and was likened by one volunteer to ‘a large drainpipe mounted on twin legs’.76 The most despised of all these weapons was, without any doubt, the pike. Although cheeky youths were known to cry out ‘Gadzooks!’ whenever pike-bearing Home Guards marched by, the 1940s version – consisting of a long metal gas-pipe with a spare bayonet spot-welded in one end – bore scant resemblance to its ancient forebears. Journalists dismissed them immediately as ‘worse than useless’ and ‘demoralising’,77 politicians criticised them as ‘an insult’,78 and incredulous quartermasters put them swiftly into storage. The frustration never faded: too many men, for too long a time, found themselves still unfamiliar with firearms.

A third abiding problem was red tape. In spite of the countless War Office assurances to the contrary, the Home Guard grew increasingly bureaucratic. ‘[T]oo much instructional paper – printed, cyclostyled, or typewritten – was produced and circulated,’ recalled one volunteer. ‘There seemed to be a paragraph and subparagraph to cover every tiniest event which could possibly happen, not only to every man, but to every buckle and bootlace. In consequence, the administration of Home Guard units tended to follow the placid, careful, and elaborate course of civil service routine, and many a man felt encouraged to take shelter behind an appropriate regulation rather than think and act for himself.’79 The more that the living reality of war seemed obscured by its paper description, the more enraged the most recalcitrant souls, such as George Orwell, became. ‘After two years,’ he wrote, ‘no real training has been done, no specialised tactics worked out, no battle positions fixed upon, no fortifications built – all this owing to endless changes of plan and complete vagueness as to what we are supposed to be aiming at … Nothing ever happens except continuous dithering, resulting in progressive disillusionment all round. The best one can hope is that it is much the same on the other side.’80

In spite of its myriad imperfections, however, the Home Guard went on to make a genuine difference. Ever since the start of the Blitz in September 1940, it had come to be valued not just, nor perhaps even primarily, as an anti-invasion force but also, and increasingly, as a vital contributor to civil defence – locating and extinguishing incendiary bombs, clearing rubble, guarding damaged banks, pubs and shops, directing traffic, assisting in rescue work, first aid and fire-fighting, and generally making itself useful in crisis situations. Tales of incompetence – often comic, occasionally tragic – would, inevitably, be told and retold (such as the time a bemused platoon from the 1st Berkshire Battalion mistook a distant cow’s swishing tail for some kind of inscrutable ‘dot-dash movement of a flag’, or the occasion when a Liverpool unit’s bid to train on a patch of waste land was thwarted by a gang of small boys who protested that ‘we was playing ‘ere first’),81 but the stories of compassion and courage were legion.82 One Buckinghamshire platoon, it was reported, ‘accommodated, fed and slept in their guardroom approximately 250 mothers and children turned out of their homes through time bombs. Half a dozen tired men of the night guard received and fed the refugees out of their rations, and then with umbrella and bowler hat went to town to do a “day’s work”.’83 Communities were comforted, spirits were lifted, and lives were saved.

For all its invaluable versatility, however, the self-image of the Home Guard remained resolutely that of a fighting force, so as the fears of invasion started to fade, the feelings of redundancy started to form, and it became increasingly necessary for the government to find ways of reassuring the Home Guard that it still meant something, and still mattered. In May 1942, for example, its second anniversary was marked by a host of measures intended to bolster its self-esteem: a day of parades and field-craft demonstrations – ‘Home Guard Sunday’ – was held. Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Paget, the Commander of the British Home Forces, paid public tribute both to the progress that the Home Guard had made, and to the ‘spirit of service and self-sacrifice’ shown by its members;84 the Prime Minister reminded the force that it continued to be ‘engaged in work of national importance during all hours of the day’, and remained ‘an invaluable addition to our armed forces and an essential part of the effective defence of the island’;85 and King George VI announced that, as a sign of his ‘appreciation of the services given by the Home Guard with such devotion and perseverence’, he had agreed to become its Colonel-in-Chief.86 Early the following year, Churchill – fearing that a forthcoming satirical film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, would encourage people to regard the Home Guard as little more than a comical anachronism87 – urged the War Office to find further ways to make the force ‘feel that the nation realises all it owes to these devoted men’, adding that they needed ‘to be nursed and encouraged at this stage in their life’.88 That May, following Churchill’s prompting, the third anniversary celebrations were greater and grander than ever: there was another ‘Home Guard Sunday’ – Churchill had wanted a ‘Home Guard Week’89 – with ceremonial parades throughout the country and a march of 5,000 Home Guards through central London. The King, who took the salute, praised the force for attaining such a ‘high standard of proficiency’, and assured it that, as the Army directed its attention elsewhere, ‘the importance of your role will … inevitably continue to increase’.90 Churchill was in Washington during the time of these celebrations, but he still managed to make the most memorable contribution with a lengthy radio broadcast designed specifically to restore a sense of pride and self-importance within the force: ‘People who note and mark our growing mastery of the air, not only over our islands but penetrating into ever-widening zones on the Continent, ask whether the danger of invasion has not passed away,’ he observed. ‘Let me assure you of this: That until Hitler and Hitlerism are beaten into unconditional surrender the danger of invasion will never pass away.’ Noting that any prospect of invasion hinged on the strength of the forces deployed to meet it, he reaffirmed his faith in the Home Guard:

[I]f the Nazi villains drop down upon us from the skies, any night … you will make it clear to them that they have not alighted in the poultry run, or in the rabbit-farm, or even in the sheep-fold, but that they have come down in the lion’s den at the Zoo! Here is the reality of your work; here is that sense of imminent emergency which cheers and inspires the long routine of drills and musters after the hard day’s work is done.

The Allies, he added, were now moving overseas, leaving the Home Guard with greater responsibility than ever: ‘It is this reason which, above all others, prompted me to make you and all Britain realise afresh … the magnitude and lively importance of your duties and of the part you have to play in the supreme cause now gathering momentum as it rolls forward to its goal.’91

The celebrations and speeches seemed to work, but not for long, and before any more bouquets could be brandished the realities of the strategic situation had started to sink in. During the first half of 1943, it had still been possible to contemplate the possibility of some sudden reversal in Allied fortunes; by the end of the year it had become clear that the Germans, now without their Axis partner Italy, were well on their way to defeat. The Home Guard, as a consequence, gradually lost its sense of purpose. All except the keenest Home Guards came to resent the obligation to surrender their evening hours in order to train for a non-existent battle, and absenteeism grew increasingly common.92

The Home Guard’s long, slow, inexorable decline dragged on into 1944. The fourth anniversary of its formation was duly marked in May with the usual array of strenuously celebratory events; on this occasion, however, the applause failed to distract the men from their misgivings. After D-Day, in June, it was evident to all that what the future held in store was not battle honours but redundancy. On 6 September, it was announced that Home Guard operational duties were being suspended and all parades would from now on be voluntary.93 At the end of the following month came confirmation of the inevitable: the Home Guard was to stand down on 14 November. Although few volunteers were entirely surprised by the decision to disband, many were taken aback by the speed at which it was set to be executed. ‘We learned that, like the grin on Alice’s Chesire Cat’, wrote one embittered volunteer, ‘we were to fade out, leaving no trace of our existence.’94 It seemed for a time that the men would be ordered to give back their uniforms, but Churchill, anticipating the probable public reaction to such a patently mean-spirited act, intervened to cancel the plan, insisting that ‘there can be no question of the Home Guard returning their boots or uniforms’.95

The end, when it came, was met with dignity. On Sunday, 3 December 1944, more than 7,000 Home Guards, drawn from units all over Britain, marched in the rain through the West End of London, and concluded with a parade in Hyde Park before their Colonel-in-Chief, King George VI. ‘History,’ he told them, ‘will say that your share in the greatest of all our struggles for freedom was a vitally important one.’96 That evening, shortly after nine o’clock, the Home Guard, which had begun with one radio broadcast, ended with another – this one delivered by the King:

Over four years ago, in May 1940, our country was in mortal danger. The most powerful army the world had ever seen had forced its way to within a few miles of our coast. From day to day we were threatened with invasion.

For most of you – and, I must add, for your wives too – your service in the Home Guard has not been easy. Some of you have stood for many hours on the gun sites, in desolate fields, or wind-swept beaches. Many of you, after a long and hard day’s work, scarcely had time for food before you changed into uniform for the evening parade. Some of you had to bicycle for long distances to the drill or the rifle range …

But you have gained something for yourselves. You have discovered in yourselves new capabilities. You have found how men from all kinds of homes and many different occupations can work together in a great cause, and how happy they can be with each other. I am very proud of what the Home Guard has done and I give my heartfelt thanks to you all … I know that your country will not forget that service.97

‘The Home Guard,’ sighed General Pownall back in the early days of its existence, ‘are indeed a peculiar race.’98 If, by ‘peculiar’, he not only meant ‘odd’ but also ‘special’, he had a point, because in spite of the lingering imprecision of its status and the nagging inadequacy of its instruction, this unlikely alliance of the wide and rheumy eyed won real respect for its readiness to stand, and wait, and serve. ‘When bad men combine,’ wrote Burke, ‘the good must associate,’99 and the men of the Home Guard did so without hesitation or fuss. At their peak they numbered 1,793,000;100 their gallantry earned them 2 George Crosses, 13 George Medals, 11 MBEs, 1 OBE, 6 British Empire medals and 58 commendations; 1,206 volunteers were either killed on duty or died from wounds, and 557 more sustained serious injuries; they cost little, but contributed much.101 The glory passed them by, but not the gratitude.

CHAPTER II A Cunning Plan

Comedy on television is a lot like comedy in Burlesque. It’s not how funny are you; it’s how many weeks can you be funny? 1

PHIL SILVERS

War is hell. So is TV. 2

LARRY GELBART

It all began, in another way, one day back in the summer of 1967. Shortly before 11.30 in the morning, at the end of May, Jimmy Perry, a 42-year-old actor, was strolling through St James’s Park when, in the distance, he heard the sound of the band playing for the Changing of the Guards. As he drew nearer, he could make out the rows of marching men, smart and sharp in their striking scarlet tunics and their towering bearskin hats. He stopped and watched. The longer he looked, however, the more vivid, in his mind’s eye, seemed a scene from twenty-six years before, when, as a youth, he had stood in much the same place at much the same time and surveyed the rows of oddly shaped, drably dressed men marching rather less neatly but rather more proudly outside Buckingham Palace on behalf of Britain’s Home Guard. It made for quite a contrast. It gave him an idea.

Jimmy Perry had been searching for an idea, the right idea, for some time. His career, so far, had been pleasantly varied. There had been concert parties and Gang Shows during wartime, followed by RADA, Butlins, repertory companies, and nine absorbing years (in partnership with his wife, Gilda) as actor-manager of the Palace Theatre, Watford. His current activity, as a member of Joan Littlewood’s left-wing Theatre Workshop in the east London surburb of Stratford, was providing him with plenty of challenges (such as portraying Bobby Kennedy in Barbara Garson’s US political satire MacBird, and then moving straight on to a role in Vanbrugh’s Restoration comedy The Provok’d Wife), but, nonetheless, he still felt unfulfilled. ‘I was doing all right,’ he recalled, ‘I was earning a living, but, you know, I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. So let’s say I was looking at that point to really establish myself.’3

Although the stage remained, in many ways, his natural habitat – he cherished its traditions and relished its immediacy – he recognised that television, with its massive audience and prodigious output, now represented his best chance to advance. Finding a foothold in the medium was, however, far from easy: in spite of the fact that Perry had already made several small-screen appearances over the course of the previous two years, he was no nearer than ever to making his mark. ‘I needed to get noticed,’ he recalled. ‘I’d been in situation-comedies and bits and pieces, but I was still waiting for the role that would let me show people what I could do. Then one day I thought to myself: “I must have a decent part. I know what – I’ll write my own sit-com, and I’ll write a really good part in it for me!”’4 Writing, at that stage, was regarded purely as a means, not an end. ‘I had no ambition to be a writer. None at all. Writing is hard – acting is blooming easy! I just wanted to establish myself as a performer, an actor, and the only way I thought I could do that was by pushing myself from the writing side.’5

It needed a sharp idea, however, to spark the strategy into life. ‘Nothing came to begin with,’ Perry admitted. ‘I’d written bits of stuff before, but not really much, and I didn’t know what I was going to write about. I just knew I wanted to write a sit-com with a nice part for myself! So I looked, I thought, I looked, I thought.’6 Then came that summer stroll through St James’s Park, and the sight of the soldiers, and the memory of the Home Guard. Perry had been in the Home Guard himself, in the 19th Hertfordshire Battalion, at the age of fifteen. ‘My mother was always fearful of me being out at night and catching cold, but I loved it.’7 Suddenly, all of the old incidents and images came tumbling back into consciousness: the late arrival of the ill-fitting uniform, the odd weapons (wire cheese-cutters, sharpened bicycle chains), the commanding officer who concluded each parade by waving his revolver in the air and shouting, ‘Kill Germans!’, the elderly lance corporal who continually reminisced about fighting for General Kitchener against the ‘Fuzzy Wuzzies’, the long, rambling lectures on how to tackle tanks with burning blankets, the Blimps, the booze-ups, the banter and the bravery. ‘To be alive at that time,’ he reflected, ‘was to experience the British people at their best and at perhaps the greatest moment in their history.’8

Then the idea struck him: ‘The Home Guard! What an idea for a situation-comedy!’9 As he made his way back to his flat in Morpeth Terrace, he started to assess the idea in his mind:

I broke it down. I thought to myself: well, it was important that I wrote about something I’d experienced and understood; and service things are always funny, always popular; and there was that thing about reluctant heroes, you know, people who were civilians in the daytime and part-time soldiers at night; and there was that whole background to it, and the attitude of the British people at that time; and no one had done the Home Guard before, no one had tackled the subject; and I was to be in it. That’s how it started.10

Later that day, during his regular train journey from Victoria to Stratford East, he took out his notebook and scribbled down some ideas. Research began in earnest the following morning:

I thought I’d better brush up on my facts, so I went to the Westminster public library and looked through all of the shelves: nothing, not a single book on the subject. Then I asked a young librarian if she could help me: ‘The Home Guard?’ she said. ‘Never heard of it.’ Astonishing. So I moved on to the Imperial War Museum, and they did have some Home Guard training pamphlets, a couple of memoirs, that sort of thing. But apart from that there was nothing – no reference to it anywhere. The public had forgotten about the Home Guard, and I thought it was time they were reminded of it.11

Devising a basic storyline did not pose the novice scriptwriter too great a problem. ‘Don’t forget I’d run Watford Rep with my wife for nine years, and we did over six hundred plays. I regarded that as my apprenticeship. If you do a fresh play every week, year after year, boy oh boy, do you know how to move actors about. That’s how I learnt my craft. Probably few other writers have had that opportunity, and I like to think that it helped me considerably.’12 His own wartime memories had enabled him to sketch out the situation, but the focus for the comedy was suggested by a 1937 English movie:

I’d been asking myself: ‘Now, what am I going to do with this? What sort of comedy set-up?’ And that Sunday afternoon, showing on television, was Oh! Mr Porter, with Will Hay, Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt – the pompous man, the old man and the boy. And the movie’s great strength was the wonderful balance of these three characters. So I thought, ‘That’s it: pompous man, old man, young boy!’13