The Home Front as a ‘Moment’ for Animals and Humans: Exploring the Animal-Human Relationship in Contemporary Diaries and Letters

Abstract

The 1939–1945 war — often called the ‘People’s war’ — is imbued with mythic qualities that show the British on the Home Front in a favourable light.¹ It is a war which people today still want to remember, as evidenced by the range of new memorials to former war workers including ‘Women of World War Two’ in Whitehall; Bomber Command in Piccadilly; ‘Blitz, the National Firefighters’ Memorial’ near St Paul’s Cathedral; the wide range of memorials at the National Memorial Arboretum; or the new memorial in Bethnal Green ‘Stairway to Heaven’.²Richard Overy’s magisterial The Bombing War has persuasively elaborated the implications of seeing the Second World War as a total war that promoted the idea that ‘all citizens had a part to play and encouraged the view that warrior identity was linked to new ideals of the civil warrior.’³ Although the Home Front is key to ‘total war’ nevertheless little research has been undertaken on the all-encompassing nature of that totality through the inclusion, in different ways, of non-human animals. Domestic animals played a large part in the events on the Home Front not least in creating emotional support for a population under aerial bombardment or acting as signifiers of ‘home’ for evacuees.⁴