David Hayes: What the 1940s Can Teach London's Occupy Movement

David Hayes, deputy editor of openDemocracy, writes each month for Inside Story.

A famous photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral in London shows the great dome of Christopher Wren’s late seventeenth-century masterpiece rising proudly above the smoke of the German Luftwaffe’s rain of fire during the intense bombardment of the city on 29 December 1940 – a living architectural symbol of civic and national resistance to an existential threat.

Seven decades on, the extraordinary protest encampment that has been occupying the vicinity of St Paul’s since 15 October is casting a more unforgiving light on the cathedral and its place at the heart of the nation’s iconography. But the epic days of the 1940s may have something to teach it in return.

The image of the cathedral’s heroic survival amid surrounding destruction captures the mid-point of the sustained aerial assaults on Britain’s industrial cities – “the Blitz,” as it came to be referred to in the country’s copious wartime folklore – that lasted for eight months from September 1940 to May 1941. It was taken by the Daily Mail photographer Herbert Mason from the roof of the newspaper’s building off nearby Fleet Street, carefully retouched to maximise its effect, and presented on the front page on 31 December (right) as “War’s Greatest Picture.”

The photo often features today – in books, exhibitions and media stories – in the company of an equally iconic shot taken by Fred Morley in October 1940, showing a cheery white-coated milkman stepping over the bomb rubble of a working-class neighbourhood to deliver his crate of bottles. This artful stunt by a photographic agency, which also entered the historical record via publication in the Daily Mirror, tells a similar tale of how the visual representation of the war effort was instantly shaped in the interest of reinforcing national morale.

The interweaving of the terrible reality of the Blitz with a compelling narrative of collective defiance and endurance has long been explored, notably in Angus Calder’s pathbreaking book The Myth of the Blitz (1991), Malcolm Smith’s Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (2000), and Juliet Gardiner’s comprehensive The Blitz: The British Under Attack (2010). Yet the protean recycling of these two images in particular, which respectively confirm the “national” and “popular” narratives of 1940–41 – the “battle of Britain” and “the people’s war” – is also testimony to how impervious Britain’s modern memory often seems to the complications of actual historical experience. So glorious and all-encompassing is the portrayal of the originating point that even the hard-won achievements of the decades that followed are experienced as a diminuendo.