GREAT BRITAIN: His Majesty's Respectables

• Share

Last week, as it must to all revolutionary ideas, respectability came at last to Britain's Home Guard.

The Home Guard had not always been respectable. It rose like a garish, un-British emanation from the bomb rubble of 1940's blitz. In those days its members practiced slitting throats with cheese cutters on gloomy Sunday mornings, reached out eager hands for nonexistent tommy guns, concocted tin-can explosives in the basement and took a desperate delight in the macabre techniques of Spanish Civil War guerrillas. But by last week the Home Guard had dressed ranks and counted off: on its second birthday, King George VI himself, the trade-mark of British character, became the Home Guard's Colonel-in-Chief.

Children of desperation, the Home Guardsmen could well receive a pat on their collective head for the way they had grown up. They numbered 1,600,000 men and boys, with a backlog of hundreds of thousands of others who were not so useful (American: good) at drilling but were well prepared to drop their garden tools for hand grenades when the whistle blew.

At Every Hedgerow. Not likely to be confused with the Grenadier Guards, on their regular Sunday drill the Home Guards nevertheless looked like able fighting men. A two-year scrounge for armament had equipped them all with firearms, even if some were ancient fowling pieces. Most of them had uniforms and steel helmets; in the most dangerous invasion zones they had Bofors guns, machine guns, light mobile Smith guns and a thing called the Blacker Bombard, which lobs 14-or 20-pound high explosive shells at moving targets (the Home Guard practiced with old baby carriages) with startling accuracy at 300 yards' range.

The British public no longer laughs at this last line of defense. In the opinion of many an expert, the Home Guard has made Britain almost invulnerable to attack. On the northern moors countrymen patrol day & night. Golf courses in Kent and Surrey are littered with Home Guard barricades to prevent plane landings. At all strategic crossroads Home Guardsmen man pillboxes, road blocks or well-placed tank traps. Behind every hedgerow, at every cottage sill, at every parish well stands a little body of men who believe not only in England but in themselves.

Blimps or Reds? Godfather of this British phenomenon was a leftist—Tom Wintringham, who led the British Battalion of the International Brigade in Spain. Wintringham wanted to teach his countrymen, while there was yet time, the new war technique of infiltration and the organization of a people's army, which he had learned in Spain. Not until May 14, 1940 did he get any official backing. That day the earnest, professorial voice of the then War Secretary, Anthony Eden, appealed over the BBC for unpaid volunteers to prepare for action in the event of invasion. The Government expected 250,000 volunteers, got 1,000,000.

Immediately there arose a hue & cry that Colonel Blimps and toffs with swagger sticks were trying to run the people's army. Others, just as alarmed, shouted that the revolution had come. One Peer of the Realm cried out: "You know, all they plan to do is cut our throats one night."