Men of the royal air force, the cultural memory of the second world war and the twilight of the British empire

Abstract

In an influential article which appeared in 1996, Bill Schwarz provocatively asserted that, in the postwar reconfiguration of Englishness, “the external determinations were primary, and that from the ruins of the colonial empires across the globe there emerged, among the white populations themselves, a recharged, intensified self-consciousness of their existential presence as white”. The rhetoric of embattled white settlers in Kenya, Rhodesia and South Africa was, in the 1950s and early 1960s, rearticulated in the populist language of politics in the metropole itself. In both domains, a common discourse emerged in which a vulnerable and increasingly victimized white community were betrayed by a political elite who were indifferent to the prospect of imminent racial suicide. With mass immigration into postwar Britain from the Caribbean and South Asia, the colonial frontier not merely came home, but “the language of the colonies was reworked and came with it”.1 Schwarza claim for a common structure of thought among whites in both metropole and colony has been taken up by Frank Mort’s study of moral change in postwar London, in which he notes that press coverage of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya encouraged a “symbolic interaction between images of the disintegration of British colonialism and the domestic world of inner-city areas like north Kensington”.2.