Did Britain really 'keep calm and carry on' in WW2?

Keep calm and carry on has long been held up as the defining spirit of wartime Britain. But was the nation during the Second World War really as united, stoic, and unquestioning as popular memory suggests? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Stephen Casey takes Isabel King through the often surprising reality of Britain's wartime morale. From challenging official narratives to relying on Nazi broadcasts.

Hello Steve, welcome to the History Extra podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. Now When most people think of the Second World War in Britain, they may conjure up ideas of the so called Blitz spirit. or the keep calm and carry on nature of British identity.

But what drew you to write about scepticism instead? It wasn't an inten an intention when I began, actually. I wrote a book about twenty years ago called Selling the Korean War. which looked at all different aspects of the selling of that war. The key element of that was how the battlefield was reported and how censorship and control of the battlefield shaped coverage of that particular war. Then when I was thinking about the literature on Britain, I knew there's been some excellent work on Church's wartime oratory, there's some good books on the Ministry of Information, but I didn't think there was anything that put the whole thing together alongside the military. So that was sort of the working idea. It was really looking at what the government was trying to achieve.

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