The ‘Other War’: Subversive Images of the Second World War in Service Comedies – Andrew Spicer

Lieutenant Ribstone (Kenneth Fortescue) “After all, there is a war on.”
Major Poskett (Alfred Marks) “Not here there isn’t.” (Desert Mice, 1959).

Pedlar (Sean Connery) “Don’t you believe in the war at all, Pompey?”
Pompey (Alfred Lynch) “Sure. Sure. I feel sorry for the blokes what get themselves killed. But I look at it this way, most of them didn’t have any say about it one way or another.” (On the Fiddle, 1961). 

In his seminal study The Myth of the Blitz, Angus Calder has shown how an official myth of the Second World War developed, an heroic story of courage, endurance and pulling together which obliterated class divisions and political allegiances, a “myth of British or English moral pre-eminence”.1 This myth was particularly active in the 1950s when, amidst a crumbling empire with Britain visibly losing her status as a superpower, a number of prestigious war films - including Angels One Five (1952), The Dam Busters (1955), Reach for the Sky (1956), Dunkirk (1958) and Sink the Bismarck! (1960) - acted as a consolatory reassertion of national self-esteem through celebrating the heroics of the officer class in winning the war. As with any myth, its hegemony was not absolute, and a number of war films emerged in the latter part of the decade, such as Hammer’s Yesterday’s Heroes (1959), which were prepared to offer uncompromising accounts of the brutality of combat, its moral ambiguities and how the ‘rules’ rarely applied, especially in the Far Eastern theatre of war. The ‘Blitz Myth’ was also contested by films featuring the maladjusted veteran, the ‘damaged man’ psychologically and ideologically unfit for peacetime civilian life, which depicted the war as a traumatising experience. This cycle of films flourished in the war’s immediate aftermath, including Mine Own Executioner (1947) and Silent Dust (1949), but continued, sporadically, throughout the Fifties culminating in The League of Gentlemen (1960).2 

A third challenge to the myth was provided by a cycle of service comedies which depicted the indignities, arbitrariness and gross inequalities of service life from a lower class perspective (the ‘worm’s eye’ view), mocking the pieties of the ‘official’ war films. Service comedies were frequently set during the war, but several, including Reluctant Heroes (1951) and Carry on Sergeant (1958) dealt with National Service, which remained compulsory for all men over eighteen from 1945-63, and helped to universalise the experience of service life amongst adult males during this period. It is no coincidence that the cycle is effectively over by 1963.

This cycle of service comedies - one strand, as discussed below, of a wider cultural corpus that included novels, short stories, plays, comics and radio and television programmes - was highly popular. As service comedy’s low cultural status meant that these films were usually only noticed by the trade press and played to suburban and provincial audiences without the benefit of West End showcasing, their box-office success was often based largely on word-of-mouth, making their popularity all the more impressive. Both Worm’s Eye View (1951) and Reluctant Heroes were huge hits, turning Ronald Shiner into a star, and Private’s Progress, which initiated the second phase, was the third most successful British film released in 1956, while Carry On Sergeant also performed extremely well.3 Their popularity is an indication of a deep seam of irreverence towards militarism and the myth of the Blitz, a widely shared enjoyment of unofficial, alternative images of bloody-minded and pleasure-seeking lower class representations of Britishness that were suppressed by official discourses. This flowering, or perhaps mushroom growth, of service comedy represents an eruption of a deep-seated tradition of non-conformist, carnivalesque hedonism that constantly struggles against notions of duty, sacrifice and stoicism, a struggle that is central to understanding British national identity. 
 
The significance of these alternative images has yet to be recognised: post-war service comedy has not received any critical analysis, symptomatic of the lack of importance accorded to comedy in conventional British cinema historiography.4 In what follows I have been necessarily selective from what is a prolific sub-genre with over forty examples, focusing on the later phase (1956-62), and analysing three representative films - Private’s Progress (1956), Operation Bullshine (1959) and On the Fiddle (1961) - which are set during the war itself and directly engage with the ‘official’ myth.

The Social Context: The ‘Other War’. 

John Ellis’s classic study, The Sharp End, describes the Second World War from the point of view of the ordinary Allied front line soldiers, emphasising the haphazard induction and training they received, which was often a wholly inadequate preparation for the difficult, hazardous terrain and foul climates in which they had to fight.5 Ellis quotes James Jones’s pithy formulation of the common soldier’s mentalité: “I went where I was told to go, and I did what I was told to do, but no more. I was scared shitless just about all the time.”6 Paul Fussell’s Wartime argues that ordinary troops were subject to high levels of deprivation and uncertainty about the aims and purpose of the war. For most, boredom was the “predominant wartime emotion”, and they suffered a constant diet of what British troops referred to as ‘bullshit’, a general purpose term for all those aspects of institutional behaviour that made service life worse than it needed to be. ‘Bullshit’ included sadism disguised as discipline, verbal humiliations, pulling rank, taking petty regulations to absurd lengths, and frequent and unnecessary inspections. Boredom and bullshit were the seedbed for the constant expressions of verbal subversion and contempt which gave vent to these frustrations and resentments.7 The following chant, used by the British Expeditionary Force marching to France in 1939, mingled bitterness and contempt with a fantasy of limitless promiscuity through an inverted patriotism:

I don’t want a bayonet up my arsehole
I don’t want my bollocks shot away,
I’d rather live in England,
In merry, merry England 
And fornicate my fucking life away.8

Boredom, frustration, fear, anger and class-based antagonism about the conduct of the war are the dominant feelings that emerge from the frank interviews with participants carried out by Pete Grafton. A young Glaswegian soldier, arrested for something he did not do and then badgered when he tried to explain himself, causing him to lose his temper and strike an officer, concluded that ‘“This army’s no what I thought it was.’ I just folded up my sleeves and said ‘Right, there’s two wars here. Let’s get intae it.’”9 This notion of ‘two wars’ was a powerful metaphor for the deep divisions that remained, indeed which were often accentuated, during wartime, and became central to the remembrance of the war itself.  

A keen sense of the indignities of service life with its rigid hierarchies was kept alive by the experience of two years National Service, which also plunged the recruit into a ‘total institution’ where he was regimented from dawn to dusk. Rather than teaching discipline, fostering patriotism and inculcating team spirit, National Service was, as summarised by B.S. Johnson, “tedious, belittling, coarsening, brutalising, unjust and possibly psychologically very harmful”.10 The result was an insolent rebelliousness: “The Army taught me how to fight against authority. Only when you have lived within an authoritarian system can you learn how to fight it”.11 David Morgan recalled that: “Scarcely a day would pass without some parody of a drill sergeant or some reference to the inherent absurdity of service life as compared to civilian life.”12 As one overview study notes: “Not unnaturally, a system based on rigid rules, many of which were palpably absurd ... [e]ncouraged the art of ‘skiving’”.13 “Skiving”, as one ex-National Serviceman recalled, “is an Army tradition. Any soldier spends most of his time working: but what he is working on is evolving means of avoiding work. A good skive always excites admiration”.14 Occasionally the dream of being billeted in some remote region, or being forgotten altogether, would come true. Such was the case of four airmen stationed at RAF Ferryside in Carmarthen who lived an idyllic life, sharing their rations with the local people “in return for home-cooked pies and cakes”. Alas, “[i]t was all too good to last and retribution came in the shape of an officer making a casual and unexpected visit while the little group was sitting down to its evening meal.”15

Fussell argues that servicemen were convinced that accounts of the ‘real war’, or what I have termed the ‘other war’, stories of boredom, resentment, a dreary nothingness or a life constrained by bullying and sadism, would never find the light of day, such was the power of “optimistic publicity and euphemism”.16 However, a vehicle for those emotions was available: service comedy, which, like comedy in general, “offers both producers and audiences a pleasurable mode of dealing with socially or sexually repressed desires or fears in an acceptable manner, and it safely displaces sensitive social or personal issues into the realm of fantasy by smothering them with laughter.”17 Memories of the war itself or of National Service (including conflict zones like Kenya and Malaya) created a receptive context in which these service comedies could work. 

Service Comedy and the Carnivalesque

Service comedy forms part of a broad tradition of working-class comedy which provides a cultural space for the tribulations of the lower classes and the need to ‘look after Number One’ in the face of vindictive and petty authority. Its appeal, as Orwell noted, was to “your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul”. This ‘unofficial self’ is cowardly, lazy, self-interested, devious and dedicated to bodily pleasures.18 One archetype was Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik (1921-23), the adventures of the ‘little man’ battling against pompous authoritarianism whose actions are ambiguously motivated, either stupid or devilishly cunning, which became an international success after it was translated in 1930. But its cultural roots are much deeper, going back at least to Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2 and Falstaff’s motley band of thieves and drunkards. This notion of an ‘unofficial’, potentially subversive cultural stratum is best understood through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, a utopian vision of the world seen from below. The carnivalesque is a hybrid, unruly, exuberant world where identity is multiple and mobile. It has a dialectical relationship to official culture, which it inverts or mocks.19 Bakhtin argued that laughter could undermine the “fear and piety” audiences experience before “distanced” (venerated or revered) subject matter, by bringing it close up thereby within the everyday, unheroic world “a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides.”20 Applying Bakhtin’s ideas, we can understand service comedy as a carnivalesque inversion of the ‘official’ war films, bringing that epic, distanced world into an over-familiar proximity where it appears ridiculous. Service comedy is therefore best understood as a form of cultural subversion rather than direct social protest. 

Service comedy on screen has its roots in the bodily-based visual comedy of music hall sketches and goes back at least to the First World War with Pimple Enlists (1914), and The Better ‘Ole or, The Romance of Old Bill (1918) based on a successful play. In the Twenties and Thirties this tradition was kept alive by popular comedians including Leslie Fuller, who played a burly working-class simpleton in such films as Kiss Me Sergeant (1930); Ernie Lotinga, who played an anarchic, anti-authoritarian and belligerent figure, Jimmy Josser, in Josser Joins the Navy (1931) and Josser in the Army (1932); and Sydney Howard, the put-upon ‘little man’ who endures humiliations but finally triumphs in Splinters in the Navy (1931) and Splinters in the Air (1937).21 During the war, Tommy Trinder, Arthur Askey, George Formby and Frank Randle carried on this tradition, poking fun at those absurdities of service life that found no place in exhortatory epics such as In Which We Serve, but within the context of broadly patriotic films which celebrated pulling together and seeing it through.22 

The sub-genre returned, at the same time as the official war films, in the late Forties with B features made on shoestring budgets: Hal Monty’s Bless ’Em All and Skimpy in the Navy (both 1949), and Worm’s Eye View (1951) produced by Byron Films, where Ronald Shiner played a sharp, quick-witted Cockney spiv in khaki. It was a case of films catching up with popular taste, as R.F. Delderfield’s play about a quintet of RAF men billeted at a boarding house on the Lancashire coast during the war had become a West End institution, running continuously for a record five and a half years from December 1945.23 Byron quickly followed its success with Reluctant Heroes (1951), an adaptation of a Whitehall farce which ridiculed National Service with Shiner playing the barking sergeant. The trade press noted the appeal of the deep familiarity of the jokes and situations here given a topical gloss. After a period in which service comedy was displaced by other forms - domestic comedy and the ‘Doctor’ films - it returned in the late Fifties when Private’s Progress (1956) was the first of a more vigorous and sustained second cycle. Norman Wisdom’s waning popularity revived with his first service comedy, The Square Peg (1958), in which the little man triumphs over the Nazis. It is no surprise that the ‘Carry On’ series was launched on its triumphant way by a service comedy, Carry on Sergeant, based on a Delderfield play, The Bull Boys.

In addition to the West End stage and novels, screen service comedies drew upon radio, and later television, programmes, including the Goons’ Down Among the Z Men (1952). The wartime radio show Mediterranean Merry-Go-Round/Middle East Merry-Go-Round gave rise to two highly popular series, Much Binding-in-the-Marsh, a farce about an RAF station that lasted for six years (1947-53), and Waterlogged Spa depicting a naval shore base at Sinking-in-the-Ooze.24 Their successor was The Navy Lark, set on Boonzey Island, an inshore naval base, another forgotten community of the indolent and the fly, that ran for over eighteen years from 1959 to 1977. Its impact was such that producer Herbert Wilcox sought to buy the rights after the third episode, releasing a film version in October 1959. 25 Granada Television’s The Army Game (1957-61), set in a transit and surplus ordnance depot at Nether Hopping, was also extremely popular. 26 Hammer’s spin-off, I Only Arsked!, which retained most of the television cast, was released in 1958. Other television series followed. 27 

As is customary with popular fiction, service comedy uses stock character types and a limited number of scenarios in which the primarily visual humour is leavened with some verbal wit, either in repartee or one-liners. The main types are the Fool and the Rogue which both have a traditional licence to mock constituted authority and were very active in postwar comedy. 28 Fools were well-meaning but accident-prone and idiotic, either working-class ‘little men’ (Norman Wisdom, Brian Rix or Kenneth Connor), or upper class ‘silly-asses’ (David Tomlinson, Leslie Phillips and Jeremy Lloyd). Rogues were almost invariably Cockney wide-boys - Shiner, Richard Attenborough, Alfred Lynch and Harry H. Corbett - always looking for an opportunity to dodge work or make money. Repeated set-piece scenes, which punctuate the often loose or episodic narratives, included the inept drill or parade; the camp concert (often the vehicle for comedians to display their talents); the catastrophe when some device or piece of equipment blows up or malfunctions; and the unexpected inspection or the premature return of an officer which wrecks elaborate stratagems. Service comedy always constructs an ‘alternative community’ which protects its members against the ravages of institutional demands. Up the Creek (1958) and The Navy Lark, for instance, are idyllic fantasies of the forgotten unit fully integrated with the local populace. Desert Mice (1959) has an unusual take on this paradigm. Major Poskett’s North African paradise, invoked in the first epigraph, is disrupted by the arrival of Sid James’s talentless troupe, Chuckles & Co, a skit on the awful intrusiveness of ENSA entertainment.

These types and situations are carnivalesque inversions of their equivalents in the official war films. Some service comedies were direct parodies. In The Night We Dropped a Clanger (1959), Brian Rix plays both the pompous officer hero Wing Commander Blenkinsop and the craven Arthur Atwood who has to take his place, a burlesque of I Was Monty’s Double (1958). Very Important Person (1961) is a sustained, often very funny, parody of the POW cycle initiated by The Wooden Horse (1950). In order to underline the distance between the official myth and the reality of what actually went on, several service comedies open with a sham paean to wartime unity. Launder and Gilliat’s Joey Boy (1965), perhaps because it came very late in the cycle, is the most savage. The opening, with its stirring music, stentorian voice-over and montage of actuality footage, evokes the Blitz Myth of a united Britain - “working together in one supreme self-sacrifice and national effort for victory” - only for this to be instantly subverted by a cut to a well-dressed spiv in a rakish homburg flogging “nylons, straight from the States”. This ironic and corrosive critique of the official myth is nowhere more explicit than in the film that initiated the second cycle, the Boultings’ Private’s Progress. 

Corruption at all Levels: Private’s Progress 

Private’s Progress’s advance publicity trumpeted “The film THEY didn’t want made” and the opening and ending flaunt its iconoclastic status: “the producers acknowledge the official cooperation of absolutely nobody”; Private’s Progress is “respectfully dedicated” to “all those who got away with it”. The opening uses a mock exhortatory voice-over, with its Churchillian rhetoric and sententious Shakespearean reference: “1942 and Britain is at war. Not only on the battlefield but on the farms, in the factories and in the home, and in the hearts and minds of every one of the men, women and children crowded onto this island, this precious stone set in a silver sea.” This is accompanied not by actuality footage, but by an animated cartoon sequence, provided by the Halas and Batchelor studio, which shows the crushing weight of bureaucracy apparently required to wage ‘total war’. The next graphic depicts the largest ever British Army numbering 1,683,292.5, at which point there is a quizzical voice-over interjection, “You can’t have half a man”, before a cut to Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael) in his medical parade prior to call-up, the half-man of the statistic, too shy to reveal his bottom half. Stanley, wrenched from his Oxbridge college and admitting he “never felt less aggressive in my life” is “not the right type” for military service. Stanley’s refined and delicate, ‘feminine’ sensibility prompts him to report to the MO when “feeling a little fragile”, one of several hilarious scenes that document his woeful ineptitude and lack of conventional manliness. Stanley, the bane of Sergeant Sutton (William Hartnell) who tries to mould him into a fighting man, is a recognisably parodic version of the eager cadet, that key signifier of acceptable young British masculinity in the serious war film. The paradigm example is Donald Sinden in The Cruel Sea (1953), who grows to resolute manhood under the stern but watchful eye of his commanding officer, played by Jack Hawkins. Through Hartnell’s presence, older members of the audience would recognise the ironic references back to The Way Ahead (1944), an official Army recruitment film sponsored by the Ministry of  Information, in which a disparate band of men are turned into an effective unit with Hartnell as the hectoring but good-natured sergeant, loyally assisting the benign but effective commanding officer played by David Niven.  

Stanley, after failing officer selection, is plunged into the twilight world of the holding unit, recognised as the place where petty bureaucracy and meaningless tasks flourished and boredom and inactivity were the order of the day. Stanley’s hut, led by ‘Coxie’ (Richard Attenborough) the working-class Rogue who has worked out every fiddle going, is composed of experienced idlers and loafers whose sole object is to look after Number One. They represent an alternative community, a parodic version of the varied cross-section of recruits, a nation unified in diversity, which inhabited the official films. The unit’s commanding officer, Major Hitchcock (Terry-Thomas), is a well-meaning Blimp, too self-regarding and lazy to do more than occasionally bluster at this “absolute shower”. In a crucial scene the exasperated Hitchcock slips away from the barracks to see the matinée performance of In Which We Serve, that icon of inspirational war films. As he gazes around, he realises that not only is the audience composed mostly of his men who should be on duty, but that virtually no-one is concentrating. Only the ever-anxious Stanley is watching, puffing furtively on his cigarette, not sure what attitude to assume, uncertain of his real identity in wartime.

The key trope of Private’s Progress is the link forged between the lower class wangler Coxie and Stanley’s Uncle Bertie, Major Tracepurcel (Dennis Price), the sinister upper class Rogue for whom “war is a time of opportunity”. Their bond represents the ruthless self-interest that unites all strata of British society. Tracepurcel has devised Operation ‘Hatrack’, ostensibly to ‘rescue’ art treasures plundered by the Nazis, but in fact made for private gain and therefore a dark double of the daring raid for a noble purpose beloved of the ‘official’ war films. Tracepurcel and his driver Cox disappear, faking their own deaths to evade detection. As ever, Stanley is left as the innocent dupe, the khaki Candide, adrift in a corrupt and heartless world. Only the final scene back in his varsity rooms reveals that the authorities have caught up with the reprobate pair. 

Private’s Progress was based on an established success - Alan Hackney’s 1954 novel was already in its sixth reprint - which the trade and popular press understood was based on well-known jokes and scenes that would be “more recognisable to the vast majority of men in the last war than all those courageous films about raids and parachute drops.” 29 The Boultings’ reputation ensured that their service comedy was reviewed extensively in the quality press where it was also welcomed. Derek Granger applauded its “wholly estimable aim of putting paid to the solemn British war film for ever. Instead of the stiff upper lip and derring-do we are sucked down into that submerged but very recognisable war-time inhabited almost entirely by malingering scroungers in the barrack room and thick-skulled temporary gentlemen in the mess ... This is a picture which possibly reflects quite a lot of a few people’s war and a little bit, surely, of almost everybody’s.” 30 Dilys Powell judged it “the perfect antidote to the high-falutin about war. It is the unheroic record of the hermit-crab combatant, the man who never wanted to have ‘much of a war’; nearly eleven years after VE day it is a relief to find this deplorable character celebrated on the British screen, which has given so long an innings to steel nerves and iron jaws. Indeed I wished that Private’s Progress had gone the whole hog and shown the triumph of the scrounger and the leadswinger.” 31

    Private’s Progress was the film through which the Boultings aligned their own deracinated middle-class dissidence with popular taste, combining a populist irreverence with a critique of middle-class values. In locating the emergence of anarchic impulses during the war, the dark underbelly of ‘our finest hour’, the Boultings prepared the ground for a further six satires, notably I’m All Right Jack (1959) where Tracepurcel and Cox were reunited as amoral captains of industry, that subjected other British institutions to the same jaundiced scrutiny, documenting the deep disappointment that the twins felt after postwar hopes for radical change had evaporated. 32 In their view comedy was the “force most destructive of injustice and ignorance” that could expose the culpability of all classes in this breakdown of moral order. 33

Khaki Sex: Operation Bullshine

Operation Bullshine (1959) was, like Light Up the Sky (1960), set on a remote battery station during the war. But whereas the later film was a nuanced, tragi-comic exploration of the vicissitudes of male comradeship under stress, Operation Bullshine is a riotous farce celebrating the fighting female. It also employs an ironic opening in which black and white documentary footage of 1942 and an accompanying voice-over - “In the darkest days of the Second World War, in her hour of peril and need, Britain prepared to meet the invader with unflinching courage. And who supplied the courage? Who supplied the fighting spirit, the will to win that brought us through the darkness and into the light of hope?” - is interrupted by sudden cut to a Technicolor shot of a boisterous ATS regiment marching behind its fearsome Commander Maddox (Fabia Drake) with her bulldog mascot. At this point the song ‘Girls in Arms’ bursts onto the soundtrack: “It’s so exciting to prepare the girls to do the fighting ... You’ll agree, when you see, how they display their charms ... Those wonderful girls in arms”. This song, and the shot of two squaddies ogling the women through binoculars, might suggest another typical portrayal of women in service comedy as small-minded, well-endowed objects of sexual desire, and there are numerous shots of the women undressing for the male gaze. However, the original screenplay by Anne Burnaby, has, like many of her other scripts for ABPC, a strong feminist undercurrent. Operation Bullshine, as Sue Harper argues, is a “joyful celebration of female bad behaviour”. 34 In particular, Burnaby seems to be intent upon rescuing the image of the ATS, which although commended by Churchill for their contribution to the war effort, had the reputation of being ‘Officers’ Groundsheets’. “She’ll be wearing Khaki bloomers when she comes” was, according to John Costello, a wartime refrain that “loaded with lasciviousness ... was one of the British soldiers’ favourite ways of welcoming the ATS units in the early years of World War II”. 35 In Operation Bullshine it is reappropriated by the women themselves, sung lustily in the shower by Ruby Cox (Dora Bryan) as a way of celebrating their youth, freedom and sexual energies. Burnaby’s presentation of the ATS comes much closer to the recollections of ATS women themselves who admitted that they “played dangerously and talked dirty” and who were “eager to be having as much sex as possible”, but on their own terms. 36 

Of course, Burnaby’s script is constrained by censorship restrictions and the overall studio policy of ABPC to produce wholesome family entertainment; therefore the sexual encounters are coy rather than frank. The central narrative concerns the efforts of glamorous Private Marge White (Carol Lesley) to get her man, Lieutenant Gordon Brown (Donald Sinden), known as ‘Killer’ because of his devastating sex appeal. When Marge goes bathing at night knowing that Killer is there and he admonishes her with the standing order that she must be under the supervision of an officer, Marge presses close against his chest murmuring “You’re an officer. Come on, supervise me.” A whole world of delicious innuendo is contained in the emphasis placed on “supervise”. Killer’s libido is curbed by the unexpected arrival of his wife Betty (Barbara Murray) at the battery; her presence has to be kept secret because married couples could not serve in the same unit. The battle of the women climaxes in the Browns’ London flat, Betty denouncing her husband as a “khaki Casanova”, only for the battery commander, Major Pym (Naunton Wayne), to arrive at the wrong moment and think he has stumbled into a love nest: “Have you got the rest of the battery in there?” he blusters. In the end the women settle their differences, and, on returning to the camp, join in the desperate manoeuvrings to get ready for the Brigadier’s inspection. The final scene, in which both sexes co-operate in the successful shooting down of an enemy fighter, is nicely undercut when the women rush across the field in competition to have first go at the pilot, who surrenders eagerly.

Operation Bullshine was greeted as a light-hearted romp full of “evergreen gags lightly tinged with sex” and “wholesome fooling”. 37 However, seen historically, it provided a very different presentation of women from the noble, asexual and self-sacrificing wives and sweethearts of the official films played by Rosamund John, Celia Johnson or Virginia McKenna. Bullshine’s women are as eager as the men to create distractions from dull routines, to circumvent petty regulations and to have a good time. Their energy and high spirits are partly derived from their liberation from the dull routines of domestic drudgery - even sensible Betty will not wash dishes because she “joined up to avoid that sort of thing”. If 819 Battery is not quite the fantasy of ‘merry England’ where everyone can “fornicate their fucking lives away”, it is a carnivalesque world that uses comedy to register some important truths about what went on in the war and who helped to win it. 

The Rogue as Anti-Hero: On the Fiddle	

On the Fiddle (1961) was adapted from another Delderfield service comedy, Stop at a Winner, which, like Worm’s Eye View, celebrated the triumph of the chameleon Rogue who can mould his identity to any circumstances. However, in this instance, Delderfield, who provided the screen treatment of his own novel, retains its broad canvas rather than concentrating all the action in one enclosed community. On the Fiddle charts the picaresque wartime adventures of two outsiders, Pedlar Pascoe (Sean Connery) the muscular, slow-witted gypsy who has volunteered as he regards the RAF as a place where you get “regular grub and a place to sleep”, and Cockney wide-boy Horace Pope - ‘Pompey’ - (Alfred Lynch) who after being enlisted accidentally feels that he’s been ‘shanghaied’. As a slum child Horace feels no loyalty to King and Country - “Suppose Hitler don’t win the war. We might be stuck here for years and years” - but consoles himself by adapting his entrepreneurial skills to a new context. Pompey has no illusions about how the war is being fought: “Everybody’s watching out for himself ... It’s only honest if you make money out of it. Everyone’s on the fiddle.” 

In each new situation - the Non-Effective Pool at Blackrock where airmen who are not being trained for combat are assigned general duties, a transit camp, a maintenance station at Craddock Wood, active service in Northern France - Pompey’s fertile brain devises an imaginative scheme to avoid danger and turn a profit. At Craddock Wood, the pair enter what is a ready-made ‘alternative’ community, a “snide’s holiday”. Corporal Gittens (Bill Owen), his feet on the desk, looks up lazily from his Western comic to explain to the new ‘erks’ that the CO is “courting a rich widow at the big house and only looks in Tuesdays and Thursdays”, the Adjutant is training to be a parson and therefore buried in his books, the Sergeant is a snooker champion and only leaves the NAAFI once a week, “and on top of that there’s two judys to every erk on the strength”. The one area where Pompey and Pedlar can make their mark is to improve the food, for a price, and the pair set to work in the cookhouse. The only problem is the ‘unnecessary’ and officious inspections of staff officer Flora McNaughton (Eleanor Summerfield). Having decided her problem is sexual frustration - “all high-strung and unhappy” - Pompey sets Pedlar to work. In a beautifully played scene he seduces the reluctant yet eager Flora and the pair get extended leave passes. 

Pompey’s most accomplished fiddle, of which he is justly proud, is to renovate the pub near their next posting. Complete with raunchy barmaids (one is Barbara Windsor) brought down from London, it becomes a money-spinning mecca for both British and American servicemen. Its success ensures Pompey’s comeuppance in the form of his American rival - Sergeant Buzzer (Alan King) - who, unhappy about the competition, gets the pair posted overseas. Pompey, in an impassioned moment of patriotism, remarks bitterly: “There’s Yanks for you. It was our war wasn’t it? Ours and the Jerries. Why did the Yanks horn in?”. But Pompey again works the situation to their advantage as he and Pedlar sell scarce commodities to an adoring local populace in the Ardennes.

After they stray behind enemy lines, the comic tone alters. Rather than the sardonic farce of Private’s Progress’s Operation Hatrack, encountering the enemy in On the Fiddle becomes the occasion for the brutal realities of combat to intrude. Pompey, who, as the epigraph quotation shows, believes not in patriotism but natural justice, kills a German who has just shot an American soldier and is immediately sick. Pedlar, who always wanted to fight the enemy, seizes the moment and displays great courage and skill in defending their position. He is proud of their achievement, but Pompey is disconsolate that “three years capital” has gone up in smoke when their lorry is incinerated. The tone lightens again when the pair are decorated by the Americans for bravery - forcing the British to ignore their list of misdemeanours and “chip in a gong” - and sent home as war heroes. They return to the pub which Pompey has sized up as his future, telling the biddable owner (Wilfrid Hyde White), that it just needs a local attraction to bring in the punters: “We’ll search the neighbourhood for some Roman ruins. In fact I know a bloke in London who makes ‘em.” Pedlar, anxious that it should be a proper home and that no-one suffers, returns with Iris (Ann Beach) and Pompey’s illegitimate child, the by-product of a liaison forged during an earlier dodge selling ‘surplus’ RAF meat to Iris’s father the local butcher (Stanley Holloway). “Gawd love a duck” mutters the quondam bachelor as he is handed his son in the expectation that he will now lead a conventionally respectable life. This was a neat ending, perhaps at the suggestion of the censor, but it lacks the picaresque punch of Delderfield’s novel. Here, demoralised by demobilisation, which means that they will have to pay for things, the pair decamp to America, “a Fiddler’s Paradise” in Pompey’s view, all expenses paid by a still grateful US government.38  

On the Fiddle was one of the rare examples of service comedy that was reviewed positively by the Monthly Film Bulletin: “Lynch takes the trouble to create a real character not a caricature ... Connery is almost equally believable. His slow, conscience-ridden and rather gormless Pascoe is the ideal foil for Pope’s quick-wittedness.” 39 Their engaging performances create an inverted image of the ‘brains and brawn’ exalted in The First of the Few (1942), representing a carnivalesque underclass which emerges in the extraordinary conditions of wartime. Rather than the relentless cynicism of Private’s Progress about the conduct of the war, On the Fiddle was Delderfield’s celebration of the resourcefulness of the dispossessed classes for whom the war is indeed a ‘time of opportunity’. In the great tradition of working-class Rogues, nobody is really harmed by their schemes, which usually have the effect of allowing ordinary people to have a better time. As the central figure, Pompey emerges as an attractive, vibrant and likeable anti-hero. Adaptable, knowing, unencumbered with much ethical baggage, he is a man for the new age of  consumerism, dedicated to giving the punters what they want. Pompey, like Joe Lampton in Room at the Top (1959), was not part of the officers’ war, but their brains and energy have been sharpened by their wartime experiences and both now want to inherit the peace. 
  
As Vincent Porter has argued, the most successful Fifties’ comedies mocked established rule-bound institutions and their “imposition of unreasoning and unreasonable authority”, calling for a more flexible way of operating which could be seen to be in the interest of the working and lower-middle classes rather than the old guard. 40 Service comedies were an important part of this process, attacking British society’s most antiquated, hide-bound and authoritarian institutions. Even more importantly, through their inversion and mockery of the official war film, they undermined the partial and flattering version ‘official’ films constructed of the Second World War as the triumph of a virtuous middle class. Service comedy could critique this myth in its entirety (Private’s Progress), but it could also celebrate those who had been excluded from that myth: the ‘liberated’ woman (Operation Bullshine) or the underclass Rogue (On the Fiddle). In that way the sub-genre provided an important space for alternative images of the British at war, which refused to allow working class attitudes and experiences to be entirely written out from the dominant discourses and included a whole range of ‘unacceptable’ masculine types, centrally the Fool and the Rogue, but also some that I have not had the space to examine, the censorious intellectual and the fey ‘gay Fool’, played by Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey respectively in Carry on Sergeant. 

The relationship between service comedy and the ‘official’ war films was clearly symbiotic: both were popular during the 1950s and declined in the 1960s. This relationship demonstrates the existence of ‘two wars’, the real war experienced by ordinary servicemen and the one promoted in official discourses. The popularity of both cycles of films showed that there was a profound need for both: the desire for a comforting, uplifting and victorious image of the war, but an equal desire for an alternative image that celebrated the largely lower-class arts of anti-authoritarian rebelliousness and individual hedonism. This struggle over the meaning of the war was absolutely central to this phase of British national identity and should encourage a re-examination of the 1950s as a contest between these antithetical forces rather than the decade of dull conformity and consensus that has, for too long, dominated conventional accounts. 

Notes

1	Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), p. 2 and passim. 
2	Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 161-77. 
3	See the annual round-ups of ‘Box Office Winners’ in Kinematograph Weekly, 20 December 1951, p. 5; 13 December 1956, p. 6; 4 December 1958, p. 17. 
4	One or two individual films - notably Private’s Progress - have been discussed, but not in the context of this sub-genre. 
5	John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (London: Pimlico, 1993). 
6	James Jones, World War II (Ballantine Books, 1975), quoted in Ellis, op. cit., p. 102. 
7	Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 79-95, 129, 139, 195-207, 263-68, 291. 
8	Quoted in John Costello, Love, Sex and War: Changing Values 1939-1945 (London: Pan Books, 1986), p. 121.
9	Young Glaswegian man, quoted in Pete Grafton, You, You & You! The People Out of Step with World War II (London: Pluto Press, 1981), p. 44. 
10	B.S. Johnson, ‘Introduction’ in B.S. Johnson (ed.), All Bull: The National Servicemen (London: Quartet Books, 1973), p. 14.
11	Bill Hodsworth in ibid., p. 92.
12	David Morgan, “It Will Make a Man of You”: notes on national service, masculinity and autobiography, Studies in Sexual Politics No. 17 (University of Manchester, 1987), p. 38.
13	Trevor Royle, The Best Years of Their Lives: the National Service Experience 1945-63 (London: Michael Joseph, 1986), p. 111. See also the recollections in Peter Chambers and Amy Landreth (eds), Called Up: The Personal Experiences of Sixteen National Servicemen, Told By Themselves (London: Allan Wingate, 1955), Mike Baker, The Last Intake (London: Temple, 1995) and E.G. Barraclough, National Service: An Insider’s Story (London: Pentland Press, 2001).  
14	Trev Leggett, in Johnson, All Bull, op. cit., p. 274.
15	Royle, The Best Years, op. cit., p. 112. 
16	Fussell, Wartime, op. cit., pp. 267-68. 
17	Vincent Porter, ‘The hegemonic turn: Film comedies in 1950s Britain’, Journal of Popular British Cinema No. 4 (2001), p. 81. 
18	George Orwell, ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, in Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), pp. 167-78. 
19	M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). For an informative discussion of Bakhtin’s ideas see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 1-26 and passim. 
20	M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, tr. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 23, quoted in David Sutton, A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy 1929-1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), p. 31. 
21	See Sutton, A Chorus of Raspberries, op. cit., pp. 104-17. 
22	For a recent analysis of wartime comedies see Robert Murphy, British Cinema and the Second World War (London: Continuum, 2000), pp. 33-53.
23	R.F. Delderfield, Overture for Beginners (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1970), pp. 218-19. 
24	Andy Foster and Steve Furst, Radio Comedy 1938-1968 (London: Virgin, 1996), pp. 78-85. Michael Paris has shown how popular comics in the 1950s retained a powerful strand of anti-authoritarianism in their depiction of working-class heroes such as ‘Ticker’ Turner, the Army’s champion ‘wangler’ and scrounger, in Victor, or Sergeant-Pilot Matt Braddock in Rover; Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850-2000 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), pp. 234-35. 
25	Denis Gifford, The Golden Age of Radio (London: Batsford, 1985), pp. 189, 225.  
26	Jane Harbord and Jeff Wright, 40 Years of British Television (London: Boxtree, 1992), pp. 14, 17, 20, 23, 26. 
27	Stephen Wagg, ‘“At Ease, Corporal”: Social class and the situation comedy in British television, from the 1950s to the 1990s’, in S. Wagg (ed.), Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, politics and social difference (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 1-31. 
28	Spicer, Typical Men, op. cit., pp. 102-25. 
29	Milton Shulman Sunday Express, 19 February 1956; see also Today’s Cinema, 15 February 1956. 
30	Financial Times, 20 February 1956. 
31	Sunday Times, 19 February 1956. Only right-wing critics, like Campbell Dixon in the Daily Telegraph (18 February 1956), a staunch champion of the ‘official’ war film, demurred. 
32	See their interview with Stanley Price, ‘The Lion Has Two Heads’, Man About Town (December 1960), p. 53. 
33	See the interview in Films and Filming (February 1957), p. 7. 
34	Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (London: Continuum, 2000), pp. 85-6, 182. 
35	Costello, Love, Sex and War, op. cit., pp. 40-6, 79-98. 
36	Quoted in ibid., pp. 87, 91. 
37	Kinematograph Weekly, 13 August 1959, p. 24.
38	Delderfield, Stop at a Winner (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1961), pp. 249-56. 
39	Monthly Film Bulletin (Autumn, 1961), p. 157. 
40	Porter, ‘The hegemonic turn’, op. cit., p. 91.