If Britain Had Fallen (32 page)

In the Channel Islands most people knew the leading citizens who were acting as a buffer between them and the Germans at least by sight, but in many British towns even the name of the mayor and councillors is often unknown to most of the population and here the unpopularity of carrying out the Germans’ orders would have fallen upon the local authority’s employees. The Germans recognised themselves that obstruction by these permanent officials would be at least as serious as opposition by the elected councillors, and the Occupation
Ordinances
threatened to ‘remove from office any official … when such official fails or refuses to conform to the Orders of the Military Commander’, although ‘definite or specific charges in writing’ were to be served upon him and he was to be given the chance to submit a defence. If his plea failed he would lose his job and, once out of work, the offending Town Clerk or Borough Treasurer or administrative officer in the Education Department would not have found it easy to find another appointment, for the Germans reserved the right to ‘veto the appointment of any official designated to serve in the occupied territories if, in the opinion of the Military Commander, such action is necessary for securing the maintenance, safety and requirements of the Occupation Forces’. Nor was it only members of local authorities and local government officers who were at risk. The Germans also listed, as subject to removal or to a ban on their appointment, ‘members of the
police and customs, teaching personnel, personnel of mail and telephone services … prison personnel’. Thus the postman who grumbled on his rounds about the extra work caused by delivering German mail, the schoolmistress who taught her children to sing ‘Hearts of Oak’, or the elderly warder in the county gaol who expressed sympathy with the prisoner inside’ for, say, working on his allotment after curfew, might suddenly have found themselves deprived of both job and pension.

As in Jersey, police stations and prisons might soon have been overflowing with offenders against one of the Germans’ innumerable regulations, and a particularly rich harvest of law-breakers would probably have been reaped by the pass laws. Passes and permits had always made a deep appeal to the German mind and Britain, which until the introduction of identity cards in 1939 had managed without any form of compulsory identity document, offered almost virgin soil. The Germans proposed for every British citizen over the age of twelve a more elaborate document than the National Registration Card already in use, containing not merely a photograph but a description of the person concerned, and the card was to be replaced every three months to prevent forgeries. Anyone travelling outside his own area also required a pass, giving particulars of the bearer and specifying the maximum amount of money he was allowed to carry, the quantity of goods he was transporting, and details of his route. Passes, the
Ordinances
laid down, were to be Sparingly issued’, and travel for non-business purposes would only be allowed for visits to ‘sick relations’, defined as ‘parents, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters’, and the issuing officer had to ‘satisfy himself of the seriousness of the illness’, a system similar to that later imposed by the British government for people visiting restricted areas near the coast. Applied to the whole country, however, it would have proved extremely burdensome to administer. Travel by night was even more strictly controlled, and the list of those likely to be eligible revealed a curiously nineteenth-century view of British society, covering merely ‘doctors, midwives and … millhands working at night’.

The first year of the war in England had seen constant upheavals in many families, as children were evacuated, men joined the forces, and women moved to be near husbands working in a new district, but the Germans seem to have envisaged that under their rule life would settle down into a static tranquillity. Only under conditions of ‘absolute necessity’ were people to be allowed to ‘cross the lines of examining posts’, i.e. move from the area of one military command to another, and permission to do so ‘should seldom be necessary except for doctors, midwives and persons travelling for revictualling purposes’. How the business life of
the country was to be carried on under such conditions was not explained. Nor was any reason offered as to why, when the precious pass was granted ‘to leave the district by motor-car not more than two spare covers and tubes will be carried’. How many drivers, it might have been asked, ever did have with them more than one spare tyre?

Although one of the Germans’ first orders on occupying Britain would have been that ‘all businesses, trade undertakings and banks’ were to remain open, everyone who went out to work would soon have felt the effects of the presence of the occupying troops. Both large public companies and small private firms would have suffered from the wholesale requisitioning of a wide range of both raw materials and finished goods and many would have been turned over to producing articles solely for the Germans, at prices, of course, fixed by them. The railways, waterways and docks, while still also under British management, would have been supervised by special Commissions of German experts, ever on the alert for further pickings for the Reich, or for any sign of slackness on the part of managers or workpeople. Particularly elaborate instructions were drawn up for Britain’s few inland waterways, the Germans apparently imagining that the British river and canal system was as vital a part of the transport network as in Europe, and judging by the volume of paperwork required the railways would have suffered even more. The Germans demanded from the harassed staff not only a daily return of coal stocks, but ten-daily or monthly statistics on the number of passengers, goods carried, locomotives, rolling stock and, not least, ‘drivers, guards and breakmen’, an all too appropriate slip in spelling, perhaps, considering how hard the Germans proposed to work their British subjects.

British factory-owners, like those in other occupied countries, would clearly have had to come to some understanding with the Germans and though their employees would have come into little direct contact with them, the Germans’ presence would have been felt the first time the unions demanded an increase in pay or some other improvement in conditions of service. There was about the Germans’ method of dealing with industrial relations an awe-inspiring simplicity. Since prices had been fixed at the prevailing level by one of the first
Announcements
to be issued by the Army commander, ‘the raising of … wages … and remuneration of any kind above the level on the day of Occupation’ was ‘forbidden unless exceptions have been expressly authorised’, and to offer more pay—and, presumably, to ask for it—was therefore a breach of the law. One of the next group of orders to be issued laid down that ‘anyone stopping work with the intention of prejudicing the interests of the German forces of occupation, anyone who locks-out employees or who incites others to strike or to lock-out will be punished’. Since any interference with the country’s economic life could be held to be contrary to German interests, this provision alone would have been sufficient to have landed any recalcitrant union official or shop steward in gaol.

The laws which the Germans intended to impose in the long term were somewhat less arbitrary, the ban on strikes applying only to public service industries, including the postal services, gas and electricity production, the railways and the mines, and everyone ‘employed either directly by the armies or by contractors working under the supervision of the armies’, though the Army Commander had the right to apply it also ‘to any other undertaking which may appear necessary for the maintenance, safety or requirements of the armies of occupation’. As virtually everyone in the country would ultimately have been working for them, directly or indirectly, few businesses of any size would have been safe from intervention, and the principles which the Germans proposed to enforce bear many resemblances to those underlying the 1972 Industrial Relations Act. Any threatened dispute had first to be reported to the usual negotiating body, which had to announce its findings within eight days, and if they were not acceptable the aggrieved party could appeal to a three-man ‘Board of Conciliation appointed by the Military Commander’. If its decision was unacceptable, there had to be an eight-day ‘cooling-off period’, and the occupation authorities had to be warned before any strike could legally be called. Even in the non-essential industries, once a strike had begun, the strikers could be ordered back to work and compelled to follow the same procedure as if they had been working for the Germans. Factory-gate demonstrations and trade union protest marches would have been dealt with even more high-handedly, since public meetings and processions of all kinds, irrespective of their purpose, were forbidden without special permission.

Away from his work, how would Occupation have affected the ordinary citizen? For anyone who lived through the years from 1941 to 1944 it is not hard to envisage the answer, for life in a German Britain would have had all the greyness and uncertainty of those years with none of the ameliorations. At the leading grammar school in Jersey, one teacher recalls, ‘it was felt that the children’s health would never stand up to sport, cross-country running, hockey, etc’ and ‘a lot of these activities were severely curtailed’ even before the buildings were commandeered by the Germans and the playing fields dug up to grow food. The pattern of events in Britain would have been similar. Gardening would have been a major activity, undertaken from necessity rather than pleasure; one could still have gone to the cinema, still have borrowed books from the library, still
have gone to church, for the Germans kept their promise in every country to allow freedom of worship (meaning, of course, Christian worship) and faithfully carried out the injunction to their troops contained in
How to behave in England
that ‘any disparagement of the religious practices of the country will be punished’.

Church would have become the only place where a British citizen could openly avow his patriotism, for prayers for the royal family (if the same rules applied as in the Channel Islands) would have been allowed and never surely would the familiar words of the Prayer Book, beseeching the Almighty ‘with thy favour to behold our most gracious Sovereign Lord, King George; and so … strengthen him that he may vanquish and overcome all his enemies’, have been answered with more fervent ‘Amens’. The singing of the national anthem, whether in church or elsewhere, would have been forbidden, as would the displaying in public, but not in one’s own home, of ‘any national or other flag’ unless forty-eight hours’ notice had been given to the Germans, to allow them to discriminate between harmless displays of innocuous bunting at fêtes and the flying of the Union Jack. The only other visible reminders of the existence of ‘the king over the water’ would have been postage stamps, of which the Germans would probably have used up existing stocks, and the royal coat of arms on pillar boxes and public buildings. If practice in the Channel Islands was followed, there would, too, have been one other reminder of the imperial past, OHMS labels on official communications, so that envelopes bearing this inscription would have been received with unusual satisfaction.

Although the press and radio would have been strictly controlled, in an occupied Britain private communication would probably not have been greatly affected. The Germans warned that ‘all postcards, letters and other postal packages will be subject to censorship’, but no one in his senses would have expected otherwise, and the draft postal regulations imposed no restrictions except on the use of uncommon languages, on illegible handwriting (which might be a concealed code) and ‘the use of ambiguous phrases, unintelligible marks or signs, code or cipher, shorthand or secret ink’. Handwriting, the Germans ruled, ‘must be legible and in Latin characters when possible’, and no doubt those whose illegibility had been inconveniencing their correspondents for years would suddenly have discovered that they could after all write intelligibly.

The rules for telephones were more drastic and would have had far greater repercussions on daily life for in 1940 under one and a quarter million private homes possessed telephones (thirty years later the figure was seven million), but the Germans proposed to close down ‘all public
call-offices’, the official term for public telephone booths, and to restrict long-distance calls to ‘urgent official, professional and business purposes’ Public telephones in fact continued to be allowed in the Channel Islands. though many were put out of action by people stealing the receiver diaphragms for use in home-made radios, and in Britain, too, one suspects the ban would before long have been found unworkable. While it existed, people would no doubt have become accustomed to applying for the use of his telephone to the nearest neighbour or tradesman who possessed one.

Although in all their regulations the Germans used metric measures, they appear to have had no plans to decimalise the currency or to force metrication upon the British public, and in the Channel Islands the traditional British system continued to be followed by local residents. But one other long-cherished example of British individuality would have vanished overnight, the rule of driving on the left. Driving on the right was the rule of the road in Germany and everywhere else in occupied Europe, and the Germans announced its adoption within a month of their arrival in the Channel Islands, adding insult to injury with a warning from the Commandant on Jersey ‘that the public must learn to use the roads properly’, for, as missing gate-posts and wrecked traffic signs all over the island already testified, the Germans were easily the worst drivers in Europe. With their potentially lethal lorries and requisitioned cars charging madly about the narrow roads, which were virtually empty of civilian traffic except for bicycles, few of the population were disposed to argue, and driving (or more commonly, cycling) on the right became universal with remarkably little difficulty.

Even fewer problems would have been encountered in adopting European Time, which the Germans brought with them to the Channel Islands, where the clocks had to be put forward an hour, for in fact the British Isles adopted it, though under the name of British Double Summer Time, in May 1941 and retained it, on and off, for most of the war. This meant that in midsummer it was still light at 11 pm, but due to the curfew at 9 or 10 pm the inhabitants of occupied Britain would have had the frustrating experience of being forced to hurry home and stay indoors on even the finest evening.