The aim was not so much to stop an enemy advance as to delay it until strong British forces could muster further inland, and ships of the Royal Navy could steam down from Scapa Flow, where they had been sheltering, to knock out the German fleet in the Channel and cut off the invaders’ supplies of fuel, ammunition and food.
On shore, the general plan was to move vital assets away to the west, as far as possible from likely landing points and lines of advance. The King and Queen – the jewels in the crown – were furnished with a personal bodyguard consisting of one company of the Coldstream Guards, known, after its commander, Lieutenant Colonel J. S. Coats, as the Coats Mission. With their four armoured cars and some civilian buses, the little force stood by to whisk the royal family out of danger, particularly in the event of an airborne landing by enemy forces.
Their initial rendezvous would have been Madresfield Court, a huge, redbrick house, part-Jacobean, part-Victorian Gothic, with more than 130 rooms, standing out in the plain at the foot of the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. The home of the Lygon family for eight centuries, the house is now inextricably associated with Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, which was inspired by his fascination with the Lygon girls, Lettice, Maimie, Coote and Sibell, with their brother Hugh, whom he knew at Oxford, and their notorious father, the homosexual Lord Beauchamp, whose excesses eventually forced him to live abroad (his brother-in law, the Duke of Westminster, who loathed him, referred to him as ‘my bugger-in-law’).
Brideshead and its landscape, as Waugh described them in 1945 – the house set in a valley above a lake, among rolling hills – bore no physical resemblance to ‘Mad’ and its pancake surroundings; but the author had been entranced by another immense house, Castle Howard, near York, and made that his model for the home of the Flyte family. On that and his love of the Lygons he built a dream world, and there is no doubt about the twin sources of his inspiration: Brideshead is a version of Castle Howard, but Sebastian Flyte, the central figure in the novel, is Hugh Lygon in all but name.
In 1940 Madresfield, with its sixty acres of gardens, its carp-haunted moat and four glorious avenues, would never have been remotely defensible, furnished though it was with a token guard force. Nevertheless, large quantities of non-perishable food were imported and stored in the basement, and much of Worcestershire was fortified as a kind of redoubt. The Severn, Avon and Teme rivers were designated ‘stop lines’, with crossing points defended by camouflaged gun emplacements, tanks parked in copses, pillboxes, road blocks and lines of trenches. Worcester itself, Kidderminster and Redditch were marked out as anti-tank islands, to act as centres of resistance, and the aim was to retard any German advance until regular home forces could regroup.
On the eastern side of Worcester another great house – Spetchley Park – was earmarked as a refuge for Churchill and his Cabinet if the invasion took place or London became too dangerous. The grand Palladian building belonged (and still belongs) to the Berkeley family, and before the war was a haunt of the composer Edward Elgar, who often stayed in the Garden Cottage and told his hosts that parts of The Dream of Gerontius were inspired by pine trees in the park.
If the Germans had landed, the transfer to the west would have taken place in two phases: in Yellow Move, non-essential staff from Whitehall would have led the way, followed, in Black Move, by the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and the royal household. The city of Worcester would have been invaded by armies of civil servants, and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon would have housed Parliament. Luckily for the owners, in the event neither Madresfield nor Spetchley was needed for senior evacuees from London; but later in the war the US Eighth Air Force took Spetchley over as a recuperation centre for pilots, and added to its amenities by building a squash court.
Two other grand houses, further north, were also considered as possible royal retreats. One was Pitchford Hall in the wilds of Shropshire, a wonderfully romantic, black and white Tudor mansion in which the King and Queen had stayed (while Duke and Duchess of York) in 1935. The other was Newby Hall, home of the Compton family, an eighteenth-century redbrick house set in splendid gardens at Skelton-on-Ure in North Yorkshire.
While the King and his Government stood fast, Nazi propaganda took to the air by way of the New British Broadcasting Station, which sent out messages intended to intimidate the population of the United Kingdom. The broadcasts, purporting to emanate from dissident elements within the country, sought to portray a nation in disarray and ripe for takeover. ‘Disunity, demoralisation, hatred of its leaders and a passionate yearning for peace were the distinguishing characteristics of this cloud-cuckoo land,’ wrote one historian.
Everybody knew that not only Churchill and his friends but even Socialist Cabinet Ministers were being bribed by Jews to continue the war. Sabotage was rife, and so were foot-and-mouth disease, faked Treasury notes and tins of meat poisoned by German agents in the Argentine.
More concrete attempts were made to unnerve the population. On the night of 13/14 August 1940, German aircraft staged an Abwurfaktion (throwing-down or dropping action), in which ‘pack assemblies’ were released by parachute over various parts of the Midlands and lowland Scotland. The packs contained maps, wireless transmitters, explosives, addresses of prominent people and instructions to imaginary agents about their roles in the imminent invasion. The aim was to suggest that the attack would come from the east coast, and that a Fifth Column of Fascists and Nazi sympathizers eager to undermine the regime was established all over the country, ready to receive the invaders. Farmers, in particular, were sceptical: they pointed out that documents purporting to be those of parachutists who had landed in standing corn, but had left no trails when they moved out of the field, must have been carried by men with exceptional powers of levitation.
There was much talk of Fifth Columnists, but most people thought that, if any existed, they were harmless. On the contrary: in the words of the historian Ben Macintyre, ‘There was an active and dangerous Fifth Column working from within to hasten a Nazi victory … motivated in large part by a ferocious hatred of Jews.’ Not for seventy years did the release of secret files reveal that during the war a large network of crypto-Fascist spies in Britain had been run – and neutralized – by one extraordinarily skilful and courageous agent working for MI5, who posed as a member of the Gestapo. He was known as Jack King, until, in 2014, his real name was revealed as John Bingham. His contacts thought he was working for the Nazis, and happily revealed their treachery to him, but none of them was ever prosecuted, partly because they were doing no real harm, and partly because any action taken against them might have broken Jack King’s cover.
On 13 June 1940 the Government imposed a ban on the ringing of church bells, except to warn of imminent air raids or invasion – in which case they would play the role of the beacon fires which signalled the approach of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Even in an emergency they might be rung only by the military or the police. Senior clerics protested, and the restriction caused displeasure among many villagers, who felt that an important part of their lives had been suppressed, and that, in the event of an attack, the invaders might single out churches for retribution, on the grounds that they were part of the defenders’ warning system. Prophesying doom, The Ringing World denounced the ban as ‘a stunning blow to ringing, from which, even when the war is over, it will take a long time to recover’. On the other hand, some people who lived near churches were delighted, and hailed the silence on Sunday mornings as one of the few blessings brought by the war. As the threat of invasion waned, the restrictions were gradually lifted, but not until VE Day in May 1945 were full peals allowed again.
Country priests and members of congregations did what they could to protect their churches from bomb damage. At Fairford, in Gloucestershire, the vicar, the Revd Francis Gibbs, supervised the removal of the outstanding medieval stained glass from the windows of St Mary’s Church and had thousands of pieces buried in a vault beneath a large memorial cross in the grounds of Fairford Park, outside the village. In a similar but even bigger undertaking, the twelfth-century stained