A country at war: mass-observation and rural England, 1939–45

The history of the rural areas during the Second World War is virtually unstudied. There is some work on agriculture and agricultural policies, but the extent to which these rely on K.A.H.Murray's ‘official’ history, published in 1955, is testimony both to the quality of Murray's work and the general paucity of more recent published research. Moving away from the directly official, or economic history, we move into the field of memoir and reminiscence. Good as many of these are, they obviously seldom make any attempt at sustained analysis. Crucially, the rural areas have been left out of accounts of the social history of the war, such as Angus Calder's magisterial studyThe People's War, first published in 1971.