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Abstract
This article examines how photography documenting the military campaign in Burma was mobilized in efforts to reconstruct the image and idea of the British Empire at the end of the Second World War. It analyses a selection of popular publications which provided visual instruction for white Anglophone audiences, promoting continuing British imperialism after the Allied victory. These publications were intended to be kept for posterity, acting as ‘domestic archives of empire’ for Anglophone audiences across the globe. Such publications represented the empire at war and in peacetime, supposedly fit for the postwar moment. At the time of their publication, these ‘domestic archives of empire’ exhorted white Anglophone readers to view the British Empire as embodying a liberal and tolerant mission. Today, they offer insights into a vernacular history of empire on the verge of fragmentation, presaging the challenges of reconstruction and decolonization and the development of imperial nostalgia.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge their gratitude to Sophie Bennett for the research she undertook on paper copies of War Illustrated held by the Special Collections and Archives at Cardiff University as part of an undergraduate Cardiff University Research Opportunity Project. We would also like to thank Nadya Bair, Maria Creech, Helen Mavin and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen for their feedback on drafts of this article. Claire Gorrara would like to thank Nick Rawlinson for the loan of his father’s copies of Hutchinson’s Pictorial History of the War. These were one of the inspirations for this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 A digital reproduction of Little’s poster can be viewed on the National Archives website: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/theartofwar/prop/allied_unity/INF3_0318.htm.
2 ‘Empire Day’ was celebrated from the early 1900s across the British Empire until it was renamed ‘Commonwealth Day’ in 1958.
3 Princess Elizabeth’s address is available on the BBC Archive website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/empire-day-1946--speech-by-hrh-princess-elizabeth/z62hwty.
4 Callahan (Citation2005: 87–113) charts the relationship between British forces and Burmese nationalists. The factions and clashes of the period stand in stark contrast to the image projected by the publications addressed here. As Ashton (Citation2001) notes, concerns about perceptions of Burma’s status after independence were paramount to UK officials in the latter part of the period, 1944–48, considered in our article.
5 Louis Moss and Kathleen Box, ‘Ministry of Information Publications: A Study of Public Attitudes towards Six Ministry of Information Books, June–July 1943,’ National Archives, RG 24/32.
6 Mountbatten was notoriously image-conscious and, through his involvement in Indian independence and the subsequent partition in 1947, had ‘a seminal role in mediating the public image of decolonisation’ (Kaul, Citation2008: 689).
7 This model is exemplified by initiatives like the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (1941–45). It sought ‘to promote “pictorializing” current affairs’ through dynamic visual publicity to help produce so-called ‘citizen-soldiers’ – informed individuals who understood what they are fighting for (Thompson, Citation2019: 57).
8 Coster mentions a number of AFPU photographers, and equivalents from the US Signal Corps, who contributed regularly to the magazine including Fred Wackett, Joe Waddell, Lewis D. Klein, Ernie Miller, Ernie Goodwin, Bill Walker and Dave Titmuss.
9 Smits (Citation2017) shows that around 10% of the total print run of Illustrated London News was distributed in Australia in the nineteenth century, constituting an important trans-imperial precedent for the less renowned twentieth-century titles discussed here.
10 Having worked on interwar public information initiatives for the UK government, Hutchinson (1887–1950) built up his father’s publishing company into a global network and a major publishing venture.
11 Montague Black is best known as a publicity designer following his acclaimed posters for the White Star Line and London’s North Eastern Railway.
12 Hammerton (1871–1949) joined Amalgamated Press in 1905, at that point the largest periodical publisher in the world. It was run by Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), but later owned by William Berry (Lord Camrose).
13 In May 1945, this photograph was also the cover image of issue 15 of Cadran, a French language photo-magazine produced by British government information services between September 1944 and February 1946. See details from the IWM photographic collection for the original photograph (ref. IWM SE 564) by AFPU photographer, Lieutenant W. Austin: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205205095.
14 Burma Star also became the name of the veterans’ association founded in 1951.
15 The selection of Meaden’s photograph may also represent an effort to pushback against the Americanization of the public image of the Burma campaign. See Ian Jarvie (Citation1988) regarding the controversy around the film Objective Burma, released in January 1945 and starring Errol Flynn.
16 The human-interest paradigm became established in the early twentieth-century press. Hammerton contributed to this model of reporting with The Great War – I Was There: Undying Memories of 1914–1918 comprising extracts from published first-person accounts supplemented with photographs by J. A. Insall. Launched in September 1938, it ceased publication after 51 issues with the outbreak of the Second World War.
17 Usill was author of The Story of the British People in Pictures (1937), as well as assistant to Humphrey Jennings on the Festival of Britain film, Family Portrait (1951).
18 See detail in Getty Images collection: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/recipients-of-the-victoria-cross-after-an-investiture-at-news-photo/72103394?adppopup=true.
19 Subsequently, Umrao Singh was sent on a tour of the Ruhr and was photographed with other Indian soldiers from the Burma campaign, demonstrating the importance placed on the international projection of the British Empire. The IWM photographic collection includes ten pictures of this visit by Gunner Heudebourck of No. 5 Unit, AFPU: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?filters%5BmakerString%5D%5BGunner%20Heudebourck.%2C%20V.A.%5D=on.
20 Webster (Citation2001) highlights how, in films addressing colonial wars and immigration after 1948, the focus shifted from the pioneering hero abroad to civilians and domestic spaces under threat, whether that be white settlers in fortified plantations during the ‘Malayan Emergency’ (1948–60), or suburban homesteads menaced by immigration from the colonies inaugurated when the Empire Windrush landed at Tilbury in June 1948. Rather than domestic archives of empire seeking to project a vision of white superiority, imperial togetherness and racialized order, popular culture from the late 1940s was marked by ‘the complexity and ambivalence of the theme of a domestic sanctuary, threatened with violation, and its interplay of ideas of racial and gender difference’ (Webster, Citation2001: 560–61).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tom Allbeson
Tom Allbeson is a Senior Lecturer in Media History at Cardiff University and co-editor of the Journal of War & Culture Studies. His research concerns media history and visual culture in contemporary Europe with specialisms in photojournalism and conflict, collective memory in post-conflict societies, and urban history. His first book — Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City — was published by Routledge in 2020.
Correspondence to: [email protected]
Claire Gorrara
Claire Gorrara is Dean of Research and Innovation for the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of French at Cardiff University. She has published widely on visual cultures of war, exploring the photography of the liberation of France in 1944–5 and representations of the Holocaust in contemporary comics and graphic novels. She is currently researching the intergenerational transmission of war memories in Anglophone and Francophone comics and graphic novels.
Correspondence to: [email protected]; @gorrara67