Lecture | Ourselves In Wartime

Home Intelligence and the Monitoring of Morale on the British Home Front during WW2

During the Second World War the British government undertook a unique experiment in the monitoring of public opinion. This was organised by Home Intelligence, a unit of the Ministry of Information that kept a close watch on popular attitudes on the home front. Intelligence from a range of sources and from all regions of the United Kingdom was sifted by a small team of officials, based at the Senate House of the University of London, who compiled secret reports on the state of public morale. These came to be circulated both within the ministry and across Whitehall. From May to September 1940, they were issued every day (Sundays excepted), after which they were presented as weekly reports until Home Intelligence was closed down in December 1944. This invaluable collection of documents offers us a remarkable insight into the mindset of the British people at a time when the fate of the nation depended, among other things, on their willingness to support the war effort. The lecture will discuss the history of the Home Intelligence unit, as well as drawing on some of the findings of its wartime reports.

Professor Jeremy Crang is Professor of Modern British History and Dean of Students in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. He has written or edited eight books related to Britain and the Second World War, including a trilogy of volumes on the Ministry of Information’s Home Intelligence unit: Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain’s Finest Hour, May to September 1940 (2010), The Spirit of the Blitz: Home Intelligence and British Morale, September 1940-June 1941 (2020), and Our People’s War: Home Intelligence Reports and the Monitoring of British Morale, June 1941-December 1944 (2024). He was an historical advisor to the BAFTA-nominated four-part BBC documentary series Blitz: the Bombs that Changed Britain.  His maternal grandfather, Robert Reid, was a BBC war correspondent embedded with the US army in Normandy and north-west Europe,1944-45.