Whilst researching whether Duddington possessed a ‘Home Guard’ Unit during WWII – I stumbled across the fact that nearby King’s Cliffe definitely did field such a Unit! Technically speaking, the King’s Cliffe theatre had at least two Home Guard Units operating in its vicinity. At its peak, the Home Guard numbered around 1.7 million men and women – and being a grassroots (‘Socialist’) organisation – it had branches everywhere meaning that everyone was welcome and everyone had a place (including people with disabilities). Women operating throughout the structure fulfilling very different roles from frontline infantry soldier – to clerk, driver and various other types of logistics.
Of course, although Anthony Eden had called for the Home Guard to be initiated, it was the Oxford Graduate Tom Winteringham (the British Veteran of the International Brigades that fought in Span during the ‘Civil War’) who invented the concept of a ‘Citizen Army’. Churchill hated the concept – whilst simultaneously falsely stating he was the founder of the concept. Churchill was concerned that the Home Guard might operate as a mechanism for the British working-class to take control of the UK – inspired as it was by the successes of the Soviet Red Army – particularly as the Red Army soldiers moved ever closer to Berlin! This is why, in the midst of the hardest fighting and the greatest danger during December 1944 – that Churchill ordered the Home Guard to be ‘Stood Down’! A year later the Home Guard would be abolished – never to see the light of day again!
Even during the Churchill-generated hysteria of the 1950s – which saw the UK reactivate the ‘Civil Defence’ concept as part of the US anti-intellectual ‘Cold War’ propaganda – the Home Guard was never reconstructed. Churchill refused to trust a ‘Socialist’ entity that empowered the workers to put up a fight against the Soviet Union – a former ally of the UK! Much of this ‘Socialist’ history of the Home Guard is hidden behind a thin veneer of military officialdom, with such and such a ‘Battalion’, this ‘Company’, or that ‘Platoon’! The point is that Britain needed the working-class at its best during WWII and the Home Guard became a highly effective vehicle to realise this objective.
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 