How will these resources help you?

The Home Front during World War II is a familiar topic at Key Stage 3. We teach it through the lens of a nation struggling to maintain some sort of normality in incredibly difficult circumstances. They ‘Dig for Victory’ and they ‘Make Do and Mend’. In Anderson shelters, they read bedtime stories to their children, unless their children have been sent away as evacuees to live with strangers for safety. Men join the Home Guard and women the Land Army. People deal with the blackout, bombing and rationing.

All this is well-trodden ground and we use plenty of primary-source material to enliven and enrich our lessons. However, there is an underside to the Home Front upon which we rarely, if ever, touch. What about the black market, the ‘spivs’, the looters and the profiteers? It’s not that we are ignorant to their existence, nor that it is all unsuitable for this age group. It’s not even that there is a lack of age-suitable resources. Rather, there seems to be an unspoken reluctance to prick the patriotic bubble, to cast doubt on the image of the whole nation pulling together as one. This could be one of the received myths we encourage our students to question. I would suggest that, for this age group, the black market would be a good introduction to the darker side of the Home Front, and would tie in with the work they will do on rationing. As well as the resources below, local newspaper archives may prove fruitful for the topic.