1. C. S. Forester’s The Ship (1943) and J. P. W
C.S. Forester’s The Ship (1943) and J.P.W. Mallalieu’s Very Ordinary Seaman (1944): the Wartime Ship-Novel, Post-war Reconstruction and Contested Visions of England in the Nineteen-Forties (Professor Chris Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University:

2. The People's War?
David Edgerton: two linked ideas about the British experience of the Second World War are largely mythical - neither particularly ‘a People’s War’ nor well explained by the ‘left’s story of Blitz to Beveridge’
On the contrary Britain was and continued to be not a welfare but a ‘warfare state’
However, he admits that key narratives about the welfare state and democratisation did emerge during the war itself.
Other historians reinforce democratisation as a key narrative, but very much a contested one
(See hisWarfare State: Britain , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005 and Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second Wold War, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2012, pp. xvii, 1, 4, 7, note 8, 123, 152, See also Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Moral and the Ministry of Information in World War II, Allen & Unwin, London, 1979, ch. 6 and 7).

3. Walter Greenwood's Wartime Novel
Something in My Heart (1944)
Major Hardcastle: ‘We’ve accomplished all this upheaval in our own characteristic way – And its only a beginning. As for social reform. You haven’t heard the last of the Beveridge Report.’ (p.206)
Epigraph: 'We are indeed grappling with the problem which is uppermost in the minds of those who are defending the country today... With my Right Hon. Friend the Prime Minister, I had an opportunity of visiting one of our ports and seeing the men of the 50th Division ... They were going off to face this terrific battle with great hearts and great courage. The only question they put to me ... was. ‘Ernie, when we have done this job for you, are we going back to the dole?’ ... Both the Prime Minister and I answered, ‘No, you are not’.
Mr Ernest Bevin. Debate on the Government’s White Paper on Employment Policy – Hansard, June 21, 1944.
Walter Greenwood's Wartime Novel

4. The Ministry of Information
MOI
Orwell and Minitru
MOI Memo to Home Office (13/9/1939): 'The people must feel that they are being told the truth. Distrust breeds fear much more than knowledge of reverses. The all-important thing for publicity to achieve is the conviction that the worst is known. This can be achieved by the adoption, publication and prosecution of a policy. The people should be told that this is a civilians' war, or a People's War, and therefore they are to be taken into the Government's confidence as never before ... But what is truth? ... It is what is believed to be the truth. A lie that is put across becomes the truth and may, therefore, be justified. The difficulty is to keep up lying ... It is simpler to tell the truth and, if a sufficient emergency arises, to tell one big, thumping lie that will then be believed' (HO 191/434 from Ian MacLaine, Ministry of Morale, p.28)

5. The MOI and Publishing
'The need to present Britain as a forward-looking social democracy in the later stages of World War II informed not only the content of periodicals and selection of externally published books, but also how target audiences ... were imagined and addressed. Increasingly, policymakers believed that it was important to appeal to a mass readership... The books selected showed a clear preference for ‘middlebrow’ authors such as J.B. Priestley.' (‘Carefully Concealed Connections:', p.220)
'In the spring of 1943 Armed Services Editions [were launched] to supply the troops with small paperbacks which would fit in a uniform pocket ...[included authors such as] A.J. Cronin, C.S. Forester, Graham Greene, Richard Llewellyn, Somerset Maugham and H.G Wells' (Valerie Holman, Print for Victory, 2008, p. 146)
'A number of publishers benefitted from MOI policy, and for some, the links they forged proved financially rewarding... Because ... the MOI continued with its strategy of invisibility, the full extent of its book, periodical and pamphlet programme has not yet been mapped ... [nor] the multifarious ways in which authors, agents, publishers printers, and distributors were ... co-opted into ‘patriotic’ government service.'
(Valerie Holman, ‘Carefully Concealed Connections: the Ministry of Information and British Publishing ’, Book History, 8 (2005), pp , p.199.)
However, C.S. Forester is said to have been quite clear that he was specifically working to help the MOI in the US (see Sanford Sternlicht, C.S. Forester and the Hornblower Saga, 1999).

6. The MOI and Post-war Reconstruction
'Officially the MOI was, in fact, more or less forbidden to discuss post-war reconstruction and planning ... Some figures within the MOI, including the socialist Harold Nicholson, had argued that for the Ministry to carry out its function it had to be able to tell the British people clearly ... what British war aims were. The Prime-minister, Winston Churchill ... was very opposed to any such definition ... and remained wary for the rest of the war of discussion of post-war reconstruction and making what he felt were at best utopian and at worst positively socialist promises about the nature of post-war British society: ‘Ministers should... be careful not to raise false hopes as was done last time by speeches about “Homes for Heroes” etc ... It is for this reason of not wishing to deceive the people by false hopes and airy visions of Utopia and Eldorado that I have refrained so far from making promises about the future’
(Hopkins, C, 'The Army of the Unemployed: Walter Greenwood's Wartime Novel and the Reconstruction of Britain, Keywords – A Journal of Cultural Materialism, Vol.10, October 2012, citing Ian McLaine‘s The Ministry of Morale, p. 183).
'The ban on the ventilation of post-war topics by Ministry speakers was... extended to cover the Beveridge Report, although no way could be found of insulating speakers from audience questions in the subject. Nor, indeed, could the ministry avoid preparing publicity on post-war topics for other departments and agencies.' (The Ministry of Morale, p.183).

7. Politics and the Armed Forces
Army Education Corps
ABCA (Army Bureau of Current Affairs) Publications
RAF
Navy:
'the Admiralty continued to maintain ... that time and suitable conditions were just not available'
Admiral Sir John Cunningham: 'Junior officers were not capable of keeping control of discussions which might well touch on social and political questions - "whence it is but a short step to criticism of politicians, of authority in general, and finally of naval authority in particular" ' (S.P. MacKenzie, Politics and Military Morale: Current Affairs and Citizenship Education in the British Army , 1992, Appendix 1.)
'They were the eyes of men attending a compulsory lecture on British War Aims. As on so many previous occasions ... the heady magic of ABCA had not worked'. (Nicholas Montsarrat, The Cruel Sea, 1951, p. 427)
Also in his East Coast Corvette: 'Politics. Virtually nothing to report here: there is no time and, in effect, no occasion for political interest. The "hostilities only" ratings have shed ... whatever convictions they had previously' (1943, p.75).

8. BUT Naval books popular among civilians and the services: e. g
BUT Naval books popular among civilians and the services: e.g. Odham's / the Admiralty, requested enough paper for 125,00 copies of The Royal Navy Today in February 1942 (Print for Victory, 85); Very Ordinary Seaman had 6 impressions , The Ship was distributed directly to the services in some 500,000 copies.

9. C.S. Forester: The Ship (Michael Joseph, 1943)
HMS Artemis (cf Cruiser HMS Penelope at the Battle of Sirte, 22 March 1942).
26 chapters, each with a brief quotation from the Captain's Report, each centred on one character
No single protagonist
Society as individualistic, compartmentalised, disciplined, hierarchical?
'Disciplined men stay calm and steady, do their duty purposefully and are attentive to orders and instructions ... and every state of mind grows out of the past' (p.117)
'The Captain had his eye on Allonby [CPO] as a future Admiral. 'Aft through the hawse hole ', the expression went for describing the promotion of a man from the lower deck' (p.128)
Captain the Honorable Miles Ernest Troughton-Harrington-Yorke: 'Peace would be a severer test of mankind even than war ... [he] would fight to the last, he would die in the last ditch, before he would compromise in the slightest with the blind or secret enemies of freedom and justice. He must remember this mood' (pp.191-2).

10. J.P.W. Mallalieu, Very Ordinary Seaman (Gollancz, 1944)
Profiteering, trade unions, capitalists, waste of money and tradition ('square rig') (pp.14, 29)
'They were given all sorts of lectures - on discipline, naval customs, politics. The Chief loathed them. Bah! Much better get a Wren to give you an hour's instruction in darning' (p.53).
'Religion and big business! That's what causes war' (p. 172).
'I'm fighting for my wife and kids. And for good old Joe Stalin' (p.177)
'At the end of the news there was a personal "appearance" by a merchant seaman who had spent eighteen days in an open boat and lost a leg. He told of the hardships he had suffered and finished: " But as soon as I'm fit again, my one ambition is to go back to sea" This was too much for Dowson... "The bloody liar ... the lying bastard" ' (p.178)
IS a lower deck perspective - some focus through Williams (WC)
'I make no apology to the reader about the bad language in the book, but I do make one to my shipmates. Though I have tried to give an accurate account of life on the lower deck of a destroyer, I have not been allowed to carry realism to the point of printing some of the words which were constantly used there' (preface)
'The book has been officially censored for any information of military value to the enemy ... but no one except myself bears any responsibility for the views on naval and political matters which are expressed by characters' (preface)

11. J.P.W. Mallalieu, Very Ordinary Seaman 2
Author's Postscript
'But don't think of sailors as heroes... think of us as we really are boys and young men who want to come home, but who go on going to sea and meeting the horrors which the sea can bring .. because we feel instinctively that there is not room in the world both for us and the Nazis.
We have no illusions about our country or about the war. We do not believe that Britain will be part of a new world fit for heroes to live in, when the war is won... But for all that we are learning about a new world. The Lower deck is not a competitive organisation... They learn to live in a community, sharing equally its terrors and its happiness... We do not want to surrender this fellowship when we at last we come home; and if we find competition, inequality and uncertainty of livelihood in the post-war world, we may no longer content ourselves with "dripping". ' ('dripping' is naval slang for moaning).

12. Culture Wars
MOI certainly sought variously to manage coverage of the war effort in non-fiction and fiction publications
Some odd paradoxes - compulsory discussion of reconstruction in the services, enthusiasm in the press, but MOI ban
Some popular fictions certainly keen to advance competing visions of post-war England - welfare v. warfare state both there? More work to do on this!