Last week’s V.E. Day anniversary commemorations were a busy time for re-enactors and 1940s vintage entertainers as they took part in nostalgic events across Britain. Hearing the songs and dressing up in the clothes of 80 years ago for some provides a reassuring view of the past where national identity is more secure, stable, and unchallenged. For some, there is a perception that this was a time of strong social cohesion, when a neighbour would share a cup of tea, and we all pulled together and danced. Of course, the primary sources of 1945 show a more complex reality and the stories we tell ourselves today tell us more about our own preoccupations than the past. This can be seen in the way social memory has changed over time for one group of unsung heroes, those wonderful men and women of the Entertainment National Services Association (ENSA) who worked tirelessly to maintain morale during the war.
It wasn’t all cheeky winks and ukuleles. During the war, ENSA gained the barbed label of ‘Every Night Something Awful’. Appropriately it was the man who is said to have first made this joke in 1939, Tommy Trinder, who also made ENSA’s final curtain call in India in 1946.[1] Based on the large numbers of appreciative letters sent to the performers by the troops and factory workers, the vast majority of 2.5 million performances ENSA provided during the war were far from awful. However, Trinder’s wisecrack stuck.[2] Unsurprisingly, given their quasi-official status and its dependence on a relatively small pool of voluntary professional entertainers, ENSA came in for a lot of criticism from the British press, military, and government during, but particularly after the war.
When the fighting finally stopped in 1945, many in Britain had questions about the quality of ENSA’s performances, the organisation’s financial probity and accusations of cronyism.[3] Much of the criticism was focused on the autocratic style of Basil Dean, who was quick to anger, feared by many in show business, and had made a lot of enemies during the six years of war. In the wake of a series of high-profile resignations, there was a call for a public enquiry into ENSA’s management and finances in the House of Commons in November 1945.[4] One of Dean’s most vocal critics was the Reverend Sir Henry Dunnico (1875-1953), Chairman of ENSA’s Broadcast Division, who accused him of being “an absolute dictator” and “overriding the decisions of my executives”.[5] Dunnico parting hand-grenade perhaps caused the most damage when he said that Dean was “the sole executive authority over an expenditure of £4 million per annum.” The newspapers reveled in the scandal and questions in parliament were inevitable.
On November 29 1945, Wing Commander Ernest Millington, MP for Chelmsford accused ENSA of wasting £14 million of public money (see Fig 3). Evelyn Strachey, the Under-Secretary of State for Air, did not really help the organisation’s cause when he said,
“I have attended one or two—I dare say a dozen,—E.N.S.A. shows in my Service career, and I must admit that some of the worst hours of that career have been spent in E.N.S.A. shows. I cannot pretend that I think that the level of entertainment provided by the ordinary E.N.S.A. concert party was a satisfactory one.”.[6]
It was ironic that at the height of ENSA’s criticism in the second half of 1945, British troops serving overseas were perhaps in the most need of entertainment in order to stave off boredom during their interminable wait to be demobbed.
In terms of financial probity, a hefty £17 million had been spent on ENSA during its lifetime up to August 1946, but this cost was the liability of the NAAFI, not the British tax payer. Whilst the Treasury made advances towards the cost of ENSA during the war, NAAFI reimbursed the State. The fact that NAAFI’s total annual turnover of £182 million by 1945 puts ENSA’s cost over its lifetime into context.[7] A public enquiry was avoided but as a result of the criticism ENSA’s budget was scaled back and the organisation was wound up within a year and replaced by the Combined Services Entertainment (CSE) organisation. Fittingly, Tommy Trinder hailed the new organisation as ‘Chaos Supersedes ENSA’ - who needs enemies when you have friends like Trinder?
Memory of ENSA endured after the war and the comedy film, Desert Mice was released in 1959 telling the story of a concert party and relations with their hapless Army Entertainment Officer.[8] This comedy film would have appealed to the affectionate (and sometimes painful) memories of the wartime audience members. Several of the stars, Dora Bryan and Alfred Marks started their careers entertaining the troops. The view of entertainment as being something to be endured by the troops and the memories of amateurish performances lasted beyond the war. For more on this jewel of a film, see my article here.
As we watched Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s comedy It Ain’t Half Hot Mum during the 1970s, there was an effort to rehabilitate ENSA.[9] In 1976, The Sunday Times magazine published a feature edition on the topic of wartime entertainment called ‘Matter of Morale’. (see Fig 4)[10] By this time, many of ENSA’s leading protagonists had died, but Basil Dean at 88 years old was still as vociferous as ever about defending the organisation.
In the article, Patrick Nicholson interviews Dean and Wing Commander Millington 30 years on. Millington recalls his indignation in 1945 at any hint of wasting finances,
“there were widows and orphans finding it difficult to get tuppence out of the War Office and yet there were impresarios getting an enormous lot. I still believe there should have been an inquiry.”
He goes on to say, rather uncharitably, that
“The show business professionals did a reasonable job in making available their services. But anybody with the ability to run a winkle stall could have done what the ENSA organisation did and ensured that the artists went to the right place at the right time.”[11]
In the article, Dean is particularly bitter about Dunnico, who died in 1953,
“A terrible man, Dean calls him, ‘who kept a collection of salacious stories in a little black book; a Baptist or something, an evil sort of chap - he was a boozer, I may tell you, as well - who wanted to go to Germany towards the end of the war. I refused permission. He never forgave me.”[12]
Dean remained defiant to the last, rejecting any criticism of ENSA’s record and ranting about his unending crusade against vulgarity. Overall the article provides a positive and nostalgic look at ENSA. Dean has the last word and wistfully describes his
“general feeling of disappointment that ENSA was rather pooh-poohed and the work we did not really recognised.”
In the same year, John Graven Hughes published, The Greasepaint War and two years later, Richard Fawkes published, Fighting for a Laugh – two important show-business history books.[13] Fawkes, a former employee of the BBC, defends ENSA by saying,
“Throughout the war, whenever news from the front was dull, reporters knew they could rely on attacking ENSA for a few popular, controversial paragraphs.”[14]
He rather theatrically concludes,
“The saddest of all war casualties was, perhaps, ENSA, which stood in the middle of the battle between quality and quantity.”[15]
Perhaps it is a bit of a stretch to claim that ENSA was the saddest casualty of the Second World War, but they do deserve to be remembered for all they did during the war.
Today descendants of ENSA performers are campaigning for more recognition of the part the organisation played during the war in maintaining morale at home and overseas. ENSA is now represented at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday and there’s a charity raising money for a permanent memorial to the entertainers at the National Memorial Arboretum to honour the memory of the men and women of the show-business profession. The ENSA Memorial Appeal page can be found here: https://ensamemorialappeal.co.uk/.
By highlighting the rather more complex background to ENSA, I do not try to undermine the important service that these men and women performed. I believe that an over indulgence of nostalgia simplifies their stories to such an extent that we do them a disservice by further distancing and cocooning ourselves from their lived experiences.
[1] Basil Dean, The Theatre at War (George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1956), p. 499.
[2] Richard Fawkes, Fighting for a Laugh: Entertaining the British and American Armed Forces, 1939-1946 (Macdonald and Jane’s, 1978), p. 187.
[3] Harry Miller, Service to the Services The Story of the NAAFI, 1st edn (Newman Neame Limited, 1971), p. 76.
[4] Dean, The Theatre at War, pp. 519–21; Andrew Merriman, Greasepaint and Cordite: The Story of ENSA and Concert Party Entertainment during the Second World War (Aurum, 2012), p. 268.
[5] Dean, The Theatre at War, pp. 519–21; ‘Variety: ENSA Squabble May Go to Parliament’, Variety (New York, September 1945), September 1945 edition, section International, p. 18.
[6] Hansard, ‘HC Deb 29 November 1945 Vol 416 C1731’ (Hansard, 29 November 1945) <https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1945-11-29/debates/573f8b35-ce2c-4b30-9565-bffebdaa9cee/Ensa(Inquiry)#contribution-1f08597a-2887-4b97-a9e2-256ecb2ef735>.
[7] Miller, Service to the Services The Story of the NAAFI, p. 76; Lieut Colonel Howard N. Cole, Naafi in Uniform (The Forces Press (NAAFI), 1982), p. 128.
[8] Desert Mice, dir. by Michael Relph (Rank Film Distributors, 1959).
[9] About a Royal Artillery concert party, not ENSA of course.
[10] Patrick Nicholson, ‘A Matter of Morale’, The Sunday Times Magazine, 15 August 1976, pp. 24–31, authors collection.
[11] Nicholson, ‘A Matter of Morale’, p. 31.
[12] Nicholson, ‘A Matter of Morale’, p. 31.
[13] Fawkes, Fighting for a Laugh; John Graven Hughes, The Greasepaint War: Show Business 1939-45 (New English Library, 1976).
[14] Fawkes, Fighting for a Laugh, p. 24.
[15] Fawkes, Fighting for a Laugh, p. 187.