Living Through the Blitz

One of the co-founders of the Mass Observation project, Tom Harrison used many of the then-unpublished records of the organisation to put together this record of people’s experiences on the British home front during the bombings of the Second World War– first-hand accounts recorded by people as they lived through the Blitz. Unlike earlier histories of the war, whether propagandist or simply patriotic, Harrisson’s version doesn’t close its eyes to the terrors and misery of the bombings, nor to the failure of the authorities to alleviate the suffering caused by the raids. Published posthumously in 1976, Living through the Blitz was part of the first wave of revisionism that washed clear the rose-tinting of earlier historians and made the blitz experience comprehensible for future generations.