Civil Defence Communities in Second World War Britain

Join Dr Jessica Hammett as she discusses the role of civil defence services during the Second World War and asks how volunteers engaged with wartime ideas about national identity and citizenship.

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During the Second World War, millions of men and women of every class, generation and region of Britain volunteered for civil defence duties.

In this talk, Dr Jessica Hammett will examine how civil defence personnel understood their roles and represented themselves as essential wartime workers.

She will demonstrate how these civilian volunteers, within their social groups and personal narratives, were able to reshape understandings of citizenship and duty to fit their own circumstances, informing a new sense of national identity.

About Dr Jessica Hammett

Jessica Hammett is a Senior Research Associate in Modern British History at the University of Bristol. This talk draws on material from her book ‘Creating the People’s War: Civil Defence Communities in Second World War Britain’, recently published by Manchester University Press.

She has published on ideas about community, identity and citizenship in Second World War Britain, and now works on the history of mental health in the era of the NHS.