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MoI Home Intelligence Reports Being Digitized

Discussion in 'WWII Today' started by GRW, Sep 10, 2019.

  1. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Can't wait until all these reports are digitized and available online. Should be dynamite.

    "When George Orwell described the "Ministry of Truth" in his novel 1984 he used the University of London's Senate House as his model.
    The "enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete" in Bloomsbury had been the Ministry of Information during World War Two.
    It was a building Orwell knew well, not least because his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy worked there in the censorship department.
    But there was another secret operation taking place in Senate House.
    The Ministry of Information wanted to know what the public was thinking.
    How were people responding to the bombing raids? What rumours were circulating? What was really irritating the public?
    So every day and then weekly, a report was gathered by local intelligence officers across the country, feeding back information to Senate House about what people were saying in pubs, shops, workplaces and air-raid shelters.
    When a city was blitzed, the intelligence operation was there soon afterwards listening to what people were saying on bombed streets and the state of their morale.
    All these reports, tracking swings in the public mood, are being made available online.
    Historian Simon Eliot has been researching this archive of "home intelligence" - and says it fundamentally altered how the war was fought on the home front.
    "People were saying, 'We want the truth, even if it's bad. We want to be treated as adults'," said Prof Eliot, who is based in Senate House, in the University of London's School of Advanced Study.
    "It quickly dawned on the Ministry of Information that this was critical."
    "What comes through very strongly is, 'Don't patronise us, don't treat us as children. We'll feel much better if we know where we stand."
    www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-49597787
     
  2. OpanaPointer

    OpanaPointer I Point at Opana Staff Member WW2|ORG Editor

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