Blasted England: how we got from D-Day to Brexit

A conversation between Patrick Wright and David Edgerton on Wright’s Repeater Books release The Village That Died for England: Tyneham and the Legend of Churchill’s Pledge, introduced by Anna Snaith, from Wed 13 Oct 2021.

Shortly before Christmas in 1943, the British military announced they were taking over a remote valley on the Dorset coast and turning it into a firing range for tanks in preparation for D-Day. The residents of the village of Tyneham, Dorset loyally packed up their things and filed out of their homes into temporary accommodation, yet Tyneham refused to die.

Although it was never returned to its pre-war occupants and owners, Tyneham would persist through a long and extraordinary afterlife in the English imagination. It was said that Churchill himself had promised that the villagers would be able to return once the war was over, and that the post-war Attlee government was responsible for the betrayal of that pledge. Both the accusation and the sense of grievance would reverberate for many decades to come.

Fully updated and with a brand new introduction, placing it in context of today’s contentious debates over British history, national identity and memorialisation, The Village that Died for England explores how Tyneham came to be converted into a symbol of posthumous England, a patriotic community betrayed by the alleged humiliations of post-war national history. Both acclaimed and reviled at the time of its first publication in 1995, The Village that Died for England is indispensable reading for anyone trying to understand where Brexit came from — and where it might be leading us.

Patrick Wright FBA is Professor (Emeritus) of Literature, History and Politics in the Department of English.

David Edgerton FBA is Professor of Modern British History in the History Department at King’s, and author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History.

Anna Snaith is Head of the Department of English at King’s.