In his book on The English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), Geoffrey Elton argued that Britain was a “nationality but not a nation, a gathering not a people” (233). Nevertheless, goodwill toward the Union has not been in short supply, as Paul Ward emphasizes in this well-researched and illuminating book. He challenges the idea that Britain was held together primarily by ties of convenience or, alternatively, that it represented simply “Englishness enlarged” (8). Instead, he analyzes the considerable personal, local, national, and imperial capital that was invested in the Union for a good part of the twentieth century, albeit unevenly and rarely consistently within individuals. He concludes that Britishness was not a spent force following its brief moment of triumph in the Second World War and as the empire dissolved; instead, British loyalties and identities persisted in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland until the late 1970s. Indeed, in Ward's view, a “sense of common interest” (9) often willingly, not just grudgingly, embraced proved as successful as the ties of war and empire in cementing Britain together. He focuses on eight politicians who were active in the cause of unionism to varying degrees of intensity across the middle decades of the twentieth century. They are selected from the nations outside the United Kingdom's English “core,” Ward's purpose being to demonstrate the role of the peripheries in sustaining the wider nation. They are also selected from non-Cabinet ranks on the grounds that their Britishness was more complicated as a result (8). The members of Ward's cast are Walter Elliot, Tom Johnston, Lady Priscilla Tweedsmuir, Gwilym Lloyd-George, Megan Lloyd George, Huw T. Edwards, Harry Midgley, and Dame Dehra Parker. They represent a range of class, party, and gender as well as national affiliations, emphasizing for Ward the multifarious dimensions of Britishness in the period concerned that provided the key to its strength.

Ward has trawled through personal papers, memoirs, and biographies relating to these individuals whose personal and public lives he portrays as closely intertwined within a clear British context. He brings larger historical perspectives to bear on the political fortunes of his subjects in three illuminating chapters on the relationship between Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, on the one hand, and the Union, on the other. Not the least merit of the book is the attention it gives to the influence of nationalist aspirations within Britain on British politics. Ward demonstrates clearly that mainland parties made concerted attempts to project themselves at various times and to varying degrees as both unionist and “pluralist” in their recognition of national distinctions within the United Kingdom. Levels of party support in the three peripheral nations have thus fluctuated accordingly.

However, for me, at least, the concept of identity in general and national identity in particular is somewhat overworked. We are told that the individuals in the book “constantly interrogated their identities and then sought to readjust the relationships between their national, regional and local identities to fit their political and personal circumstances” (183). This seems to exaggerate both the self-awareness of Ward's subjects on the identity front and the frequency of their shifts of allegiance. Part of the problem is that Ward makes the “private” lives of individuals bear a political significance that they cannot always withstand, as in the example of Elliot's letters to his wife while serving with the British army during the Second World War. His requests for more news of their farm in the Scottish Borders is adduced as evidence of the association of his patriotism “with a particular locality” following his exclusion from Churchill's government on account of his failure to take a public stand against appeasement (22). But can such requests be so narrowly interpreted? Similarly, Tweedsmuir's hunting trophies from various imperialist encounters scattered throughout her house rather than confined to “male spaces” suggests to Ward that her (second) marriage to John Buchan's son “and domestic life were tied up with imperialism” (66). But can the political be made to eclipse the personal so readily, and on the basis of such limited evidence?

The “gender” perspective on Britishness is also strained in places. Thus, the concentric nature of Megan Lloyd George's local (Anglesey Welsh), national (British), and imperial identities is said to have had an additional, gender dimension; for Ward this is apparent in her praise of Elizabeth I, in whose reign empire was founded and whose ancestral roots lay in Megan's constituency of Anglesey (100–102). Yet the gender association here seems incidental rather than fundamental. Another example Ward gives is the greater acceptance that Britain's political class gave to Gwilym Lloyd-George's compared with that of his father; for Ward this is “essentially” a result of the particular kind of “masculinity” (97) wrought by Gwilym's British upbringing. Differences of personality or, indeed, the trailblazing effect of his Welsh father in easing that acceptance are not considered as alternative explanations. On the other hand, gender stereotypes abound in the book, as in the example of Megan Lloyd George's dash to find her father in the Norway debate in 1940, when Chamberlain declared that he had “friends” in the House. Pivotal though his daughter's action may have been in the speech by Lord George, which sealed Chamberlain's downfall, it was surely not evidence of her “subordinate” status (94). Similarly, the enlisting of Eliot and other appeasers in the army in 1939 was not obviously an “attempted restoration of the manliness of their patriotism” (9) and is a clear extrapolation from the footnote reference.

Ward's scholarship and versatility in including individuals from all the peripheral nations that constituted “Britain” in the twentieth century is admirable. However, the absence of English representatives leaves something of a lacuna at the heart of this study. The claim that “unionism was not an imposition from the core but a product of the periphery” (186) goes too far and contradicts the more measured statement that unionism “was a product of the peripheries as well as of the core” (8). Certainly, it would have been interesting to include English representatives of Labour who attained some national prominence and who also saw themselves as “Britishers,” for example, Lord “Jack” Lawson. Also, the Union was effectively propagated, although without in any way being “imposed,” by English public figures, prominent among whom was Ernest Barker. He was not a politician, but he delivered the Stevenson Lectures on Citizenship at Glasgow in 1924, to both academic and popular audiences, his subject being (British) national character. If unionism is kept in such perspectives, scholars of Britishness in the twentieth century have much to learn from this pioneering study.