Nuclear historiography: an overview

Nuclear historiography has passed through a number of phases since the mid-twentieth century. Consider, to begin with, the huge and ever-growing literature on American nuclear history – the best-developed nuclear historiography we have. Even before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Manhattan Project's managers had set in train the writing of official and popular accounts of the project. The Smyth report on Atomic Energy for Military Purposes and books such as Laurence's Dawn over Zero were the founding documents of a strain of sanitized, popular nuclear history that has continued to the end of the twentieth century and beyond.Footnote ¹ Complemented by autobiographical and biographical material of those involved in the Manhattan Project, this literature presented the nuclear very much from the scientists' point of view, and often in the positive light that seemed appropriate in the early years of the nuclear age. This journalistic strain of history reached its fullest expression in Richard Rhodes's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 epic The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The tone of these works changed over time from celebration to moral lament, but their source base and construction share certain characteristics, summarized by Barton Bernstein in an insightful and trenchant review of Rhodes as ‘inadequate research, superficial analysis, [and] uncritical use of sources’.Footnote ²

A second generation of American nuclear historiography began in the 1960s with the first full official histories of the Manhattan Project and its successor the Atomic Energy Commission. Like accounts intended for popular consumption but based on more rigorous research, privileged archival access and more robust source criticism, these histories focused on leading political, military and scientific figures and emphasized the development of policy and institutions from the point of view of military necessity.Footnote ³ Later official and semi-official institutional histories of the various national laboratories can perhaps be seen as part of the same tradition, with their emphasis on particular establishments and their contributions to the larger American nuclear project.Footnote ⁴ Nuclear history was being framed in the name and image of the nuclear state.

In parallel with these official histories, another strand of nuclear historiography emerged in the 1960s from diplomatic history. Focused initially on the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later on the ‘lessons’ of the Cuban missile crisis, this literature has subsequently expanded to encompass a much wider range of issues concerned with the military, diplomatic, national security, policy and strategic aspects of nuclear history. Now a huge field, it is driven by a much richer sense of historical debate than is found elsewhere in nuclear history, which has led it in turn to develop a sophisticated set of methodological approaches and a sense of historiographical awareness from which other aspects of nuclear history have much to learn.Footnote ⁵

In the 1980s, with the ‘second Cold War’ in full flow, histories of the nuclear began to emerge which engaged with wider responses to nuclearization. Drawing on a broad range of primary sources, Paul Boyer's seminal 1985 book By the Bomb's Early Light offered a series of close readings of early post-war American responses to nuclear weapons in particular social, cultural and ideological contexts in the 1945–1950 period. Boyer offered no single definition of culture, but showed the diversity of American responses to the nuclear in that period.Footnote ⁶ At about the same time, however, Spencer Weart's Nuclear Fear took a very different approach to the nuclear and to historical evidence. Where Boyer offered close readings of primary texts in specific contexts over a relatively short time period, Weart's was a much broader survey of nuclear imagery, which extended an again undefined ‘nuclear culture’ backwards long before the bomb. Weart sought to show how the characteristic literary and other popular imagery of nuclear devastation had significant antecedents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century apocalyptic fiction, and how these antecedents shaped responses to Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the threat of mutually assured destruction in the age of the H-bomb. Nuclear Fear thus felt somewhat exculpatory in tone, and in effect reified ‘nuclear culture’ as an autonomous, homogeneous and transcendent entity.Footnote ⁷

As studies of nuclear politics, technology and strategy multiplied, this genre of cultural studies of the nuclear continued into the 1990s and beyond with several edited collections on various aspects of the cultural history of the nuclear, some of which offered substantive new material and analysis, but others of which were only slight collections of weakly linked case studies.Footnote ⁸ Meanwhile, with the end of the Cold War and the release of swathes of hitherto secret archival material, more in-depth study of nuclear programmes themselves became possible, drawing on the historiographical developments and interdisciplinary work that had taken place over the preceding thirty years. Often informed by critical theory or approaches from geography, anthropology or the burgeoning field of cultural studies, these studies included social histories and anthropologies, focusing on everyday life lived in the nuclear workplace;Footnote ⁹ studies of the construction of nuclear citizens through the apparatus of civil defence; regional and spatial aspects of nuclear programmes;Footnote ¹⁰ and the architecture, landscape and legacies of the nuclear.Footnote ¹¹

This is clearly an impressionistic and oversimplified account. But the last twenty years have undoubtedly seen a huge diversification in the empirical range, methodological depth and analytical sophistication of studies of American nuclear history. Because historians of nuclear America have increasingly been engaging with the larger questions and approaches driving mainstream historical analysis, we now have thorough and often exemplary studies of American technopolitics, strategy, bureaucracy and operational logistics in the Cold War and the arms race; nuclear imagery and the mass media; nuclear architectures and landscapes; economic and environmental impacts of the nuclear; the militarization of everyday life in the Cold War; oppositional cultural politics and the homeland victims of the nuclear complex; and so on. A summative literature has even attempted an evaluation of the costs and consequences of American nuclearization.Footnote ¹² An important factor in this expansion and diversification was the relaxation of national security and improved access to archival sources after the end of the Cold War (at least until 9/11 created a new set of security concerns). But we should also remember that nuclear weapons have particular historical resonances and a continuing salience in American political discourse – as the 1995 Enola Gay episode at the Smithsonian Institution demonstrated all too clearly – that keep US nuclear history at the forefront of historical debate. It is perhaps in this sense that national contexts matter most for nuclear history.Footnote ¹³

While American nuclear historiography has developed to a considerable degree of sophistication, other studies too have emerged to enrich the field of nuclear history generally.Footnote ¹⁴ To take a just a few illustrative examples, Holloway and Josephson have explored the history of Soviet military and civil programmes,Footnote ¹⁵ and studies by Abraham and others of nuclearism in India and Pakistan explore similar issues of state nuclear ideologies in the South Asian context.Footnote ¹⁶ Hecht's study of French postwar nuclear technopolitics offers an exemplary analysis of the constitutive role of nuclearism in the formation of national identity. Her most recent work explores the colonial and postcolonial aspects of the international nuclear complex, again engaging larger issues both of local labour politics and of wider geopolitics and moving beyond purely national frameworks to consider the transnational circulation and regulation of nuclear materials and the construction and deconstruction of the condition of ‘nuclearity’ itself.Footnote ¹⁷

Against this increasingly rich and sophisticated historiography, how does British nuclear history fare? In very broad terms, British nuclear historiography has gone through much the same sequence of historiographical development as its American cousin: the British government's own credit-seeking 1945 addendum to the Smyth report and the early scientist–popularizers;Footnote ¹⁸ the official histories of Margaret Gowing and Lorna Arnold;Footnote ¹⁹ studies of nuclear policy and strategy by Lawrence Freedman, John Simpson and others (with a particular interest in the nature of the ‘special relationship’ with the United States);Footnote ²⁰ and now a new post-Cold War generation of increasingly sophisticated and primary-source-rich histories of strategy, security and nuclear intelligence.Footnote ²¹ We have fine biographical studies of particular nuclear scientists;Footnote ²² excellent initial surveys of the anti-nuclear and arms-control movements;Footnote ²³ and, recently, a fascinating debate on the British media and nuclear issues focused on the BBC's suppression of Peter Watkins's 1965 film The War Game.Footnote ²⁴ Following extensive declassification and freedom-of-information legislation, we also have authoritative studies of the British state's offensive and defensive plans for nuclear war.Footnote ²⁵ But they are largely the plans of the state, and largely for the state. Where are the British people in these histories, the workers who made nuclear technologies, the people whose lives were shaped by them, overtly or covertly? Where are the sociogeographical studies of Harwell, Windscale and Aldermaston to match Peter Hales's superb study of the spaces of the Manhattan Project? Where are the British counterparts of Laura McEnaney's and Tracey Davis's incisive and theoretically informed analyses of the militarization of everyday life and the performativity of nuclear citizenship in 1950s America?Footnote ²⁶ Where are the counterparts of Hecht's studies of nuclearity and national identity? Where, in short, are the theoretically informed social and cultural histories of nuclear Britain akin to those now emerging elsewhere in nuclear history? Has British nuclear historiography stalled?

Problematizing ‘British nuclear culture’

In a foundational 1995 article on ‘The origins of British nuclear culture’, Kirk Willis pointed towards the then recent studies by Boyer and Weart, and noted that, in contrast to the US case, British nuclear culture had been ‘almost entirely neglected’. In beginning to fill this gap, he defined ‘nuclear culture’ as ‘the knowledge, imagery, and artefacts of applied nuclear physics’, and the ‘cultural history of nuclear science’ in Britain as ‘the history of popular images of and attitudes towards nuclear power, atomic energy and nuclear weapons development’. He further characterized ‘nuclear culture’ as ‘in some measure international, the cumulative product of a wide array of sources ranging from plays, films, serials, comic books, novels and science fiction tales to scholarly monographs, learned articles, and scientific popularizations which were freely translated, frequently subtitled, and thus widely disseminated’.Footnote ²⁷ What he then provided was essentially an inventory of popular and popularizing atomic and nuclear-themed literature from Robert Cromie's The Crack of Doom in 1895 to J.B. Priestley's The Doomsday Men in 1938. On this basis Willis evoked and apparently instantiated a ‘British nuclear culture’ which shifted from an early optimism about the potential of nuclear science (exemplified by Frederick Soddy's radioactivity-inspired utopianism in his 1909 book The Interpretation of Radium) to a pervasive pessimism about the destructive nature of nuclear science only confirmed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Without much evidential basis, Willis located the roots of post-war British responses to the nuclear (including the formation of anti-nuclear movements) in this deep-seated cultural pessimism.Footnote ²⁸

But as with Weart's Nuclear Fear, this account of ‘early British nuclear culture’ was entirely based on hindsight – specifically on the later knowledge of the existence and effects of nuclear weapons. For example, one of the characteristics of the retrospective selection of pre-1945 materials was the attribution of extraordinary prescience or even predictive power to certain authors and texts. A classic example is the paper's treatment of H.G. Wells's novel The World Set Free (1914). Wells had read Frederick Soddy's Interpretation of Radium with its enthusiastic evocation of the ‘smiling Garden of Eden’,Footnote ²⁹ which could be opened up by the beneficial application of the energy latent in radioactive matter (Soddy, of course, was trying to promote his own discipline and excite people's interest in radium and radioactivity at a time of great concern about future energy supplies). Wells absorbed all this, and used it in a new novel. Written in 1913, Wells's story is told from the point of view of the 1950s, and concerns Holsten, a young scientist–inventor who in 1933 had discovered how to release the internal energy of atoms, potentially solving the world's energy problems and realizing Soddy's utopia. In a typically Wellsian turn, atomic-powered prosperity soon brings social catastrophe, however, with rampant unemployment, nationalism and political unrest. Towards the end of the 1950s there is a violent world war in which ‘atomic bombs’ are used, and Wells gives a vivid description of the ‘unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs’, the ‘puffs of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimes scores of miles from the bomb-centre and killing and scorching all they overtook’, and the devastation that resulted.Footnote ³⁰

This is all characteristic Wells: scientific patter clothing a story of utopia turning to dystopia, rescued in the end by technocratic world government. But Willis (and many others) see here an uncannily prescient forecast of actual world events. ‘No later commentator can avoid pausing to praise Wells's prescience’,Footnote ³¹ says Willis. The year in which Holsten fictionally unlocks the door to atomic energy, 1933, is even linked by some commentators to the real-world burning of the Reichstag that year and to the Hungarian émigré physicist Leo Szilard's contemporaneous conceptualization of the nuclear chain reaction, apparently creating an eerie sense of pre-destiny about Wells's text.Footnote ³² Yet Willis (and several of Wells's biographers) conflate reality and imagination here. Holsten is fictional, and it was not hard for someone like Wells to imaginatively extrapolate and vividly describe the likely consequences of the large-scale release of energy and radioactivity. Willis's account – as well as, I want to suggest, many other accounts that fall back on a generalized notion of ‘nuclear culture’ – historically reifies the nuclear rather than analysing or explaining it.

The significance of this historiographical reification is that nuclear science and technology are essentialized in the form they acquired in 1945, and this form is extended backwards in time as the basis for a search for precursors which are then retrospectively attributed the status of a homogeneous, monolithic ‘nuclear culture’. The status, structure and meaning of that ‘culture’ are not questioned. As in Nuclear Fear, this has consequences well beyond mere Whiggism. Invoking a ‘nuclear culture’ which pre-existed any widespread understanding or even use of the word ‘nuclear’ quickly becomes an apologia for the bomb, a retrospectively constructed prelude to and – in effect – a legitimation of what came later. The invocation of nuclear culture here performs ideological work: in a parallel to what I have called the ‘bomb historiography’ of early twentieth-century nuclear physics, nuclearism can be ‘found’ in culture long before its material realization, partially effacing both its novelty in 1945 and, implicitly, diminishing the agency and responsibility of those who later created it.Footnote ³³

These examples are from pre-war ‘nuclear culture’, but the same general approach can be found in accounts of ‘nuclear culture’ in the postwar period. A study of atomic-themed music from ‘Atomic baby’ to ‘Nuclear funeral’, for example, is essentially a diachronic list of popular songs with atomic themes whose imagery allegedly reflects ‘general attitudes toward the bomb’. Again, the nuclear is reified and the role of popular music in shaping, as well as reflecting, the attitudes of various audiences towards the nuclear goes unexplored.Footnote ³⁴ Similar, largely diachronic, accounts can be found of ‘nuclear theatre’,Footnote ³⁵ ‘nuclear fiction’,Footnote ³⁶ ‘nuclear film’ and so on.Footnote ³⁷ In all of them, a homogeneous ‘public’ and a homogeneous response to cultural outputs are simply assumed as a given – or, worse, ignored completely.Footnote ³⁸ ‘Nuclear culture’ is too general, too passive, too monolithic, too simplistic a category.

To move forward we need to think more explicitly about the different social, political and ideological groups involved in the production, dissemination, mediation and reception of nuclear science and technology and their many and diverse representations and sites; we need to consider the political and ideological relations between these groups; and we need properly to historicize the flux of interpretations in the cultural production and consumption of the nuclear. Reworking the idea of ‘British nuclear culture’ as an analytically more productive category requires us to engage with developments elsewhere in the historical disciplines to think more critically about the very concepts ‘British’, ‘nuclear’ and ‘culture.’ In recent years, for example, historians have explored the complexities of Britishness and national identity.Footnote ³⁹ The natures of ‘British’ and ‘Britishness’ are multivalent and have been subject to constant contest and change over time, not least in the twentieth century when Britain's demographic changed considerably. Christoph Laucht's recent work reminds us that several of the key British nuclear scientists who contributed to Tube Alloys and the later nuclear programme were émigrés, raising interesting questions about integration and identity, and interestingly problematizing conventional notions of the ‘Britishness’ of the British nuclear project.Footnote ⁴⁰ On a larger stage, the changing relations between Britain, the empire and the Commonwealth meant that the political and ideological frameworks within which notions of ‘British’ and ‘Britishness’ could be articulated were constantly changing. The diverse forms of political engagement with or opposition to Europe and the United States have both challenged and helped to define notions of Britishness. Internally too, ‘Britain’ can be seen as a constellation of Celtic nationalisms and English regionalisms, fragmenting in the last decade with devolution for Wales and Scotland (with interesting potential consequences for the future of the UK nuclear deterrent, given the location of the UK's Trident base at Faslane in Scotland).Footnote ⁴¹

Clearly, ‘British’ is a problematic term. What particular aspect of ‘Britishness’ do we mean when we speak of a ‘British nuclear culture’? It depends where and when we are in the past, and who we're discussing.Footnote ⁴² The historical interest and analytical purchase lie in the contingency and the contextual specificity. The same is true for ‘nuclear’. We routinely employ broad terms like ‘The Nuclear Age’ and so on, but the meanings and implications of the fission weapons of 1945 and the early Cold War were very different to those of the thermonuclear weapons of the 1950s and after. Nor is the nuclear just about weapons. Nuclear power has had a wide range of meanings and has been both lauded and vilified over the period since 1945.Footnote ⁴³ The nature of the nuclear condition changed considerably over time, and it matters whether we're discussing 1948, 1961 or 1983, as the political and social contexts and the perceived possibilities and threats arising from nuclear technology were so different at each of those points. And ‘nuclear’ can have very different connotations for a worker at Windscale or Aldermaston, for an anti-nuclear protestor or for someone using a (nuclear) magnetic resonance imaging device in a hospital, either as medic or as patient.Footnote ⁴⁴ The ‘nuclear’ itself covers a multitude of technologies and social contexts, and again the salience and meaning lie in the specificities. As Hecht has persuasively demonstrated in her recent work on nuclearity, ‘the nuclear’ is a shifting subject and an unstable object.Footnote ⁴⁵ No account of a generalized, monolithic ‘nuclear culture’, national or otherwise, can do justice to this diversity or perform historically useful analytical work.

Perhaps most problematic of all conceptually is the notion of ‘culture’. ‘Nuclear culture’ has typically been taken as referring to the ways in which the nuclear is reflected in the traditional high-cultural forms of art, architecture, literature, poetry, music, film, drama and so on, as well as studies of nuclear imagery and nuclear discourse. Studies of ‘popular’ nuclear culture in the print and broadcast media, advertising, comics and so on have also become more significant in recent years. All too often, however, such studies have focused on cultural availability and form but rarely on mechanisms of cultural production and circulation of particular cultural items or the specific circumstances of their reception and consumption in different synchronic and diachronic contexts. Instances of ‘nuclear culture’ have been treated as free-floating entities whose meanings are presumed to have been as obvious to their audiences as they are to later historians.

Again, rather than relying on the self-evident significance of the nuclear, historians would gain a great deal by engaging with work on cultures and their relationships with various contexts current elsewhere in the historical disciplines. Well-theorized studies of popular cultures, high cultures, folk cultures, elite cultures, mass cultures, dominant cultures, subcultures and so on abound – not just in distant historical fields, but in the history of science and technology.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly, detailed studies of the creation, circulation and reception of texts, images and other cultural objects indicate the complexities and contingencies of the relationship between interpretation and context.Footnote ⁴⁷ Work in these fields is now routinely showing the constitutive role of cultural production and the ways in which it actually shapes notions of citizenship, national identity and so on, rather than merely reflecting them.Footnote ⁴⁸ What kind of ‘culture’ – and whose culture – do we mean when we speak of ‘British nuclear culture’? It matters.

Butlin's and the bomb: histories of Uranium 235

As a historical category, a monolithic ‘British nuclear culture’ is clearly at best unstable, and at worst untenable. How, then, could we think more productively and more historically about the relationships between the nuclear and the cultural sphere? Consider the 1946 play Uranium 235. Written by the left-wing singer, playwright and activist Ewan MacColl and first performed by the progressive Theatre Workshop group, the play has attracted several historical commentaries, including accounts by some of those involved in the early productions.Footnote ⁴⁹ It has typically been seen either as a triumph of proletarian theatre or as an effective piece of science communication. And the problem of poor source criticism and source repetition looms large as later accounts draw on earlier ones without the benefit of further, independent research. In Science on Stage, for example, theatre historian Kirsten Shepherd-Barr situates Uranium 235 in a sequence of ‘Plays about Physics and Physicists’, and focuses mainly on its form and its dramaturgical aspects. For her, the context is the type and development of theatrical technique, rather than the specifics of genesis and reception of particular plays in specific contexts. To the extent that she does discuss the play's performance and reception, she draws largely on MacColl's own – not always reliable – autobiography, Journeyman, as her principal source.Footnote ⁵⁰ In his admirable history of British theatre since 1945, the Guardian's theatre critic Michael Billington situates Uranium 235 in a different context: that of the rebuilding of theatre in austerity Britain. But he draws on Goorney and Shepherd-Barr as his principal sources, so adds little to established accounts.Footnote ⁵¹ Charles Carpenter's promisingly titled Dramatists and the Bomb misses the play entirely,Footnote ⁵² and even biographers of Theatre Workshop founders Ewan MacColl and Joan Littlewood – though critically independent elsewhere in their analyses – tend to draw on their subjects' own accounts of the significance of this work.Footnote ⁵³ Yet the interest of Uranium 235 – its historical and cultural meaning – lies in the specificities of its creation, its enactments and its reception in the different contexts in which it was performed between 1946 and 1952.Footnote ⁵⁴

Born in Salford in 1915, MacColl's real name was James (or Jimmie) Miller – he adopted Scotland as his putative birthplace in the 1930s, and the name Ewan MacColl when he was a deserter and on the run from the Army during and after the Second World War. Largely self-educated, MacColl became involved in left-wing street theatre and the workers' theatre movement in Salford and Manchester in the 1930s, and established himself as an actor, singer-songwriter and communist political activist. When he met actress and director Joan Littlewood in 1934, they formed a new company, Theatre of Action, and for the next few years put on a series of performances of agitprop theatre, drawing on sources of theatrical technique including Brecht, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Laban and American workers' theatre.Footnote ⁵⁵ Miller began to write plays for the group, and the growing company developed the effective use of light, sound and movement in its productions.Footnote ⁵⁶

After the disruption of the war and Miller's desertion, Theatre of Action reformed in Manchester in 1945, with Miller now taking the alias Ewan MacColl. Theatre of Action, too, was renamed Theatre Workshop.Footnote ⁵⁷ MacColl wrote a new play, Johnny Noble, and in the late summer of 1945 the company toured working-class areas in the north of England with a run of mostly one-night performances of the new piece and MacColl's adaptation of Molière's The Flying Doctor. The hand-to-mouth tour started just as the Japanese surrendered in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings, and the subsequent publication of the official Smyth report on the work of the Manhattan Project, seemed of such significance to two members of the company – engineer Bill Davidson and ICI physicist H. Verity Smith – that they persuaded MacColl to write a play about the bomb and its significance. They gave MacColl a crash reading course in atomic physics, and he began work on the new play: Uranium 235.

MacColl decided that the best way to present his message was through a historical framework, so the play eventually took the form of eleven scenarios, outlining the development of atomic science from the ancient Greeks to modern physics and the present – a dramatic version of the teleological ‘bomb historiography’ of the Smyth report and other historical accounts. The scenarios deployed different dramatic and theatrical styles and techniques to make their points: an expressionistic jazz–dance; naturalism (the actors playing themselves); a circus-act; a section in which the audience became members of the nineteenth-century Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society; a knockabout comedy featuring Einstein, Bohr and Planck; an atomic ballet of protons and neutrons in which fission is enacted; and so on. The whole was presided over by a Puppet-Master (played by MacColl himself) and his sidekick Death. It all drew heavily on agitprop, and closed with a direct challenge to the audience: would they choose peace or war, life or death (Figure 1).Footnote ⁵⁸

Figure 1.

Cover of the published script of Uranium 235 (author's copy).

Rehearsals began in the David Lewis Theatre in Liverpool late in 1945. The play was first performed alongside the troupe's other repertoire in Newcastle in February 1946, and then toured working-class theatres and halls across the north of England. This entertainment circuit is very much the context in which the early productions of the play must be understood. Driven by political commitment, the troupe played bitterly cold halls, in theatres that sometimes smelled of animal dung, and typically to very small audiences.Footnote ⁵⁹ Against this dismal background, the highlight of the tour came in May 1946, when the company was booked for a week at the newly opened Butlin's Holiday Camp at Filey, in Yorkshire. According to the later reminiscences of MacColl and others, the Butlin's performances were ‘a triumph and a complete vindication of everything we had said about the theatre. A working-class audience could be won for a theatre which concerned itself with the social and political problems of our time’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Basing their accounts on such reminiscences by those involved, historians have also tended to take the Butlin's performances as an indication of the self-evident importance of the play and of the nuclear as a theme.Footnote ⁶¹ But a closer consideration of the context suggests a rather different interpretation.

The 250-acre Filey Camp had been planned and built in 1940, but had been commandeered immediately by the military. It reopened as Billy Butlin's showcase camp in 1946, and in that first season, as he rebuilt his entertainment empire, Butlin ‘began to look around for opportunities that would give his camps prestige’. He paid £1,100 to bring the Yorkshire Pullman luxury train out of wartime storage for a VIP excursion from London to Filey. Then,

The show ‘was a colossal success, and it played for a week to packed houses. Music-lovers, starved for six years of opera of this scope and brilliance, came from all over the country’. Butlin, according to one biographer, ‘had discovered that there is prestige in encouraging culture’Footnote ⁶² – so much so that he

According to another Butlin's historian, ‘it didn't really matter whether the campers liked or disliked it, they filled the theatre with their curiosity’, and such events ‘gave Butlin's a lot of publicity’.Footnote ⁶⁴ As Cyril Joad put it in a New Statesman and Nation article on ‘Butlineering’, the working and lower middle classes were able to sample a life with ‘concerts and fancy dress carnivals and amateur theatricals to mark the highlights and the gala nights – yet every night, it seems, is a highlight and a gala night’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Experimental theatre, in the form of Theatre Workshop, was clearly part (and presumably quite a cheap part) of this prestige-seeking mix. Visiting Filey in the week when Theatre Workshop performed there, News Chronicle reporter Ian Mackay was obviously captivated by the scale and scope of the enterprise: ‘Business is pleasure and pleasure is business in Butlin's, and real big business at that.’ He had been astonished at what ‘this pleasure business really means in hard cash’ and ‘how much organisation, inventiveness, ingenuity and sound common sense is involved in this highly skilled modern industry of providing fun and games for people’. Butlin, he reported, planned to ‘provide exciting holidays for about 12,000 workers every week at his three big camps' in Filey, Skegness and Clacton – with two further camps due to open in Ayr and Pwllheli.

Strolling around the camp, Mackay ‘watched the workers relaxing after their “six years hard” at the bench. It was really terrifying to watch the grim determination with which they applied themselves to their relentless pursuit of pleasure’. And, Mackay added,

This was mass entertainment for the post-war upper working and lower middle classes, a release from the effort of war.

‘Of all the bizarre and unexpected things you come across in his phantasmagoria of a place’, Mackay wrote a couple of days later in another report, ‘there is nothing quite so surprising as the brilliant band of young strolling players who have been packing the camp theatre this week’. But this too was a tribute to Billy Butlin, for

Theatre Workshop, he wrote, were ‘making important experiments both in presentation with lighting and stage effects’. Though they specialized in dramatic dialects, there was ‘nothing of the raffish roguery or lushgush of our Bloomsbury Exquisites about them’. And ‘just like the Moliere team, the Theatre Workshop carried its own playwright around, young Ewan McColl … who is by way of being quite a dramatic portent in his own way’. ‘Just as had G.B.S. [George Bernard Shaw] in his twenties, McColl has a flaming beard and a tendency to lapse into lecturing.’ But his play Uranium 235 ‘is undoubtedly a theatrical event of first importance … really more of a mediaeval or mystery play’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Mackay's articles offer valuable insights when read against the grain. Mackay dramatizes the drama, makes the entertainment entertaining; he was not commenting on the nuclear per se, but tried to capture the human drama, character and spectacle. Similarly, Butlin's deliberate attempt to create a lavish spectacle and to draw in holidaymakers through the presentation of a variety of entertainments is clearly part of the context in which the Theatre Workshop Filey performances must be seen. The national and international political situation, too, form an important backdrop to this story. Nuclear issues were kept in the news headlines not least by ongoing discussions at the United Nations about international control, and by preparations for further nuclear testing at Bikini. In June 1946, even the king commented in public on the bomb. Opening the Royal Society's Empire Scientific Conference, he acknowledged that ‘the production of the atomic bomb through scientific prediction and scientific collaboration has brought home to the world with terrifying directness the fact that the increase in man's knowledge of the material universe may be fraught with infinite possibilities of good and evil’ – though this ‘must never be used as an argument against scientific research’. Rather, it should ‘lead us all to seek for ways and means of increasing our respect for moral principles and to endeavour under God's guidance to reject the evil and choose only the good’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Pious though such hopes might have been, they garnered newspaper headlines, and gave Theatre Workshop a further peg on which to hang promotion of the play. And publicity was key to attracting audiences, for even in northern music halls there was competition. While Theatre Workshop's motives for airing the nuclear issue may have been overtly ideological (even if presented as pedagogical), the theatrical circuit around which they moved created opportunities for others to tap the same theme. At Leeds in the third week of September, advance notices of the troupe's performances at the Riley Smith Hall of Leeds University perhaps prompted some local rivalry. In the same week, the well-known comedian Ernie Lotinga, ‘Britain's Greatest “Funstar”’ (and evidently a favourite of cultural arbiter T.S. EliotFootnote ⁷⁰), was booked to perform at the Leeds Empire Theatre as ‘Jimmy Josser’, a character he had established in a series of comedy films in the 1930s.Footnote ⁷¹ For his Leeds appearances, Lotinga advertised a new act: ‘The Atom Bomb’ – ‘Twelve Explosions of Comedy, Song and Dance’.Footnote ⁷² The Leeds Guardian's advance notice of the show found it enticing (Figure 2):

Figure 2.

Advertisement for Ernie Lotinga's ‘Atom Bomb’ show, Leeds Weekly Citizen, 20 September 1946, p. 4.

With the newspapers full of atomic secrets and spies (Alan Nunn May had been sentenced to ten years' hard labour for atomic espionage at the beginning of May) and the atomic tests at Bikini atoll in July, the reworking of Lotinga's characteristically bawdy humour through an atomic theme offered his audiences long-familiar routines in a topical setting. But this did not necessarily impress all who attended. Though it found it ‘artistically staged’, the Yorkshire Post's notice of the show noted that ‘many farcical situations are woven around the boisterous humour of Ernie Lotinga, assisted by Jack Frost, in the revue “The Atom Bomb”, which has some semblance of a plot about the recovery of a stolen secret formula’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Yorkshire Evening Post was more brusque, dismissing ‘another of those strange mixtures of music, song and dance, artistically dressed and staged, which Ernie Lotinga brings round’, whose loose plot ‘very nearly gets lost in the comedy episodes, the humour of which is not only thin and crude, but sometimes in not very good taste’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Clearly, with nuclear issues prominent in the media and novel entertainment somehow to be manufactured, the bomb and nascent nuclearism were open to a variety of cultural uses aimed at a diverse range of audiences and appetites, even vulgar appetites.

A similar diversity characterized responses to Uranium 235, often contrasting starkly with the cherished memories of success at Butlin's that have informed later historical commentaries. In early October 1946, Theatre Workshop performed at the Little Theatre in Edinburgh and the Queen's Theatre in Glasgow. In November, the Dunfermline Journal gave an advance build-up to a performance at that town's Carnegie Hall. While presenting new plays and novel technical methods, Theatre Workshop, it reported, was ‘seeking something that is very old, the community of spirit between player and audience which has characterised all the great theatres of the past’ – when ‘dramatists spoke the language of the people and dramatic art was not, as it is largely today, prostituted to the service of a few financiers’. The ‘young Scots poet’ (!) Ewan McColl was a dramatist ‘concerned with real life as people live it’, and part of the ‘great revival of artistic consciousness at present arising in Scotland’.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the event, one review found in the play ‘profound feeling, intermingled with artistic tableaux, dramatism, vivid costuming with satirical dancing and an overall cloak of shadow and light, sound and lecture’, but noted that it was ‘not too well received’ – clearly a reference to low audience numbers, for the play ‘impressed the audience who were present’ with its demonstration of the ‘build-up of science to the atomic age and the suffering which science could cause were it not properly harnessed’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This gross indifference prompted another correspondent to write in disgust, ‘The most talented theatre group of its kind has just visited Dunfermline, playing to practically empty houses. Dunfermline people should be ashamed of themselves. Such a venture deserved far greater support from an alleged cultural town.’Footnote ⁷⁸ In Dunfermline, at least, Uranium 235 shook up nationalist sentiment and local cultural sensibilities, rather than working-class engagement with nuclearization.

Contrary to the retrospective focus on the apparent success of Uranium 235 at Butlin's and its portrayal as a self-evidently significant element of nuclear culture, then, consideration of other performances and the contexts of its reception suggests that it met with a wide range of expectations and responses, from holiday camp amusement to high-minded nationalist aspiration, and from indifference to imitative competition. It is difficult to locate a homogeneous ‘British nuclear culture’ here. And there are other interesting contrasts which widen still further both the scope for comparative contextual analysis and our understandings of nuclear cultures, plural. Theatre Workshop revived the play in 1950 and again toured industrial areas of South Wales and rural and urban venues in northern Britain. Its reception this time was generally muted, partly perhaps because of the changing political context, not least the testing of the Soviet atomic bomb in August 1949, the deepening Cold War and hardening anti-communism. But elite urban critical sensibilities were now also unleashed. After a performance at Manchester's Library Theatre in July 1951, the Manchester Guardian's reviewer thought that the play ‘builds a crude but very effective sermon on a very simple text’, its ‘preaching technique’ being ‘in effect a mixture of the “Green Table” ballet, “The March of Time”, the “Eagle” magazine, and a sort of nightmare pantomime’. Worse,

If the play had ‘any message, apart from the well-known symbolical one of Energy at the crossroads, it may rest in the assurance that the piece is “an attempt to rediscover the conscience of the world”’; but, the Guardian concluded, it ‘has shown us such a dreadful world, all through history, that this can hardly be taken seriously’.Footnote ⁸⁰

This shift in sensibility, from reported working-class enthusiasm to elite metropolitan dismissal, went a stage further in 1952. During rehearsals in Manchester, the actors Sam Wanamaker and Michael Redgrave dropped in, and were deeply impressed. They arranged and financed a series of performances of Uranium 235 at the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage, London. Here too the play was largely slammed. Ivor Brown in The Observer lambasted the play's politics and its passé style:

Theatre Workshop, he concluded,

Though it was politically more sympathetic, the Manchester Guardian made many of the same points. While praising Joan Littlewood's production, the Guardian's critic thought the drama ‘old-fashioned’, with ‘questionable’ history and an ‘outdated’ theatrical style. The propaganda was ‘efficient’ and gave ‘several of the players the sort of part which would bring the house down at the Unity Theatre’, especially MacColl himself as the Puppet-Master and ‘Doreen Warburton as his secretary, who might indeed bring other houses down and is a serious threat to the pre-eminence of Miss Diana Dors’. Yet even for the Guardian the message of the play was ultimately a crude one: ‘the sort of message which is more commonly conveyed in a pamphlet, and indeed the audience found pamphlets on sale outside the theatre at the end of the performance: pamphlets about germ warfare in Korea’.Footnote ⁸³ For MacColl and Theatre Workshop, of course, this was precisely the point. But for the critics, more used to the conventional world of Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan and J.B. Priestley, Uranium 235 was well past its sell-by date.