Priestley's War by Neil Hanson (Great Northern Books, £18.99)

5:16pm Tuesday 11th November 2008

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SOME people claim that the so-called “wartime spirit”, the unity of purpose in the Second World War which inspired everyone to pull together, help each other and share the burdens fairly, is a myth.

The author JB Priestley had no doubt the spirit existed. Not long before he died, just a month shy of 90, in 1984, he said: “The British were absolutely at their best in the Second World War. They were never as good, certainly in my lifetime before it, and I’m sorry to say I think they’ve never been quite as good after it.”

Priestley’s opinion carries great weight. A veteran of the First World War, he became a leading broadcaster in the Second. Audiences of up to 16 million listened to a series of talks he gave, entitled Postscripts, which were broadcast directly after Winston Churchill’s addresses to the nation.

Born in Bradford and always with a strong leaning towards the working class, he was well qualified to pass a carefully-considered judgement on Britain and its people during the war.

His memorable endorsement of the wartime spirit is the penultimate offering in this book, which opens with an anti-war article written for a local left-wing periodical in 1913. But in September, 1914, less than a month after Britain had declared war, he volunteered to fight.

He later recalled that on his first morning in service “a regular sergeant, noting sardonically the newish sports coat and flannel trousers that, like a fool, I was wearing, set me to work at once removing the congealed fat from immense cooking pots.”

Soon he was writing from the trenches: “”We are ‘soldiering’ (as the Tommies phrase it) in earnest now. We have just been in the ghastliest part of the whole Western Front… Great hills half blown away with enormous shells; villages absolutely razed to the ground; old trenches full of heads, legs and arms.”

Through letters, articles, and those broadcasts (incidentally stopped by Churchill when he urged that the postwar world must truly be made a “land fit for heroes”) the book follows Priestley’s progress from youthful soldier to a passionate disarmament campaigner and leading founder of the CND.

Sadly Priestley’s literary stock has fallen from the high point it reached with his best-selling novel, The Good Companions, and An Inspector Calls, still a popular play. His reputation may revive. Meanwhile this collection, produced with the co-operation of his son and presented with an informative running commentary by the editor, showcases Priestley as a robust communicator, critical of much in society, yet never losing his faith in humanity.

His final words here are: “Though growing old, gouty and grumpy, weary of power-mania and propaganda and all their imbecilities, I have not yet abandoned the hope I felt and tried to celebrate in wartime.’’