- The high-decibel music and
high-kicking dancing were standard splendid fare
at the 'Showplace of the Nation'. But the film
which held its première after the floor-show
caused an unusual sensation. It was normal for
audiences to emerge from the theatre blowing
their noses: MGM were experts at activating the
tear-ducts. But these tears were different. They
were shed not just for the Minivers, whose
wartime family tragedy the audience had just
witnessed. They were shed, also, for the whole of
homely civilization -- village life, families,
whistling milkmen, kindly old station-masters --
that was being destroyed, at that very moment, by
Hitler's war in Europe.
-
- Mrs Miniver, more than any
film which had yet been made during the Second
World War, brought the meaning of 'a people's
war' into the minds of Americans, millions of
whom had been opposed to joining the war until
forced to do so by the Japanese and the Germans
in December 1941. Greer Garson and Walter
Pidgeon, as Mr and Mrs Miniver, helped them to
see what they were fighting for. No film had ever
run for more than six weeks at Radio City Music
Hall: Mrs Miniver ran for ten, breaking
box-office records. (It had to be taken off to
make way for Bambi.) Across the United
States, across Canada, in Britain, Australia,
South Africa, New Zealand and India, the story
was the same. People queued round the block.
-
- 'Propaganda Bureaus Are Struck
Dumb With Envy' ran a headline in the Toronto Globe.
Propagandists had been striving for years to make
the war effort understood by the populations of
the United States and Canada: and here, in a
little family movie whose central plot was
nothing more bellicose than a rose competition at
a village flower show, that aim was achieved with
little apparent effort. Winston Churchill (an
uninhibited weeper during the sad bits of films)
is said to have predicted that Mrs Miniver's contribution
to defeating the Axis powers would be more
powerful than a flotilla of battleships.
President Roosevelt was so stirred by the film's
closing sermon that he requested it to be dropped
across Europe in leaflet form and broadcast to
the world on Voice of America. Even the Nazi
propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, who loathed
the film's hero and heroine, admitted that it was
an exemplary piece of propaganda, which the
German industry should emulate.
-
- Mrs Miniver became synonymous in
the public mind with all that was saintly and
self-sacrificing in wartime womanhood. Chicago
launched a 'Name Chicago's Mrs Miniver’
contest. The winner, smilingly photographed on
the centre pages of the Chicago Times, was
Mrs Leonard Youmans, of 5109 Kimbark, 'who, in
her patriotic accomplishments, typifies thousands
of other stout-hearted local women in this war
year of 1942! She has two sons, Donald and
Clifford, in the Navy Air Force. Clifford was
wounded on Atlantic duty and is convalescing in
hospital. Mrs Youmans has a record of over 1,000
hours of service at the Chicago Servicemen's
Center. She is a Travellers' Aid for troops in
transit. She is chairman of the Home Hospitality
committee of the Navy Mothers' Club of Chicago.
And she does all her own housework besides!'
-
- The original Mrs Miniver was a
pre-war creation who first appeared on the Court
Page of The Times on 6 October 1937. Once
a fortnight for two years, a 'Mrs Miniver' piece
was published: 'Mrs Miniver and the New Car',
'Mrs Miniver and the New Engagement Book', 'The
Minivers on Hampstead Heath'. The articles were
anonymous, signed 'From a correspondent'. But
there seemed no doubt that they must have been
written by a contented, well-balanced,
happily-married woman who longed to share her joy
in life, and her peace of mind, with Times
readers. The articles were all about the gentle
pleasures of a modern upper-middle-class
marriage. Their position at the top of the Court
Page was reassuring: if His Majesty The King was
holding a luncheon at Holyrood in the left-hand
corner, and Mr and Mrs Miniver were attending the
Highland Games in the right-hand corner, then
surely civilization (in spite of the horrors
going on in Spain and the threatening noises from
Germany) must be safe.
-
- When the articles were published
in book form by Chatto & Windus in October
1939, the author's name was revealed: Jan
Struther, the pseudonym of Joyce, née
Anstruther, whose married name was Mrs Anthony
Maxtone Graham, resident of Chelsea and mother of
three. The book -- an ideal Christmas present in
its pink and grey slip-case -- was loved by some
readers and detested by others. The rightness,
the relentless optimism and the exquisite
sensitiveness of the heroine got on many British
people's nerves. But when it was published in
America in 1940, it became the Number One
national bestseller. 'Mrs Miniver will place a
gentle hand on your elbow,' said the New
Yorker, 'and bid you stop to observe
something insignificant; and lo! it is not
insignificant at all. That touch -- the touch of
Charles Lamb, even of Shakespeare in a minor mood
-- is one of the indefinable things that English
men and English women are fighting and dying for
at the moment.'
-
- Jan Struther was my grandmother.
But this is not a book about a dear old grandmama
with whom I went to have scones for tea in the
1980s. I sometimes imagine the kind of
grandmother she might have turned into, if she
really had been the 'Mrs Miniver' of her own
creation. She would have been one of those
paper-thin, white-haired Chelsea ladies who live
in mansion flats off the King's Road, and who
occasionally venture out in their tweeds and
pearls to make the journey to Peter Jones on a
number 11 or 22 bus. Her drawing room would have
been a chintzy, scented haven of potpourri and
lilies, with pink-and-white striped sofas and
silver-framed photographs of her deceased husband
in a kilt. She would have managed to keep on a
loyal old retainer, who baked the scones and laid
her tray for breakfast. We would have sat
together by the fire (gas-flame, perhaps), and
she would have talked about what the King's Road
used to be like in the 1930s.
-
- But Jan Struther never reached old
age. She died at fifty-two, nine years before I
was born. Even if she had survived till her
eighties, she wouldn't have been that kind of
grandmother at all. She would have lived on the
Upper West Side of Manhattan in an untidy
apartment strewn with open reference books and
wood-shavings and long-playing records not put
back into their sleeves. We would have sat by the
air-conditioning unit drinking gin and tonic out
of chipped glasses and talking about love and
politics. Her venturings-out would have been to
the drugstore for malted milk, or to the hardware
store for carpentry tools.
-
- During the height of Mrs
Miniver's fame and success during the war,
Jan toured America as an unofficial ambassadress
for Britain, giving hundreds of lectures about
Anglo-American relations to enchanted audiences.
The public wanted to believe that she was the
embodiment of her fictional creation, a sensible,
calm, devoted wife and mother. She felt it was
her wartime duty not to disappoint them. No one
guessed -- no one could possibly have guessed --
that she was in fact living two parallel lives.'
Extracted from Debrett's 'People of Today', 1998
edition. 
