Winston Churchill's "We will fight them on the beaches" speech is viewed as one of the great speeches of history, but what was the contemporary reaction to it?

Interestingly, almost no-one actually heard Churchill give that speech on the 4th of June 1940, made following the remarkable evacuation of most of the British troops stranded at Dunkirk. It was delivered in the House of Commons, but unlike many of Churchill's other famous speeches it wasn't delivered on the radio as well.

So instead, people heard a BBC announcer reading his words, or read the text of the speech in the next day's newspapers. The recording of Churchill delivering that speech is actually from 1949.

As for how people responded to it at the time, the responses were rather mixed.

It's easy to find individuals who eulogised it - Conservative MP Henry Channon wrote that Churchill was ‘eloquent and oratorical, and used magnificent English… several Labour Members cried.’ The speech received particularly high praise from many American media outlets, even isolationist ones such as the Chicago Daily Tribune. This is not surprising - the section of the speech vowing that the Empire would continue the fight even if the British Isles fell was specifically tailored to appeal to concerns that Roosevelt had expressed. Churchill even took advice from American newspaper editor William Philip Simms on how to best appeal to an American audience, and deleted a line critical of America's failure to intervene in order to maximise its appeal across the Atlantic.

In the UK press, the speech was highly lauded but was only given pride of place by two newspapers - The Daily Mirror and The Daily Worker (the latter was a Communist paper).

However, when we turn to measures of mass opinion things don't look quite as good as we might expect. Our main sources for this aspect are:-

Ministry of Information's Home Intelligence reports - i.e. the government's monitoring of morale and conditions
Mass Observation's reports and diaries - this was a massive anthropological project to study the British people's attitudes and interactions. As well as sending out questionnaires on issues, some correspondents kept diaries of conversations overhead in the butcher's etc.

The Ministry of Information's Home Intelligence report covering the speech noted that:-

The grave tone of Churchill’s speech made some impression and may have contributed in some measure to the rather pessimistic atmosphere of today. […] The contents of the speech were on the whole expected but some apprehension has been caused throughout the country on account of the PM’s reference to ‘fighting alone’. This has led to some slight increase in doubt about the intentions of our ally [France].

Mass Observation summarised reaction to the speeches as:-

Churchill’s speech has been mentioned frequently and spontaneously this morning. There does not appear to have been a great deal in it which was unexpected, but its grave tone has again made some impression, and may be in part the cause of the depression.

British housewife Nella Last wrote in her diary that:-

We all listened to the news and the account of the Prime Minister’s speech and all felt grave and rather sad about things unsaid rather than said.

So Churchill's speech was recognised at the time by politicians and press as being a particularly fine example of rhetoric, but it didn't produce any great surge of patriotic effort. People responded to the speech's content more than its style, and the content was fairly depressing - the speech suggested that France would not hold out much longer, and that an invasion of the UK was quite possible. Churchill took over as Prime Minister when there was precious little that wasn't bad news; cheerier speeches would simply not have rung true.

Interestingly, in 1947 Nella Last wrote about that speech again, but in very different terms indeed - she remembered that she 'felt my head rise as if galvanised and a feeling that "I’ll be there -- count on me; I’ll not fail you"'. This is a good illustration of how memories of Churchill's early speeches have been re-imagined in hindsight, basked in the glow of the Allied victory.

Sources:-

The Roar of the Lion - Richard Toye. This book is entirely focused on Churchill's wartime speeches with a heavy focus on their contemporary reception, and is the #1 source for this. It's worth also checking out reviews of the book (e.g. this one, which argues that Toye overstates how critical the reception of Churchill's speeches was ).

Toye's also written a nice short blog post specifically on the 'We Shall Fight on The Beaches' speech.

Listening to Britain - Addison & Crang (eds.). This book provides extensive extracts from Home Intelligence reports covering May-September 1940, which includes reports on how Churchill was received by the British public.

This Smithsonian Magazine article on the speech is also where I got the Nella Last quotes from.

Lastly, this previous AskHistorians post on public opinion during the Dunkirk might well be interesting to you.