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"We sang, we danced and we all held hands": celebrating VE Day
It’s 80 years since Britain erupted in joy at the news that the war in Europe was over. But how did those who lived through VE Day remember it? With the help of the BBC WW2 People’s War archive, John Willis reveals a day of partying, remembrance and continuing sacrifice
The long and brutal war in Europe was finally over. At 2.41am on 7 May 1945, Germany signed an unconditional surrender agreement at General Eisenhower’s HQ in Reims, 80 miles north-east of Paris. Later that day, the BBC announced the news and the first celebrations began. Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared the following day a national holiday, VE Day (Victory in Europe), and checked the supply of beer was large enough to satisfy the thirst of a happy nation. In Southampton, VE Day opened with a symphony of blaring ships’ horns shortly after midnight. Later, beacons blazed, bunting fluttered in the afternoon sun and joyful parties echoed around every corner of Britain. Children tied effigies of Hitler to lampposts or burned the führer on bonfires. At 3pm, Churchill broadcast from Downing Street: “My dear friends, this is your hour. This is not a victory for any party or class. It’s a victory of the great British nation as a whole.” But Churchill also reminded the partying millions that the conflict was not yet over. A fanatical, undefeated Japan still controlled swathes of territory in the far east. In 2005, the BBC marked the 60th anniversary of VE Day by setting up a huge project called the WW2 People’s War. With help from thousands of volunteers, charities, libraries and museums, the corporation collected an astonishing 47,000 testimonies, both from those who had been serving in the armed forces and from the home front. This was not history as seen from the lofty perspective of politicians or generals, diplomats or historians. Rather, the project gathered the memories of ordinary British men and women – a ground-floor history. The WW2 People’s War (and my book of the same name) stand as comprehensive accounts by those who fought, grieved, loved and survived through years of conflict – and how they reacted when the fighting in Europe was over. Most of the testimonies on the following pages are taken from this archive. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/04/2C7DMHBcmyk-1197be3.jpg" width="2286" height="1522" alt="Four young people - two women and two men - stand with their arms around each other in the fountains at Trafalgar Square" title="One of the most famous images of VE Day from Trafalgar Square shows lifelong friends Cynthia Covello and Joyce Digney with two male companions" /> A riotous party Unsurprisingly, many of those who gave interviews had vivid memories of VE Day itself. Frank Mee from Stockton-on-Tees, who was 16 in May 1945, clearly remembered the party: “I went off to a dance and it was riotous, flags draped around the hall and lights full on, everyone kissing everyone else. I drew the line at the hairy-faced sailors and stuck to the girls, making sure I went round several times. We sang, we danced, and we all held hands singing every song we could think of… “We walked home feeling as if a huge cloud had lifted off our shoulders and I must admit I never once thought of the war in the far east still going on, as we sang and danced in the streets. Each time we met a group going the other way, we shared bottles and kissed all the girls. To a 16-year-old with raging hormones it was seventh heaven.” The scenes were similar in Glasgow. Tommy Mac was 14 and his testimony gives a sense of a topsy-turvy day when temporary connections gave rise to memories that lasted a lifetime: “She was an older girl, perhaps 16 or so. Still, she was to be my companion for the rest of the day. We made our way hand in hand from where we lived to find the main celebration in George Square… I didn’t see many drunks, now I think on it. There was no need. The spirits were lifted high enough as it was. It was quite wonderful to see all the men and women in uniform hugging, kissing and generally flirting with the civilian population. “During all this time, I never once let go of my companion’s hand. I danced with her, hugged her, kissed her too. I don’t know how many times. I never did find out what her second name was. All I knew was her name was Norah, my lovely Norah. In all my life I have never forgotten her, and although we were close to being as intimate as possible, there was never any impropriety. We stayed together until 4am when we finally kissed and said goodbye, each hugging the other. I never saw her again, and to this day I sometimes wonder whether Norah remembers as well. My lovely Norah, with you I shared the most memorable day of my life.” • Read more | A brief guide to VE Day Eight-year-old Barbara Vanderstock’s father had been away fighting for five years and by VE Day had still not returned home to Croydon. But his absence didn’t stop his family from joining in with festivities: “Never mind, we were going to celebrate. Mum organised a massive bonfire in the garden and all our friends came. The flames were as high as the house. We all sang songs of victory – ‘Roll out the Barrel’, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘We’ll Meet Again’, a song I later learnt from dad made soldiers in the western desert weep. “Next, we went round to the street bonfire party where older boys carried lighted flames and marched in procession, ironically a sight reminiscent of the prewar Nazi rallies… There were flags, trestle tables, homemade paper hats, orange juice, jellies, and cakes and we sat there surrounded by laughing grown-ups who would give us anything we wanted.” But VE Day wasn’t just about bonfires and dancing. It also heralded the renewal of simple pleasures, as if a forgotten world of sensations had suddenly been found again. Mary Burgess from Liverpool enjoyed a carefree walk with her nephew, who identified himself only as ‘Tanker’ in the archive. He recalled: “The striking aspect of it all was the banks of daffodils everywhere. It was as though the whole world was new, was young again – and clean.” They joined a queue for ice cream: “Never have I tasted ice cream so creamy, so sweet and so cold. And the texture was just right perfect! So, there we were: Mary and I walking along in the spring sunshine, licking ice creams down to the last milky drops, which we sucked noisily out of the cardboard corners, and happier than we had been in years. That was when the war ended for me and that was when there seemed to be a future.” Central London was the scene of the biggest celebrations. Thousands attended public thanksgiving services at St Paul’s Cathedral. The royal family came out onto the Buckingham Palace balcony several times, waving to the joyful crowds. Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth II, moved anonymously as a 19-year-old through the happy evening crowds in her Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) uniform. She later described it as “one of the most memorable nights of my life”. The other foe Not everyone could face VE Day’s unrestrained jollity, especially those who had seen action. Ulric Cross, a Bomber Command navigator from Trinidad, was the most decorated West Indian in the RAF, nicknamed the Black Hornet. Cross fully intended to join the celebrations in London but, on witnessing the joyful crowds, he headed home. Having seen so many friends killed, he felt too uncomfortable to celebrate: “Everybody was overjoyed and I just didn’t feel like taking part in it. I just felt a lot of people had been killed. This was not a cause for celebration… A lot of my friends were killed… [But] I was extremely glad the war was over.” Or at least almost over. As Churchill had been careful to mention on 8 May, the Allies still faced “another foe”. This was abundantly clear to Odell Johnson of the US 453rd Bomb Group, which was assigned to fight the Japanese as the war in Europe wound down, but first had to return to the USA for training. On VE Day itself, as his troop train pulled past tenement buildings into London, Johnson witnessed a sight that made him laugh: “On the fourth or fifth floor, stood this elderly woman on the fire escape… In her hands she had a pair of red, white and blue bloomers.” Johnson was astonished at the size of the patriotic knickers: “[They] would have fitted the biggest elephant you ever saw. She stood there, waving at us Yanks going home on VE Day and wishing us well.” As Johnson was shipped out of the UK via Southampton, Ted Stocker was busy flying in the opposite direction, repatriating British prisoners from German camps. “We had the privilege of flying back over England on the evening of VE Day when all the bonfires were lit. It was a magnificent sight!… I did get a drink sometime early on the morning of the ninth as the girls in the telephone exchange found a bottle of gin that had something left in the bottom. I had a very tiny tot of gin. That was my VE Day.” Far from home If George’s VE Day pleasures were limited, he did at least make it back to Blighty. In contrast, thousands of British troops were miles away from the celebrations in the UK, maintaining order in Germany and countries the Nazis had occupied. WAAF Mary Pettit, for example, was stationed in Brussels: “What a sight! The whole city was lit up by searchlights, rockets, flares, Very lights [flares] everywhere. British, Belgian and American flags were flying, crowds were in the streets singing and laughing, car horns were sounding. As the evening sky darkened, the famous buildings were silhouetted against the glow from bonfires and fireworks. The old trams were clanking along as usual, but now with people standing or dancing on their roofs.” Mohammed Hussain was an Indian machine gunner stationed in Austria. When the soldiers learnt of Germany’s surrender: “There was a spontaneous eruption of joy. Within a few minutes the entire atmosphere had transformed from one of death to one of a potential new life.” Nineteen-year-old actor Beryl Andrews was touring Germany in an ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) production. Her words similarly capture a sense of emotions being released. On VE Day, she was entertaining British troops at Emsdetten, North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany: “During the show someone came in at the back and called out, ‘The war is over!’ With one accord the whole audience rose to its feet and cheered madly, it was wonderful. I don’t know how we finished the show, we felt choked with emotion. I shall never forget hearing during the interval hundreds of happy voices singing, ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’.” Starting a fire Some, though, had to be on duty. Flight Lieutenant Albert Ricketts was also stationed in Germany. His whole base was stood down for VE Day, except Albert, who was ordered to fly to Canadian Army HQ to pick up a senior officer, Major-General Gerald Templer: “[He] greeted me with the words, ‘We must be the only silly buggers working today.’” That evening, in the absence of fireworks, Albert and his colleagues fired a Very pistol, or flare gun, instead. “The person using the pistol fired one cartridge straight up into the air and the wind carried the burning cartridge onto one of our aircraft setting it on fire, so it was completely wrecked. Somehow or other we managed to cover up this unfortunate accident.” • Read more | "The war without an end": what happened in Europe after VE Day? Ron Goldstein of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars had served in north Africa and Italy. The long battle against the Germans up through Italy was brutal and the campaign did not end until 2 May 1945, just six days before VE Day. Ron spent the day itself on duty near Venice: “There we were in this field in the middle of nowhere, when someone on another tank called out, ‘They’re going mad back home, get the BBC on your set or you’ll miss all the fun!’ I turned my set to the Forces station and, for the benefit of those outside the tank, hung all the earphones over the side of the hull. The crackle of the headphones soon drew a small crowd around the tank and we all listened in amazement to an unknown announcer describing the scenes in Trafalgar Square. “I remember quite clearly that my emotions at the time were mixed. On one hand it was good to feel that perhaps some of my loved ones back home were taking part in these scenes. On the other hand, I – and in hindsight I’m sure most of my comrades – felt somehow cheated that we, who had risked life and limb and had been away from home for so many years, were not there in England to share in the triumph.” A few days later, Goldstein received bad news that could only have compounded his sense of ambivalence: “I received a letter to say that my brother, Jack, had been shot down over Germany and had been posted as missing. It reached me within a week of the war ending in Europe.” While on VE Day itself, anxiety for the future was largely buried beneath the exuberant partying, Ron Goldstein’s memories offer a sharp reminder of how contingent the future still seemed – and was. In the domestic arena, for instance, many returning from service abroad wondered if their partners had found new love. And for those waiting at home, would their partners be the same after witnessing so much horror on the battlefield or in a prison or internment camp? A quote from Birmingham resident Eunice Edwards captures the uncertainty: “Everybody longed for the end of the war, to come home and get back to normal. Alas, no one could go back to 1939. Everything had changed. Some people had married and wanted new houses; some had lost loved ones and couldn’t rejoice. Some people got married after long separations and others got divorced as soon as they could. Some girls had married soldiers from America and Canada and went away to start new lives. It was a case of new beginnings for all of us.” Even for those not facing personal upheavals, there was a sense of needing to begin anew, as reflected in the reflective words of Kathleen Godrey, who was based at Bletchley Park and served with the WAAF: “Now it seems hard to imagine or even remember the shabbiness of our lives… No houses had been painted for years, no trees planted, no roads repaired. In cities where the parks should have been protected by elegant railings, there was either barbed wire or nothing at all. The railings and even saucepans had gone to win the war and in London most buildings which had been bombed were still standing in ruins. We all had to start a new life.” Conflict continued Some had to wait longer than others for a fresh start. On 8 May 1945, Enola Gay, the B-29 from which an atomic bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima in August, had yet to even enter service. In the far east, the fighting was still intense and thousands of British citizens were incarcerated in Japanese camps on VE Day. Cut off from the outside world, they had no idea the war in Europe was over. As Britain celebrated VE Day, Sergeant Len Baynes from Cambridgeshire was a prisoner of war in Thailand, who had been set to work repairing the infamous Burma Railway of Bridge on the River Kwai fame – a track that 12,000 Allied prisoners had died building. When a train transporting wounded Japanese soldiers pulled into a station, Baynes felt sympathy for the enemy: “Nearly every truck contained several dead. Many had terrible wounds, undressed and covered in flies. Others had amputations only covered in field dressings… Our men, their prisoners, walked the length of the train lifting those out who could stand, and filling mess tins and water bottles for others.” When he finally returned home aged 23, Len’s family scarcely recognised him: “I left home a fresh-faced young man and now I looked [to them] like an old man.” In her internment camp for women and children, deep in Sumatra’s interior, British nurse Phyllis Briggs also knew nothing about events in Europe. It was not until 24 August 1945, nine days after Japan had surrendered, that her guards told Briggs the war was over in both Europe and the far east. She had been interned for more than three years. In the final months of conflict, the number of women dying in Briggs’ camp rapidly increased: “The coffins were very rough boxes made of boards that did not even join together properly. We used to cover the coffin tops with ferns to make them look more decent and fill the gaps… I shall always connect ferns with dear friends who had gone. Miss Dryburgh, Nan Wier, Miss Livingstone, Mary Cooper, Macfie – all real friends dying one after another. Several Dutch nuns and Australian sisters died – always one or two deaths every day. The gravediggers found it difficult to dig deep enough, it took so much strength. In the end, it was the children who were the strongest and it was they who did the digging.” From an original group of 15 female internees, only five survived Japanese imprisonment. New world order For Phyllis Briggs and thousands like her, life after the war would never be the same again. Britain partied hard on VE Day, yet once the trestle tables were folded away and the bonfires burnt out, families across the nation – and in the various war zones across the globe – were confronted with the task of coming to terms with loss and dislocation in their lives. Soon they would vote out Winston Churchill, who had inspired Britons through even the darkest days of the war, and replace him as prime minister with Labour leader Clement Attlee. A new world beckoned. In Croydon, eight-year-old Barbara Vanderstock’s father had missed spending VE Day with his family, but he eventually returned home to fresh beginnings: “We went to town on the decorations, crowning our efforts with a large poster, ‘Welcome Home Dad’… We went to sleep and we were woken up by dad, who was in his army uniform standing at the door. He said: ‘Hello Erbs’, and we said: ‘Hello dad.’ It was a strangely ordinary moment.” John Willis is a historian and former TV executive. His latest book, The People’s War: Unheard Voices, is out now (BBC Books) This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Millions of people took to the streets of Britain on 8 May 1945 to celebrate VE Day – the day when the German armed forces signed an unconditional surrender, and the Second World War in Europe finally came to an end. Hanging bunting, waving flags, drinking and dancing, the streets were crammed with joyous revellers...
At 2.41am on 7 May 1945, at a schoolhouse near Reims in northern France, General Alfred Jodl, the German chief of staff, signed the unconditional surrender of all German land, sea and air forces wherever they might be fighting. General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, rang General Sir ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff. “The war is over,” he said. “But no official announcement could be made” said Juliet Gardiner, writing for BBC History Magazine in 2005. “Stalin insisted that victory should not be proclaimed until German troops on the eastern front had surrendered to the Soviet general Zukhov in Berlin and the long-awaited news could be proclaimed simultaneously in London, Moscow and Washington.” Yet rumours that the war had finally ended soon began to filter through to the British public. “The newspapers are full of rumours of surrender… feeling almost excited… everyone is speculating,” wrote Lyn Murphy, who worked for the director of an electrical manufacturer engaged in war production, in her diary for 7 May 1945. “They shouldn’t keep people hanging about waiting like this. The government needn’t be afraid of people going mad, everybody’s very sober about it,” complained a middle-aged man to a member of Mass-Observation, the organisation that compiled reports on British wartime attitudes and morale, which was out in force now that victory was in the air. On the afternoon of 8 May 1945, the British prime minister Winston Churchill made the radio announcement that the world had long been waiting for. He announced that hostilities with Germany would cease at one minute past midnight, and that “our dear Channel Islands”, the only part of British territory to have been occupied, “are to be freed today”. After nearly six long years, the war in Europe was finally over. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/05/GettyImages-3432929-4d9bca8-scaled-e1746607596456.jpg" width="619" height="413" alt="Prime Minister Winston Churchill makes his VE Day broadcast to the world, 8 May 1945. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" title="Prime Minister Winston Churchill makes his VE Day broadcast to the world, 8 May 1945. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" /> Time to party The celebrations began almost immediately. But there were no official plans for VE Day – notice of the public holiday had been so short that most weren’t sure how to celebrate. Gardiner, who later interviewed people who experienced VE Day firsthand, said: “A London window cleaner probably spoke for many when he declared ‘the holiday is the main issue… very few have any definite plans, and these almost exclusively consist of getting drunk.’” Most people had expected the church bells to be rung: “I thought they’d be clanging all day long,” reported a Surrey woman, “but there was no signal. Just hanging around… No All Clears, no bells. Nothing to start people off.” The weather looked set to be fair – though the papers forecast possible rain later. But even that was a novelty, said Gardiner. Throughout the war it had been forbidden to publish the weather forecast in the newspapers or broadcast it on the wireless, for fear of giving the Germans information that might be useful in planning bombing raids. Some people went to church to give thanks for the peace at hastily arranged services, while others strolled around their local streets admiring the flags and streamers that had been hung out. Children set to work making Union Jack flags with cardboard and crayons. Although VE Day was strictly speaking a continental European event, it was celebrated all over the world. In London, more than a million people took to the streets and huge crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace to see Churchill standing on the balcony alongside King George VI. The king's daughters, Princess Elizabeth – the future Queen Elizabeth II (pictured far left) – and Princess Margaret, appeared alongside them. In Paris and New York, similar crowds gathered along the Champs Elysée and in Times Square. Michael Mason, 13, who had been evacuated from his home in central London to a village in Hertfordshire in 1939 and was still there on VE Day, said: “I caught the early bus… to London. I wanted to spend the day with my mum and dad. The scenes in the capital were incredible. It was one huge celebration. A tremendous wave of pent-up feelings had broken loose. The streets were crammed with joyful revellers.” The partying went on into the night: “Crowds surged back to Buckingham Palace to call for the king and queen again, lines of conga dancers wove along Piccadilly, revellers jumped into the fountains in Trafalgar Square,” wrote Gardiner. “The police were tolerant, instructed to intervene only when there was danger to life or limb, to let a war weary people go a little wild just for one night. In fact, there was remarkably little trouble or drunken behaviour – partly because most pubs had already run dry by eight o’clock.” Majorie Cantwell, who was nine in 1945 and living in Ealing, west London, thought that “VE Day was the best day of my life. All morning we had been collecting things for the bonfire (including an old piano full of woodworm!)… when darkness finally fell we lit our bonfire and placed a Hitler “guy” on the top. It was in the middle of the road so we were all able to dance around it. “Later two radios were placed side by side in the window of a nearby house and BBC dance music was relayed into the street. All the grown-ups danced and sang until they were exhausted. When the dance music went off the air, my dad entertained everyone with his banjo and people sang and danced some more. We all went to bed that night tired and happy and I felt that nothing could ever harm us again.” Look back at the 8 May 1945 celebrations in pictures… <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/05/GettyImages-3276265-040cd5d-scaled-e1746607806479.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Canadian troops entertain the crowds in Leicester Square while waiting for the broadcast of the King's VE Day speech, 8 May 1945. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)" title="Canadian troops entertain the crowds in Leicester Square while waiting for the broadcast of the King's VE Day speech, 8 May 1945. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)" /> <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/05/GettyImages-3312682-7950150-e1746608155941.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The residents of Tilloch Street, Islington, London, who organised a tea party in the street for their children at Whitsun. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)" title="The residents of Tilloch Street, Islington, London, who organised a tea party in the street for their children at Whitsun. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)" />
"I felt very alone in a world gone horribly mad": the experiences of evacuees in WW2
It was a moment of possibilities, dislocation and dread. Dan Todman tells the story of the 1.5 million urban Britons evacuated to the countryside at the start of the Second World War
It’s October 1939, and an aristocratic couple are discussing how to manage the horde of ill-spoken, slovenly evacuees from the city who have been billeted in their house. Not to worry, the husband tells his wife: bringing the children into a more refined environment will soon civilise the youngsters. Instead, as the sketch plays out on the BBC Home Service, the couple’s lordly airs and graces disappear. It’s the evacuees – sent away from home at the behest of the authorities – who change their hosts, rather than the other way around. It’s a skit that fits with how the story of Second World War evacuation has often been constructed, both at the time and in the years since. Here is a narrative that emphasises a clash of cultures: the rural rich suddenly confronted by the urban poor – a moment replete with topsy-turvy possibilities. But the circumstances around the recording of the sketch itself reveal how evacuation was a much larger and more complex event than this straightforward narrative suggests. Read more | Persuading the people: British propaganda in the Second World War It was performed by a cast of variety performers who had also been evacuated, from London to Bristol. That move was part of the BBC’s own preparations to maintain a schedule of light entertainment to intersperse with the news bulletins and government announcements expected to dominate the airwaves over the first weeks of the war. Seen in this light, the first wave of evacuations was specifically a product of conditions in the autumn of 1939 – but it was also an event that came to have a deep significance in the British folk memory, emblematic of the longer and wider disruptions, separations and anxieties experienced by so many civilians. It was, too, part of a global phenomenon, as states and communities sought to move people out of harm’s way. Thinking about evacuation therefore helps us understand not only Britain’s war, but also a wider human experience – national and local differences notwithstanding – of the impact of mechanised conflict. Pre-emptive action In Britain, three types of evacuation were undertaken: official, organisational and private. Official schemes evacuated children, mothers with infants, pregnant women and disabled adults from cities to locations in the surrounding countryside – so-called ‘reception areas’. These were set in motion on 1 September, once war was imminent but before it had been declared. More of these evacuees came from London than any other single city but, with the exception of Northern Ireland (where evacuation didn’t start until 1940), this was a nationwide phenomenon. In total, more children were evacuated from other conurbations including Greater Manchester, Tyneside and Merseyside, than from the capital. Read more | Guernsey’s child evacuees Schemes were set up to relocate important parts of the state machinery that would run the war, too. The Air Ministry was later sent to Harrogate, the Admiralty to Bath and a new Ministry of Food was based in Colwyn Bay. At the same time, the BBC wasn’t the only organisation that evacuated its staff. Others, including banks, galleries and universities, moved part of or all their operations away from big cities. Meanwhile, many private citizens with the means to do so took it upon themselves to head to the homes of rural relatives or seaside resort hotels. In those first days of September 1939, as many as 3.5 million Britons may have been in transit by train, boat, coach or car. Being evacuated, as well as seeing evacuees depart, travel or arrive, were shared common experiences that lodged in the memories of those involved. As evacuee Donald Wharf recalled: “I will never forget standing, dazed and bemused, on the forecourt of Paddington Station… I also felt very alone in a world gone horribly mad. That was, of course, in spite of the fact that the station was virtually full, mostly with East End evacuees with labels and gas masks like me. But that was the way I felt at the time – maybe some others did too – while lots, who were similar in age to me, just put down their boxes and cried.” Anticipating attacks The rationale for these relocations was simple. There was a widespread expectation that any new conflict might start with a devastating air attack by enemy bombers. Such a raid would inflict all the horrors of the front-line trenches of the First World War – not just high explosives and slicing shards of metal but also choking and blinding gas – on civilian populations. The best way to protect vulnerable people and essential services was to move them out of danger. Such fears substantially overestimated the power of combatant air forces at the outset of the war, but it was the perception of risk that mattered. Had anything close to the worst-case predictions come to pass in Britain, the impact would have been so awful that it might have broken the country’s will to carry on. Local authorities were responsible for planning official schemes for evacuating children, some mothers and vulnerable adults. Teachers and members of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), the civilian organisation set up under the auspices of the Home Office in 1938 to support civil defence and war work, then implemented these schemes. Local arrangements varied by area – how parents signed up their children to be evacuated, how much form-filling was involved, and how active local government officials were in communicating with families. As part of Britain’s official war history, Richard Titmuss was commissioned to study the effects of evacuation and bombing. In the resulting book, Problems of Social Policy (1950), he suggested that the varying quality of these local arrangements, and the confidence (or lack thereof) they inspired, influenced whether parents registered their children to participate in the scheme. Meanwhile, in the reception areas, WVS billeting officers arranged accommodation for evacuees. Householders with empty bedrooms could be compelled to take in evacuees, but in practice the overwhelming majority volunteered. In return, they were paid an allowance by the government. Most were not owners of stately homes or manor houses. Instead, it was typically lower-middle-class and working-class families who most often offered help. Their willingness to take in evacuees at short notice, creating considerable inconvenience, spoke to a moral acceptance of the obligation to help the needy in a time of national crisis. Unlike the wealthy, however, those of more modest means often lacked the space to separate themselves from evacuees whose manners, lifestyle and expectations were frequently very different from their own. Mass movement In some ways, the official scheme was an extraordinary success. In just a few days it moved around 1.5 million people from urban to reception areas without a single fatality. Had the expected aerial apocalypse arrived, this would have looked like an even greater achievement. Yet those journeys, and the travellers’ experiences on arrival at their destinations, did not feel so orderly to those involved. Most evacuees did not travel far, at least by modern standards. The majority went to rural areas relatively close to their home cities, though some were despatched much further afield. More than 250,000 were billeted in the Home Counties, 73,000 in East Anglia, and almost 57,000 in Wales. However, transport difficulties sometimes turned even journeys that were relatively short in miles into drawn-out tests of endurance. “I remember crying all the way to Wales,” evacuee Beryl Fermor (née Hedges) later wrote. In London, in particular, the pressure to quickly clear mainline stations saw evacuees packed onto trains as they arrived, breaking up school parties and disrupting organisation in reception areas. In some cases, it was weeks before billeting officers and teachers tracked down all their charges. Patriotically eager to bolster morale and reassure parents, journalists conjured up visions of the positive reception evacuees received. Reporting from “somewhere in Buckinghamshire”, the Daily Express painted a picture of women preparing spare rooms and putting “hot water bottles in the beds in which London children would sleep”. In practice, the situation was more varied and often chaotic. In some cases, billeting officers got the children they had been expecting and had already allocated to receiving households, and children were dropped off to their hosts in a process that was brusque but at least efficient. In others, unexpected parties of exhausted evacuees were left in draughty church halls while locals came to choose the ones they’d like. Even when things went well, there were inevitable confusions and complications that compounded the uncertainty and distress. Hostile hosts Some evacuees enjoyed warm welcomes from kind strangers who recognised the novelty and terror of the children’s situation. Having been instructed by his mother to look after his younger sister and “never let go of her hand”, one former evacuee remembered his eight-year-old self watching anxiously as all the other children in their party were found a billet. Every potential host found reasons not to take on two siblings. Finally, however, a married couple arrived who asked how they could help and, when the situation was explained, “without any hesitation they offered to take us both into their home”. Read more | Rationing, school closures and 'Blitz spirit': how did people cope in WW2? Conversely, some evacuees found themselves picked by those grudgingly looking for the least filthy or the most useful for household labour. “In retrospect,” Audrey Demers (née Jones) recalled, “we were treated in a similar fashion to cattle, as the villagers came and looked us over and selected or rejected.” Split up from friends and siblings, some children found themselves living with hosts who were abusive, neglectful or simply unwilling to tolerate for long this strange imposition on their home. Maintaining the dignity and welfare of evacuees in reception areas had been less of a concern in the planning than the need to get people out of the cities quickly. Even judged on these terms, however, the official scheme fell short. Take-up was highly variable. Only about half of London’s eligible schoolchildren were evacuated. In Newcastle, the figure was as high as 70 per cent. In Sheffield, only 15 per cent of those eligible took part. Some families could not organise themselves to meet the timetable of evacuation. Others were unwilling to trust their children to strangers. For many, warnings of the horrors of war only strengthened a protective desire to keep their families together. In the event, the UK did not come under sustained air attack until the summer of 1940 and the Blitz. As a result, adult evacuees soon left the reception areas and families brought their children home. The rate of return varied substantially. Many London children stayed away for the whole war. Conversely, in Clydebank, Scotland, from where more than half of the children had been evacuated in 1939, all but 5 per cent had returned by the end of 1940. They were still there in March 1941 when the Luftwaffe launched catastrophic raids that, according to official figures, left 528 people dead and 617 seriously injured. The initial experience of evacuation often brought differences to the fore. At the household level, the mixing of families in such close proximity inevitably exposed gaps in habits, routine and religion. Clashes of cultures released a flood of rumours in the reception areas – stories that revealed and reinforced class-based and regional prejudices about the urban poor. It was said that dirty children and slatternly mothers had arrived in inadequate and lice-infested clothing. They lazed around billets that were left increasingly filthy by their ill-mannered incontinence, it was claimed, and never contributed to household chores. In an angry Commons debate, Sir Henry Fildes, the Liberal National MP for Dumfriesshire, called evacuation “the dreadful scourge… placed upon the homes of Britain”. Head lice and bed-wetting In practice, the deplorable condition of some evacuees was usually the result of poverty, not preference. Two in five child evacuees from Liverpool and Sunderland, for example, had parents who depended either on out-of-work benefits or on very low incomes. Evacuation came early on a Friday, when wages were most stretched. Many families simply could not afford to kit out their children with new clothes or items on the packing lists supplied by schools. Problems with head lice and bed-wetting were not helped by long journeys on packed trains or by billeting at unfamiliar houses with forbidding hosts. “I can honestly say that we enjoyed being evacuees,” remembered one, almost 65 years later, adding that “we were well treated and obviously loved by our adopted parents.” For him, the experience made a lasting difference. His parents also moved out of London when they were bombed out of their home, and he never returned to the capital. Yet his words indicate that he knew others had not been so fortunate. And evacuees’ experiences did not have to be awful to be painful or to leave a lasting mark. “Home is not where one lives,” said one girl, evacuated from London’s East End to Oxford, “but where one has all the people one loves and knows.” Another evacuee, interviewed at the same time, recalled the differences between their home lives and the repressed respectability of their middle-class hosts, explaining: “I cannot do as I like in the house; I must also come in when I am told and sit down and eat my meals properly and not run out into the street with a slice of bread in my hand.” A third bemoaned the fact that “If we play ball in the streets, a window opens and an old lady puts her head out and starts telling us off.” Mothers' misery Those women who had joined their children on evacuation had a particularly miserable time. Accompanying teachers quickly sought to organise education for school-age children. In contrast, there had been no official preparation to support evacuated mothers. Their presence impinged on the private lives of host families in ways that embarrassed everybody. They had been separated not only from the family groups that formed their closest networks of support, but also from the world of urban leisure – particularly cinemas and dance halls – that offered some temporary respite from the travails of motherhood. Read more | The cruel cost of the Blitz: how did everyday Britons rebuild their lives? Devon’s Inspector of Education reported that the lack of space and privacy created “a very bad psychological disturbance for both mothers and children. They become difficult, the children cry and are irritable, and the nervous energy of the mother is sapped. Sometimes she punishes them for nothing at all and at others she is over-indulgent and sentimental.” Yet if women sought to go out, they often had to traipse the streets idly or risk further condemnation for moral lassitude. Given all this, it was little wonder that mothers returned home quicker and in larger proportions than any other evacuees. Those providing accommodation didn’t have it much easier. Having offered their homes in a crisis, they found themselves committed to sharing space with evacuees with whom they might have little in common, for the duration of a war that, the government made plain, would probably last for years. Even those for whom this proved a joyous experience found it demanding – not least because the value of the allowance they received from the government was rapidly eroded by the pace of early war inflation. A phenomenon so large inevitably involved a full range of human characteristics. There were good and bad hosts among those opening up their homes, just as there were good and bad evacuees. While acknowledging the worst and the best behaviour, we also need to recognise the stoic tolerance of the majority who just tried to get by. Second World War evacuations across Europe and Asia The UK was not the only country in which civilians were evacuated – or evacuated themselves Japanese aggression during the Sino-Japanese war (starting 1937) forced 60 million people to flee their homes in China. Evacuating industries, ministries and civilians to the west became a key part of the Chinese Nationalist government’s strategy to survive the war. When fighting broke out in Europe in September 1939, France and Germany both evacuated civilians from areas on each side of their shared border in anticipation of military operations – although, just as in the UK, the lull in action over the winter of 1939–40 encouraged some to return. The surging tide of Axis military victories in 1940–42 spurred enormous waves of mass flight. The 9 million Belgian and French refugees who took to their country’s roads and railways in May–June 1940 offered a frightening vision of social dissolution and encouraged other states to put more effort into controlling population movements. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, one of the most violent but impressive state-organised evacuations of the conflict saw the core of the Soviet war industry relocated from the path of Axis forces and rebuilt beyond the Urals. In Malaya (now part of Malaysia), Burma (Myanmar) and India. Meanwhile, the chaotic efforts to manage the flood of refugees from Japanese advances after 1941 further delegitimised British colonial rule. Allied success in reversing early Axis victories depended on massive aerial and ground campaigns that forced evacuation and refugee flight. Through an expanding programme that came to include mothers as well as children, Germany evacuated millions of its urban inhabitants from the threat of Allied bombing and the advance of the Red Army. In France, occupation authorities required non-essential civilians to leave fortified coastal towns. As the fighting fronts swept back through Europe and Asia, millions fled the demolishing force of the ground campaigns. Events at the end of the conflict, including the territorial settlements, ethnic cleansing and politically violent nation-building that underpinned the post-1945 order, displaced still more people. There were many differences between the experiences of those in flight – what forced them to move, who organised their departure, and whether they could ever return. But there were also commonalities – physical relocation, tensions with those receiving them, and a sense of powerlessness. The experience of evacuees in Britain was distinct, but it was far from unique – and indeed more common than the stories of combatants. Altogether, about 175 million people became refugees because of the conflict – far more than were mobilised into all of the militaries and munitions factories. This was an unprecedented scale of simultaneous popular displacement, involving about 8 per cent of everyone alive on the planet at the time. Clearing the coast There were further waves of evacuation – officially organised and otherwise – later in the war. Following the fall of France in June 1940, the new proximity of German air bases and the threat of invasion sparked schemes to evacuate coastal cities. And after the start of concentrated German night-time bombing raids on British cities in September 1940, fresh rounds of urban evacuations were organised, both pre-emptively before the raids and afterwards to relocate those who had been bombed out. Uptake rates on later schemes were lower than in 1939. Only in 1944 did evacuation on a similar scale occur. That summer, as London was ravaged by V1 flying bombs, more than a million people temporarily left the capital, including 307,000 children and mothers. This time the danger was immediate and real, but once again few people stayed away long. Most returned even before the government declared that it was safe to do so. Read more | The dangers of the Blitz spirit By that point, evacuation had already been the subject of numerous publications. Even as it was ongoing, the process was being narrated back to the British people by journalists, commentators and comedians. It was also analysed by social scientists and, inevitably, co-opted by politicians eager to establish their own version of what the war should mean. The public discussion that followed demonstrated the widespread appeal of the idea that the conflict ought to lead to societal change, but also the persistence of older ideas – notably the urban-rural divide and the alleged irresponsibility of the poor. The potency of both radical and conservative narratives was such that even today, when we think about what evacuation might have meant, they can colour our thinking. In truth, what evacuation meant to those who experienced it very much depended on their individual experiences. Dan Todman is professor of modern history at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Britain’s War: A New World, 1942–1947 (Allen Lane, 2020) This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
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Eat for victory: the British Restaurants of WW2
As the hardships of the Second World War began to bite, a new network of public dining rooms was established – the British Restaurant. Bryce Evans explores the story of these healthy, economical establishments, and the lessons they could teach us today
Canteen dining often conjures up negative images. This kind of large scale eating might seem grindingly institutional, evoking the worst memories of school dinners: the eternal smell of cabbage and the misery of wet trays. Yet during the darkest days of the Second World War and the rationing that continued long afterwards, a thriving national network of government-backed communal eating establishments offered not just good-value, healthy food. These British Restaurants were, on the instruction of the Ministry of Food, “centres of civilisation” – spaces for all classes, overcoming the Victorian notion of the public consumption of food as something solely for the deserving poor. Established in 1940, British Restaurants were state-subsidised dining rooms offering price-capped, nutritious meals to the public. But the story of wartime communal dining in Britain had actually begun more than two decades earlier, in the latter stages of the First World War. In 1917 the Ministry of Food had established the National Kitchen – a network of more than 1,000 large state-subsidised canteens that functioned until 1919. One of the scheme’s key proponents was the pioneering vegetarian, restaurateur, real tennis Olympic medallist and all-round Edwardian man of action Eustace Miles. Writing in the ministry’s 1918 Public Kitchens handbook, he had stated: “At some future time it will be difficult to believe that each household in the country did its own separate marketing, buying small amounts of food from retail dealers a hundred per cent above cost price, that every hundred houses in a street had each its own fire for cooking, and that at least a hundred human beings were engaged in serving meals that could have been prepared by half a dozen trained assistants.” That was the old way of feeding the nation. Following the dour, difficult years of the First World War, Miles believed that Britain would surely embrace a brave new world of social eating. And the benefits of state-subsidised communal dining seemed obvious: economies of food and fuel, cheap and nutritious fare, and social cohesion. The National Kitchen network seemed to have made home cooking a thing of the past. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/01/GettyImages-1360178342sml-0ac7c8b.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="People queue for food in a state-run National Kitchen, c1918. (Photo by Daily Herald Archive/ National Science & Media Museum/ SSPL via Getty Images)" title="People queue for food in a state-run National Kitchen, c1918. (Photo by Daily Herald Archive/ National Science & Media Museum/ SSPL via Getty Images)" /> Nutty idea? But it wasn’t to last. Along with other factors, the deadly postwar Spanish Flu pandemic helped put paid to mass dining on a national scale, as large gatherings of people were deemed unsafe. Miles’s ideas were also ridiculed by no less than the famous author GK Chesterton, who derided his pioneering nut-based energy bar as “nutter” – the first use of this derogatory term in the English language. Yet despite the dismissal of his plan as being for the sandal-wearing and the wrong-headed, two decades later Miles’s vision was realised on a much greater and lasting scale with the launch of the British Restaurant system. The name itself was coined by prime minister Winston Churchill, who felt that the term “communal feeding centres” smacked of Dickensian poverty or Soviet monotony. While fulfilling the wartime priorities of patriotism, morale and affordable living, these places also had to be attractive places to visit – as a gastronome and bon viveur such as Churchill appreciated. In order to overcome an institutional feel, the Ministry insisted on pleasant surroundings featuring specially commissioned artwork: some venues in London even featured paintings loaned from the royal collection at Buckingham Palace. As with National Kitchens, British Restaurants occupied prime retail spaces on high streets, and featured music, flowers and attractive interior design – and regular inspections for cleanliness and food hygiene. Read more | Saving food, saving lives: rationing in the Second World War The British Restaurant’s basic remit was to combat food and fuel price inflation – at the outbreak of the Second World War, the UK was importing two thirds of its food – and boost morale through attractive yet cheap mass urban social-eating spaces. After receiving a start-up grant from the Treasury, local governments were responsible for recruiting paid staff and management teams. Each British Restaurant was to be run on business lines, with instructions to turn over a profit or at least break even. There was a degree of autonomy over menus – but not menu costs, which had to conform to the Ministry’s price structure. Under retail guru and minister for food, Lord Woolton, who had made his name at the department store chain Lewis’s, the state worked with private enterprise – most notably the millionaire Russian émigré Flora Solomon of Marks and Spencer – to ensure that British Restaurants looked and felt like attractive commercial premises. Interestingly, a prominent local supporter of socialised eating was the man later held up as a paragon of entrepreneurial individualism: future prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s father, Alf Roberts, who as town councillor was responsible for bringing a communal canteen to Grantham in 1942. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/01/GettyImages-3063042-939e748.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="London mayor George Wilkinson (centre left) and food minister Lord Woolton in an air raid shelter, 1940. (Photo by Fred Morley/ Fox Photos/ Getty Images)" title="London mayor George Wilkinson (centre left) and food minister Lord Woolton in an air raid shelter, 1940. (Photo by Fred Morley/ Fox Photos/ Getty Images)" /> A balanced diet When it came to menus, a compromise had to be struck between the Ministry’s nutritionists, who were eager to get British people eating more vegetables, and a general public resistance to healthier fare. So, while the Ministry’s nutritionists attempted to push thick vegetable soups and the “Oslo Break fast” (a version of the continental breakfast), the urge to enjoy comfort food was more pressing. For people suffering the trauma of air raids, it seemed that sausage rolls, fish and chips and chocolate bars were preferable. Eventually, a compromise was struck, with meals devised to resemble the hearty yet healthy “meat and two veg” fare of yesteryear. In 1941, the Ministry of Information recruited popular music-hall actor Tommy Trinder to promote British Restaurants. His experience was captured in the short film Eating Out with Tommy Trinder, in which his fiancée and in-laws were treated to a British Restaurant meal by the eponymous star. “Look what you get for four and tuppence!” enthuses the relentlessly upbeat Trinder in the film, continuing: “Blimey – they’re giving the stuff away!” Aimed at working and middle-class housewives at a time when the notion of “eating out” would have seemed the preserve of the upper class, Trinder went on to wax lyrical about the quality of the food, its affordability, and the cutting-edge kitchen technology used to feed people en masse. “Now, look, you eat at home… your one oven cooks for four… this restaurant uses four ovens and cooks for 800 people,” he exclaims. “If all these people ate at home like you do, it would take 100 ovens and 100 times the gas or electricity to feed them. And they’d all be peeling the spuds in the old-fashioned way – but here they’ve got a machine that does it all. In go the potatoes, on goes the switch, and off come their overcoats!” The restaurants gained celebrity endorsements from various other – politically diverse – quarters: writers JB Priestley and Barbara Cartland, to name but two, were enthusiasts. But social eating had its detractors, too. Author Edward Blishen considered British Restaurants “anonymous” places, because of their air of uniformity. That sentiment was echoed by Frances Partridge, a member of the Bloomsbury set, who described her local venue as “a huge elephant house” full of people eating “enormous all-beige meals… beige mince full of lumps, and garnished with beige beans and a few beige potatoes”. Such sniffy verdicts belied the restaurants’ success. By 1943, these venues were registering impressive net profits nationwide, suggesting both popularity and long-term viability. For the financial year 1942–43, net profit nation wide was £97,500; for 1943–44, it had soared to £170,000 (between around £3.5m and £6m in today’s money). One reason for the National Kitchens’ decline had been that their prices exceeded cheap tea houses such as Lyons. In 1946, by contrast, the Ministry of Food estimated that a standard British Restaurant meal cost one shilling and threepence (customers paid in cash), whereas the equivalent average price in a Lyons outlet was one shilling and tenpence – significantly higher. And yet, whereas National Kitchens raised the ire of the private retail trade by interfering with the sense of fair play associated with the free market, British Restaurants achieved a much better relationship – harmonious rather than antagonistic – with private food retailers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/01/GettyImages-591978482-96578f8.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Waitresses in training for the Lyons tearoom chain, 1945. British Restaurants aimed to match, or undercut, its prices (Photo by Daily Mirror/ Mirrorpix/ Mirrorpix via Getty Images)" title="Waitresses in training for the Lyons tearoom chain, 1945. British Restaurants aimed to match, or undercut, its prices (Photo by Daily Mirror/ Mirrorpix/ Mirrorpix via Getty Images)" /> Changing tastes British Restaurants represented just one arm of a greatly expanded wartime public feeding network – something that historians have largely overlooked, focusing instead on the success of the rationing system. They were the most eye-catching form of public dining, but also operated alongside other options such as factory and dock canteens, and emergency feeding in shelters. As such, a British Restaurant acted only as an “eat out” option, never a primary food provider: that was the function of the ration book. At their peak there were 2,160 British Restaurants across the country, most on busy urban thoroughfares. The extent to which the British Restaurant became a high-street fixture is illustrated by comparison to the number of McDonald’s restaurants in the UK today – about 1,300. In frequently citing Churchill’s early dislike for the term “communal feeding”, historians have overlooked his later defence of British Restaurants, “which had served a most useful purpose and should not be allowed to disappear”. Read more | 10 tips for surviving on the home front during the Second World War And yet, as was the case with National Kitchens before them, disappear they gradually did. The British Restaurant outlasted the war, but its numbers were already in decline when rationing was lifted in 1954, and few survived beyond this point. This demise was chiefly due to shifting postwar trends in consumer capitalism. “Eating out” – along with the supermarket – became more accessible and normal for the working class, and restaurants serving foreign cuisine grew in popularity. But perhaps the most lingering cultural blow to British canteen dining was delivered by George Orwell’s bestselling Nineteen Eighty Four, published in 1949. In his novel’s repressive, authoritarian society, Orwell reimagined the popular BBC canteen, where he ate every day, as a subterranean dystopia in which greyish-pink slop was doled out to obedient queues of “proles”. Read more | The food policies used by the Nazis to maintain control in the Third Reich Orwell’s prose recalled the nagging utopianism in the language employed by proponents of social eating – a rather preachy tone of civilisational ascent echoed in the 1960s by JG Davies, a leading food scientist, who told London’s Royal Society of Arts that home cooking would disappear by the year 2000. Instead, he confidently predicted, “instant” food, pre-prepared and served in large communal feeding spaces, would be the norm, reflecting profound sociological changes. Davies’s observations attracted the ire of restaurant critic Egon Ronay, who protested that “home cooking will never come to an end – unless the way to a man’s heart is through a pill… if this does come about, I am glad I shall be dead by the year 2000.” Ronay (who died in 2010, at the age of 94) need not have worried. Home cooking has persisted and, by the end of 20th century, and with the postwar rise of individualism and consumerism, it was the notion of communal eating that had become rather passé (though has since enjoyed something of a resurgence, thanks to restaurants such as Wagamama). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/01/GettyImages-1360178106-30d84a3.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Home cooking – as seen in a 1939 demonstration kitchen – would die out by 2000, according to a leading food scientist in the 1960s (Photo by Daily Herald Archive/ National Science & Media Museum/ SSPL via Getty Images)" title="Home cooking – as seen in a 1939 demonstration kitchen – would die out by 2000, according to a leading food scientist in the 1960s (Photo by Daily Herald Archive/ National Science & Media Museum/ SSPL via Getty Images)" /> Food for thought There are, though, surely lessons here for the 21st-century UK. Far from a historical oddity, cheap yet nutritious social eating provided a successful way of combating what is today termed “food poverty”. British Restaurants were popular venues appealing across the classes, and there was much less stigma attached to them than that associated with food bank use today. Though it might be assumed that the political left would champion communal feeding and the right dismiss it, the political reception was more nuanced. Examples of its proponents – from Churchill, to Barbara Cartland, to Margaret Thatcher’s father – demonstrate this. Today’s network of food banks (of which there are about 2,500) broadly equates to the number of British Restaurants at their peak. Yet whereas the basic food-bank model perhaps replicates those of the Victorian era, targeted at the poorest in society, the British Restaurant was instead founded on notions of “Food for All” and the “Right to Food”. Amid today’s cost-of-living crisis, the UK’s recent history of social eating provides an alternative – and arguably more sustainable – model. In other words, an alternative approach to feeding people well lies within living memory. Yet so-called “wartime exigencies” are often quickly forgotten or dismissed – and the experience of communal dining at the British Restaurant is no exception. Writing in her memoir after the war, Flora Solomon reflected that “restaurants existed, and so did communities; but put the two together, and you were introducing a practice so alien to the mentality of the British people it could be likened to replacing the brick walls of the Albert Hall with glass and turning the place into a nudist colony.” Solomon and others successfully revived a First World War experiment, establishing the British Restaurant as a supplement to the ration book, with tangible psychological and health benefits. Perhaps it might be time to re-evaluate British canteen dining and its Orwellian image problem, and recognise the social and economic benefits it delivered. Bryce Evans is professor of modern world history at Liverpool Hope University and author of Feeding the People in Wartime Britain (Bloomsbury, 2022) This article was first published in the January 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Why we should remember when the paper poppy became a symbol of remembrance
More than 100 years ago, in 1921, paper poppies were first sold to raise money for returned soldiers of the First World War. Fiona Reid explores the history behind this symbol of remembrance...
More than a century ago, in 1921, paper poppies were first sold to raise money for returned soldiers of the First World War. In postwar society, many veterans struggled to find homes, employment and financial security, so associations were formed to campaign for their rights. Sometimes, these efforts turned violent, causing great anxiety in a British political establishment still reeling from the Russian Revolution and postwar political radicalism across Europe. Read more | Remembering the First World War: blood, poppies and poetry Yet when a number of ex-servicemen’s groups combined to form the British Legion, with Field Marshal Earl Haig as its president, veterans’ associations started to become more widely popular and part of the establishment rather than a force for opposition. As part of this process, the British Legion introduced the idea of selling paper poppies as a fundraising campaign to alleviate the material distress that lay at the root of veteran discontent and political agitation. In its first year, the Legion sold 9 million poppies, entrenching the deeply felt symbolism attached to the poppy since the 1915 publication of the poem In Flanders Fields by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. On the podcast | First World War poets: everything you wanted to know Throughout the 1920s, most British people chose to wear poppies every 11 November, but attempts to unify the nation in a shared memory were never completely successful. In 1933, the Co-operative Women’s Guild introduced the pacifist white poppy to counter the supposed militarism inherent in the so-called Flanders poppy, inspired by the poppies that grew on the battlefields. Many veterans reacted angrily and sometimes destroyed the white poppy wreaths left at war memorials. Commemorative events were scaled back during the Second World War, and poppy-wearing remained limited until the 1990s when the British Legion campaigned successfully to reintroduce the two-minute silence. Since then, poppy-wearing has become widespread not just on Armistice Day but in the weeks leading up to 11 November. It is now unimaginable for a public figure or a BBC journalist to appear without wearing a poppy in early November. Wearing the poppy is no neutral act. It has always been political and highly symbolic; it has always been contested and has served to highlight national divisions as well as shared myths and memories. Does wearing the poppy glorify war, or does it remind us of its tragedies? There are many responses to that question, but after 100 years, wearing the poppy reminds us that the after-effects of war endure and that we still have no answer to the question posed by the Scottish poet Tom Scott: “Why are men always making war rather than the things they need?” Dr Fiona Reid is the associate dean at Newman University in Birmingham, and author of Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914-30 (Continuum, 2010) This article was first published in the November 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine
Winston Churchill delivered some of the most inspirational speeches in history, but which of his orations were the most important? Here, Winston S Churchill – grandson of the famous prime minister – selects eight of the very best...
‘We lie within a few minutes’ striking distance’ 16 November 1934, London Winston Churchill was, in November 1934, a lone voice in questioning the country’s policy of appeasement to Hitler: “At present we lie within a few minutes’ striking distance of the French, Dutch and Belgian coasts, and within a few hours of the great aerodromes of Central Europe," he said. "We are even within canon-shot of the Continent. "So close as that! Is it prudent, is it possible, however much we might desire it, to turn our backs upon Europe and ignore whatever may happen there? I have come to the conclusion – reluctantly I admit – that we cannot get away. Here we are and we must make the best of it. But do not underrate the risks – the grievous risks – we have to run.” 'We take our stand for freedom' 5 October 1938, House of Commons, London Just a few days after Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich brandishing his now infamous scrap of paper, Churchill predicted that war had certainly not been averted. He was right. “This is only the beginning of the reckoning," he told the House of Commons. "This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.” Read more | Did appeasement cause the Second World War? 'Blood, toil, tears and sweat' 13 May 1940, House of Commons, London It's May 1940. Chamberlain has resigned, and Churchill, now 65, has formed his government. This first speech in office settles the country’s nerves: “I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. This is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? "I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory, there is no survival.” 'We shall never surrender' 4 June 1940, House of Commons, London After the Dunkirk evacuation, Churchill calmed the nation’s euphoria and stiffened its resolve with this speech: “Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Listen | Richard J Evans answers key questions about the Third Reich 'This was their finest hour' 18 June 1940, House of Commons, London Churchill stands tall in the face of an impending onslaught, and inspires the pilots of the RAF to victory in the Battle of Britain. “The battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. "If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” Read more | What exactly was the British empire? 'The few' 20 August 1940, House of Commons, London As the Battle of Britain climaxes, Churchill praises the bravery of the RAF pilots. “The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Read more | 6 Battle of Britain myths 'An iron curtain has descended' 5 March 1946, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri In the spring of 1946, Churchill warned about the threat of Soviet Russia. This stopped America’s retreat into isolationism and led to the creation of NATO: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.” 'The nation… had the lion heart' 30 November, 1954. Presentation by both Houses of Parliament, Westminster Hall, London On his 80th birthday, Churchill showed he was still a master orator: “I am very glad that Mr Attlee described my speeches in the war as expressing the will not only of Parliament but of the whole nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and, as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it, and if I found the right words you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue. It was the nation and race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar." Winston S Churchill's Never Give in! The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches was published by Pimlico in 2003. This feature was first published in Living History Magazine (later merged with BBC History Magazine) in 2003
Saving food, saving lives: rationing in the Second World War
This week marks the anniversary of food rationing being introduced in Britain, beginning with bacon, butter and sugar, during the Second World War. Feeding the nation during wartime was a serious business. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska describes the women's war on the kitchen front
A report by the social research organisation Mass Observation on the food situation in 1941 noted the “difficulty of eking out rations with unrationed foodstuff, the high prices, particularly of perishable foods, shortages and the consequent queues, occupy the first place in the average working woman’s present-day life”. The point was made succinctly by a Mass Observation diarist who “invariably” asked his wife what her friends said about the war before writing his entry. She “always” replied, “‘Nothing, they don’t discuss it. They are more concerned about what to get for tea’ – which is, I suppose, after all a war topic”. In the Second World War the civilian population had to cope with extensive rationing of food and clothing as well as severe shortages of other consumer goods as economic resources were diverted towards the war effort. During this period of austerity, housewives acquired an increased status because the successful implementation of rationing and other domestic economy measures was vital in maintaining civilian health and morale. This pivotal female contribution was recognised by the government. For example a Ministry of Food leaflet declared: “The line of Food Defence runs through all our homes … The woman with the basket has a vital part to play in home defence. By saving food you may be saving lives”. The housewife’s daily battle on the kitchen front was as critical to victory as that of the soldier or the worker in essential industries. Second World War: a timeline Food was undoubtedly a major concern for women in wartime, but this did not mean that they were uninterested in the wider war effort. Clara Milburn, a middle-aged, middle-class housewife who lived in a village a few miles from Coventry, commented on the progress of the war in considerable detail in her diary. Anxious about her son who was a German prisoner of war, Milburn accepted wartime sacrifice. She considered the extension of food rationing in the summer of 1940 as “all to the good”. Nevertheless, Milburn lamented rising prices and growing shortages of unrationed foods and other goods. Following the introduction of clothes rationing in 1941, she commented that, “Life is certainly queer now, with coupons for clothes (margarine coupons at that) and very ordinary commodities like potatoes kept in the shops for regular customers only!” Timeline: when did food rationing begin and end? January 1940 | Food rationing begins: butter, bacon, ham and sugar rationed March 1940 | Meat rationed July 1940 | Tea and margarine rationed May 1941 | Cheese rationed June 1941 | Clothes rationed December 1941 | Points rationing introduced for canned and processed foods February 1942 | Soap rationed July 1942 | Chocolate and sweets rationed May 1949 | Clothes rationing abolished May 1950 | Points rationing abolished September 1950 | Soap derationed October 1952 | Tea derationed February 1953 | Sweets rationing abolished May 1954 | Cheese and fats derationed July 1954 | Meat, bacon and ham derationed, marking the end of food rationing How to stop the grabbing Nella Last, a middle-aged, working-class housewife, started writing her diary as a Mass Observation volunteer. She lived in Barrow-in-Furness, which like Coventry suffered severely from bombing raids. Last, who remembered the look of “beyond” in the faces of young men volunteering in 1914, responded to Chamberlain’s declaration of war with resignation and she worried about her two adult sons. Your guide to the Blitz, plus 9 places affected by the bombings Last was rather more critical than Milburn and in 1942 she wrote that the “present rationing system has been a farce”. Last deplored the fact that there were many who “got more than their share”. She grudgingly endorsed strict rationing. “Much as I dislike coupons and chits, I think it’s the only fair way to stop overlapping and grabbing”. Wartime surveys show that housewives generally welcomed the introduction of a comprehensive food policy and nine out of ten supported rationing. Food rationing and shortages made the housewife’s task more arduous and women’s time became an important national resource in the exceptional circumstances of war. Women’s tendency to spend their time caring for their families rather than indulging in personal leisure pursuits was utilised by the state as an indispensable aspect of the austerity policy. An avalanche of propaganda informed housewives on the details of food policy, advised them on how to make the most of scarce resources and suggested new recipes such as ‘mock’ dishes. With the introduction of clothes rationing, soap rationing and shortages of virtually all household goods, housewives learned how to “make do and mend” to maintain at least a semblance of customary standards and domestic rituals. The introduction of clothes rationing affected women to a greater extent than men. The policy was not just a concern of the young and fashionable. Mothers worried about clothing children under rationing and surrendering coupons for household linen – part of the ration since 1942 – became a continuous source of grievance. Satisfaction with food increased as ration levels stabilised from 1942 onwards, but there was no shift towards contentment with regard to the clothing situation in Home Intelligence morale reports. Another problem was the shortage of soap and in 1943 Milburn wrote in her diary: “never in all my life have I been so short of soap – a nasty feeling”. 5 foods you (probably) didn’t know were being eaten in the Middle Ages Shopping became increasingly difficult in the course of the war. Milburn lamented the “miserable” look of shops in 1942 as shelves were “getting emptier and emptier”. “Many things were not obtainable” any more “so one just had the weekly ration”. Likewise, Last wandered around a market with many stalls closed and few goods available with “sadness” in her heart. In contrast with the “joyous” prewar atmosphere of “meet-a-friend-and-have-a-chat” nowadays “grim-faced women queue and push – and hurry off to another queue when served”. To purchase unrationed foods and other scarce items required queuing, and food queues were an unremitting problem. Home Intelligence morale reports described food queues as a “bigger menace to public morale than several serious German air raids” in February 1941. Housewives did most of the queuing, yet this was a task that working women and mothers of young children had real difficulty finding time to do. According to a Mass Observation report, to a “great extent queues have been the trial of the women rather than the men. Men have felt the lack of variety of food at the dinner table, but they have not gone through the tiring ordeal of queuing, for what there is in front of them”. Used to economising, Last prided herself on being a “good cook and manager”. She did all her own baking and cooked stews stretching cheap cuts of meat into a filling meal. Her husband appreciated her abilities: “By Jove, when I hear some men talking about what they get to eat, I realise how lucky I am”. The boys who lied about their age to fight in WW2 Making sacrifices in war The Milburns had a large garden and homegrown vegetables augmented the family’s rations considerably. However, digging for victory required not only access to a suitable plot of land, but also time and Clara Milburn’s diary reveals the effort and frustrations involved. By contrast, relatively little came of Nella Last’s plan to grow vegetables in her back garden. However, she kept hens and the family had plenty of eggs. Housewives frequently shielded men and children from the full impact of the reduction in consumption that accompanied rationing, a sacrifice that extended across the social spectrum. Nevertheless, female morale was generally high during the war, the overwhelming majority of housewives considered themselves to be well fed and they accepted the necessity of sacrifice for the duration. How wartime affected cosmetics and fashion Stimulated by women’s magazines and the cinema, demand for fashionable clothes and beauty products was high on the eve of war. With unprecedented levels of female employment, demand for cosmetics increased further during hostilities. In the wake of clothes rationing, women focused on elaborate makeup, inventive hairstyles and coupon-free accessories to counterbalance the limitations of their wardrobe. As Doris White, a young engineering worker, put it: “Our aim in life seemed to concern our faces and hair”. A wartime survey shows that the overwhelming majority of working women and 90 per cent of the under-30s used cosmetics regularly. Women's right and duty to maintain a fashionable appearance was portrayed as critical to female morale. The magazine Woman proclaimed in December 1939: "Nowadays beauty is a duty, since it cheers and inspires both yourself and others". The firm Yardley coined the slogan "Put your best face forward" and one advert declared, "Never should we forget that good looks and good morale go hand in hand". Cosmetics or toilet preparations were never rationed, but official production was cut by 75 per cent of prewar output to economise on labour and raw materials. According to the Board of Trade, which was in charge of controlling domestic consumer goods, the industry actually produced over half of prewar output in 1941. At the same time, the only cosmetics “normally” seen in shops were of “very obscure and, in most case, illegal origins”. The report concluded that new legislation would “deal with the most important abuses, but there is little doubt that the black market will merely move on to some other forms of evasion”. 10 facts about crime on the home front The possibility of prohibiting the industry entirely was discussed in 1942. This proposal was rejected in view of the “uproar which prohibition would evoke” because in order to sustain morale “women must have lipstick and powder”. Instead, the Board introduced increasingly tight regulation, and legislation governing the control of cosmetics was changed eight times in six years. This policy dealt a “blow at the Black Market”, but new loopholes continued to be exploited. One example was the appearance of a product called Laddastop following the prohibition of nail varnish, which required scarce solvent-based substances, in 1943. Marketed to stop ladders in silk stockings, Laddastop was pink and sold in small bottles with a brush for application. A Board of Trade official lamented that the “Black Market has defeated us”, because manufacturers claimed that they were not producing a toilet preparation at all. The predicament was resolved by a Ministry of Supply order which prohibited preparations containing the banned solvents in bottles less than half a pint in size. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska is an associate professor of modern British history at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is author of Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption (Oxford University Press, 2000). This article was first published in the March 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine
My history hero: Michael Morpurgo chooses Krystyna Skarbek (1908–1952)
Author and poet Sir Michael Morpurgo chooses SEO agent Krystyna Skarbek as his history hero
Krystyna Skarbek: in profile Born in Poland, Krystyna Skarbek – also known as Christine Granville – was an agent for Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), which conducted espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance operations in Nazi-occupied Europe. Celebrated for her daring wartime exploits, she was stabbed to death by a spurned admirer in London in 1952, aged just 44 How did you first hear about Krystyna Skarbek? Sir Michael Morpurgo: Because of two extraordinary uncles of mine, Pieter and Francis Cammaerts, who had an English mother and a Belgian father. Pieter joined up at the start of the war and was killed in 1941. Francis joined the SOE and in March 1943 was dropped into France, where he set up a resistance network. In July 1944, before the Allied landings on the Mediterranean coast, Krystyna was sent to join his unit. They worked together closely, providing information and carrying out sabotage missions that were crucial to the Allied advance in their area. What kind of person was she? Krystyna became a resistance fighter after Poland, her country of birth, was invaded in 1939 by Germany and the Soviet Union. She was clever, charismatic, spoke several languages and, just as importantly, got on with and understood people. She also looked striking; everyone in the SOE who came into contact with Krystyna fell in love with her – my uncle included, even though he was married. What made Krystyna a hero? She had enormous courage and was committed to getting the Germans out of her country. She loved to wreak havoc on the enemy, blowing up trains and creating chaos. She had a passion for liberty that inspired those around her. She was as strong as any man, and when she set her mind to a task she’d follow it to the end. Lastly, she was a woman in what was mostly a man’s world; a female secret agent was somehow much less noticeable. It was this, along with her tenacity and courage, that helped make her a perfect SOE operative. What was her finest hour? For me, it was saving my uncle’s life. Towards the end of the war, the Free French government in London encouraged Resistance forces in the Vercors massif to rise up against the Nazis before the D-Day landings. The Germans responded with fury, brutally massacring civilians and Resistance fighters. Francis was captured and taken to a Gestapo prison at Digne, where he was to be shot. Krystyna brazenly walked in and demanded to see the commander. Claiming she was my uncle’s wife, and the niece of Field Marshal Montgomery (all lies!), she told the Germans to release my uncle – or there would be hell to pay when the Allies arrived. They demanded 2m francs. Within 48 hours the money had been dropped and handed over, ensuring my uncle’s survival. Read more: Noor Inayat Khan: the daring life of the British WW2 ‘spy princess’ Do you think she deserves to be better remembered? Yes, as should all the other SOE secret agents and operatives. I’m hoping that my book, In the Mouth of the Wolf, will help highlight their efforts, and tell their story in a small way. Is there anything you don’t particularly admire about her? No – I think she was a wholly admirable person. It’s sad that she found it so hard to adjust to civilian life after the war ended, but the truth was that she’d been living on the edge for years. She probably found the postwar world a rather drab and dull place, and was perhaps suffering from some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. Read more about 100 women who changed the world If you could meet Krystyna, what would you ask her? I’d ask how we as a nation could, after the war, have prevented her from falling into this world where she seemed hardly able to swim. More should have been done to help her, and others like her, readjust to everyday life. In a way she was used up and spat out. Sir Michael Morpurgo was talking to York Membery. Sir Michael Morpurgo is a children’s author and poet. In the Mouth of the Wolf, illustrated by Barroux, is published in May by Egmont Listen again: Hear Michael Morpurgo discuss Mozart on Radio 4’s Great Lives: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076rln This article was first published in the May 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
Your guide to the Blitz, plus 9 places affected by the bombings
From September 1940 until May 1941, Britain was subjected to sustained enemy bombing campaign, now known as the Blitz. Find out how it began, what the Germans hoped to achieve and how it severe it was, plus we visit nine places affected by the attacks
From his vantage point in Normandy, Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring pointed his binoculars in the direction of the English coast. It was 7 September 1940, a fateful day in the history of the Second World War. Overhead close to 1,000 German bomber and fighter aircraft headed towards the English capital where they would shortly wreak devastation on the streets below. This was the first day of the sustained bombing campaign against Britain, popularly known as the Blitz, which Adolf Hitler hoped would soon bring a stubborn enemy to its knees. That day Göring had made a confident broadcast on German radio: “This is an historic hour, in which for the first time the German Luftwaffe has struck at the heart of the enemy”. The September raids were not in fact the first aerial attacks Britain had suffered in the war. There had been sporadic incidents of bombing since the previous October but these were small and infrequent, a far cry from the massed bombardment that Britain would face in late 1940 and early 1941. For Germany, the Blitz was in part a recognition that Hitler’s plan to invade Britain that summer was failing. After the fall of France in June 1940 Britain had been all that stood in the way of victory for Germany in the European war. However, because of the strength of the Royal Navy, an invasion of the British Isles would be a highly risky gamble and one that Hitler was not prepared to take without first achieving aerial superiority. The Second World War: a timeline Over the next few months the Luftwaffe clashed repeatedly with the RAF, hoping to win control of the skies. It was a close run thing but in the end it was the British fighters that emerged triumphant, inflicting heavy losses on their German counterparts. The legend of the Battle of Britain was born. With an invasion seemingly unlikely, Hitler switched his focus to the bombardment of British cities. This was to have the dual purpose of damaging Britain’s infrastructure and weakening civilian morale. Furthermore, on 25 August, British bombers had raided Berlin, and it is likely that the Blitz was also partly motivated by revenge. London received the brunt of the initial attacks, being bombed for 57 consecutive days at the start of the onslaught. Other cities did not escape, however, with ports and industrial centres also selected for destruction. The bombers came over in waves several hundred strong and because they flew by night it was very difficult for British defences to prevent them getting through. Listen | Jonathan Boff explains how ordinary people coped with the privations of World War II and considers what parallels can be drawn with the current Coronavirus crisis Preparations had been made for air raids including the distribution of Anderson air-raid shelters, evacuations of civilians to the countryside and the establishment of the Air Raid Precaution organisation, but nonetheless there was significant loss of life. Despite government efforts, many people were without effective shelters and so underground alternatives, notably tube stations, were commandeered for this purpose. In May 1941 the main phase of the Blitz ended. By this time British air defences, aided by developments in radar, had improved, meaning the Luftwaffe was suffering heavier losses during the raids. Perhaps more importantly Germany was about to embark on the invasion of the Soviet Union and needed to divert resources to the east. Operation Barbarossa: Hitler’s greatest mistake What is clear is that the Blitz did not achieve either of its objectives. British production was impaired but nothing like enough to knock the country out of the war. And while the population was undoubtedly shaken, civilian morale held up remarkably well in the face of the bombs. Air raids, albeit on a smaller scale, continued throughout the Second World War. Towards the end of the conflict the British people faced a new menace when the Germans began launching V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets at the country. These weapons arrived too late to shift the direction of the war but were still able to inflict a great deal of suffering. Around 60,000 British civilians were killed by German air raids in the war and countless buildings were damaged. But the legacy of the Blitz is not just limited to broken walls and bones. “It has become part of the mythology of the war,” says Dr Jeremy Crang of the University of Edinburgh. “The Blitz has come to represent the indomitable spirit of the British people against the odds and, along with the evacuation from Dunkirk and the battle of Britain, forms one of the planks of Britain’s ‘finest hour’. Words by Rob Attar. Historical advisor Dr Jeremy Crang, co-editor of The Burning Blue: a New History of the Battle of Britain (Pimlico, 2000) Your quick guide to the Blitz What was the Blitz? The Blitz was a sustained bombing campaign against Britain launched by the Germans towards the end of the Battle of Britain. What does Blitz mean? The word Blitz is an abbreviation of the word ‘Blitzkrieg’, meaning ‘lightning war’. When did the Blitz begin and end? The main phase of the Blitz began on 7 September 1940 and ended in May 1941, though Germany continued with sporadic bombings until 1945. A series of German raids in 1942 targeted historic cities and were nicknamed ‘Baedecker raids’ after the German guidebooks of that name. Was London the only city targeted during the Blitz? No, although London did endure 57 consecutive nights of bombings. Other cities targeted included Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Southampton and Swansea. How many people died in the Blitz? Between September 1940 and May 1941, 41,480 people were killed, says Richard Overy, of whom 16,755 were women and 5,184 were children. During the entire war, 60,595 British civilians were killed by enemy action in the UK, writes Daniel Todman, of whom 7,736 were children. How many German bombs were dropped on Britain? German bombers dropped 58,000 tonnes of bombs in 1940 and 1941. Nine places in Britain affected by the Blitz St Dunstan’s Church, London Where the first bombs fell Long before the Second World War began the British authorities were deeply concerned about the possibility of air raids in a future conflict. “The bomber will always get through,” former prime minister Stanley Baldwin had warned back in 1932. The Spanish Civil War had shown the potential for aerial destruction and, by the time Britain went to war with Germany, many feared a catastrophe. Two years earlier it had been estimated that 1.8 million might be killed or injured in a 60-day attack. The people of Britain would have to wait a year to find out whether their worst nightmares would materialise. On 7 September 1940 the Blitz got under way when two waves of German bombers dropped their loads over London, killing or wounding 2,000 people and igniting the largest fires the city had seen since 1666. The Great Fire of London: how the ferocious blaze of 1666 destroyed the capital Then, as on several future occasions, the docklands in London’s East End were the principal target. The district of Stepney took a savage mauling on that first day of the Blitz. Bernard Kops, who lived locally in 1940, later said: “That day stands out like a flaming wound in my memory. Imagine a ground floor flat crowded with hysterical women, crying babies and great crashes in the sky and the whole earth shaking”. During the Blitz many buildings in Stepney were reduced to rubble but the church of St Dunstan and All Saints survived with only its windows destroyed. The church is one of London’s oldest, dating back to at least the tenth century, although the main structure is chiefly late medieval. Today one of its stained glass windows recalls the Second World War, with an image of Jesus rising above the ruins of Stepney after the Blitz. Chislehurst Caves, Kent Where people hid from the bombers This ancient cave complex has been gradually dug out of the rock over the course of several thousand years. Up to the early 19th century Chislehurst was mined for chalk and after that it became a popular tourist attraction, which it still is nowadays. During the Second World War, however, the caves became very popular for an entirely different reason. Londoners living through the Blitz were in desperate need of shelter. Hundreds of thousands of households had been provided with Anderson shelters by the government but these offered limited protection and were only available to those with gardens. The indoor Morrison shelter was not distributed until March 1941. So as the skies filled with bombers night after night, huge numbers of civilians sought to find alternative places of safety. The Few: who exactly were the heroes of the Battle of Britain? In this spirit Chislehurst Caves became a giant impromptu air-raid shelter. So many Londoners took advantage of its caverns and passageways that special trains had to be put on to transport them all there. Some even took up residence, as an observer noted in November 1940. “We were told to go to the inner caves: but they had been filled by regular visitors – who had commandeered positions weeks before. Some had taken possession of cut out rooms, and curtains were fixed in front and behind… there were tables, cooking stoves, beds, chairs behind the curtains. Bombed out families live there permanently and the father goes to work and returns there and the mother goes out to shop and that is their home.” How dangerous was 'Blitz Spirit'? The stoicism of the British people in response to the Luftwaffe raids of 1940–41 is seen as heroic, but their defiance resulted in needless deaths, says Richard Overy. "The popular slogan that the bomb that killed you ‘had your name on it’ is not just a Blitz myth, but is recorded in wartime diaries and eyewitness accounts," he writes. "After a flurry of sheltering in the first weeks of the Blitz in September 1940, Londoners developed a growing insouciance..." The dangers of the Blitz spirit Bethnal Green Tube Station, London Where a tragedy of the Blitz occurred One obvious place to shelter from the Blitz was London’s underground network, deep below the city. Initially the government sought to prevent the stations being used for this purpose but the weight of popular pressure was such that the authorities were compelled to back down. As many as 177,000 people hid from the bombers in tube stations where they were sometimes supplied with beds and toilet facilities by the authorities. Like many other stations, Bethnal Green became a popular hideout. On 3 March 1943 it was the scene of a disaster. The worst stage of the Blitz was by then long finished but raids did still occur from time to time. That day air-raid warnings were heard and people hurried towards the station where they hoped to shelter. Exactly what happened next remains slightly unclear, however it seems that the firing of a new type of anti-aircraft gun caused panic and all at once a crowd of people surged forwards as they were descending the steps. In the resulting crush 173 people were killed and dozens more injured. Alf Morris, who was 12 at the time, later recalled the scene. “People were falling around me. I don’t know who they were, they were just falling. I went to move and couldn’t because they had trapped me. I couldn’t move at all. I was crying and screaming.” Afterwards the survivors were told not to speak about what had happened and it was only gradually that the full story emerged. There is now a plaque at the station commemorating the incident. How did Britons rebuild their lives after the Blitz? The German bombing of Britain from 1940–45 exacted a terrible price, in lives lost, infrastructure wrecked and nerves shattered. Daniel Todman reveals how Britons rebuilt their lives, and their cities, in the aftermath of the raids. "Psychiatrists reported that, although survivors of bad raids often showed signs of extreme shock, almost all of them recovered fairly quickly, without much more treatment than a kind word, a blanket and a cup of tea," he writes. "Those with more severe reactions to the horrors they witnessed, however, may have been discouraged from reporting by the media’s celebration of stiff-upper-lip endurance..." The cruel cost of the Blitz Coventry Cathedral, Coventry Where a city was wrecked Two months into the Blitz, the German bombers began to target Britain’s other industrial cities in earnest. This new phase was announced in horrifying fashion on 14 November when 449 bombers emptied their loads onto the city of Coventry. It was the most concentrated attack yet carried out over the British Isles and the effects were so severe that the German propaganda machine coined a new English word: ‘Coventrate’, which meant to destroy a city from the air. The raid cost 554 lives. The physical destruction was also great, including buildings with no military purpose such as hospitals. Coventry’s medieval cathedral sustained tremendous damage, as reported by Tom Harrisson, director of Mass Observation, at the time. “At each end the bare frames of the great windows still have a kind of beauty without their glass; but in between them is an incredible chaos of bricks, pillars, girders, memorial tablets”. In the aftermath of the war it was decided to let the ruins stand and construct a new cathedral close-by. The architect Basil Spence was commissioned to design the replacement structure, which was consecrated in 1962. Unlike so much of the postwar reconstruction, Spence’s cathedral is a majestic achievement, often held to be the architect’s greatest work. St Paul’s Cathedral, London Where a London icon survived In 1940 London was bombed 126 times. The last great raid of the year on 29 December was also one of the worst. Incendiary bombs were dropped around the square mile of the City causing an inferno that was dubbed the Second Great Fire of London. That night photographer Herbert Mason took a photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral’s distinctive dome emerging out of the smoke. This picture was shown on the Daily Mail front cover two days later and is probably now the defining image of the Blitz. Many of the buildings around St Paul’s were ruined during the war but Christopher Wren’s masterpiece (completed in 1710) avoided major damage, even though it was struck by 28 bombs. The cathedral’s survival owed much to a group of volunteers called St Paul’s Watch who took it upon themselves to douse incendiary bombs and prevent fires taking hold. Close to the cathedral is The National Firefighters Memorial. This bronze sculpture was created by artist John Mills in 1991 to recognise members of the United Kingdom Fire Service who risked their lives tackling the blazes of the Blitz. The names of 997 who died in the conflict are inscribed on the memorial. More recently the names of firefighters killed in peacetime have also been inscribed on the monument. Was the Blitz a 'golden era' for criminals? Joshua Levine reveals how the German bombing of British cities in the Second World War created new opportunities for lawlessness. "The range of offences committed during the Blitz, from breaches of regulations to cold-blooded murder, was wide," he writes. "And while some were committed by inveterate wrongdoers, many were carried out by ordinary people reacting to opportunity..." Criminals of the Blitz St Luke’s Church, Liverpool Where a church recalls Merseyside’s pain Britain’s ports enabled vital supplies to be brought into the country so it is little surprise that they were targeted in earnest by the Luftwaffe. Bristol, Portsmouth, Cardiff, Swansea, Plymouth and Southampton were all hit. Merseyside, then the country’s second most important port, endured a particularly torrid time, with almost 4,000 killed in the area between August 1940 and January 1942. The most intense period of bombing in Merseyside occurred from 1–7 May 1941. This ‘May Blitz’ saw 870 tonnes of high explosives dropped on the area, resulting in 1,741 people being killed. Among the Liverpool buildings damaged in these raids was St Luke’s Church, which was the recipient of an incendiary bomb on 5 May. The late-Georgian church’s ruins were left as they were after the war to act as a reminder of the trauma of the Blitz. It is now popularly known as ‘the bombed-out church’ and also contains a memorial to the Irish potato famine. Dalnottar Cemetery, Clydebank Where victims of Scotland’s Blitz lie Most of Scotland avoided serious damage in the Blitz. The main exceptions were Glasgow and the neighbouring Clydeside towns that served as hubs of industry and shipbuilding. In the spring of 1941 they were subjected to heavy raids by the Luftwaffe. One of the worst casualties was the small town of Clydebank, which was ravaged in successive nights of bombing on 13 and 14 March. Clydebank had been earmarked as a potential victim at the start of the war and most of its women and children had been evacuated in 1939. However when the expected attacks failed to materialise many of the evacuees returned to a town that they hoped had been spared. These illusions were shattered in dramatic fashion on the first night of the raids when 1,650 incendiaries were dropped along with 272 tonnes of high explosive bombs. By the end of the second night Clydebank had been devastated. It was reported that only seven of the town’s 12,000 houses escaped harm in the fierce bombardment. The number of dead was 528 and hundreds more were seriously injured. As it happened the industrial sections of the town were less badly damaged, meaning that the cost to British production was relatively limited. Belfast, Northern Ireland Where the Belfast Blitz is remembered Belfast was spared the bombers for the first few months of the Blitz, but with its valuable shipyards and factories it was never likely to escape entirely. Yet the local authorities seemed reticent to prepare for this eventuality, which meant that Belfast’s air-raid precautions left a lot to be desired. The Luftwaffe struck the city on three occasions in April and May 1941, wreaking havoc with high explosives, incendiary bombs and parachute mines. In total around 1,000 people were killed, most on the night of 15 April when the loss of life was significantly higher than after the attack on Coventry. “It was like an earthquake that night,” said resident Jimmy Penton. “The ground shook and the people squealed and yelled. They thought it was the end of the world." RAF Middle Wallop, Hampshire Where British fighters took on the bombers The British tried several tactics to stop the bombers getting through. Searchlights, anti-aircraft guns and night-fighter planes were all employed for this purpose, yet with limited success initially. Early in the Blitz it was taking an average of 30,000 shells to bring down a single Luftwaffe aeroplane. As time progressed, the use of radar and the introduction of the Bristol Beaufighter enabled the defenders to make life more difficult for the bombers. Spearheading the attack was John ‘Cat’s Eyes’ Cunningham of the RAF’s No. 604 Squadron. He accounted for several German aircraft, earning both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Distinguished Service Order for his efforts in 1941. How the RAF won the war His morale-boosting achievements were trumpeted in the press where his remarkable ability to track down enemies at night was attributed to a diet of raw carrots. In reality, his secret was the Beaufighter’s airborne interception radar. RAF Middle Wallop was completed in 1940 and utilised as an RAF base for the remainder of the Second World War. This article has been curated from content first published in BBC History Magazine, BBC History Revealed and HistoryExtra between 2009 and 2017