Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?
Britain’s War Office thanked the SAS for its remarkable efforts in WW2 by abolishing it – yet soon realised the error of its ways. Gavin Mortimer tells the story of how the elite unit reinvented itself to confront the challenges of the postwar world
“Light-hearted banditry”, “ruthless pirating”, a “phantom army” – it’s fair to say that the Special Air Service (SAS) didn’t always attract the most complimentary headlines. In the white heat of the Second World War, when this and other British special forces achieved unlikely successes through a series of daring raids, disparaging press reports could be discarded as merely tomorrow’s chip paper. Nonetheless, they fuelled the impression that the SAS operated outside the rules of the regular British army, and were used as ammunition by some who aimed to whip special forces into line – or even shut them down altogether. That threat became a reality after the conflict ended. David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, coined a description – “freemasons of mediocrity” – for a certain kind of staff officer who looked upon his men with suspicion and, in some cases, hostility. These ‘freemasons’ regarded the SAS and other irregular outfits – the Long Range Desert Group and the Chindits – at best as private armies, at worst “café gangsters”. This view extended to the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), which spent the spring of 1944 waging a bloody guerrilla campaign in the Aegean to tie down German troops ahead of the invasion of France. Its actions prompted a sharp exchange between Winston Churchill and Simon Wingfield Digby, the Conservative MP for West Dorset. “Is it true, Mr prime minister,” enquired Wingfield Digby, “that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union Flag, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cut-throats?” “If you do not take your seat and keep quiet, I will send you out to join them,” retorted Churchill. One could argue that Churchill was the founding father of Britain’s special forces. It was he, shortly after coming to office in May 1940, who instructed the formation of a commando force to launch a “vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive” against the Axis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-106756195webready-3acc480-e1769169656193.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Winston Churchill with wife, Clementine, and their son Randolph, in 1940. Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, accounts of which made his father “terribly proud” (Image by Getty Images)" title="Winston Churchill with wife, Clementine, and their son Randolph, in 1940. Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, accounts of which made his father “terribly proud” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Men such as Stirling, Paddy Mayne (Stirling’s second-in command) and George Jellicoe (the commanding officer of the SBS) first learned the art of guerrilla warfare with the commandos. Churchill’s son Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, and wrote to his father describing how they were destroying dozens of enemy aircraft in daring raids – accounts that made the PM “terribly proud”. When Churchill visited Cairo in August 1942 to discuss the next phase of the north African campaign with his generals, he found time to lunch with his son and Stirling. Churchill dined with Stirling again at the end of May 1945, following the latter’s release from Colditz, having been captured in January 1943. Stirling had plans to re-deploy the SAS Brigade to the far east, and he wanted to sound out their principal benefactor. But within weeks Churchill was gone, voted out of office by a British public who believed a new leader was required to rebuild the country. The SAS would soon follow the wartime leader into temporary retirement. Read more | The real SAS Rogue Heroes: the true stories behind the WW2 drama Uncertain future Even if Clement Attlee hadn’t been elected prime minister in July 1945, the SAS and Britain’s special forces might still have faced an uncertain future. The country was practically bankrupt, having spent almost £7bn (a quarter of the national wealth) on the war effort. Defence spending would obviously be slashed, and those ‘private armies’ were an obvious place to start. After all, what was the point in maintaining a guerrilla force now that the war was over? The SAS paraded for the final time at their Essex HQ on 8 October 1945. Four days later, Brigadier Michael Calvert, commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, sent a memo to 12 of the most senior officers of the SAS, SBS and Long Range Desert Group entitled ‘Future of SAS Troops’. He explained that the War Office had asked for his “recommendations for the future of SAS in the next war and its composition in the peace-time army” as part of its review into Britain’s military capabilities. Calvert feared that the bureaucrats within the War Office – those “freemasons of mediocrity” – were determined to disband the SAS. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-154417103webready-51d1025-e1769169399236.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Members of the Long Range Desert Group in 1942. By the end of the Second World War, their new brand of warfare was attracting hostility from some elements of Britain’s military (Image by Getty Images)" title="Members of the Long Range Desert Group in 1942. By the end of the Second World War, their new brand of warfare was attracting hostility from some elements of Britain’s military (Image by Getty Images)" /> One of the most forceful and erudite replies came from Major Roy Farran, DSO and MC, a senior SAS officer who had served in north Africa, Italy and France. He began by stating that, though special forces warfare was still in its infancy, its potential was enormous – particularly because it could exploit the rapid recent developments in air power, communications and motorised transport. “Since it is now so easy to place troops across the enemy lines of communication, I feel that it is important to have a unit of the Special Air Service-type trained to operate individually with the minimum support and with the maximum amount of improvisation,” he wrote. Farran had already identified Britain’s likely next foe and envisaged how special forces could be used in the event of a conflict. “I believe there will be great opportunities for guerrilla troops in the event of a war against the Soviet Union, which I suppose is the only possibility at the moment,” he told Calvert. Such a war would be either a defensive or offensive one. “In the former case a unit like the Special Air Service could inflict damage on the enemy and slow up his advance out of all proportion to its size… In an offensive war the SAS would increase the speed of our advance by spreading panic and confusion in the enemy’s rear.” But the prescient Farran also envisaged that, before a large-scale war with the Soviets, Britain could well find itself entangled in insurgencies as its empire began to break up. Counter-insurgency, he declared, was a role to which the SAS and SBS were ideally suited, adding: “If the principle of the SAS does not continue, I cannot believe that the army is thinking along progressive lines.” Another important figure contacted by the War Office was Lieutenant Colonel Tony Simonds, the commander of MI9’s A Force, who had worked with the SAS in Italy in the autumn of 1943. The main task of MI9 – a secret department within the War Office – was to assist Allied military personnel in enemy territory to evade and escape. Simonds recommended the establishment of three SAS regiments: one for Europe, based in Britain; a second for the Middle East, based in Cyprus; and a third for the far east, based in Singapore. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/standard-3Michael-Calvert-cmykwebready-6c7040b-e1769169955638.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Michael Calvert (left) gives orders after the capture of Mogaung in Burma, June 1944. The following year, as commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, Calvert fought for the unit’s survival (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" title="Michael Calvert (left) gives orders after the capture of Mogaung in Burma, June 1944. The following year, as commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, Calvert fought for the unit’s survival (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" /> Simonds wrote that “the role of guerrilla forces in any future war is to defeat the enemy, behind his defended front lines, while the orthodox forces prevent the enemy from advancing”. However, he also suggested that the SAS should “familiarise themselves topographically, militarily, socially and politically with the area. To know and to study the various factions and elements of their area… and to know which personalities should be eliminated should it become necessary in British interest.” That latter role had been the modus operandi of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War – acting more like secret agents than special forces. Read more | “They changed the way war is run”: Ben Macintyre on the early SAS Ultimately, however, the arguments put forward by Calvert and other senior special forces officers fell on deaf ears, and their regiment and units were disbanded. End of an error It didn’t take long before the War Office realised its mistake. In January 1946, Jewish paramilitaries in Mandatory Palestine derailed a British train – the first serious guerrilla act in an insurgency that grew increasingly violent as the fight for the establishment of a Jewish state intensified. It was the first of many such insurgencies as Britain’s empire began to fracture. In 1947, Major Pat Hart, a staff officer in the SAS during the war, learned that the SAS was going to be revived as a territorial regiment under the command of Colonel Brian Franks. Hart was appointed Franks’ second-in-command of 21 SAS – a designation that merged the 1st and 2nd Regiments of wartime fame. According to Hart’s recollection, a War Office study group had been formed in 1946 to re-examine the future of Britain’s special forces. “The result of the study was the recommendation there should be a continuing presence in the army, so the knowledge gained should not be lost, and whilst it could be called anything, probably the best thing was to call it SAS,” he said. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-79043094webready-e676d4c-e1769170186832.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="At the end of the Second World War, Britain was facing bankruptcy and defence spending needed to be cut. ‘Private armies’ were an obvious place to start (Image by Getty Images)" title="At the end of the Second World War, Britain was facing bankruptcy and defence spending needed to be cut. ‘Private armies’ were an obvious place to start (Image by Getty Images)" /> Recruitment began in September 1947. Of the first 200 soldiers signed up, 59 had served with the SAS during the war. One of those was Pat Duggan. “While the majority in the forces were pleased to return to their former lifestyles [in 1945], many of us, hemmed in by the norms of a peaceful civilisation, felt only frustration and spent our time dreaming of, or searching for, something that resembled our wartime role,” he reflected. “When the SAS was reformed as part of the TA [Territorial Army], we homed in like pigeons – a roll-call of the dispossessed.” Having so many experienced soldiers in their ranks made it easier to train the new recruits in their unorthodox methods. “We were creating an SAS unit that would be available to do any sort of SAS job once it was trained,” explained Hart. “We went off on Nato exercises, as part of the training, and it was very helpful for Nato command to have an SAS unit there.” The first active deployment of 21 SAS was to Malaya (then a British colony, today peninsular Malaysia) to help quell a two-year-long communist insurgency. The uprising – which the British knew as the Malayan Emergency – threatened colonial rubber plantations and tin mines, so the government called on the talents of men skilled in guerrilla fighting. “There were a few contacts,” recalled John Gardner of the SAS. “A few seconds, perhaps minutes, of intense shooting, then silence. Blood trails were followed, and some CT [insurgent] bodies were found and brought in, but many blood trails led to nothing… during these weeks we lived in a general state of alertness, even at night half awake, of dirt and sweat, our blood sucked by the many leeches.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/1.47-CMYKwebready-f500202-e1769170640593.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Rhodesian troops served in the Long Range Desert Group in WW2 and went on to form their own SAS squadron, some of whom are seen here in the 1950s. C (Rhodesia) Squadron operated with the SAS from 1951–53, largely in Malaya (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" title="Rhodesian troops served in the Long Range Desert Group in WW2 and went on to form their own SAS squadron, some of whom are seen here in the 1950s. C (Rhodesia) Squadron operated with the SAS from 1951–53, largely in Malaya (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" /> The SAS remained in Malaya throughout the 1950s – years that proved a crucial learning curve for a regiment that was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic. Johnny Cooper, one of the original 66 recruits to the SAS when the unit was formed by Stirling in 1941, was a squadron commander in Malaya. “We were carrying out trials to develop a two-week ration that was possible for a man to carry,” he recalled. “The object was to avoid the weekly air drops which were a complete give-away and lost us the vital element of surprise.” As a result, the SAS produced a ‘starvation ration’ consisting of dehydrated rice-based food carried in a four-gallon petrol tin. Read more | He shot down 3 planes in 4 minutes: meet the WW2 pilot you won't have heard about A global audience It was no coincidence that in 1952 – shortly after Winston Churchill had been returned to Downing Street – it was decided to raise a regular-army SAS regiment: 22 SAS. Over the following decades, the SAS was sent to fight insurgencies in other remote corners of the British empire and spheres of influence – Aden, Borneo, Oman – before being deployed to Northern Ireland in the 1970s. But perhaps the most high-profile of all its operations occurred in the spring of 1980 when it ended the Iranian embassy siege in London in dramatic style, watched by a global television audience. It was a feat that underlined the regiment’s reputation as the world’s pre-eminent special force. Throughout these operations, one aspect of the SAS was immutable, and that was the temperament of each recruit. In 1956, Dare Newell, the SAS regimental headquarters major, wrote to several wartime special forces officers to ask what characteristics they thought essential for an SAS soldier. From their answers he compiled the selection criteria. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1241653502webready-85c1750-e1769170516483.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Members of the SAS on a training exercise in Hereford, c1970. By now, the regiment was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic (Image by Getty Images)" title="Members of the SAS on a training exercise in Hereford, c1970. By now, the regiment was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic (Image by Getty Images)" /> “A man’s personal qualities and make-up count more than technical efficiency in his own arm of the service. Technical efficiency can be taught; the personal qualities required for long-range, long-term operations in enemy territory, however, are part of a man’s character and, although they may be developed over a period, they must be learnt in childhood.” The qualities deemed essential were initiative, self-discipline, independence of mind, ability to work without supervision, stamina, patience, and a sense of humour. These characteristics continue to underpin the SAS ethos today. Warfare and weaponry evolve, but not human nature. One of the 12 recipients of Mike Calvert’s worried memo in October 1945 was Major John Verney of the SBS. “We came to know one another’s physical and mental capacities, and with them our own,” he said of his wartime service. “Strength and skill were respected, and a fair degree of both were essential, but there were other qualities, such as a cool head, or a good temper, that might well prove more valuable.” CLONE WARS Countries worldwide have established forces based on the British SAS template The reputation of the SAS, encapsulated by its ‘Who Dares Wins’ motto, is global. Its influence is evident in France’s 1er Régiment de Parachutiste d’Infanterie de Marine (1erRPIMa), the US Delta Force and Germany’s GSG 9. New Zealand and Australia have their own SAS regiments, both raised in the 1950s and using the same motto as their British counterpart. It is also alleged that the SAS has trained Ukrainian special forces for many years. The wartime SAS included two regiments of French troops who fought under British command. In June 2024, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, President Emmanuel Macron visited the French SAS memorial in Plumelec in Brittany. According to France’s Ministry of Defence, the 1erRPIMa “has its roots in the SAS of World War II, [and] is based on daring, determination and endurance”; its motto is Qui ose gagne – a direct translation of that of the British SAS. The founder of Delta Force, Charles Beckwith, was one of America’s most innovative military thinkers in the late 1950s. A member of the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Beckwith was posted to 22 SAS as part of an exchange in 1962. During that time, he conceived the idea of an American equivalent. On his return to the US, Beckwith received encouragement from General Sam Wilson, a Second World War veteran who had been trained by the British Chindits in south-east Asia. In a 2016 interview, Wilson explained that he had met David Stirling in the course of helping to establish Delta Force. Like Delta Force, Germany’s counter-terrorism unit GSG 9 was formed in the 1970s in response to a series of high-profile terrorist atrocities. When GSG 9 rescued all hostages from a hijacking at Mogadishu airport in Somalia in 1977, it was assisted by two SAS soldiers. Over the course of three decades, David Stirling’s band of “renegade cut-throats” had become a blueprint for special forces units across the globe. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/NZ-females-CMYKwebready-cdfea04-e1769170865434.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Members of New Zealand’s SAS female engagement team. Along with Australia’s SAS, they use the same motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’ – as their British counterpart (Image by New Zealand Special Air Service)" title="Members of New Zealand’s SAS female engagement team. Along with Australia’s SAS, they use the same motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’ – as their British counterpart (Image by New Zealand Special Air Service)" /> This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Keep calm and carry on singing: why Britons fell in love with opera during World War Two
As the conflict with Nazi Germany raged on, British tram drivers tuned in to Tchaikovsky and waitresses revelled in Wagner. But why? Alexandra Wilson explores the surprising Second World War obsession with opera
Glasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The soprano Joan Hammond, who sang the title role that night, later recalled that there were always newcomers in the audience wherever the Carl Rosa performed, searching for something different to do – but also for some kind of transcendental escapism. Invariably, they cheered the singers to the rafters. Surprising though it may seem to us today, opera was hugely popular during the Second World War. This was part of a broader surge of interest among the British in the so-called high arts – a sudden and rather urgent desire to ‘become cultured’ and to enjoy the best that life had to offer – when every day might be your last. Guy Ramsey reported in the Daily Mail in 1943 that “every day in every way Britain’s musical and dramatic taste is becoming more and more ‘highbrow’”. Tram drivers were listening to Tchaikovsky, waitresses were revelling in Wagner, and operas were drawing large audiences at provincial theatres. This war, Ramsey wrote, was more personal than any before it, and felt closer to home. Serious times called for serious art, and popular variety shows no longer seemed in step with the national mood. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/2X2FXR2webready-9f2accf-e1767623285427.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph shows a man in a cap with round glasses and a cigarette in his mouth sitting on one of many stools outside a theatre. In front of him to the right, a billboard advertises the Sadler's Wells Opera" title="Stools for hire by people queueing for Sadler’s Wells Opera Company performances at the New Theatre, 1943. Tickets started at just 1/6 (about £4 today) (Image by Alamy)" /> Workers’ playtime Opera had already enjoyed reasonably wide popularity in Britain during the interwar years. In London, the enterprising impresario Lilian Baylis had set up companies at the Old Vic in the 1920s and Sadler’s Wells in the 1930s that were explicitly aimed at fostering a love of opera among local working-class communities. And over in the East End, people could regularly watch operas at the People’s Palace, a large entertainment complex on the Mile End Road. Touring opera companies regularly visited towns and cities around the country, and were eagerly anticipated by people of all social classes. Operatic music could also be widely heard in restaurants, hotel foyers and cinemas, and broadcasting and gramophone records had done a great deal to popularise and democratise the art form. But the opera boom of the early 1940s was in a different league. It would have been logical if opera had ground to a halt during the war, given the large resources conventionally needed to stage performances. To be sure, the most prominent venues did close: the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden was turned into one of the most popular wartime dance halls, and Glyndebourne in East Sussex became a home for evacuees from London. Read more | The War of the Operas: new money vs old in The Gilded Age Sadler’s Wells soldiered on during the early months of the war, staging matinees to get around the problem of blackouts, but soon enough the Blitz put paid to this, and the theatre became a refuge for the newly homeless. However, the company moved its operations to Burnley and toured extensively from there, putting on works including The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, Rigoletto and La bohème with a scaled-down cast, piano accompaniment, a simple painted backcloth and a sofa. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/La-Traviata-9c942fb-e1767623963300.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing two women sharing an afternoon tea on a tray, in a theatre auditorium" title="Audience members sip tea during the interval in a 1943 matinee performance of La Traviata at the New Theatre in London’s West End. The soaring appetite for opera among all classes fuelled a wartime renaissance in Britain (Image by Imperial War Museum)" /> The Times praised Sadler’s Wells for “Making converts to the art of music-drama” in places such as Oldham, Accrington and Stockport. Performances were so popular that theatres were desperate to book the company. The manager of the Hull New Theatre reported that his postbag was constantly full of letters from audience members “representing a cross-section of the community” who wanted to see the troupe. Periodically, when it was safe to do so – and even when it wasn’t – the company returned to London to perform in the West End. The soprano Elisabeth Parry recalled a performance at the Haymarket Theatre in 1944 when the show went on even while alarms rang and ‘Doodlebugs’ (V1 flying bombs) could be heard buzzing overhead. Audience members remained in their seats, and the singers and orchestra carried on as if nothing was happening. The success of the Sadler’s Wells tours showed that the British would happily embrace opera if only they were given the opportunity. Journalists expressed frustration that there had never been a move to set up a similar opera company in every major city around the country, because there was clearly plenty of demand. “No doubt there are as many busmen as there are butchers, bakers, baronets and bankers who enjoy a good opera when they can get it,” argued The Times. And the Times Literary Supplement proposed that, with a dozen more companies along the lines of Sadler’s Wells, “we should have a genuine art of opera in England as we already have a genuine public for it”. Sadler’s Wells worked in partnership with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which also arranged concerts in which professional musicians, including opera singers, performed in factories, air-raid shelters and hospitals. CEMA’s broad aim was to “carry music, drama and pictures to places which otherwise would be cut off from all contact with the masterpieces of happier days and times”. Operatic performances also featured in the Holidays at Home initiative organised by the Ministry of Labour, which turned open areas in cities into makeshift seaside resorts, and put on a wide range of entertainments. One such scheme in Liverpool, which included performances of opera, ran for 11 weeks in 1942 and attracted an audience of three quarters of a million. Arias on the airwaves Of course, there was also plenty of opera on the radio. In 1941, regular monthly broadcasts of studio operas resumed for the first time since the outbreak of war. The emphasis was primarily on well-known classics such as La Traviata and The Barber of Seville because, as the conductor Sir Adrian Boult said, “The evidence is general that the musical public turns to these sources for mental and spiritual recreation more eagerly than ever today.” BBC listener research from 1943 revealed that the numbers listening to variety shows were down by 20 per cent, whereas audiences for classical music and serious drama were on the rise. Read more | The biggest misconceptions about WW2 evacuees? This historian has the answers Victor Hely-Hutchinson, the BBC’s director of music from 1944, wrote that one of the few benefits of the war was the rise of an immense public enthusiasm for good music. “Go to an orchestral concert, or a fine operatic performance,” he said, “and you will find a corporate appreciation and desire for music of a kind, and on a scale, that has never been seen in Britain before.” Radio broadcasts allowed audiences to enjoy the highest standards of singing, which were not always evident in rough-and-ready touring productions. “Stayed at home tonight to listen to Faust – complete – on the wireless,” wrote one unnamed office worker in a diary submission for Mass Observation in 1942. “Feel very grateful to the BBC for giving us first-class opera; it is not often we get first-rate opera in Manchester, and there is nothing worse than good music badly executed.” Many people, men in particular, first encountered opera in the forces. Some took part in amateur operatic productions of works such as Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at military bases in Britain. Others stationed in the Middle East with Paiforce (the Persia and Iraq force) had the opportunity to hear operatic arias in concerts organised by the Entertainments National Service Association. Some of the most respected British opera singers of the day, such as Walter Widdop, Dennis Noble and Miriam Licette, toured that region. But by far the most significant boom in enthusiasm for opera among soldiers was seen in Italy. In 1944, the Daily Express reported that “one of the biggest surprises of our ‘invasion’ of Italy has been the way the men have become opera fans”. Some enterprising army captains reformed the mothballed opera company at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Word soon spread that watching opera was a good way to spend an evening, and British troops took to queueing around the block to get tickets. The 1,600-seat theatre was always full to capacity, and two performances a day had to be scheduled to meet demand. A similar enterprise was also set up at the bomb-damaged and abandoned Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, Sicily and, as the Allies moved north, more companies were founded in major cities across the country. Naomi Jacob, who in 1948 wrote a book about opera aimed specifically at the soldiers who had come to love it in Italy, recalled that when the idea had first been mooted, there had been a lot of scepticism about whether British and American troops would be willing to listen to opera. But houses sold out in advance, and audience members often came back several times. Jacob reported that “no better audience ever existed… they were punctual, they gave rapt attention, and their appreciation was unstinted”. From September 1943 to the end of the war, countless British servicemen watched performances of opera in Italy. The composer and broadcaster Spike Hughes reported that “in every town the same thing happened: the British soldier took to grand opera as if it were in his blood”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1754686839webready-9635b10-e1767623396598.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a stage show. A large ensemble crowd stands at the back of the stage, while one man stands at the front, crouched down with his arm held backwards" title="A 1940s opera performance in Rome. Many British servicemen first experienced – and came to love – opera while stationed in Italy during the war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Exposure to Italian opera in Italy helped soldiers to become more discerning listeners. In Britain before the war, opera was performed in English translation everywhere except Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, two ‘luxurious’ venues that sat apart from the national norm. But here, suddenly, was an audience that had shown itself perfectly capable of appreciating opera in the original language. The Rome correspondent for the Sunday Express reported that “an ‘opera-conscious’ audience is being created for Britain after the war, but if any theatre magnate wants to cater for them he must offer something better than a third-rate touring company”. Optimism for opera Hopes were high, then, for what Britain’s operatic landscape might look like in the postwar period. Even the most sceptical commentators were coming round to opera: the Daily Express reported that “the most ridiculous art-form ever invented” was “proving more popular than anybody ever imagined”. Of course, many people who had encountered opera in pared-back productions during the war had no idea what it really could be. The public was, as The Liverpool Daily Post put it, “as ignorant of the real taste of opera as a wartime infant is of the taste of bananas”. But appetites had been whetted, and Britons emerged from the war wanting to see not only more opera but better opera. To a large extent, these expectations were met. The theatre director Tyrone Guthrie argued after the war that London was becoming the musical centre of the world, with opera at its heart. In the autumn of 1947, audiences in the capital had the opportunity to watch no fewer than 23 different operas performed by five companies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1360190650webready-ae6a690-e1767623509642.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing five women dancing on a stage, in front of a large crowd of men in military uniform, who are all sitting on the floor" title="Servicemen watch a wartime rehearsal by the Entertainments National Service Association, which toured combat zones (Image by Getty Images)" /> A new company based at the Cambridge Theatre in Seven Dials performed Italian opera in Italian to groups of former servicemen and West End shopworkers. For a while, even glamorous Covent Garden presented a form of “opera for the people”, running regional auditions and recruiting talented opera-singing coalminers, secretaries and milkmen as soloists for a new company. Read more | "Hooray! The war is ended": 5 people's recollections of VE Day Some of these initiatives were only short-lived. Even so, there was very much a buzz in the air around opera after the war, with the Musicians’ Union declaring in 1947 that classical music had become “a necessary part of the life of the people”. The wider acceptance of opera as bona fide popular entertainment seemed to be summed up by the fact that when the San Carlo Opera Company from Naples visited just after the war, it performed not only at Covent Garden but also at Butlin’s holiday camps in Filey and Skegness. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/San-Carlo-Opera-Companywebready-ce0beda-e1767624438971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a crowd of women, dressed in dresses and frilly white pinafores. One sits at a piano, surrounded by the others" title="Members of the San Carlo Opera Company of Naples perform at a Butlin’s holiday camp in the mid-1940s. Classical music was now, so the Musicians’ Union declared, “a necessary part of the life of the people” (Image by The Butlin’s Heritage Collection, History of Advertising Trust Archive (HAT))" /> Sadler’s Wells, meanwhile, made a triumphant return to its Islington home, where on 7 June 1945 it staged the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes – a rapturously received work that seemed to signal a hopeful new beginning for British operatic composition. New troupes formed to take touring opera around the country in the late 1940s. The 1940s also saw the foundation of Welsh National Opera – a group of talented amateurs at the outset but later a major player on the British operatic scene. Perhaps most importantly, thanks to the huge explosion of interest in the high arts that had taken place during the war, the nation was far more open-minded towards the possibility of funding it afterwards. Up to this point, public subsidy had only ever been a pipe dream. Now CEMA provided a model for the new Arts Council of Great Britain, which leaned heavily towards favouring opera. Thanks to subsidies, opera could be staged at Covent Garden year-round rather than just for a three-month summer season, and prices could be kept low. The Arts Council also undertook local measures to foster music-making and music appreciation, setting up clubs in workplaces and lending gramophone records. Meanwhile, opera featured prominently on the BBC’s new Third Programme. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WNO-Chorus-in-Ebenezer-Chapel-1946-Idloes-Owen-front-6th-from-the-leftwebready-12658e1-e1767624255173.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph of a large crowd of men and women, sitting in rows" title="Singers with the Welsh National Opera in the 1940s. The company made its debut with a double-bill of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci in 1946 (Image by Welsh National Opera)" /> “Fifteen years ago I should have felt obliged to defend opera as a form of art,” said the critic and academic Edward J Dent in a lecture delivered at Liverpool University in 1945, “but that is no longer necessary.” Opera continued to be enjoyed by large, socially mixed audiences through the 1950s, sixties and seventies, and was drawing record audiences in the eighties and nineties. But by those later decades, the media had begun to circulate a simplistic idea that opera was elitist, and by the turn of the millennium the idea was so entrenched that it was deterring newcomers to the genre. Opera was also becoming more expensive, declining on television and disappearing from the school curriculum. Today, opera still has something for everyone, but it has receded from the mainstream cultural conversation. Regrettably, it has become necessary, once again, to defend it as a form of art. Alexandra Wilson is a senior research fellow at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her latest book is Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (Oxford University Press), published in September 2025 This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"Imagine starting a life with so little": the stories of South Asians in Britain
Kavita Puri on the importance of the stories of South Asians in Britain
I remember looking in the BBC archives for stories of the first arrivals of South Asians in the postwar years, and being surprised at how little programming had been made documenting the experiences of my parents’ generation. That was well over 10 years ago now. From then on, I began to record testimonies of people who came to the UK from South Asia after the Second World War for my Radio 4 series Three Pounds in My Pocket. The title of that programme was inspired by the fact that, for years after the war, strict currency controls dictated that those arriving from India could not bring more than £3 into the UK. Imagine starting a new life in a new country with so little. Over time, I went on to record accounts from the descendants of that three-pound generation, hearing about their struggles and achievements. Many of the people I first interviewed – including my father – are no longer with us. I feel so grateful that I was able to capture their stories: memories of what these former subjects of the Raj had imagined Britain to be, what it was actually like when they arrived, how they were received and, so many decades on, where they now felt ‘home’ was. Read more | “The nation is a very novel idea, and imposing it on millions of people is hard work” | Joya Chatterji on south Asia in the 20th century Asians comprise the largest minority ethnic group in Britain today, yet it’s always struck me how little the history of South Asians in Britain is known – among South Asians themselves as well as across the country as a whole. It’s noticeable that in 2025 there is still no central British South Asian cultural archive, and that South Asian Heritage Month is only in its sixth year. South Asians have had a presence in Britain for centuries, as Rozina Visram’s seminal 2002 book Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History discusses. The first such settlers came as sailors and servants, brought by the East India Company. In time, students, ayahs (nursemaids), princes and professionals arrived. In 1892, Dadabhai Naoroji was elected as Liberal member of parliament for Finsbury Central, becoming the first MP of South Asian heritage. He supported free education, votes for women and home rule for Ireland, and campaigned for representation for Indians in the government of India. Large-scale immigration from the subcontinent started after the 1948 Nationality Act was passed. It conferred on subjects of British colonies and the Commonwealth the right to settle in the UK. But the South Asian experience has not been as well documented as that of those coming from the Caribbean. Dr Florian Stadtler, co-author of Asian Britain: A Photographic History (2013), believes one of the reasons is because “there was no Windrush moment”. But it could also be because the term ‘South Asian’ encompasses so many people from different places on the Indian subcontinent, with their own distinct regional histories, languages, cultures. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many south Asian diasporic families don’t know of their First World War links" An important new digital hub has just launched. South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories (southasianbritain.org) aims to explore the complexity of this longer story. It discusses themes ranging from family and politics to multiple migrations and resistance, as well as education and intellectual life. There are some wonderful oral testimonies. Bari Chohan, for example, explains how some of his family came to Britain in the 1870s, setting up homeopathic clinics across the country. His great-uncle married a nurse, and they were one of the first mixed-race couples in north-east England. His father, who was in England at the outbreak of the Second World War, fought with the British Army. There’s so much history in that one family’s story. Understanding and acknowledging this long presence of South Asians in Britain is important. As identity in politics comes to the fore once again, and questions are asked about who is British and who belongs here, these stories take on a greater significance. South Asians have lived in, contributed to, fought and died for Britain. It’s time this is more widely recognised. This column was first published in the October 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"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
War and military history podcast episodes
Browse our archive of HistoryExtra podcasts on war and military history, from Nelson’s demise at Trafalgar to the role of Indian soldiers in World War One...
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