HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-02-20T17:03:03.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: "I felt very alone in a world gone horribly mad": the experiences of evacuees in WW2
items: "War's greatest picture"? Inside the night St Paul's Cathedral survived the Blitz
items: What was Christmas like in Britain during WW2?
items: Is “Blitz Spirit” a myth?
items: Lucy Worsley on Blitz Spirit: the courageous stories of six Londoners
items: Blitz spirit or broken morale?
items: Your guide to the 1940 Coventry Blitz
items: Your guide to the Blitz, plus 9 places affected by the bombings
items: How did WW2 affect schools in London?
items: The dangers of the Blitz spirit

"I felt very alone in a world gone horribly mad": the experiences of evacuees in WW2
type: item
date: 2025-02-20T17:03:03.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Children
subject: Wartime Britain
description: 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
encoded: 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 notwi…

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"War's greatest picture"? Inside the night St Paul's Cathedral survived the Blitz
type: item
date: 2024-12-29T12:25:32.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: On 29 December 1940, a night of havoc broke bricks and mortar and claimed more than 160 lives. But it also created a moment that was used to bolster British spirit for years to come…
encoded: The Blitz had halted briefly over Christmas 1940, but on the evening of Sunday 29 December the Luftwaffe resumed bombing an already hammered London. The whistling sounds of incendiaries were first heard at 6.15pm, and for the next three-and-a-half hours more than 100,000 such bombs fell. The attack was so ferocious that one American reporter telegraphed his office with the words: “The second Great Fire of London has begun.” While most people huddled in shelters or Tube stations, an act that had become all too familiar, firefighters and volunteers tirelessly tackled the 1,500 or so blazes across the city. Dozens of buildings were utterly destroyed – but not one crucial landmark. Why did Churchill want to save St Paul's Cathedral? St Paul’s Cathedral was surrounded by smouldering ruins, while flames licked the edges of the churchyard. But Prime Minister Winston Churchill, recognising its importance to British morale, sent a message saying St Paul’s must be saved at all costs. The cathedral’s volunteer firewatchers, the St Paul’s Watch, spent the evening putting out the fires from the 28 incendiary bombs that rained down on the building, using stirrup pumps, buckets and sand. One crashed through the dome and lodged in the support beams – causing molten lead to drip down – before it finally fell to the stone floor. Yet, incredibly, the cathedral sustained no irreparable damage. By dawn, the fires had been brought under control by the exhausted firefighters, the ‘heroes with grimy faces’. The night had left more than 160 dead and around 500 injured. War's greatest picture? A couple of days later, once the photo had been cleared by the censors, the Daily Mail's front page featured what it dubbed "war's greatest picture". St Paul's was still standing and almost emerging, defiant, from the black smoke. It was taken by Herbert Mason from the roof of the newspaper's office, around half a mile from the cathedral. "The shining cross, dome and towers stood out like a symbol in t…

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What was Christmas like in Britain during WW2?
type: item
date: 2021-12-10T09:04:00.000Z
creator: Emma Slattery Williams
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Christmas
description: As the bombs rained down on Britain, the season of goodwill still went on, albeit very differently. Emma Slattery Williams investigates what Christmas was like on the Home Front…
encoded: As the fighting raged across Europe, families on the home front still tried to bring a sense of normality to the festive season, although some traditions had to be adapted to account for the threat of bombing raids, goods shortages, and the reality of spending the holidays apart from loved ones. The Christmas of 1939 wasn’t much different to previous years in terms of celebrations, although for most people, the absence of family members marked the traditional get-together. But the Christmas of 1940 was a different story. After 57 consecutive nights of the bombing raids of the Blitz between September and November 1940, there was a small respite on Christmas and Boxing Day but, by 29 December, many families were rushing for the safety of air raid shelters once more. Rationing meant Christmas dinners looked, and tasted, very different, while the blackout put an end to festive lights on the streets. And as fuel rationing and travel restrictions began to bite, family celebrations were local affairs. Read more | WW2 timeline: 20 important dates and milestones you need to know What did people eat for Christmas in WW2? The familiar fare that would normally grace the dining table at Christmas was hard to come by. Some families saved up their rationing coupons so they could afford some extras, but, once rationing was in place, turkey was off the menu. ‘Mock’ food became popular, with foods such as vegetables and sausagemeat replacing turkey and other festive treats; in the week before Christmas in 1940, the tea ration was doubled and the sugar allowance increased to 12 ounces. Read more | The history of Christmas, plus 10 festive facts you might not know Homemade or renovated gifts were a necessity for most – toys, if they could be found, were expensive and many families were facing financial hardship. In 1941, the use of paper for anything other than to wrap food and for deliveries was prohibited, so old newspaper was used as substitute wrapping paper. How did people celebra…

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Is “Blitz Spirit” a myth?
type: item
date: 2021-02-16T12:17:32.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Second World War
subject: Period
description: Ahead of their new BBC One documentary on the subject, Lucy Worsley, Joshua Levine and Yasmine Permaul discuss how Londoners really reacted to the devastating bombing raids
encoded: Ahead of their new BBC One documentary, Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley, historian and broadcaster Lucy Worsley, historical consultant Joshua Levine and producer Yasmine Permaul interrogate the idea of “Blitz Spirit”. Introducing us to a raft of characters who lived through the bombings in London, they reveal how people really reacted to the devastating raids that threatened them and their loved ones. Read more: Lucy Worsley on Blitz Spirit: the courageous stories of six Londoners

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Lucy Worsley on Blitz Spirit: the courageous stories of six Londoners
type: item
date: 2021-02-05T15:40:14.000Z
creator: Lucy Worsley
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical people
description: Lucy Worsley tells the stories of six people who endured the London Blitz, and finds that it was a time of courage and resilience, doubt and despair
encoded: Listen to this article: What does “Blitz Spirit” really mean? It’s a concept that’s frequently invoked in times of crisis: a curiously British commitment to keeping calm and carrying on. Eighty years on from the Blitz, though, it’s worth remembering that the eight months of intense bombing between September 1940 and May 1941 did not comprise just one single, homogeneous experience for the people living in London and the many other British cities affected. Those eight months were indeed a time of remarkable resilience, and of terrible suffering. Yet our clichéd images of the Blitz – jolly singalongs in the air raid shelters, milkmen continuing to deliver as usual to bombed-out houses – don’t tell the whole story. It seems timely, while we’re facing a national crisis of our own, to drill down deeper into the nature of the “Blitz Spirit” – and one way to do that is to look in detail at the personal recollections of Londoners who were there, living and dying beneath the bombs. The government issued propaganda declaring that “London Can Take it” – but would these ordinary people have agreed? The dangers of the Blitz spirit A closer look shows us that Londoners experienced a whole spectrum of doubt and despair as well as the courage and resilience about which we more often hear. And it’s hard to generalise: every person had their own unique experience of the Blitz, as the recollections of these six individuals reveal. NAME: Robert Barltrop AGE IN 1940: 17 JOB: Porter at Sainsbury's The day of 7 September 1940 had been a normal one for Robert, preparing chickens at the Sainsbury’s in east London where he worked. But that afternoon he took up his lookout post on the roof of the building to see the very first raid of the Blitz coming in from the east. The German planes “were flying across my line of vision”, he recalled. “I had a perfect view… they were heading straight for London, and it was going to be the docks that were going to get it… I began to hear thumps, and those …

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Blitz spirit or broken morale?
type: item
date: 2021-02-01T17:31:56.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Second World War
subject: Period
description: Jeremy Crang investigates reports on British morale made during the Second World War and considers what they can tell us about the ‘Blitz spirit’
encoded: Historian Jeremy Crang discusses his book The Spirit of the Blitz (co-edited with Paul Addison), which investigates reports on British morale made during the early months of the Second World War and considers what they can tell us about the so-called ‘Blitz spirit’. Jeremy Crang is the author of The Spirit of the Blitz (co-edited with Paul Addison) (OUP, 2020) Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones

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Your guide to the 1940 Coventry Blitz
type: item
date: 2020-10-29T15:20:32.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: During the night of 14/15 November 1940, several hundred German bombers inflicted devastation on the industrial city of Coventry. The 11-hour raid represented a radical departure in the air war that would mark (and mar) the way bomber fleets were used during the rest of the conflict. Here, historian Frederick Taylor explains what happened and why Coventry was targeted – and whether Churchill was forewarned of the attack…
encoded: Why was Coventry targeted? From early September 1940, Adolf Hitler had given priority to nightly attacks on London, hoping to force the British to make peace. By November, however, despite this relentless Blitz against eight million Londoners, Britain still held firm. Hitler decided to broaden Germany’s bombing effort with large-scale attacks on Britain’s industrial towns, especially those involved in aircraft production. Coventry counted as a jewel in the United Kingdom’s military-industrial crown. German intelligence was well-informed about the city’s industries and key infrastructure – exactly where in the city aero engines were manufactured; radar sets; military vehicles and navigation aids, and so on. Industry aside, however, there were further reasons for Berlin’s interest in the ‘Heart of England’. The Luftwaffe’s so-called ‘England Committee’, composed of Foreign Office officials and specialist academics, had advised the planners that the Midlands was a bastion of “conservative, stubborn-dour Englishness”. If such people’s morale might be broken, perhaps the country could, after all, be bombed into surrender. What was Operation Sealion, Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain? And why was it cancelled? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/2663043_10hitlergambnle_sml-2-127fd70.jpg" width="801" height="530" alt="Calculated risk: Adolf Hitler makes plans at his headquarters in Bruly-de-Peche, Ardennes, Belgium. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Calculated risk: Adolf Hitler makes plans at his headquarters in Bruly-de-Peche, Ardennes, Belgium. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> What happened? In fact, a succession of comparatively short – but in some cases lethally sharp – German raids against Coventry from late August onward had already killed 176 civilians. But the scale of the operation planned for mid-November – codenamed ‘Moonlight Sonata’ because of the expected full moon – foresaw a brutal step-cha…

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Your guide to the Blitz, plus 9 places affected by the bombings
type: item
date: 2020-09-07T11:00:49.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Wartime Britain
description: From September 1940 until May 1941, Britain was subjected to sustained enemy bombing campaign, now known as the Blitz. Find out how it began, what the Germans hoped to achieve and how it severe it was, plus we visit nine places affected by the attacks
encoded: From his vantage point in Normandy, Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring pointed his binoculars in the direction of the English coast. It was 7 September 1940, a fateful day in the history of the Second World War. Overhead close to 1,000 German bomber and fighter aircraft headed towards the English capital where they would shortly wreak devastation on the streets below. This was the first day of the sustained bombing campaign against Britain, popularly known as the Blitz, which Adolf Hitler hoped would soon bring a stubborn enemy to its knees. That day Göring had made a confident broadcast on German radio: “This is an historic hour, in which for the first time the German Luftwaffe has struck at the heart of the enemy”. The September raids were not in fact the first aerial attacks Britain had suffered in the war. There had been sporadic incidents of bombing since the previous October but these were small and infrequent, a far cry from the massed bombardment that Britain would face in late 1940 and early 1941. For Germany, the Blitz was in part a recognition that Hitler’s plan to invade Britain that summer was failing. After the fall of France in June 1940 Britain had been all that stood in the way of victory for Germany in the European war. However, because of the strength of the Royal Navy, an invasion of the British Isles would be a highly risky gamble and one that Hitler was not prepared to take without first achieving aerial superiority. The Second World War: a timeline Over the next few months the Luftwaffe clashed repeatedly with the RAF, hoping to win control of the skies. It was a close run thing but in the end it was the British fighters that emerged triumphant, inflicting heavy losses on their German counterparts. The legend of the Battle of Britain was born. With an invasion seemingly unlikely, Hitler switched his focus to the bombardment of British cities. This was to have the dual purpose of damaging Britain’s infrastructure and weakening civilian morale.…

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How did WW2 affect schools in London?
type: item
date: 2020-03-23T13:00:43.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Education
description: We recently interviewed Jonathan Boff about the ‘Blitz spirit’ for the HistoryExtra podcast, in which he explored how ordinary people coped with the privations of World War II. Following the school closures across the UK and US, our content director David Musgrove asked what parallels could be found between wartime measures and the current school closures to prevent the spread of COVID-19…
encoded: David Musgrove: As schools close both in the UK and the US, there is a social dislocation that this imposes on the population, obviously a very live issue now. What parallels are there in either the First or Second World War and the public response to it? Jonathan Boff: Obviously there's a slight difference, in the sense that schools were not closed in either world war because of a fear of spreading disease, as they have been today. But actually, there are some really interesting parallels with the Second World War. As many people will know, for cities that were in danger of air attacks the first plan for children in the event of war was that they should be evacuated to the countryside. Large numbers of children were evacuated, and the schools were also evacuated. For example, large numbers of schools were evacuated from West Ham, I think, to Oxford. Listen | Jonathan Boff explains how ordinary people coped with the privations of World War II and considers what parallels can be drawn with the current Coronavirus crisis But a lot of the children did not go: their parents didn't want them to go, or they didn't want to go. So, you had a situation where the schools were in Oxford and the children were in many cases still in the East End, and that caused severe dislocation. Many fathers were out at work and many of their mothers were also out at work, but the schools weren't running. So the children were missing free milk and free meals, which were very important, particularly in poor areas. There were estimates that as many as a million children might have been effectively 'running wild' in London by the middle of September 1939. Increasingly as the war went on, and when the Blitz started [in September 1940], schools were being requisitioned for civil defence, and therefore were closing down. As many as two thirds of all the schools in London, about 60 per cent of those in Manchester, were closed down for that reason. Of course, many were bombed as well; something like …

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The dangers of the Blitz spirit
type: item
date: 2020-03-16T10:34:47.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Wartime Britain
description: The stoicism of the British people in response to the Luftwaffe raids of 1940–41 is seen as heroic, but their defiance resulted in needless deaths, says Richard Overy
encoded: In November 1940 novelist Vera Brittain and a friend took a taxi through the ruined areas of the East End of London. On the way an air-raid alarm sounded, and a policeman stopped the taxi and warned the driver and passengers to take shelter. The taxi-man glared at the policeman with “unutterable contempt” and carried on towards Bethnal Green, with the approval of his two charges. He told them that he slept every night on the top floor of a block of flats, that had no shelter, listening to the bombs falling around him. “Unless it has me name on it, it won’t git me,” was his conclusion. Brittain thought this was typical of the fatalism expressed by Londoners in the Blitz, firm in the belief that “destiny remains unaffected by caution”. She too on occasion, at the end of a tiring day, chose to sleep in her bed oblivious to the thudding noise of the bombs and guns around her. Brittain survived, but thousands of Londoners who defied the rational impulse to shelter did not. Bombing deaths in Britain during the nine-month German aerial Blitz on Britain were remarkably high compared with the casualties imposed by most bombing during the Second World War. Between September 1940 and May 1941, 41,480 people were killed, 16,755 of them women and 5,184 of them children. The peak month was September 1940, when 6,968 were killed; the lowest number of deaths occurred in February 1941, with 859 dead, thanks to the poor flying weather. German bombers dropped 58,000 tonnes of bombs in 1940 and 1941. British bombing of Germany in 1940 cost just 950 deaths and in 1941 a further 4,000, inflicted by 50,000 tonnes of bombs dropped by the RAF on European, principally German, targets. It took 10 tonnes of bombs to kill one German but only 1.3 tonnes to kill a Briton. The popular explanation for this disparity relies on two surviving myths of the bombing war. First, that German bombing was deliberately terroristic, targeted at civilian populations to force British surrender; second, that RAF …

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