Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (3 page)

They say the pub has sold out of everything but gin, so Inv. gets four gins, and a few minutes later – a little late for the start – the King’s speech is turned on. Several women at the back of the lounge stand up, assuming reverent attitudes. There is a sense that people have been waiting all this time for something symbolic and now they have got it: the room is hushed as a church. M22B puts his feet on the table, leans back in his chair, and groans . . . At ‘endured to your utmost’ there are deep cries of ‘Hear hear!’. Whenever the King pauses, M22B says loudly, Ts, Ts, and becomes the centre of looks of intense malevolence from all corners of the room . . . When the King says ‘Of just (long pause) – of just triumph’ several women’s foreheads pucker and they wear a lacerated look. At ‘strength and shield’ Marxist unaccountably removes feet from table. When
God Save the King
is sung, the whole room rises to its feet and sings, with the exception of the Marxist twins, who remain sullenly seated. F25B, the wife of one, gets up.

Afterwards, the investigator asked her why she had stood up. ‘Was it sheer politeness? She says yes, she supposes so – she felt like being in harmony with everyone else.’
^5.

The news bulletin that accompanied the King’s broadcast included the welcome return of the weather report (Stuart Hibberd referring jocularly to ‘news of an old friend – the large depression’), though for Nella Last, a middle-aged, middle-class housewife living in Barrow-in-Furness, not even this made her ‘fully realise things’ as she continued to have ‘that curious “flat” feeling’ through the evening. Thirty-nine per cent of adults then stayed tuned to
Victory Parade
, though by the time the programme ended at 10.45 the audience had dropped by more than half as even the unadventurous left home to see the floodlights and the bonfires. ‘A grand team of voices’, as one grateful listener put it, included Stewart MacPherson describing the scene in Piccadilly, Richard Dimbleby in Whitehall and Howard Marshall outside Buckingham Palace. There was praise for ‘the choice of Tommy Trinder to give the running commentary from Lambeth’, while ‘listeners were much moved by the final sequence of Ralph Wightman [the countryman broadcaster] from Piddletrenthide’, which was ‘even described as “a stroke of genius”’. The programme also featured the recorded voices of Eisenhower, Montgomery, Air Chief Marshal Tedder and men of the fighting units, as well as descriptions of the celebrations in Dover, Birmingham and several American cities. ‘Made me think,’ ruminated Frank Lewis in his digs at 233 Upper Brook Street, Manchester 13. ‘Pretty picturesque and patriotic picture as a whole; especially descriptive were the crowded scenes, Piccadilly etc, and Mr Churchill speaking to a crowd from a roof top in Whitehall, with his cabinet’. Even so, he ended his diary entry on a far from gruntled note: ‘“On this most memorable of all days,” to quote the radio, I have spent the enormous sum, I don’t think, of 1/11d.’
^6.

Of course, the image we have of that warm Tuesday night is very different and predominantly takes its cue from the events in London’s West End. ‘There was wild excitement in Trafalgar Square, half London seemed to be floodlit – so much unexpected light was quite unreal,’ wrote Joan Wyndham, having taken time off from her WAAF mess in the East Midlands. ‘There were people dancing like crazy, jumping in the fountains and climbing lamp-posts.’ Or take Noël Coward: ‘I walked down the Mall and stood outside Buckingham Palace, which was floodlit. The crowd was stupendous. The King and Queen came out on the balcony, looking enchanting. We all roared ourselves hoarse . . . I suppose this is the greatest day in our history.’ The iconography is understandably imperishable: of Churchill making the ‘V’ sign from a floodlit Ministry of Health balcony as the jubilant crowd below sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’; of the Old Etonian trumpeter (and young Guards officer) Humphrey Lyttelton playing ‘Roll out the Barrel’ as he lurched on a handcart from Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square and back followed by a long, swaying line of revellers doing the conga; of young women in confident groups on their own; of even the two princesses (Elizabeth and a 14-year-old Margaret Rose) being allowed to mingle with the crowds after midnight.

Certainly Anthony Heap had no complaints, or at least no complaints bar the absence of live music and ‘the fact that the pubs, though allowed to keep open till midnight, were nearly all closed’. He and his wife returned to the West End at 7.30, saw one of the Royal Family’s 11 balcony appearances and made a typically painstaking tour of the main floodlit buildings. ‘One small incident we witnessed in St James’s Street – a dozen or so young revellers dancing “ring-a-ring-a-roses” round Philip Page, the gouty and arthritic dramatic critic of the
Daily Mail
, as he slowly hobbled across the road – was typical of the hundreds of smaller manifestations of high spirited gaiety that we saw tonight.’ For many, Heap noted, that night was still young:

No one seemed to bother much about getting home, for though the last trains to the suburbs had left the West End at the ridiculously early hour of 11.15 or thereabouts, there were still as many sightseers about when we started to walk home just before midnight as there were when we arrived on the scene in the early evening. While outside Leicester Square station was a queue extending all the way up to Cambridge Circus waiting for the first trams in the morning! A sight which made us truly thankful that we were able to walk home, footsore and weary though we were as we trudged through Bloomsbury, so dark and drear by comparison with the brightly illuminated West End.

The couple finally flopped into bed at 1 a.m. ‘It had been a grand day and we’d savoured it to the full. We were, in fact, VE Day-drunk!’
⁷

The West End, though, was not London, let alone Britain. ‘Usually, crowds were too few and too thin to inspire much feeling,’ reckoned Mass-Observation, ‘and on V.E. night most people were either at home, at small private parties, at indoor dances or in public houses, or collected in small groups around the bonfires, where there was sometimes singing and dancing, but by no means riotously.’ Most contemporary accounts confirm this rather low-key feel to proceedings. ‘The town was thronged but the crowds were orderly’ was how Colin Ferguson, a pattern-maker working for Babcock & Wilcox in Glasgow, found that city’s George Square shortly before midnight. ‘Most of those walking about evidently just out to see what was going on.’ So, too, in the Birmingham suburb of Erdington, where after the King’s broadcast ‘the “bonfire” in Mr Swinnerton’s field in Marsh Lane’ was the attraction for Mary King (a retired teacher), her husband and a group of friends: ‘It was a tremendous scene. Many people gathered to enjoy the sight. Everything quiet and orderly & enjoyable.’ Raymond Streat was at a big bonfire in Wilmslow, built by the Boy Scouts: ‘What curious people are we English? There was no cheering or rowdying. About two thousand folk stood there silently watching flames lighting up the dark skies . . . We were all content, apparently, to stand still and to stare. One or two attempts to launch a song died away.’ Judy Haines and her husband, meanwhile, had heard the King’s speech relayed at the Westminster Theatre before setting out for home: ‘Quite easy to get on the bus (though we changed at Leyton) and we had a front seat and good view of the bonfires and merriment. Met Mother H. waiting for Dad, at Chingford. Went in to spam and chips, etc. After that we were invited to a party at the Odeon, which we refused. Mrs Telford had thought we would have loved it, but I explained we had just done a show and had a meal.’ She noted, as any sensible person would, ‘It was twenty to twelve, by the way.’
^8.

Not all the bonfires were quiet, meditative affairs. Certainly not in deepest Herefordshire, where the local paper described what it was pleased to call ‘A Country Village Celebration’:

Passing through the village of Stoke Lacy early on Tuesday afternoon one was startled to see the effigy of Hitler hanging from a gibbet in the car park of the Plough. That evening, a crowd began to gather, and word went round that Hitler was to be consumed in flames at 11 pm. At that hour excitement was intense, when Mr W R Symonds called upon Mr S J Parker, the Commander of No 12 Platoon, of the Home Guard, to set the effigy alight. In a few minutes the body of Hitler disintegrated as his 1,000-years Empire has done. First, his arm, poised in a Heil Hitler salute, dropped as smartly as it was ever raised in life. Quickly followed his German hat; then a leg fell off, and then the flames burnt fiercely to the strains of ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘There’ll always be an England’ and ‘Roll out the Barrel’. Then the crowd spontaneously linked hands, and in a circle of 300 strong sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Mr Parker then called for cheers for Mr Churchill, President Truman, Marshal Stalin, and our serving boys and girls.

The ceremony was followed by the singing of ‘God Save the King’.

There were similar scenes elsewhere. In the West Midlands, where streets in the working-class districts of Wolverhampton ‘vied with each other in the number of streamers and flags they could produce’, Hitler was ‘burned many times over’; in a Coventry suburb a self-appointed ‘Mayor and Wife’ – both men, with a builder, ‘the fattest man in the street, and the jolliest’, as the Mayoress – conducted a mock funeral for the effigy. ‘Preparations for these affairs were elaborate and careful and they were well-organised,’ the Mass-Observation survey found. ‘The whole performance seems to have been charged with a deep satisfaction for most of the people who watched it.’
^9.

But for Gladys Langford – 55 years old, married in 1913, deserted by her husband in 1914, living on her own at the Woodstock Hotel, N5 – the escape from central London on a number 19 bus did not presage a happy evening:

Miss Sweeney invited me to the bar [ie at the hotel] and I said I would go after the King’s Speech. When I arrived and saw a semi-circle of people all ‘put’ so to speak, I just fled. I remembered what Lil used to say at parties at home, ‘They don’t really want you – they are only being polite’, so I fled! Miss Sweeney & Miss Gilman both followed me but I refused their welcome and decided to go to bed early. However, Miss Stevens, Mrs Polley and Mrs Mobbs came about 11 pm to call me from the drive, inviting me to go to Highbury Fields where there was a concert – of sorts – and flood-lit dancing spaces. Crowds there with dogs and children much in evidence. Came back to find everyone almost in the bar and was persuaded to join the throng. Peter Gurney bought me a light ale and Mr Burchell a double gin. People were dancing on a space the size of a handkerchief, sentimentalising and singing – all in different keys and often different songs. Mafoot [?] insisted on kissing me and holding my hand – and I detest him. 18 year old Gurney took me on his knee and put his arm round my neck and Burchell wanted me to do ‘Boomps-a-daisy’ with him. My inhibitions made me refrain from doing more than laugh at less restrained people.

Writing up her diary some hours later, she added with grim satisfaction, ‘there are some sore heads here this morning.’

Henry St John was also on his own and living in a hotel, in his case the Westbourne in Bristol. In his mid-30s, he had been educated at Acton County School, and his parents had run a confectioner’s in Chiswick High Street. He had joined the Civil Service straight from school and seems by the mid-1940s to have had a fairly itinerant role, going to different regions and auditing the accounts at their labour exchanges. For him, rather as for Philip Larkin, the war had essentially been a personal inconvenience, and his diary entry for VE Day was entirely in character. It read in toto: ‘It was learned that the cook, who had been living at the Westbourne, went out yesterday and had not come back.’ Nor did St John’s next entry, recording the events of the Tuesday night, quite take the big view: ‘A party in a nearby house went on until 2 a.m., with music, dancing, singing, and shouting, so that I could not sleep until well past that hour, and as I slept badly the previous night I felt good for nothing today.’ St John seems to have been a man of virtually non-existent human sympathies but was not wholly exceptional in apparently having zero interest in this historic event. Another sleepless diarist was perhaps more typical. ‘Far into the night there was the noise of singing and shouting at the pub and fireworks going off, and in the sky the glimmer of some huge bonfire, or was it the illumination of London?’ The writer Denton Welch, living in Hadlow in Kent, then felt – as surely so many did – the discomfort of imminent change from a condition that, for all its inconveniences, had become familiar: ‘There were awful thoughts and anxieties in the air – the breaking of something – the splitting apart of an atmosphere that had surrounded us for six years.’
¹⁰

VE+1, the Wednesday, was inevitably a bit of a let-down, not helped by most pubs (in London anyway) having run out of beer. ‘This VE business is getting me down with fatigue’ was how Lees-Milne bluntly put it. A certain amount of normality returned – for example, the senior Labour politician Hugh Dalton took Michael Young from his party’s research department to lunch at the Marsham Restaurant and found him ‘not particularly sympathetic, but quite capable’ – but there were still plenty of festivities, including a plethora of street parties for children. These were mainly jolly affairs, as innumerable photographs show, though not without their tensions. ‘Half our road where all my friends lived had semi-detached houses and detached bungalows while at the bottom end the houses were small and terraced,’ Michael Burns later recalled about growing up in Tolworth just off the Kingston bypass. ‘We had a street party that our parents were insistent should not include the children from the terraced houses, so there were two parties in Southwood Drive divided by about two hundred yards.’ In Islington one of the children’s street parties was organised by a maid from the Woodstock Hotel. ‘She obtained a Nazi flag and took it into a pub and let people pay 6d a time to spit on it,’ Gladys Langford recorded. ‘She finally sold it for 10/-, having made a total of £2 15s 0d.’ Frank Lewis once again tried the centre of Manchester and once again was unimpressed: ‘Big crowds everywhere, especially Albert Square, still doing nothing, apparently just hanging about.’