The Day War Broke Out Read online

  The

  Day

  War

  Broke

  Out

  Jacky Hyams is a freelance journalist, editor, columnist and author with over twenty-five years’ experience in writing for mass-market magazines and newspapers in the UK and Australia.

  A Londoner who has spent many years travelling, her feature-writing career was launched in Sydney, Australia, where she wrote extensively for the Sydney Morning Herald, Sun Herald, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, Good Housekeeping, New Idea, Clio and The Australian Women’s Weekly. Returning to London, she spent several years as a women’s magazine editor on Bella Magazine, followed by six years as a weekly columnist on the London Evening Standard.

  Her memoir, Bombsites & Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood, and its follow-up, White Boots & Miniskirts: A True Story of Life in the Swinging Sixties, were published in 2011 and 2013 respectively, both by John Blake Publishing. She is also the author of The Real Downton Abbey, a brief guide to the Edwardian era (John Blake Publishing, 2011) and The Female Few, a study of the women Spitfire pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary, while her most recent books are Bomb Girls: Britain’s Secret Army: The Munitions Women of World War II and Frances Kray: The Tragic Bride (both John Blake Publishing, 2013 and 2014).

  JACKY HYAMS

  The

  Day

  War

  Broke

  Out

  Untold true stories

  of how British families faced the

  Second World War together

  Published by John Blake Publishing,

  The Plaza,

  535 Kings Road,

  Chelsea Harbour,

  London SW10 0SZ

  www.facebook.com/johnblakebooks

  twitter.com/jblakebooks

  First published in paperback in 2019

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78946-126-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78946-146-6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design by www.envydesign.co.uk

  Text copyright © Jacky Hyams 2019

  The right of Jacky Hyams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright-holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

  John Blake Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  1.Countdown to Catastrophe

  2.Chaos

  3.The Goodwill of Strangers

  4.The Day Our Lives Changed

  5.How We Lived Then

  6.Working Life

  7.Entertainment

  8.Holidays

  Epilogue: The Day the War Ended

  Pictures

  Recommended Reading

  Sources and Bibliography

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  WARMEST THANKS TO THE EVER-HELPFUL STAFF AT THE JUBILEE Library, Brighton, Hove Library, the research teams at The Keep Archives in Falmer, and in London the Imperial War Museum and Westminster Reference Library.

  Many thanks too for the valuable assistance given by Chris McCooey, Lyn Hall, Eva Merrill, Frank Mee, Arian, Ariette and Christian Everett, Katie Avagh and family, Irene Watts, Liverpool Museums, Derby Evening Telegraph (now the Derby Telegraph) and the Mass Observation Archive.

  Maureen Hone, Vera Barber, Christine Haig, Jean Ledger, Eileen Weston, Philip Gunyon, Pat Thorne, John Blake of the Barking and District Historical Society, and Selma Montford also gave valuable assistance. Others whose collaboration was greatly appreciated include Pat Cryer (of the website www.1900s.org.uk), Pat Thorne, Alexandra Wilde, Simon Stabler of Best of British/Yesterday Remembered and Dr Kath Smith of Remembering the Past, Tyneside.

  AUTHORS NOTES

  Before 1971 the pound was divided into 20 shillings (s).

  One shilling was made up of 12 pennies (d).

  A pound was made up of 240 pennies.

  A guinea was worth 21 shillings, or 1 pound and 1 shilling (£1 1s 0d).

  I have given prices and sums of money in the original pre-decimal currency, which was replaced in February 1971.

  In order to calculate today’s value of any original price quoted, the National Archives has a very useful website with a currency converter.: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter. As a general rule of thumb, £1 in 1939 was worth about £40 in today’s currency.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE DAY WAR BROKE OUT

  HOW DID THE NATION REACT TO THE NEWS THAT WAR HAD just been declared? How did ordinary families across Britain, many still living with the haunting consequences of the previous world war, deal with the arrival of such a devastating pronouncement?

  There are times when it may seem that every aspect, military or otherwise, of the events of the Second World War has been explored, examined and revisited time and time again in every medium you care to think of. Each year on Remembrance Sunday the country takes time out to revisit it all – to honour the contribution of British and Commonwealth men and women, military and civilian, in the two world wars – and the role they continue to play in conflicts across the globe. It is perhaps the one unifying point in any year when due homage is paid to victory and loss, to powerful memory and the significance of the country’s history – and, in the First and Second World Wars, to how millions from countries across the world had joined with Britain to fight. Yet for me, one question above all has long dominated my thoughts when we stop to look back each year. Who were we, as a nation, on the day war broke out, 3 September 1939?

  What was day-to-day life like for the civilian population of Britain, a country whose very empire at the time spanned an incredible 25 per cent of the globe, yet was still a small island where divisions of class and geography dominated almost everything? There is much to discover about Britain in 1939. In the first instance, the 1930s have mostly been viewed by history in a negative light, dominated as those years were by a global Depression and high unemployment in many parts of the country. To say that ordinary working people then did not have very much in terms of spending power, possessions or all the other accoutrements of the consumer society we now inhabit is not an exaggeration. By today’s standards families were, mostly, quite poor. There was very little welfare from an unsympathetic state to prop them up. No NHS either. If you had a job, even if it was poorly paid, you were all right. You might be on the edge, but you’d survive. Just.

  Families in the 1930s did not experience the same kind of mobility we take for granted either. There was a public transport network and there were, by today’s standards, small numbers of cars and motorbikes on the road. But you needed to be quite well-to-do even to own a car. Jumping on a plane? Again, unknown to ordinary people, strictly for the very well-heeled. Yet what is fascinating about the era is that the very beginnings of a consumer society, similar to that of today, had started to emerge in Britain a few years before 1939.

  Home ownership, especially in the city suburbs, had started to become a reality for some. Council-house building and the planned demolition of many slum areas by local authorities
was under way. The extreme popularity of Hollywood movies had started to exert its powerful influence on millions, especially young women who could copy the fashions and hairstyles of the movie stars of the day, often sitting at home making their own versions of what they’d seen on the big screen. Television, of course, was barely in its infancy. So the huge popularity of cinema held sway – even through the war years and the bombing raids. Tickets to a movie palace were, after all, affordable for everyone, even children. From 1937 to 1940 a standard ticket cost just 10d (slightly over 4p).

  One hugely important aspect of life in 1939 emerged not long after war was declared. Sending thousands of innercity children off to the country, when it was believed that there would be huge bombing raids – including the use of poison gas – against city inhabitants virtually hours after war was declared, brought an important awareness of the huge variations in living standards according to income and class.

  As I’ve mentioned, mobility for many was limited, especially those trapped in poverty. Yet even those more affluent middle-class households in the rural areas who had agreed to take in evacuee children were taken aback at the poverty and deprivation they encountered when these children, many from inner-city slums, were sent to live in their homes. This awareness of ‘how the other half lived’ would eventually take shape to bring reform of general living standards. Yet, although progression had slowly started to take shape with the commencement of the Beveridge report, it would be a long time before benefits were felt by the ordinary working folk of the United Kingdom.

  In 1939, what still mattered very much were family cohesion and a pattern or routine to everyday living which has long gone. Today, churchgoing in Britain is at a record low. Yet Sundays then were for regular church attendance for most – frequently followed by the traditional Sunday lunch.

  Men, in the main, were the breadwinners, women mostly stayed home and kept house. This way of life would be rent asunder by wartime, conscription and the eventual call-up of women when millions of them started working in paid employment for the war effort. Perhaps the true, understated importance of that warm day in September 1939 was that it was pivotal, marking a point where a process of huge, irreversible change would begin for the country and its people.

  This was a world without numerous television channels, fast food chains, credit cards, drones or instant messaging. Courtship meant going to a dance and letting a young man walk you home. Marriage was for life – divorce was rare, scandalous, and mainly the province of the wealthy. Access to a telephone meant the public phone box in a nearby street. Cosmetic enhancement meant a new lipstick, not a series of Botox treatments. Taking the temperature of ordinary lives in Britain on 3 September 1939 – and in the times before and after that day – is a surprising exercise. Some of what follows on these pages might sound quite shocking to twenty-first-century ears. Much of it, though, tells us that human nature itself can, at times, be strongly resistant to conditioning or environment. Determination, pluck, stoicism and a long-lost sense of community all had a part to play. Virtually every aspect of people’s lives was about to be taken over by the state on the day war began. Today, of course, society would question such a bold step. Back then, it was mostly accepted. People grumbled, but in the main they simply got on with it. Perhaps the experiences of the previous war had saddened or soured many. Yet the instinct to survive, as ever, took over.

  Finally, it was left to Frank Mee, one of the contributors to this book, a man who had lived through the story, to point out, with the wisdom of years, the truth of it all: in reviewing those all-important times, we can only hope and pray that neither we nor our families ever find ourselves facing such a situation again.

  1

  COUNTDOWN TO CATASTROPHE

  MY MUM AND DAD WERE IN THE MIDST OF THE CROWD THAT night near the London Stock Exchange. A Daily Express photographer had been sent out onto the City streets to capture the moment, the instant-reaction shot as the people in the crowd scanned the newspapers.

  I have a print of that black-and-white photo hanging on my wall, Mum smiling for the camera amid a sea of men’s suiting, Dad, bespectacled, startled, a bit confused: twenty-somethings frozen in time, caught up in the historic moment.

  The date was 30 September 1938.

  IT IS PEACE, the headlines screamed, NO WAR WITH GERMANY.

  Many were already convinced by then that war was imminent. But on that September night, Britain’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had flown back from Munich after his third meeting with German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, waving an important piece of paper, a nonaggression pact with Germany. Hitler had been readying to invade Czechoslovakia. Now, thanks to Chamberlain’s diplomatic efforts, he had agreed to desist.

  The bit of paper, the PM told the cheering crowds, ‘was symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with each other again.’

  ‘Peace for our time,’ he said that night.

  ‘Yes, but how long is “our time”?’ came the cynical response.

  Perhaps understandably, some people clung to the hope that this was genuine, here was a last chance for peace. Others who had watched events in Germany in the last few years with growing alarm saw the Munich fiasco for what it was: a last-ditch diplomatic attempt to stave off the inevitable, a way of buying urgently needed time for both sides to prepare for war. Germany had openly rearmed while Britain’s defences were in a parlous state. Preparations and planning for war, a shade too tentative until then, would now have to be accelerated with all speed.

  Adolf Hitler’s terrifying ambitions for war and domination of Europe had grown increasingly apparent not long after he and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933.

  Hitler had never come to terms with Germany’s defeat in the First World War and believed that the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 peace accord that ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers, was grossly unfair: Germany had been stripped of territories, population and overseas colonies. He wanted the return of the territories that had belonged to Germany before the First World War. To this end, in March 1936, he sent his troops to reoccupy the Rhineland, a buffer zone between Germany and France which had been demilitarised after the First World War. Germany had been forbidden to station troops there. Hitler’s aggressive move was in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles.

  Unprepared for war, and despite vociferous diplomatic protests, neither France nor Britain took any action to halt or reverse Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland. France had considered mobilisation but wanted British cooperation, yet, due to Britain’s adamance regarding their policy of appeasement of Germany, Britain was unwilling to engage.

  Elsewhere in Europe that year, further war clouds gathered. Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had waged and won war in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). Afterwards, Germany and Italy formed a coalition, the Rome–Berlin Axis, linking the two Fascist countries.

  In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War erupted, as Fascist General Franco attempted to seize power in Spain from the elected Republican government. One million lives would be lost in the war until the Republicans finally surrendered in March 1939, and Franco remained the dictator of Spain until his death in 1975. To a considerable extent, the war had served as a testing ground for German and Soviet Russian military readiness, especially aircraft and tanks, with German armour and elements of the Luftwaffe (air force) supporting the Nationalists, and Russian forces operating on the Republican side; Italian forces also served in support of Franco.

  Emboldened since his reoccupation of the Rhineland, Hitler’s territorial ambitions rapidly expanded. He insisted the German people needed Lebensraum (living space) in the vast farming areas of Central and Eastern Europe, areas which could feed Germany and its peoples. This meant Hitler seizing even more territories.

  In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria into the German Reich, a move known as the Anschluss (the union or linkup). A few months later, the German Army was mobilised.
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  ‘Peace was dying,’ wrote American war correspondent Virginia Cowles. ‘Everyone in their hearts knew it.’

  The tinderbox that would eventually lead to disaster was Czechoslovakia, then a country of many different ethnic groups formed after the First World War from part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had been dissolved when war ended in 1918. Hitler wanted to annex an area in the north and west of the country called the Sudetenland, where three million German-speaking people lived.

  Secretly, during a visit to Germany, Chamberlain had agreed that the Sudeten Germans could be separated from Czechoslovakia. Appeasement, i.e. diplomatic efforts to maintain peace even in the face of Hitler’s aggression, was still, even then, the official policy for Britain’s political class. Then, on Chamberlain’s second visit to Germany on 22 September 1938, Hitler upped the ante with an advanced timetable for the handover of the Sudetenland and claims for more Czech territory. One week later, Chamberlain returned in triumph from his third visit to Germany, waving the ill-fated piece of paper.

  Officially, at least, Chamberlain believed in the so-called peace treaty but essentially the idea was to avoid war with Germany through diplomacy until Britain had rearmed – despite any lesser compromises that might be involved. Yet when Hitler broke his Munich promises and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, diplomacy and appeasement no longer held sway. The brief respite did give Britain time to build up defences and start a programme of rearmament. By then, Chamberlain acknowledged that Hitler was likely to seize Poland. In March 1939 France and Britain drew up an Anglo-French agreement, guaranteeing assistance to Poland, should Nazi Germany attack the country. Five months later came the words everyone had hoped would never be spoken: ‘This country is at war with Germany.’

  But why was Britain so ‘lamentably unprepared’ for war, as Winston Churchill later admitted? Why did the preparation for war only accelerate just a year before hostilities broke out?