The Day War Broke Out Page 17

  RADIO DAYS

  Don Carter was the youngest of ten, born in 1920. He grew up in the Tenantry Down area of East Sussex. As a schoolboy, he would listen to a very early radio set in the home he shared with his widowed father and siblings.

  The first radios were known as wireless sets. Heaven knows why, they were all wires. The very first were known as crystal sets and reception was obtained by what was known as a ‘cat’s whisker’, which was moved around by means of a lever in close proximity to the crystal.

  The first wireless we had required an aerial running the full length of the garden from a height of fifteen or twenty feet, like a high clothes line. It also needed a copper rod buried in the ground as an earth. The set itself was an upturned wooden box on top of which were several valves of different kinds [transistors had not then been invented, they did not become available until the late 1950s]. One of these valves lit up. There were two coils which could be moved closer together or further apart, as required. There were one or two more bits and pieces – beyond my comprehension – and two enormous tuning dials about the size of a large teacup and an ‘on’ and ‘off’ switch on the front of the box.

  Under the box, there was a tangle of wires connecting all the parts together. At this time I do not think there were any wireless sets connected to the electrical mains. Batteries and accumulators provided the power (in our home there was no electricity). The amount of power that had to be supplied by the batteries was something in the order of 120 volts. There were no 120-volt batteries at that time. However, there was a flat torch battery from which protruded two metal tags, the positive and negative poles. They provided a current of 4.5 volts. A sufficient number of such batteries had to be connected together by brass clips to provide the equivalent power. The accumulator had to be taken to the local wireless shop for recharging about once a fortnight, this cost just a few coppers [pennies]. As this process took a couple of days, it was advisable to have a spare accumulator. This was for a wireless set that was only used in the evenings.

  There was no loudspeaker, just one pair of earphones. How then did the family listen in? The earphones were placed in a china pudding basin and the resulting resonance was somehow supposed to improve sound quality.

  Reception was extremely poor by today’s standards. There were all kinds of atmospheric interferences, whistles, crackles, long whooping sounds. It was as if we were trying to make contact with outer space. Despite all this, it still seemed worthwhile to rush home from school to book a place next to the pudding basin. After all, not many of your schoolmates had such a contrivance. We would probably not have had one if it had not been for the fact that one of my brothers, who was an electrician, had a workmate who was very interested in the subject.

  Wireless was definitely the up-and-coming thing then. It seemed that every young man was busy building his own set.

  What were those early radio audiences listening to? The first ever BBC radio broadcast came in November 1922. Most programmes were broadcast live, a mixture of music, talks, news and weather forecasts. There was Children’s Hour from 5–6pm; news itself was only broadcast after 6pm. Live sporting events were broadcast, but no sporting results were given out. Incredibly, newsreaders in the studio would read the news of the day in evening dress, speaking in posh, Oxford-type accents.

  Sunday listening was limited. There were no radio broadcasts on Sunday morning or early evening (since so many people went to church each Sunday, it was feared broadcasts might discourage this).

  By the 1930s, radio light entertainment mostly focused on dance band shows until the first ever radio comedy show, merging comedy with music, started in 1938. This was Wednesday night’s Band Waggon with Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch, Audiences loved it. In fact, it became so popular that cinema managers complained that their box-office receipts plummeted every Wednesday night. The show ran until 1940, but ended when Murdoch went into the RAF and Askey left to pursue a hugely successful career in film and TV, which incuded sitcoms.

  When war broke out, the BBC closed down all regional stations; all programmes were from the BBC Home Service. Radio, by this time, especially news, music and comedy, had become a crucial element in the life of the nation – as it proved to be throughout the war.

  Along with a trip to the cinema, a once-weekly outing to a dance venue played a huge part in people’s social lives. Throughout the 1930s the dance-hall boom spread right across the country as the popularity of dancing grew. It was estimated that Glasgow, for instance, had more dance halls per head of population than anywhere else in the country.

  The dance hall, village hop or church social were frequently the places where the majority of couples first met. Dancing was one of the very few activities that parents of unmarried girls deemed ‘respectable’ enough to allow a girl to go off with a group of friends for a night out at a local palais. Unmarried women then were, by today’s standards, extremely limited in what they could do unaccompanied. Public houses or cocktail bars, for instance, were completely off-limits for single women on their own; only women of dubious reputation would venture inside unaccompanied.

  As with the movies, the weekly dancing habit escalated during the war, especially in the big city dance venues, when around 10,000 people a week would pack into huge halls, some of which ran four separate sessions a day.

  Dancing was a great morale booster. Servicemen and women with just a few hours’ leave, as well as local habitués, would gravitate onto the floor to perform the more traditional dances like the tango, the foxtrot or the waltz, or the livelier conga, rumba or hokey cokey.

  Frank Mee (see Chapter 4), from Stockton-on Tees, was born in February1929. He still has vivid memories of the dance floor, from the late 1930s onwards.

  In the larger dance halls, you danced on sprung floors or at least highly polished and prepared floors. In small halls, it was plank floors with nails sticking up or on concrete with linoleum squares glued down.

  Any kind of footwear would do, but some people had dancing pumps and others wore what they had down to hobnail boots – frowned upon if it was a polished floor.

  I lived for dancing, young as I was. Dad said I would have danced on the pigsty roof, if he had played the music – too true! Where most lads saw dancing as a means to an end, i.e. girls, for me dancing was the end, the girls were the means.

  At ten, I had been given an insight into the wonder and splendour of the dance hall. My parents were competition dancers at a time when money or gifts could be won. They had different partners for the competitions and we had a house full of prizes of various kinds they had won.

  As the babysitter was loath to look after me (I was a bit of a handful, she said), I was dressed up and taken to the local Co-op (Co-op Dance Halls were to be found all over the country). I would sit quietly and take it all in, overawed by the combined beauty of the music, lights and swirling dancers in the multi-coloured flowing dresses. The men wore sober suits or tuxedos. All my life I never failed to be amazed at the splendour and ambience of those large dance halls.

  The high, often domed ceiling had masses of spotlights that changed colour as they turned. The huge mirrored ball, with the spotlight on each corner of the room shining on it as it turned, cast scattered beams of moonlight on the dancers as the main lights dimmed to a soft haze. The coloured spotlights would weave among the dancers, wrapping them in a warm, ethereal glow as it passed – it was wonder indeed.

  Most halls had plush settees along the walls, with a scattering of tables and chairs. One end would be a standing area and the other end taken up by the stage. We had some large dance bands in some of those dance halls. The players would come on stage in their tuxedos and the band leader would stand up front. He waved his arms, did his little dance steps and sang the odd song, smiling all the while at the ladies passing.

  During those early days of watching, I was often taken on the floor by ladies during the interval between competitions. I was quite tall and a quick learner, so I could s
oon do most of the old-fashioned dances, as they were called. In the interval, records would be played of the modern dances, so I got a feeling for the quickstep, waltz and foxtrot – an early learning curve without a doubt.

  By the time I was in high school, we were dancing three or four times a week in church halls, school halls, and I was going to Cochran’s Dance Studio for lessons in modern dancing. The vicar or church workers would run the church hall dances, mainly to a record player or on occasion a three-piece band. We got a night of Victor Sylvester records, one of the UK’s most successful musicians and bandleaders of the ballroom dancing era, though us scallywags would try to sneak a Glenn Miller onto the machine [Miller was an American big-band trombonist, bandleader and composer of the Swing era; musically, one of the most popular dance sounds of the Second World War until his tragic death in a plane crash in 1944].

  We had to do a duty dance with the vicar’s wife and the tea ladies as behoves young gentlemen. One local spinster of undecided age took a shine to me and would come dashing over. She would wrap me in a wrestling hold from which there was no escape, pull me to her bosom and then do a sort of military two-step to whatever dance was being played. My memory is of an overwhelming smell of mothballs wafting round my nose. It ended all lascivious thoughts right there – the smell of mothballs was a passion killer all my life. I did get a tea and bun paid for, so stood the punishment. Another memory is of dancing with an older woman. She was the spitting image of Carmen Miranda, the film star. She’d take me on the floor for the tango or rumba, pull me in tight and say, ‘Touch my bones, feel the movement.’ She was right and I soon stopped blushing beetroot red.

  Throughout my life, dancing got me new friends, wherever I was. I danced in many of the largest halls in the country and loved every minute of it. Many of us met our partners in dance halls. I eventually met my late wife of sixty years at a dance. She was also a good dancer and we did English-style demonstrations when we went abroad, by request.

  Dancing and cinema aside, there were other pervasive influences at play in the late 1930s, especially for women. There was nothing new in magazines for them, but by the mid-1930s, new printing technology offered a far more tempting read. High-circulation magazines like Woman’s Own and Woman were launched in 1932 and 1937, respectively, with Woman quickly establishing itself as the market leader, selling one million copies a week by the time war broke out. The formula was a standard combination of romantic fiction, health and beauty, knitting patterns, dressmaking, gardening, cookery and household management, but the inclusion of photos and articles about the most glamorous, if remote, influencers of the era, the Royal Family and the big Hollywood movie stars of the time, proved to be the main circulation booster. Home and hearth with a dash of glitter!

  As for the Royal Family, their overall popularity did not wane, despite the bad 1920s years of the Depression, unemployment and hunger marches. Big celebrations for the Silver Jubilee of King George V in May 1935 gave the people the opportunity to celebrate and show their love of King and Country.

  It was a big day for patriotism. The King himself was reported to have commented that he had never seen so many people on the streets. London’s centre was lit up by floodlights, flags and bunting festooned the streets everywhere and the nation celebrated the public holiday with sporting events, pageants and street parties. Frank Mee recalled:

  We got a day off school and as was usual, the Green at Norton became the playground for the crowds having a day out from the town, a tuppenny bus ride away. We got a bag of buns from the local bakery and a Jubilee mug. The day off school was the main thing for me – freedom! Our local board school was very old and dreary to someone like me, used to a large garden-cum-smallholding to play in.

  A year later, King George V was dead and we were celebrating Edward VIII. My parents had many discussions about him and Mrs Simpson [Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée with whom the soon-to-be King was in love].

  I gathered there was a lot of antagonism around it all when he came to the throne in 1936. My parents definitely did not approve. We got another day off school, more buns and a new mug. The Green once again was a place of meeting, fun and games, with small stalls, roundabouts and Wall’s Ice Cream (‘Stop me and buy one’) three-wheeled bicycles.

  The new King’s coronation was set for May 1937, but in December 1936, the King made a dramatic broadcast to the nation to inform them that he was abdicating the throne for the twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson.

  The public knew little of the story of the relationship, but what they did hear met with much disapproval – exactly like the views of Frank Mee’s parents.

  Foreign newspapers had widely reported the relationship with Mrs Simpson – but such was the scandal of the relationship at the time, the British people had been more or less kept in the dark, partly because of official restraints on news coverage. As the dashing Prince of Wales, Edward had been extremely popular. Now he was gone, more or less in permanent exile in France with his new wife and a new title: the Duke of Windsor.

  His brother Albert, known as Bertie, his wife Elizabeth and their two daughters, Elizabeth (the present Queen, Elizabeth II) and her sister Margaret, were catapulted, overnight, into a life they had never really anticipated, following Bertie’s coronation as George VI in May 1937.

  It was a startlingly dramatic beginning, but by the end of 1937, the new Royal Family were established in Buckingham Palace and despite the King’s stammer and consequent dislike of speaking in public, Bertie, Elizabeth and their daughters were destined to prove even more popular than George V and his wife, Queen Mary.

  The then Princess Elizabeth drew much admiration round the world when, aged fourteen, she made a radio address to evacuated children in October 1940, during the Battle of Britain. The war years helped to cement the people’s love for their Royal Family – Britain was still very much a patriotic nation.

  A FITTER NATION

  Attitudes to fitness took a leap forward in the 1930s. The background to this had been the toll that poor nutrition and living standards had taken on many male volunteers during the First World War, making them unfit for military service.

  Today’s fitness obsession had its early roots back in 1930, when the Women’s League of Health and Beauty was formed by Mollie Bagot Stack, with the aim of making co-ordinated exercise available to all ages through dance, exercise and callisthenics (gymnastic exercises), the first ever concerted attempt to encourage people to view the regular group workout as a means of staying fit and healthy.

  Membership was 2 shillings and 6 pence, classes cost 6 pence and there was an affordable uniform of a white satin blouse and black satin knickers. Within seven years, the League had 160,000 members. It was cheap to join, and big displays of synchronised exercise were staged in London’s Hyde Park and the Albert Hall, all heavily featured in the newsreels of the day.

  Alongside this were other factors involving greater awareness of a healthy lifestyle. The growing Boy Scout and Girl Guide movement, with its emphasis on outdoor life, was claiming membership of over one million by the end of the 1920s. Rambling or hiking in the country became a growing leisure activity, leading to the formation of the Ramblers’ Association in 1935.

  Outdoor swimming was also rapidly developing as a healthy pursuit. To this end, from the mid-1930s local councils in seaside resorts invested heavily in new swimming pool lidos, since having a public swimming pool was then viewed as being as important as it had been to offer visitors a pier half a century before.

  A total of 169 new lidos were built across the UK by local authorities during the 1930s, both for seaside holidaymakers and city dwellers. By the late 1930s, Londoners could enjoy huge newly built open-air lidos in Chingford, Tottenham, Edmonton and Brockwell; in the north of England, Morecambe’s Super Swimming Stadium, opened in July 1936, was reputed at the time to be Europe’s largest outdoor pool.

  The need for Britain to focus on health and fitness was reinforced by the cou
ntry’s poor performance at the Berlin Olympics in August 1936, which the Nazis used to promote an image of a new, strong, united Germany, with the emphasis on physical fitness, masking the reality of their aims as a racist and increasingly violent regime. But the message from the imagery of the Olympics was clear: a physically fit younger generation would make a more formidable fighting force in wartime.

  The following year, the British government launched the National Fitness Council, with the aim of launching a nationwide keep-fit campaign. Local authorities were encouraged to make land available for improving sporting and outdoor activities. By then, of course, war was moving onto the horizon.

  Yet even as plans were being drawn up for food rationing and how the nation could be fed in wartime, the 1930s phenomenon of health and fitness – and the significance of diet – came into play. It meant that new discoveries about nutrition could play an important part in feeding the nation, despite wartime shortages.

  The wartime food rationing diet that was drawn up for the nation, spartan as it was, was basically nutritious. It had been carefully calculated by scientists and statisticians. Rationing also forced people to adopt new eating patterns so that those who had previously consumed a poor diet could increase their intake of protein and vitamins, since everyone received the same ration. As a result, many people had a better diet under wartime food rationing than before the war years, with a consequent improvement in the nation’s health.

  Moreover, the keep-fit craze of the 1930s continued to thrive post-war. By the 1950s, a popular keep-fit guru had emerged. Her name was Eileen Fowler, a fitness instructor who had toured the country during the war, conducting group physical training. She had a following of half a million BBC radio listeners regularly exercising to her programme at 6.45am each morning; the country’s first ever keep-fit broadcasts. Fowler’s career as a fitness expert would span radio and TV through the years: ‘My aim in life is to keep families fit,’ she declared. She died, aged ninety-three, in 2000.