In the lead up to the 80th anniversary of VE, Khaleda Brophy-Harmer (PhD Candidate at the University of Southampton), has gone through the archive’s collection of VE day materials to provide insight into how people experienced and wrote about VE day.
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On the evening of May 7th, Prime Minister Winston Churchill interrupted radio broadcasting to announce the end of war in Europe. Germany had signed the act of unconditional surrender, and tomorrow (May 8) was to be a national holiday – a day of prescribed and socially sanctioned celebration. Germany’s surrender did not come as a surprise, people in Britain had been awaiting such an announcement, and in anticipation Mass Observation (MO) had requested its investigators take readings of national mood, record preparations for the celebrations, and take details of the day itself once it arrived. Its national panel of writers were also asked to record their own experiences and reflections of the day. Based on ‘informal interviews, overheard comments, and systematic observation’, the File Report ‘Victory in Europe’, is a comprehensive collection of some of these materials. The report gives a snapshot into some of the varying ways in which Victory Day was experienced by ‘ordinary’ people (particularly in the capital), and how they reported feeling during the closing months of the war.
MO’s File Report writes: ‘Long before the final announcement of peace was made people had begun buying their flags for Victory Day…All the West End stores had big displays of patriotic flags and were doing brisk business’. To the backdrop of wartime austerity and hardships (the rationing, bombing, blackouts, fear and losses), in the form of ‘flags and decorations’ people perhaps anticipated a moment of relief, and even (officially sanctioned) jubilance. Shopworkers told ‘Observers’ that patriotic ‘scarves, streamers, rosettes’, and even ‘ hair-slides’ had been selling fast in the weeks building up to the announcement. By the time peace in Europe was imminent to purchase yourself a flag, the File Report wrote, had become a serious undertaking – and, if you found yourself one, you could expect to queue to purchase it. As an overheard ‘flag pursuer’ reflected (joining a queue of 150-200 people): ‘I’ve been in so many different queues since the war, it’ll be a change to join a flag queue’.
Still, even with your flag, whilst waiting for the VE day announcement, the question of when to put it out, MO reported, was for some a burning one. For an individual living in Chelsea, to prematurely adorn their house would been a real loss of face:
This hesitancy and concern for getting ahead of oneself (and publicly celebrating too early) was seemingly understandable; the file report emphasizes palpable feelings of ‘confusion’, frustration, disbelief and ‘fluctuating emotions’ amongst those observed and interviewed prior to the announcement of Victory in Europe. As one member of the public exclaimed:
Certainly, as peace in Europe grew closer, many reported a growing apathy and frustration:
On 7th May – when the awaited news finally came – one wartime diarist (5270), working as a typist in Cheshire, reported first hearing cheering from the factory floor, soon followed by an ‘excited typist’ bursting-in to tell them Germany had surrendered, and ‘Churchill was going to speak to them later tonight’. In response she and her co-workers remarked on feeling ‘sick’, and rather ‘queer’. As the news spread, she writes, flags could soon be seen ‘everywhere’.
Contrastingly, Observer 3613, a 22 year old woman living in London with her parents, wrote:
I heard the news Flash on the Monday just as we were preparing to go out for the evening. We had got fed up with the Peace News. It was so continuous and prolonged with nothing definite that we had decided to go round to the local and have a drink anyway. My parents and I couldn’t believe our ears, but shortly afterwards we could hear the hooters and sirens from the boats on the Thames in the dock.
Once it had arrived, MO material shows the day itself as being marked in profoundly different ways by different people, and amidst an array of reflections and emotions. In Bridgend (Wales) diarist 5213 commented on a continued air of confusion:
[I] passed a number of school children “I don’t know if there’s school said one”. I think that is the doubt everyone had – no one seemed to know what to do as the announcements had come as they had. One of the fellows had come into town and gone to the office, no one else was there so we had a coffee, walked round town a bit…
As he describes a quiet walk later with friends, he comments on a shared experience of VE day as a rather surreal ‘anticlimax’, perhaps summed up in his companion’s comment: ‘I didn’t imagine we would be spending VE Day this way’. Indeed, after the build-up and the waiting, theirs is a sentiment reiterated across the File Report, Topic Collection, directive replies and diary entries.
For Diarist 3613, newly navigating life in a wheelchair, the morning of May 8 was spent in bed, later doing some work from home, and visiting her sister and two young nieces with her mother. Although commenting on the crowds, music and dancing, she finishes her reply with:
I had found Churchill’s speech singularly disappointing, but we hadn’t listened to the King’s. In fact, I thought the whole thing was a colossal anti-climax, but I suppose it was bound to be so to a certain extent.
Certainly Observer reports, directives and diaries do also tell of the parties had on VE day. The bunting, singing, dancing, church bells, floodlights, bonfires and playing of piano-accordions, gramophones, barrel-organs, and hurdy-gurdies. So too do they detail the songs people sang, and even ‘students running round dressed up and wheeling others in barrows’ through Oxford (diarist 5354). Still, wartime diarists and directive replies also shine a light on the more intimate ways in which people quietly marked the coming of peace in Europe. For an accountant living in Yorkshire (diarist 5076), this came in the form of opening some tinned chicken and sausages, bought five years previously and set aside for the day peace finally arrived (the chicken, unfortunately, rather disappointing).
Perhaps most powerfully, MO material on VE day also gives space for the quieter reflections of the day – of those who stayed at home, went to church, or could not bring themselves to join in with the festivities (despite all the flags). Those whose grief and losses muffled all the outside noise, providing a space for heavy-weighing thoughts and hopes for friends and family still away in the war. Indeed, in parallel to the reported crowds for Churchill and the King, MO material gives a voice to those who turned the radio down, and off.
For diarist 5213 the days celebrations, ‘all seemed a part of another world – that I passed through it, but was not of it’; his thoughts always, ‘intruded by two things – Tom and Belsen’. He writes:
I’m afraid the memory of Tom will damp by total enjoyment of anything for a long long time. This, though, is really no time for celebration but for dedication of our lives, to work for those things we have fought for and for which so many have died.
Poignantly he asked: ‘…how soon will they forget?.. Shall it be in vain, again?’
Indeed, MO accounts of VE Day give snapshots into some of the very raw realities of life in Britain. Diarist 5270 recounts (and seemingly gives her support for), a violent xenophobic attack on two Italian men attending victory celebrations. Chiming with what Gavin Schaffer, Neil. A Wynn and Panikos Panayi have all identified as a time of increased persecution and discrimination for ethnic minorities in Britain, 5270’s account serves as a fitting warning against the smoothing-out of complex histories; the glossing-over of Britain’s multifaceted past, and the place of MO material in telling some of those stories.
Primary Sources used:
File Report : FR 2263 – VICTORY IN EUROPE
Topic Collection: TC 49 – VICTORY CELEBRATIONS 1945-46
Directive: 3613’s response to May 1945 directive
Diarists:
Secondary Sources Referenced:
Panayi P., ‘Immigrants, Refugees, the British State and Public Opinion During World War Two’ in War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War Two, Kirkham P. and Thomas D.(ed) (London: Lawrence &Wishart, 1995).
Schaffer G., ‘Rethinking the History of Blame: Britain and Minorities during the Second World War’, National Identities, 8:4 (2006), pp.401-419
Wynn N. A., ‘‘Race War’: Black American G.I’s and West Indians in Britain During the Second World War’ 24:3 (2006), Immigrants & Minorities, pp.324-346.