Were you, or someone you know, living in London during WWII?

You’re very welcome @lozengeoflove - the Provincial Lady books are fantastic for cultural history: the one where she visits Russia is incredible...

I do sometimes wonder if the stuff about what people[‘s parents] did during the war would have caught hold in quite the same way if British society hadn’t been so dramatically reshaped in the postwar period with the end of Empire & the influx of migrants from across the Empire & then the Commonwealth. The question could be angled both to unify & to divide when it came to immigrants - but it didn’t have the same kind of risk as it did in formerly occupied countries.

My son came home from school with a worksheet for his history homework; he had to ask his grandparents about their experiences during wartime, specifically rationing. My grandfather was a forester on Lord Egerton's estate, Tatton Park in Cheshire. Lord Egerton looked after his staff; my mum wrote on the worksheet that she was absolutely sick to death of eating venison all the time. This piece of information never made it to the class project book...

Terrific thread.

My MIL was a single woman in her early 20s when the war started. She worked for the Post Office Savings Bank (now NS&I) in West Kensington, which would have been a protected occupation, as they were raising government funds to pay for the war effort, so she was never conscripted. She lived with her parents in Northolt. There's a longstanding RAF airbase there, so the area must have been a target for bombers.

I never thought to ask her about the war when I had the chance, and sadly she died nearly 30 years ago now, and had dementia for several years before that.

I do know that her twin brother served in the Navy during the war, but sadly fell ill and had to be invalided out. My memory is that he contracted a tropical disease while in West Africa, but my husband thinks he developed MS. Whichever of us is right, he ended up in a hospital somewhere near London where he sadly died not long after the war. He had married, but had no children, and my MIL commented bitterly that his wife never bothered to visit him. They didn't stay in touch after he died.

There must have been lots of marriages that came to grief during/after the war. Long separations, all sorts of other stresses. Many people struggled to re-adjust to civilian life after the excitement/responsibility/companionship of their wartime work. Plenty of PTSD around too, of course.

My FIL's first marriage was another casualty. We don't know when he married, whether it was before or during the war, but he was divorced not long after it ended. No children, so probably quite a short-lived marriage.

Before the war, he worked for his father in SE London. GFIL ran a small business making good quality ready-to-wear garments for sale in clothing shops. When the war began, he was offered a contract making garments for the military, but turned it down as the prices offered were so low he'd have made far less profit than he was used to. This was a very bad move. If he'd taken the contract his workers, including both his sons, would have been classed as doing essential war work and wouldn't have been conscripted. As it was, all his workers were classed as doing non-essential work, so they were mostly conscripted, or joined up, and because of rationing, he struggled to get materials and would only have been able to produce garments to utility standards anyway, probably also at a very low profit. End result, he closed the business, and both his sons got conscripted.

My FIL went into the RAF and trained as a mechanic working on repairing engines and the fabric of planes. At one point he was transferred to work in a munitions works instead. He ended up in France after D-Day and spent months in Belgium until the war ended. He was fortunate not to be injured as far as I know. Hard work, but nothing like as bad a war as many others.

My DPs were married in May 1940. They hadn't known each other very long, but my DF had already been called up into the RAMC and they believed that, if my DM was a married woman, she would not be called up into the forces. My DF came back from his unit on the Friday, they married on the Saturday, they spent their wedding night at my DGM's house and he returned to his unit on the Sunday afternoon. They did not live together until 1946, when he was finally demobbed, by which time they were both very different people. Divorce was unthinkable, so they lived together very unhappily for 53 years!

DM then had the advantages of being married, both financially and socially. My DGPs evacuated themselves to Llandudno, but left my DM in their house, in an area that, in the end, had only one big bombing raid. To hear my DM talk, the social life was fantastic, especially when the Americans arrived and, although she did war work, it was in an office. They had a big fire in the winter and used to take potatoes into work to bake in the fire for lunch.

Meanwhile, my DF was dealing with battle casualties day after day ...

Oddly, i know exactly where my DMIL was on the day my DPs got married. DMIL was in Holland watching Nazi paratroopers land in her village and watching the neighbours cheering. Her education ended at the age of nine as the family was moved around and kept away from the coast so they couldn't escape. Her DF was interned in Poland until 1944 nd his health never recovered. Her experiences have been recorded in print and on video and she relived them day after day when she developed dementia.

OP I've just seen your link to the Catford school bombing - I wonder if that's MIL's policeman dad in the picture? I'll show her and ask.

(And dining room makes more sense than classroom)

My mother spent the war working in the West End and living in a semi in Cricklewood. My favourite war story was about an incendiary bomb (designed to burst into flames on contact) landing on the doormat outside a neighbour's house a few houses down. The proud, and furious, housewife opened the door, picked up the mat with bomb and ran across to the tennis courts opposite where she hurled it yelling 'you can have this one back Jerry'. Adrenalin. Must have been faulty bomb but blimey.

My dad was born in 1934, in Hull, which was very badly bombed as a major port.

He used to tell a tale of being sent to collect his dad’s collars from the cleaners’ on his trike, when the air raid siren sounded. He tried to ride home as fast as he could, but a policeman dragged him off his trike by the scruff of the neck and took him into the shelter. My gran must have been frantic - he was about 6.

Later he was evacuated to Berkshire. His aunt was Head Cook and Housekeeper for a stately home, and dad and one of his sisters were sent there to live below stairs. He had a whale of a time, didn’t really go to school for two years, got pocket money every week and went delivering milk on the horse-drawn milk float - Highclere Castle (Downton Abbey) was on his round!

She had gone home at lunchtime because she had forgotten her dinner money. Hers was the classroom where most of the children were killed. Her dad was the local policeman and didn't know she'd gone home so he thought she'd died until she came back to school not knowing what had happened.

A chilling PS to the story is that the German pilot flew so low he actually waved at the kids before unleashing his bomb and afterwards he came back and strafed them as they were trying to run away.

Her brother developed a lifelong stammer that day and her cousin suffered shrapnel injuries which affected him for the rest of his life.

They had been evacuated at the beginning if the war but her pregnant mother was so distraught their dad brought them. Didn't even send them away again after that day.

My mum was older and joined the WRNS. She wasn't in London but she had a marvellous time mostly due to having been able to leave a strict home at 18.

Not read the whole thread, so this might have already been mentioned, but Lucy Worsley did a good programme on this called ‘The Real Blitz Spirit’. It should still be on iPlayer.

My Nan was a small child in the East End during WW2. She has very vivid memories of emerging from an air raid shelter to see their house had turned into rubble.

My Gran worked in London in WW2. She’d had a miserable childhood and been forced to leave school at 14 and work. She’d joined the army, marched thousands of miles to London and was assigned yo civil service war work and got promoted. She loved it, doing a good job hadn’t been a possibility before, and the London social life.

Her view was that ‘blitz spirit’ wasn’t accurate and people were as they always were/are, with bad housing, looting, unfriendliness, selfishness etc. In general she was a ‘glass half empty’ type

A few years ago think the national archives published papers from the end of WW2 when the decision was taken by government to fire the women civil servants and give men the jobs.

With the loss of her good job and job options being far fewer with the men back my gran hastily got married, then had a lot of DC, which didn’t work out at well, sadly. She only ever did low paid, ad-hoc type work.

Think she might’ve been better in modern times with education and work opportunities and having far fewer DC and divorcing.

-having tonsilitis aged 3 and being on a medical ward. Seeing lots of soldiers there with serious wounds. No-one believes her now, as why would a small girl have ended up on men's medical, but she must have seen something while in hospital, as she remembers it very well.

I can totally understand this. When I was 10 (late 1970s) and had my appendix out I was moved with another girl on to a female surgical ward as they needed beds on paeds and we were the oldest. We loved it there were lots of gory stories about gynae issues and all the ladies gave us sweets / chocolates etc.

A children's ward could easily be closed due to one of the diseases we have vaccines for now. My mum spent 6 weeks in hospital with diphtheria (probably 1945 ish), they were not allowed visitors and any toys they had on the ward had to be left on the ward or burned.

I can easily see a situation where a ward closes and a child is temporarily moved, probably with a nurse eg they close a peads ward and only retain staff for the ward and send the other nurses and the student nurses to other wards and one takes the 3 year old with them.

I think a 3 year old may also be a boost to moral for the men with injuries.

It may also have been as simple as an air raid so she was safer in a hospital of any kind and then could be transferred later.

I worked at one hospital that when I started was part of a group, the old fever hospital was still used for clinics and all the wards were separate and you had to go outside to walk to another ward, you would not have been able to do that in an air raid.

Sorry off topic musings.

Sorry one more thing to add.

My mother came to the UK as an au pair in the 60s. She said everyone used to ask each other 'and what did your parents do during the war?' She couldn't understand why people were asking or bothered as no one in Denmark spoke about it. It was/is such a large part of the British physche perhaps so much more so than other nationalities.

So not London but my DGM was attempting to raise her family (DM born 1944) in Copenhagen during nazi occupation. She really hardly spoke about it but I got her talking a bit in her final years.

She says the Nazis took everything- food; coal etc and they had some of the coldest winters for years in the mid 1940s - she had to go foraging with the kids for wood to burn and they also ended up burning furniture to heat one room.

She said she was so scared of the soldiers- she didn't speak German but she remembers walking to work one morning and a soldier shouting at her in German and cocking his rifle but she turned and ran down the street.

By the end of the war, she said Denmark was full of soldiers who were barely teens - 13/14 year old boys in massive oversized German uniform. She remembers that eventually they all deserted and walked back to Germany but she said the boys she saw had stuffed valuables into their uniforms and tried to carry stuff home and the roads ended up littered with bits like silver candlesticks etc. She felt sorry for those boys - they looked lost and scared. Although she hated hearing the German language the rest of her life.

My aunt was good friends as an adult with a girl who survived the accidental British bombing of a school. The bombers were aiming for the gestapo headquarters but one mistook the school or crashed into it. Her friend was dragged out from the rubble. She would have been 12 or so. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstitutJeannee_d%27Arc

Was just thinking about the air-raids (my maternal grandmother used a Morrison shelter - one of the ones that’s basically a table with quite serious ambition); & wondered if other MNers knew that Operation Double Cross (vaunted as huge success - in circles allowed to know, obviously! - at time, & then later, when declassified, seen as act of genius pretty much on a par with, say, Operation Mincemeat) was revealed to have essentially made no difference* a couple of years ago as V-2s were so inaccurate (18 miles is quite the margin of error) anyway. The sheer size of the things is just horrifying...

On subject of books, if you’re familiar with E. M. Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady, she wrote one that covered her wartime experiences. While they’re fiction, they’re based on her own life, and they’re lighter going than lots of other stuff - plus they were written for a contemporary audience. Have just found The Provincial Lady in Wartime on Project Gutenberg Australia, so you can read it immediately should the mood take. And I must not read it immediately but must try to get some sleep...

• link is to the Daily Mail as academic work in question is not open access & their article is perfectly reasonable handling of topic; warning only as so many MNers v vocal about not looking at it at all ever, so hardly seems fair not to mention.

Nominating for Classics too

Late MIL was born in Wandsworth but grew up in Kent. She moved back to London as a married woman. DH’s older sibs were born 1940 and 1942. First child born in London, then she was evacuated to somewhere in the country where the second baby was born. It was a former stately home that was turned into a nursing home for evacuated and pregnant women from London. Not sure where it was - I thought Northants but DH says not. We should just ask BIL what it says on his birth certificate. Anyway MIL told a story of being in a railway station late at night, the new baby was bawling. No idea why she was there. I think waiting for a train but no idea why. ?back to London. Surely not at night? Anyway MIL told this heartwarming story of the lady from the closed tearoom hearing the crying and opening up the tearoom so MIL could feed the baby. Her sister and family weren’t evacuated- they were in Surrey, forget where exactly, Kingston maybe? Is that Surrey? and lost everything in a bombing. Luckily they were all okay though.

My DF was evacuated to Canada under the Commonwealth Overseas Reception Board (CORB). Only about 3000 children went in total as the programme was halted after the City of Benares was sunk by torpedo and many children lost their lives. (The ship my DF was on was a couple of days ahead).

I haven't read the full thread so apologies if this book has been suggested, but Bandaging the War is a true story told by a lady who was a student nurse during the war in London, it's really good, really enjoyed it.

My mum was a teenager during WW2. She used to say despite the obvious danger, it was the happiest time of her life. She used to go to a place called Rainbow Corner to dances organised by the GI soldiers. She said they looked so elegant and handsome in comparison to the English soldiers and always had access to chocolate, fruit and Nylons.

I’ve never heard of Ethel & Ernest, just looked it up & I’m pretty sure it would make me sob

@nancy75 God, yes. Did you ever watch Ethel and Ernest? The bit where they were taking him to the station and waving him off - I went to see it at a parent and baby showing with DS and DH, and I bawled.