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

[lozengeoflove]

I’m really interested in what experiences women had of living in London during WWII. I’ve read so much about the male experience of fighting but I’d like to hear how women found the domestic life in London during this time.

Currently re-reading Sarah Waters ‘The Night Watch’ and would really love to hear about first hand experiences.

@InglouriousBasterd

My grandparents met in London during the war - my grandad was from a wealthy London family, grandma from a very poor Lancashire family but posted to London with the Wrens. My grandad was a bomber pilot and trained mostly overseas in a base that was occasionally visited by Winston Churchill - he was assigned as his ‘guard’ and recalled he barely slept, drank a lot and smoked a lot He would never speak again about his bombing experience - he was too traumatised - however, he did tell my dad that he learnt to use the stars as a guide to return home after a night raid.

My nan had a fun war - she loved being a wren and made the most of all the dances! I did a project on WW2 years ago for school when she was still alive - her most vivid memory was the lack of stockings and make up!

Just to add - they married in spite of much naysaying from both families, as they were from such different social classes. They really adored each other - I remember seeing pictures my grandad had taken just after the war and he was so in love.

My Nan was a child in the war and her father was in the Home Guard. Nan tells plenty of stories from that time but the two that stand out:

Walking home through a field (just outside London) with her sister picking blackberries. Enemy aircraft flew over the field on their way home following a daytime raid in London. Seeing both of them walking through the field, one of the planes took aim at them and strafed the field with bullets. Nan and her sister took cover in a ditch full of brambles and were unharmed apart from some scratches.

Another time during an air raid, my Nan and her sister were sent to the shelter at the bottom of the garden. Their father was drinking and “entertaining” in the house when a bomb fell nearby. Eventually their Dad remembered both his small daughters were in the shelter and when he checked that they were unharmed their only complaint was “the bomb blew our bloody candle out!”.

Many years ago as a teen I was walking through a field with my Nan when for some unknown reason they tested one of the old air raid sirens. My poor Nan just froze until it stopped sounding.

@InglouriousBasterd it’s been repeated on this thread how class differences made for varying experiences of war. I’m so glad your grandparents had a happy story to tell.

@LadyCluck - your poor Nan. Bet she didn’t expect to hear that sound again.

Thank you so much for all the book and programme recommendations. I’ve watched Blitz Spirit, Housewife, 49 (I miss Victoria Wood) and started on Foyle’s War. Really felt enthralled by all programmes. Each in their own way vividly paints this part of our history.

I’ve not (yet) read it myself, but you might like Sarah Rose’s The D-Day Girls, about 3 of the 39 women recruited by the SOE - it’s meant to be very good. If you want to know more about British Army nurses, there’s Nicola Tyrer’s Sisters In Arms...

(I keep meaning to do some research into how long it took the RAMC to cop on to How To Cope With The Fact Women Can Be Doctors as they were utterly unable to deal with said concept during WWI... )

Oooh thank you @MarieVanGoethem.
I was utterly disgusted when I read that Churchill though that it was utter impertinence when women teachers asked for a pay parity.

It’s laughable to me now that my male colleagues should be paid more than me, simply based on their sex.

My dear grandfather was a teenage boy in London during WW2. East end and then North London. He talked of the blitz and how friends and younger kids would be playing on and picking things out of the rubble from the bombed houses.

He made a trip to the countryside to check on a younger kid in the family who'd been evacuated. Think that was quite emotional.

Because he wasn't old enough to fight he had responsibility to work and help the mum /-aunties/ neighbours etc. Grew up quick!!

@lozengeoflove
His comments on Astor taking her seat in the House are quite something too - he said having a woman in Parliament was liking having one intrude on him in the bathroom. Definitely points to Astor mind you: "Sir, you are not handsome enough to have such fears".

I genuinely quite enjoy reading Hansard (I’m great at parties, me... ) - it tells you a lot about people. Looking up your local MP can be quite instructive - mine at the time women were campaigning for the right to vote had zip to say on that but was at least interested in workers’ rights & health provision.

I sometimes wonder if they’d have lifted the marriage bar in teaching in 1944 if they’d known victory was so (relatively) close. Am sure it gave huge leverage to the (Home) Civil Service (FCO managed to keep theirs until the 1970s?!) & the BBC.

It does seem boggling that we’re 150 years on from the first Married Women’s Property Act & have had the vote (with qualifications) for over 100 years but we’ve still not got equal pay & there are still absurd stereotypes about male/female traits & roles.

These are such interesting experiences to read! My grandparents lived in London... sadly my grandad died when I was 5.... my grandmother when I was about 19.... I so wish I had asked more about their experiences....

My father lived in London at the outbreak of war, though he was away at school. His school was evacuated en masse to another location that was more rural as they were close to German military targets in their usual site. His father was a retired serviceman, who signed up again as soon as war broke out, with his wife remaining in their Belgravia home. That fell victim to the blitz, at some point, and she relocated to billets close to where he was stationed, after he was reassigned following two sinkings in the Indian Ocean. My father didn't return to London until he was an adult, as my GF died shortly before the end of the war, and my GM moved to Surrey after it was over.
Sadly, I've no idea what my GM got up to in London, as she died quite some time before I was born, but I imagine it was volunteering of some sort.

My gran was a child. She, her older brother and younger sister were initially evacuated to Scotland together with their mum as the sister was still young enough for their mum to go too. They came back (I think) during the phony war period. When things got worse again, the children, this time without their mum, were evacuated to Cornwall, but were dreadfully homesick (and I think there were also concerns that the (lovely) childless couple they were billeted with wanted to adopt them).

Pressed post too early! Anyway, the children picked up shrapnel off the beach and sent it home with a message saying, "It's just as dangerous here as at home, please let us come home," which was of course not true, and were allowed home.

Gran was then in London during the worst of the Blitz. She remembers coming home from school and finding her mum's slippers in the middle of the road where she'd left them in her hurry to get to the air raid shelter with the younger sister, and not knowing if that meant her mum had been killed by a bomb (she hadn't been).

Her brother's best friend was killed, but she never talked about that much, and they were bombed out at one point.

When my mum was a child, 20 years later, gran had what I can only describe as a PTSD attack when an aircraft came over and for some reason cut its engine overhead. (When you heard the engine of a Doodlebug cut out, that's when the danger was - it was about to land.) Something I think is interesting though is that she's never, ever expressed regret that they came back from Cornwall. Even though they were well treated there, and London was clearly traumatic, they preferred London and being with their family (her dad wasn't called up, as too old - he'd fought in WW1.)

My mum stayed in London as a child. She was left with lifelong terrible claustophobia due to sheltering in tube tunnels. She said all the images of people having jolly sing-alongs in the shelters are wrong, they were all terrified, people were crying, and they could feel everything shake when a bomb hit and would wonder if they were all going to be buried alive.

They had a Morrison shelter in the house, which was just a reinforced table to hide under, and she wasn't convinced that would be much help.

Her dad told her and her sisters that if the Germans landed he would cut their throats rather than let the Germans get hold of them!

Not surprisingly she was always a very anxious person.

More please? Really enjoying this

My grandmother was a little girl and evacuated from London to where she spent her life growing up (North East).

Her father was a pilot and she met my grandfather at a roller disco.

My grandmother is 100, and said the war was nowhere near as bad as the pandemic 😁

She was in Birmingham rather than London, but Birmingham was also very heavily bombed.

She worked as the secretary in a factory making parts for spitfires, which was one of the jobs considered vital. She was very disappointed not be allowed to go away on duty elsewhere and be a wren or something similar.

At nights she worked at the fire station, coordinating call outs, cooking for the men, and even taking her turn up on the roof - very dangerous, which from her point of view made it all the more fun 😂

I have no idea when she slept! She has less energy now, of course, but she's still just as feisty.

I work with the very elderly but only a few have been willing to share their experiences of the war. Almost all of them are terrified of thunderstorms which they attribute to growing up in wartime.

One gent I cared for was a teenager during ww2. He would talk about sitting on the hill overlooking the Thames and watching spitfires intercepting the doodlebugs and using the wings of the plane to tip them into the river, away from the industrial area on the opposite side of the Thames. One time a bomb dropped across the road whilst he was in the playground of his school and the force of the blast took him off his feet although he was largely uninjured.

One lady I care for told me how she and her sister were evacuated to Snodland which was effectively up the road from where she lived with her family. After two weeks her mum come and got them as she figured they had about the same amount of risk. Her father wasn’t fit for service so he was one of the men who would be first on the scene if a house had been bombed, looking for survivors/deceased/live ammunition’s. She told me that one day a bomb dropped on their street and he had to go and search for his neighbours. They had evacuated to their Anderson shelter and so were fine but he apparently hesitated for a second before leaving as they were good friends with the other family and he was worried about what he would find. My lady talked about going to school during the war and how they had shorter days and how they to go to school on Saturdays too. She was at school when they announced the end of the war and said that there wasn’t any fuss. The teacher just announced the war was over then everyone carried on with their work.