Victory! VE Day Celebrations on the British Home Front

Most children, naturally, enjoyed the parties. Clearly, there was amusement, and as described sometimes embarrassment, at the antics of adult revellers. There was also an element of bemusement - the younger ones had no memory of what peacetime had been like, so the real significance of the day was often hard to grasp. On asking what peace was like, Barbara Chamberlain was informed 'that it meant having ice cream and oranges, bananas and chocolate bars, lights in the streets and everyone being safe. And best of all, Daddy being home again.'

But, although Joyce Markwick records the period as 'a time of great joy,' this was not the case for everyone. Unlike Barbara Chamberlain's dad, thousands of fathers would not be coming home. Not surprisingly, therefore, the response to VE Day by many families and communities was much more muted, as Jean Barker makes clear:

Many neighbours and school friends lost brothers, sisters, sons and fathers in the war. My classmate Betty Edwards lost a brother in Norway; Albert Knowles who lived on our street was also killed in the Navy. Mrs Audsley's son was drowned in the hold of a Japanese prison boat when the British bombed it. Mrs Hen lost her boy in a mantrap in Burma .... Things were never the same after the war with half the family gone [her brothers, Alan and Arthur]. When peace was declared [we didn't have a street party], maybe our neighbours thought we hadn't much to celebrate.

Even families where the father did return were not always able to join in the fun. Amy Briggs's husband had been invalided out of the army and things were evidently difficult for them. After arriving home on 8 May, disappointed that Leeds city centre had offered no organised entertainment to divert her young daughters, she found her husband 'stretched on [the] settee reading. No word spoken. Has not spoken to me for three weeks - don't know why - but feel that if he won't speak on V-Day, he'll never speak! Simply couldn't bear it. Rushed round to Mrs M. with Anne. Had a cry and then a lump of her apple pie and talked until 1 a.m. Made some tea when I went back home. No word from T. [her husband]. God! What a day. Wish I were back at work with my friends!'⁸

For others, there was as yet no end of the War in which to rejoice. Mrs J Garvey was:

Personally still filled with dread as my future husband was training for the assaults on Japan on VE Day.

The fact that Japan still had to be defeated provides an understandable explanation of why, in spite of all the celebrations, 8 May 1945 did not really recapture the excited mood of 11 November 1918: 'Several people today have said that as they had relations in the Far East they could not celebrate properly. That has been in everyone's heart that more fighting, more dying and more atrocities are still to come. Also that all the flag waving and dancing will not bring alive the dead to their homes. Men that have lost their sight and limbs cannot be the same. Life will always be sadder for those of us who think. If we knew this had been a war to end war we would feel more jubilant but when it may happen again without extreme care, it makes llfe seem a dilemma.⁹

William Whitehead writes that his memories of VE Day are qulte vague, he simply recalls sitting, with other children, round a fire in the street, listening to a neighbour playing the accordion. Families in his street still had sons away on active service - it is VJ Day that is therefore clearer in his mind:

All the grown ups in the road had organised a street party for us. They had obtained trestle tables from somewhere and they had made tablecloths out of Union flags, someone had made bunting and stretched it across the road by tying it to the lampposts. We children did not realise the sacrifices the adults had made to enable them to put on the spread of food...every child [also] received a white mug that had their name and the letters V.J. and the date on them.

On 8 May, nobody knew that these VJ celebrations were close at hand - the general view was that there would be at least another year of hard fighting.

In addition to continued hostilities, the edge was also taken off the festive mood when the realities of the War's horrific events became more widely known. C J Smith writes that his 'most poignant memory of the weeks following VE Day and which appeared to have a marked effect on most people that soured the taste of victory, was the graphic news of the Holocaust. Everyone was encouraged to go to our one and only working cinema - the 'New Imperial and see the shocking film footage coming out of Germany'.

He recalls that these images made people physically sick as they stared disbelievingly at the Nazi atrocities, making them realise that 'our deprivations caused by the almost nightly bombings and our food, shelter and clothes shortages, were nothing.'

Uncertainties about the post-war world also clouded the mood and left people unsure in their reaction to victory. On 9 May, Amy Briggs wrote that everyone was 'looking considerably more cheery than they did on V-Day. I think we were all too stunned when peace did come and did not know what to do with ourselves. To me people just looked like a lot of sheep drifting around town [V-Day in Leeds] all looking for someone else to stand on their heads and shout Whoopee' but no one did. Truly they were a subdued, happy mass, lost and off their bearings because all at once their best 'toy' had been taken from them - the war!'¹⁰

The people also became aware, if they were not already, that peacetime life was not going to bring an immediate deliverance from wartime hardships and austerity. C J Smith recalled that 'the cupboard was bare as we rejoiced in the euphoria of victory [and] there came the stark realisation that the country had suffered and, as a result, the belts which we were told to tighten in those bleak days of war, would not be relaxed as shortages of almost everything remained. The cinema and theatre lights which had dazzled us all on VE night had been switched off again in order to save fuel. There was less meat in the shops than there had been the year before.' Rationing had, even yet, not reached its peak. Bread, for example, not rationed during the War, was added to the Ministry of Food's list in 1946.

By 17 May, the young ATS clerk, who had so enjoyed the victory celebrations, was noting a decisive change in mood, affected more by international than home concerns:

It is littie more than a week since VE-day, but already the reaction is setting in. I find the news extremely depressing. Britain and the US seem to be at loggerheads with the USSR over nearly every controversial point, and the US isolationist press, in its usual unhelpful way, is fomenting this state of affairs ... There seems to be nothing but strife and confusion ahead when we should be seeing the bright skies of peace - and we are all feeling tired and hardly capable of coping with it.¹¹

The peacetime continuation of rationing was emblematic of the economic challenges that confronted the post-war government, as it worked to rebuild the war-scarred nation. The deteriorating relationship with the USSR became the major defence and foreign policy concern. However, these domestic and international matters were to exercise a new premier and a new administration. Unlike Lloyd George's government, in 1918, the Churchill Coalition did not extend beyond the War - indeed it did not survive to see the end of it. The resumption of normal political life caught many people by surprise, as the following account exemplifies: 'I came back to the world of newspapers and radio today, after three days of blissful isolation in a Norfolk village. I found a state of political upheaval, Parliament in the act of being dissolved, and Churchill and Attlee being rude to each other in public letters.'¹² The 5 July election, and its apparently unexpected result (a Labour landslide announced on 26 July), signified the extent to which the British in 1945 were much more focused on building the peace than celebrating the victory. There was a sense that the missed opportunities of 1918, real or imaginary, must not be repeated. Jobs, homes, health and education were uppermost in people's minds.

H.M. King George VI's message to schoolchildren. [Shirley Cleves]

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Outwardly, there were many similarities between 8 May 1945 and the Armistice celebrations in 1918: the vast crowds, the fêting of the Prime Minister, the cheering of the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace. It is also the case that people had plenty of reason for mixed emotions on both occasions.¹³ However, there are also considerable differences. There was much more euphoria in 1918. Victory and the end of hostilities generally surprised people. In 1945, victory had been trailed for months and celebrations kicked off before an official announcement had been made. In 1918, the British genuinely believed that they were marking victory not just over Germany, but over war itself. Few in 1945 were so optimistic, especially given that, on VE Day, the present war had not yet reached its end. Above all, in 1945, there was little reason to suppose that peace would be easy - building a better Britain at home and defending Britain's interests overseas were immense challenges. As A J P Taylor observed, 'Few Englishmen now imagined that victory was itself a solution, an end of all problems and difficulties.'¹⁴

VE Day was an opportunity to let off steam. It was an end to bombings and blackouts. Hitler was dead, burning in effigy on bonfires across the land. The British nation was secure - the mainland had withstood all threat of invasion and the Channel Islands were liberated. But joy at these events did not blur the nation's vision. There was no wallowing in victory and no complacency. There were too many ongoing worries and doubts to lend the day any greater significance. Perhaps these concerns (along with knowledge that the hopes of 1918 had been disappointed) explain why surprisingly few of the vast number of individual accounts, preserved in the Second World War Experience Centre, make significant mention of VE Day. For most people, it was a resting point, not the final destination. The King's diary entry for 8 May makes plain his own appreciation of the realities, in words that the vast majority of his subjects are likely to have echoed: 'The day we have been longing for has arrived at last and we can look back with thankfulness to God that our tribulation is over. No more fear of being bombed at home and no more living in air raid shelters. But there is still Japan to be defeated and the restoration of our country to be dealt with, which will give us many headaches and hard work in the years to come.'¹⁵

Endnotes

7. Sheridan, Wartime Women, p. 238.
8. Sheridan, Wartime Women, p. 228.
9. Sheridan, Wartime Women, pp. 245-246.
10. Sheridan, Wartime Women, p. 228.
11. Sheridan, Wartime Women, p. 236.
12. Sheridan, Wartime Women, p. 236.
13. For a thorough discussion of the mood and emotions of November 1918 see Peter Liddle's chapter, 'Britons on the Home Front' (Chapter 5), in Hugh Cecil & Peter H Liddle, At The Eleventh Hour, Leo Cooper, Barnsley, 1998, pp. 68-83.
14. AJ P Taylor, English History 19 14-1945, Oxford, 1965, p. 594.
15. Diary of HM King George VI, cited in Hennessy, Never Again, p. 60

Article by Ian Whitehead.

This article was first published in the Centre's Journal 'Everyone's War' Issue 11: VE Day Anniversary Issue.

	Celebrations in the cities.
	This page: street celebrations.