Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (4 page)

On Saturday 8 June the Victory parade left Regent’s Park heading towards Tower Hill, culminating in a royal salute on the Mall. As many as 10 million Londoners – as well as visitors from out of town – came to celebrate. Some had taken up their positions in the Mall on Thursday and Friday to secure the best view, bringing with them ‘food, blankets and radios’. Many arrived on one of the seventy-five special ‘Victory Express’ trains that brought in sightseers from all over the country.
⁴
Typically, despite the weather reports optimistically forecasting ‘ideal weather – plenty of sunshine, but not too hot’,
⁵
after a promisingly sunny morning heavy rain fell throughout the rest of the day, drowning the city. But despite the weather, the crowd that braved it was determined to celebrate.

The parade was more than four miles long and consisted of over 500 vehicles from the navy, the RAF, British Civilian Services and the army. This was followed by a marching column of 20,000 troops and eighteen marching bands, which went from Marble Arch to Whitehall then along the Mall and up to Hyde Park Corner. The marching column was headed by the flags of the Allies, each with a guard of honour (apart, controversially, from Poland). Next came units representing the services of the British Empire and these were followed by units from all the British services. It took forty-five minutes for the whole marching column to pass any given point. The pageant, a spectacle ‘never surpassed in Britain’ marched in front of the royal family who stood for an hour and forty-eight minutes – much of it in the pouring rain – on the saluting base in the Mall, honouring the procession. Finally, ‘under a weeping sky’ came ‘the most enthralling spectacle of all’, as 307 RAF and Royal Navy planes roared over Trafalgar Square. This was followed by dancing, community singing, orchestral concerts and Punch and Judy shows in the various parks of central London as well as a free performance of
As You Like It
at the Regent’s Park Open-Air Theatre. As one newspaper reporter observed, ‘this beats everything – the coronation, the Jubilee and any of the cup finals’. At sunset, after years of blackout, the iconic buildings of London were lit by floodlights for the first time – the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the National Gallery, St James’s Palace, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Horse Guards’ Parade, Nelson’s Column, the War Office and, most poignantly of all, St Paul’s Cathedral – still standing indomitably, but surrounded by the devastation wreaked by the Blitz of 1940–41. Despite the sense of celebration, it was clear that recent wounds were barely healed.

The royal family appeared on the balcony at Buckingham Palace before travelling to Chelsea where the King and Queen embarked on the royal barge, accompanied by the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. The barge proceeded down the Thames to Westminster, with crowds packed on both banks of the river, as well as on the six bridges left open to the public that day. Ticker tape was dropped from Westminster Bridge as the King disembarked at the Houses of Parliament.

Perhaps the most impressive moment in a day of memories came when, after the King had landed, the packed crowds thronging the bridges, streets, windows and roofs high above the river joined in singing ‘God Save The King’ to music relayed over 500 speakers.

The festivities continued at 11 p.m. with a firework display over central London, concentrated on the Thames. Fireworks and coloured water displays were accompanied by cascades of fire from temporary bridges across the river and bonfires burned along the Mall. The
News of the World
noted that ‘in visual effect it was the Blitz all over again and floodlit buildings gave the impression of the aftermath of an enemy incendiary raid’.
⁶
Traffic came to a standstill and motorists and pedestrians ‘talked to each other freely as they waited to move on’. After a year of peace, the whole event was a reminder of the spirit and camaraderie that had helped the nation through six arduous years of war. A second RAF fly-past at 11.15 p.m. helped reinforce this feeling. Responding to the still enormous crowds outside Buckingham Palace, the royal family made a final appearance on the balcony at 12.25 a.m. before retiring to bed, though parties continued across the city well into the night.

The colour newsreel that recorded the celebrations for posterity ended with images of the fireworks on the Thames – the ‘most brilliant firework display in London’s history’, accompanied by strains of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Stanley Maxted, the distinguished Canadian war correspondent, brought his feelings about the day to a suitably patriotic close, echoing one of Churchill’s best-remembered wartime speeches:

And this ends a great day, a day belonging to the little man of the free peoples. Tomorrow, with this day’s glory in his heart, he – and the woman beside him – will return to the business of carving out the future of the nation. While behind him in his memory will rest this Victory Day to which he passed through his finest hour.
⁷

Despite some grumbling (‘We haven’t got much to celebrate about’; ‘People have had enough of it’),
⁸
‘V’ Day was a great success, but it was a momentary highlight of celebration in what was to be a year of great anxiety and privation for the majority of the population. Britain was exhausted, bankrupt and bereft of basic commodities, not the least of these being food. The housing shortage had reached crisis point. During the war years, 116,000 houses had been destroyed across Greater London. Another 1,300,000 were in need of repair. Bombed-out families had nowhere to live and returning servicemen were exacerbating the problem. Building materials were scarce and many skilled tradesmen were yet to be demobilized. Desperate families became illegal squatters in empty houses and offices in Mayfair and Piccadilly, many of them garnering popular support from the general public. Just a few days after ‘V’ Day, on 19 June, Tom Williams, the Minister for Agriculture, observed that Britain faced ‘a grim and melancholy situation’ that was ‘worse than the hardest days of the war’.
⁹

In 1939, 70 per cent of Britain’s food had been imported – including 50 per cent of meat and 70 per cent of cereals and fats. One of the main strategies of the Axis powers during the war had been to attack imports to Britain, thereby undermining British industry and potentially starving the nation into submission. The government had responded with an immediate programme of rationing in order to equitably feed and clothe the population.
¹⁰
Rationing had quickly become a way of life and continued to dominate conversation and headlines throughout the war and well into the next decade, only to fully cease in 1954; the whole period of rationing in Britain lasting fifteen years. Petrol rationing had begun immediately the war broke out and this had been swiftly followed by the rationing of foodstuffs. Bacon, butter and sugar were rationed first, soon followed by meat, tea, jam, biscuits, cereals, cheese, eggs, lard, milk and tinned fruit. Some imported fruits all but vanished – 80 per cent had been imported in 1939 – hence the iconic disappearance of bananas. By 1946 many basic foods and clothing had been rationed for years. Restrictions continued to affect almost every consumer product from basics like sheets and blankets to luxury items like nail varnish and nylons. Books continued to be printed to ‘Wartime Economy Standard’, with thin paper, narrow margins and cheap bindings. Newspapers were also still restricted, often to four pages – effectively just a single folded sheet. If the general populace had hoped that the end of the war was to bring an end to the misery of rationing, they were bitterly disappointed.

Clothing was rationed on a ‘points’ system. Initially the allowance had been for approximately one new outfit per year but as the war had progressed, points were reduced to such an extent that the purchase of a coat constituted almost an entire year’s ration. By 1946 pre-war wardrobes had been ‘cannibalized to destruction’ as everybody attempted to ‘make do and mend’. All demobilized servicemen, though, were fitted out with a ‘demob suit’: a complete civilian outfit from cufflinks to shoes. But ‘it was strange to walk around a lot of young men your age wearing virtually the same suit’, observed one young recently demobbed soldier. The demob suit was simply ‘one uniform in exchange for another’.
¹¹
To make matters worse, the quality of these suits was very poor, held in low esteem by the men who had to wear them; variously dismissed as ‘foul’, ‘gaudy’ and ‘like walking around in a pair of pyjamas’.
¹²

The food crisis was not only affecting Britain – it was global. As well as attempting to feed the nation fairly, the government, rather altruistically, was also trying to stave off famine abroad following poor harvests in Europe and Asia. In the summer of 1946, a 15 per cent cut in malting barley for brewers was made. The British public was told that it was being processed into animal feed, but in reality, the bulk of the barley was being sent abroad, ‘particularly’, noted an indignant
Daily Express
, ‘to Germany’. This resulted in a 50 per cent cut in supplies of beer in many pubs and clubs. The situation was exacerbated by a change in British drinking habits. By June 1946, the average man (and now woman) was drinking 25 per cent more beer than they had done before the war started. Beer was cheaper than spirits, which were extremely expensive now that the duty on them was so high. Added to this, men who had generally favoured spirits before the war had changed their drinking habits after spending years in the army, where beer had been the most popular, accessible and affordable tipple for the majority of conscripts. Women were also drinking more beer as drinks like sherry had become expensive or unobtainable during the war years. Harvey’s famous Bristol Cream Sherry was still unobtainable in 1946.

Consequently many venues regularly ran out of supplies of beer and had to close intermittently. Pubs in some areas were only able to open for three ‘priority’ hours a day: lunchtime, after work and for one hour in the evening. A chalked-up sign saying ‘Sorry, Closed: No Beer’ became a common sight in London to such an extent that the
Daily Express
suggested that beer should come under state control, much as the nationalized Coal Board was to supervise the provision of coal.

But the most emotive issue was the peacetime rationing of bread, which had never been restricted during the war. This was to prove very hard for the general populace, but particularly to housewives, who were already making do with the ‘National Loaf’ – the smallest and darkest that had been produced since the First World War (‘We have stood everything else, but this is the last straw,’ one housewife complained to her local newspaper). The issue was fiercely debated in parliament, with Winston Churchill commenting that the prospect of bread rationing was ‘one of the gravest announcements I have ever heard in time of peace’. If Britain couldn’t supply herself with her own daily bread, what hope was there for her future? When bread was finally rationed to an average 9 oz a day on 21 July 1946, it was front-page news both in Britain and America. In practice, however, the bread ration proved to be adequate for most families’ needs, but as David Kynaston notes in
Austerity Britain
, ‘the very fact of peacetime bread rationing would remain a symbolic sore as long as it remained in force’.
¹³

As well as adding more stress to the life of the average housewife, scarcity had also given birth to a new sort of crime wave, and it was around this time that the black-market ‘spiv’ began to emerge as a recognizable type – the opportunistic patter, the wide lapels, the gaudy tie, the pencil moustache. Many perfectly respectable citizens both condemned
and
used the black market. Some organized gangs stole basics – hundreds of thousands of poultry and millions of eggs were illegally traded. Others specialized in the luxury market for cars, furs and jewellery. These crimes were severely dealt with by the courts. One licensee, Gertrude Bryan of Epsom, was fined £1,236 (the cost of a semi-detached house at the time) for charges of receiving clothing coupons and stealing corned beef. Her accomplice, Frederick Gilbert, was sentenced to nine months in prison. The magistrate gave real weight to their sentences:

When the whole of Europe is tightening its belt we have before us these offences connected with the abuse of rationing. It might be that people would go short because of these cases. The whole fair distribution of food might break down if these offences became widespread.
¹⁴

Throughout the summer, the economist John Maynard Keynes attempted to negotiate a grant or financial gift from the United States that might help alleviate Britain’s perilous situation (he referred to it later as a ‘financial Dunkirk’). But despite his high hopes, all he could arrange was a reluctant loan. The Americans were very loathe to make the loan and the British equally loathe to need it so desperately. Ultimately, the Anglo-American loan of £1.1 billion was finally negotiated on 15 July 1946. It was only paid off sixty years later, in 2006.

Buffeted between severity and celebration, Britain in 1946 was suffused with a mixture of relief and uncertainty, hope and exhaustion. Even the weather, as if to reflect the confusions of the period, was unseasonably changeable. At the end of May, after a transatlantic depression lost its way, Britain was drenched by twenty-eight days of rain while Iceland basked in a typical British summer. The weather that followed in June was a mixture of sunshine and showers, so that nobody was sure whether to prepare themselves with headscarves or sunglasses. An artist and occasional film extra, Margery Gardner, unsure what to expect from day to day, carried both in her handbag: a pair of white sunglasses and a headscarf given to her by a boyfriend who had been in the RAF.