How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On (2 page)

Things got worse. A young girl was blown into their garden after a bomb fell nearby; the girl survived but her parents, neighbours of my mother and father, were killed. Down the street, three
Scottish soldiers died when a blast bomb fell, stripping them naked but leaving their bodies unmarked. Out doing the shopping one morning after a raid, my mother and a neighbour were stopped by an
Air Raid Precaution (ARP) warden who told them that a human ear had just been found in the road.

More than 1,200 citizens of Hull were killed and ninety-five per cent of the city’s houses damaged in some way or other. When the houses directly opposite my parents’ house were
flattened, with the blast throwing my mother from one end of their hallway to the other, it was the final straw; they decided it was time to return to Derby. And so I missed out on being a
Yorkshireman, and it was all Hitler’s fault.

It all sounded rather hair-raising. But what appeared to be a constant theme in all the stories my parents told me was the humour that came through. There was generally a round of laughter when
they remembered a neighbour on an outside lavatory, caught with his trousers around his ankles when a bomb fell nearby. There was the woman down the street who wouldn’t go to the shelter
until she had found her false teeth. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ shouted her son, ‘they’re dropping bombs, not bloody ham sandwiches!’

They even found amusing the story of the family who emerged from their shelter after one heavy air raid, opened their back door to return to their house, and discovered that the only thing still
standing was that outside back wall.

‘They had to laugh,’ said my mother. I rather doubted it. Indeed, I often wondered if it was just my parents who saw the humour – sometimes black – in all this, or
whether it had been a common experience for people faced with war. So in 1978, through Britain’s national and regional newspapers, I made an appeal for amusing war stories to be included in a
book. The response was immediate. From all over the country, people wrote in with their tales. It turned out that my parents weren’t the only ones with a fund of war stories of the humorous
kind.

Interestingly, the overwhelming majority were stories from the Home Front, either of the Blitz or of regular service life. It was obvious that soldiers, sailors and airmen serving abroad were
enjoying – that should probably be enduring – a wholly different war from those posted at home. Thus, the stories in this book are much more about what life was like in wartime Britain
than what it was like in overseas theatres of war.

But, home or abroad, remember this was only thirty-three years after the end of the war, so the memories were still quite fresh. Some respondents were in their sixties and seventies, and had
already reached adulthood when war was declared. Their wartime memories were of work or military service. Others were perhaps only in their forties when they wrote to me and so recalled the war
through the eyes of a child. If one made a similar appeal today, it would be impossible to gather a similar archive of memories simply because so many of those who responded in 1978 must have since
died. I kept collecting material for some time afterwards, always with the intention of producing this book. Various career commitments prevented me from doing so until now.

What prompted me to revisit them was that ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ slogan that seems to be everywhere these days and which, when I first saw it, I assumed to be from a wartime
poster. It was indeed one of three produced by the Ministry of Information in 1939 when it was intended to raise public morale – or at least prevent it from sinking altogether – in the
face of mass air attacks on British cities, and possible invasion. The first two in the ‘set’ – ‘Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will Bring Us
Victory’ and ‘Freedom is in Peril’ – were soon displayed across Britain.

Yet despite the fact that some two and a half million copies of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ were printed, they never saw the public light of day. In fact, until 2012 when someone turned
up to BBC television’s
Antiques Roadshow
carrying fifteen of them, it was thought that only two copies existed outside official archives.

Why weren’t the posters ever displayed publicly? Well, the intention had been to release Keep Calm and Carry On in the event of an invasion, and that threat had receded. Also, heavy
bombing and gas attacks had been expected within hours of war being declared. But it was almost a year before the Blitz started, and gas was never used. Civil servants had misjudged the
public’s reaction to the war and all its dangers, and the poster would have patronized people who had already shown great courage in the face of the first aerial bombardments. Britons were
getting on with their lives. They didn’t need a poster to tell them to Keep Calm and Carry On. They were doing that anyway.

So, at last, here are the stories of those who kept calm and carried on without the poster. The stories remain largely unedited because I want the voices to ring out. My intention was that what
little tidying there was to be done should not destroy the freshness of these accounts. They were not written at the time, but they were recalled when such memories were still vivid in the minds of
those who had experienced them.

Life was difficult, and not just for people on the front line, whether in the army abroad or facing death from the skies over Britain. Even getting to work and keeping the family safe could be a
stressful experience. The problems of balancing a home life around wartime work were never more well illustrated than when MPs discussing manpower problems were told by the Joint Parliamentary
Secretary to the Minister of Labour that a man sought permission to start work at 8 a.m., rather than 7 a.m., because he had to take his baby to its grandmother’s. His wife had to get up at
5.30 a.m. to be at work for 6 a.m., and Gran didn’t come off nightshift until 7 a.m. You needed a sense of humour to cope with that.

Of course, it was not just the proverbial men and women in the street that found laughter was often the best way to deal with those dark times. In December 1940, even official British sources
could not resist a little humour when they dropped propaganda leaflets along the Dutch, Belgian and French coasts. The leaflets were in the form of a travel warrant and invited German troops to
make a one-way trip to England where they would find ‘a most cordial reception, with music, fireworks, free swims, steam baths, and many other entirely novel forms of entertainment are
provided. Visitors will find their welcome so overwhelming that few are expected ever to return home.’ The leaflets were: ‘Valid for next summer!’

Humour was indeed everything. When the London home and offices of the actor, playwright, songwriter and wartime intelligence officer Noël Coward were destroyed in the spring of 1941, he
took himself off to Snowdonia and, in just five days, wrote the play ‘Blithe Spirit’. It premiered in Manchester in June that year, and in London’s West End the following month.
To get into the theatre, first-nighters walked across boards from a recently destroyed air-raid shelter. If it seems odd that such a frivolous play could have emerged during such a terrible time,
let us remember that its author was the man who also wrote ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly To The Germans’. Winston Churchill enjoyed the song, but the BBC banned it.

Together, all this confirms what we always suspected: that the British have a rare talent for caustic satire, a gallows humour frequently used to draw the sting or fear out of a threatening
situation, and, above all, stoicism in the face of even the greatest adversity. It was all put to particularly good use during the Second World War as Britons strove to rebuild their homes,
factories, shops and, most of all, their lives. Almost everyone seems to have kept calm and carried on.

H
einz Guderian invented the Blitz. Sort of . . . The German army general advocated a tactic based on speed and surprise, where light tank units and
fast-moving infantry were supported by air power. Hitting hard, moving swiftly, creating havoc, it was the blitzkrieg or ‘lightning war’ that Adolf Hitler adopted to overrun Poland in
1939 and enslave Western Europe the following year. It was blitzkrieg tactics that drove the British Expeditionary Force back to Dunkirk in 1940, and their most awesome use was at Operation
Barbarossa – the German attack on Russia in 1941.

To the British, however, the Blitz came to mean only one thing: nightly aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe. Throughout the autumn, winter and spring of 1940–41, the nation came to dread
the wail of air-raid warning sirens, particularly in the big cities of London, Birmingham, Sheffield, Coventry, Hull, Manchester, Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast, but also in smaller towns
and even, on occasions, isolated villages.