Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Hylton, Stuart,
Their Darkest Hour: The Hidden History of the Home Front 1939–1945
, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2001.
Keegan, John,
The Second World War
, Hutchinson, London, 1989.
Kramer, Ann,
Land Girls and Their Impact
, Remember When, an imprint of Pen and Sword Books, Barnsley, 2008.
Lewis, Roy and Angus Maude,
The English Middle Classes
, Phoenix House, London, 1949.
Longmate, Norman, ed.,
The Home Front: An Anthology of Personal Experience 1938–1945
, Chatto and Windus, London, 1981.
Longmate, Norman,
How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life during the Second World War
, Hutchinson, London, 1971.
Lynn, Vera, with Robin Cross and Jenny de Gex,
Unsung Heroines: The Women Who Won the War
, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1990.
Marchant, Hilde,
Women and Children Last: A Woman Reporter’s Account of the Battle of Britain
, Victor Gollancz, London, 1941.
McBryde, Brenda,
Quiet Heroines: Nurses of the Second World War
, Chatto and Windus, London, 1985.
Menzies, Janet,
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, John Wiley, Chichester, 2005.
Minns, Raynes,
Bombers and Mash: The Domestic Front 1939–1945
, Virago, 1980.
Nagorski, Tom,
Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of the U-boat Attack on the SS
City of Benares
– One of the Great Lost Stories of WWII
, Constable and Robinson, London, 2007.
Nicholson, Jenny,
Kiss the Girls Goodbye
, Hutchinson and Co., London, 1944.
Noakes, Lucy,
Women in the British Army: War and the Gentle Sex 1907
–
1948
, Routledge, London, 2006.
Orwell, George,
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell
, vol. 4, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Penguin Books in association with Secker and Warburg, Harmondsworth, 1970.
Panter-Downes, Mollie,
London War Notes 1939–45
, ed. William Shawn, Longman, London, 1972.
Powell, Anne, ed.,
Shadows of War: British Women’s Poetry of the Second World War
, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1999.
Sackville-West, Vita,
The Women’s Land Army
, Imperial War Museum, London, 1944.
Scott, Peggy,
British Women at War
, Hutchinson and Co., London, 1940.
Sheridan, Dorothy, ed.,
Wartime Women: An Anthology of Women’s Wartime Writing for Mass Observation 1937
–
45,
Heinemann, London, 1990.
Shukert, Elfrieda Berthiaume and Barbara Smith Scibetta,
War Brides of World War II
, Presidio Press, Novato, CA, 1988.
Smith, Harold L.,
‘The Effect of the War on the Status of Women’
, in H. L. Smith, ed.,
War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War
, Manchester University Press, 1986.
Summerfield, Penny,
Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War
, Manchester University Press, 1998.
Summerfield, Penny,
Women Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict
, Croom Helm, London, 1984.
Taylor, Eric,
Forces Sweethearts: Service Romances in World War II
, Robert Hale, London, 1990.
Tyrer, Nicola,
Sisters in Arms: British Army Nurses Tell Their Story
, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2008.
Tyrer, Nicola,
They Fought in the Fields: The Women’s Land Army: The Story of a Forgotten Victory
, Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1996.
Waller, Jane, and Michael Vaughan-Rees,
Women in Wartime: The Role of Women’s Magazines 1939–1945
, Macdonald and Co., London, 1987.
Watkins, Gwen,
Cracking the Luftwaffe Codes: The Secrets of Bletchley Park
, Greenhill Books, London, 2006.
Wicks, Ben,
No Time to Wave Goodbye
, Bloomsbury, London, 1988.
Williams-Ellis, Amabel,
Women in War Factories
, Gollancz, London, 1943.
Woolf, Virginia, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, in
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
, The Hogarth Press, London, 1942.
Zweig, Ferdinand,
Women’s Life and Labour
, Gollancz, London, 1952.
Post-war
Addison, Paul,
Now the War Is Over: A Social History of Britain 1945–51,
BBC and Jonathan Cape, London, 1985.
Allport, Alan,
Demobbed: Coming Home after the Second World War
, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009.
Campbell, Olwen W.,
The Report of a Conference on The Feminine Point of View
, Williams and Norgate, London, 1952.
Garfield, Simon, ed.,
Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-war Britain
, Ebury Press, London, 2004.
Hennessy, Peter,
Never Again: Britain 1945–51
, Jonathan Cape, London, 1992.
Hodson, J. L.,
The Way Things Are: Being Some Accounts of Journeyings, Meetings, and What Was Said to me in Britain between May, 1945 and Jan., 1947
, Victor Gollancz, London, 1947.
Hopkins, Harry,
The New Look: A Social History of the Forties and Fifties in Britain
, Secker and Warburg, London, 1963.
Howard, Kenneth,
Sex Problems of the Returning Soldier
, Sydney Pemberton, Lever Street, Manchester, 1945.
Jephcott, Pearl,
Rising Twenty: Notes on Some Ordinary Girls
, Faber and Faber, London, 1948.
Kynaston, David,
Austerity Britain 1945–1951
, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2007.
Lewis, Jane,
Women in Britain since 1945: Women, Family, Work and the State in the Post-war Years
, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992.
Mass Observation,
Peace and the Public
, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1947.
Newsom, John,
The Education of Girls
, Faber and Faber, London, 1948.
Sissons, Michael, and Philip French, eds.,
Age of Austerity
, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1963.
Slater, Eliot and Moya Woodside,
Patterns of Marriage: A Study of Marriage Relationships in the Urban Working Classes
, Cassell and Co., London, 1951.
Summers, Julie,
Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War
, Simon and Schuster, London, New York etc., 2008.
Wicks, Ben,
Welcome Home: True Stories of Soldiers Returning from World War II
, Bloomsbury, London, 1991.
Wilson, Elizabeth,
Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain 1945–1968
, Tavistock Publications, London, New York, 1980.
Winter, Jay,
‘The Demographic Consequences of the War’
, in H. L. Smith, ed.,
War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War
, Manchester University Press, 1986.
Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina,
Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption 1939
–
1955,
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Archives and Websites
The American War Bride Experience:
http://uswarbrides.com
.
BBC People’s War:
www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar
.
Collection of Working-class Autobiographies, Brunel University.
The D-Day and Normandy Fellowship website:
http://ddnf.org.uk/
.
The Imperial War Museum.
Mass Observation Archive, Sussex University Library.
Newspaper Collection, British Library at Colindale.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online:
www.oxforddnb.com
.
The Royal Navy website:
www.royalnavy.mod.uk
.
The Wartime Memories Project:
www.wartimememories.co.uk
.
World War-2.net:
www.worldwar-2.net
.
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the help of a large number of people; I am grateful to all of them. With such a range of contributions, it seems invidious to prioritise my thanks, nevertheless I owe a special debt of gratitude to Eleo Gordon, my tireless and magnificent editor at Viking, whose idea the book was, and another one to my husband William Nicholson, who has never failed to encourage, advise, read and reread. Affectionate thanks also to my agent, Caroline Dawnay, and to Venetia Butterfield at Viking for her confidence in me.
I am particularly grateful to a number of people who have given me special help; thank you to the late Russell Ash, Lord Briggs, Janie Hampton, Nicola Tyrer and Sarah Waters. I would also like to acknowledge specific research assistance from Paul Beecham, Henrietta Bredin, Anna Fewster, Sabine Goodwin, Miles Mantle, Julia Nicholson and Teddy Nicholson.
The book would not exist in its present form without the inclusion of interviews with the elderly ladies who contributed their memories, their time and their hospitality: the late Verily Anderson, Kaye Bastin, Mavis Batey, the late Pip Beck, Anne Olivier Bell, Dorothy Brewer-Kerr, Mary Davis, Pat Evans, Dame Mary Glen-Haig, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Sheila Hugh-Jones, Joan Kelsall, Christian Lamb, Dame Vera Lynn, Flo Mahony, Patience Maxwell, Eileen Morgan, Jean Park, Marguerite Patten, Margaret Pawley, Isa Rankin, Thelma Rendle, Vera Roberts, Betty Smith, Marjorie Smith, Joan Tagg, Kay Wight, Cora Williams and Phyllis Willmott.
In some cases I have spoken to or corresponded with the friends or relatives of women who wanted a helping hand or could no longer speak for themselves: thank you to Judith Bastin, Robert Bhatia, Peter Brimson, Mary Clayton, Bess Cummings, Charlotte Deane, Catherine Green, Sue Green, Jonathan Keates, Ralph Kite, Christopher Long, Maggie Paterson, Elizabeth Paterson, Alexandra and Gordon Tregear and Michael Trindles.
Thanks, too, to the people who were so helpful in bringing me together with my interviewees: Ruth Boreham, Richard Cable, Martyn Cox, Sue Gibbs, Janet Hodgson, Jonathan Hugh-Jones, Ruth Jennings, Virginia Lewis-Jones, Anne Morrison, Deborah Mulhearn, Jane Myles, Tom Nagorski, Alastair Upton, and Tessa Volders. A number of kind people replied to my requests for memories or information: my thanks to Mary-Rose Benton, Mrs T. Dufort, Mrs V. Falck, Jean Faulks, Averil Kear, Anne Lewis-Smith, Anne McGravie, Joyce Openshaw, Patricia Potton, Beryl Staley and Philip Wall.
Librarians and archivists are my heroes (and heroines, of course). Particular thanks to Fiona Courage, Karen Watson and their colleagues at the Mass Observation archive at Sussex University; also to the staff of the London Library; and to Sophie Bridges, Paula Gerrard, Emma Goodrum, Dr Lesley Hall, Isabel Hernandez, David Jamieson, Matthew McMurray, Dr Juliette Pattinson, Katrina Presedo, Andrew Riley, Andy Smith and Julie-Ann Vickers.
Research for a book of this kind can lead an author on some fascinating diversions through academic institutions, local history societies, oral history societies, military associations, niche magazines and the like; en route, I’ve had help from a number of people involved with such organisations, notably Ruth Brown, Squadron Leader Beryl E. Escott, Pat Farrington, Juliette Gammon, Frank Haslam, Steve Humphries, Dr Irene Maver, Naomi McMahon, Mrs Julie Somay, Lis Tighe, Eve Watson, Dave Welsh, Andrew Westwood-Bate, Jo White, John Wilson, and Angela Wintle. I’ve also been given useful leads by Andrew Bibby, Daniel Hahn, Sam Humphrey and Janet Menzies.
My year-long quest to unearth the post-war career of the mysterious author Frances Faviell deserves a paragraph of acknowledgements to itself. I was spurred on by James Beechey, Frances Christie, Chris Faviell, Sabina ffrench Blake, Mrs Peggy Guggenheim, Duff Hart-Davis, Bea Hemmings, Wendy Hitchmough, Max Hodgkin, Colin McKenzie, Richard Morphet, John Moynihan, Jonathan Prichard, Richard Shone, Father Jonathan Swindells and Henry Wyndham. Our joint efforts were finally crowned when I managed to trace firstly Mrs Pamela Hanbury, whose mother, it turned out, had been Faviell’s closest friend and finally (through the help of Stephen Woolley) John Parker, Faviell’s son.
A number of friends and strangers have offered kind and unprompted
assistance on different occasions. For this, grateful thanks to Alex Dufort, Dr Margaretta Jolly, David Kynaston, Dr James Le Fanu, Dr David Mellor, Di Speirs and Julie Summers. Answers to specific queries were ably supplied by Liz Bassett and Felicity Thompson.
The challenge of indexing a book studded with namechecks has been splendidly met by Douglas Matthews; my thanks, too, to Katherine Stroud and to the team at Viking: Ben Brusey, Lesley Hodgson, Keith Taylor and David Watson who have been diligent and enthusiastic throughout.
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