Millions Like Us Read online

  By the same author

  Among the Bohemians

  Singled Out

  Millions Like Us

  Women’s Lives in the Second World War

  VIRGINIA NICHOLSON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  For my mother, Anne Olivier Bell

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and grew up in Yorkshire and Sussex. She studied at Cambridge University and lived abroad in France and ltaly, then worked as a documentary researcher for BBC Television. Her books include the acclaimed social history Among the Bohemians: Experinents in Living 1900–1939, and Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War, published by Penguin in 2002 and 2007. She is married to a writer, has three children and lives in Sussex.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Author’s Note

  Prelude

  1 We’re at War

  Ready for the Fray

  Heaven Help Us

  The Children

  The Darkness

  Uncharted Territory

  2 All Our Prayers

  Behind the Maginot

  It Couldn’t Happen to Us

  In the Face of Danger

  Beached

  So Naked, So Alone

  3 Wreckage

  The Love of Her Life

  The Sad Atlantic

  Battleground

  Taking It

  Nights of Fire

  4 ‘Ready to Win the War’

  White Alert

  Red Alert

  A Man’s Job

  Cheap Wine, Pink Gin

  Stocking Wars, Sex Wars

  5 ‘Your Country Welcomes Your Services’

  Women in Uniform

  The Lowest Form of Life

  Officers and Ladies

  Women Must Weep

  Don’t Die for Me

  6 The Girl That Makes the Thing-ummy Bob

  The Kitchen Front

  Clocking On

  ‘She’s Most Important – in Her Way’

  Yanks

  Heat and Sand

  7 Sunny Intervals

  No Tears Left

  Out of Bounds

  The Wages of Sin

  Under the Volcano

  Worth Fighting For

  8 Over There

  A Song and a Cheer

  Dancing the Night Away

  The Secret Army

  The Smell of Death

  Mud and Warpaint

  9 No Real Victory

  Dim-out

  The National Effort

  Back-room Girls

  Until Belsen

  This Incredible Moment

  10 A Brave New World

  A Brief Period of Rejoicing

  The Right Telegram

  Tomorrow’s Clear Blue Skies

  Little Boy and Fat Man

  Haunted

  11 Picking Up the Threads

  Demob

  Running on Empty

  A Pearl of a Wife

  Divided We Fall

  A la Recherche

  12 A Bitter Time

  ‘A Fine Type of British Girl’

  Our Mothers’ Shoes

  The Wifely Thing

  Out of Uniform

  Vanquished

  13 There’ll Be Bluebirds

  Flower Women

  A Love Match

  Modern Times

  The Pram in the Hall

  Millions Like Them

  Appendix

  Notes on Sources

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Inset Illustrations

  1. Two young women from the Worthing ‘Blackout Corps’ paint their local hospital windows. (Fox Photos)

  2. Spirit of the Blitz: a West End hairdressing salon picks up where it left off – in an air-raid shelter. (Popperfoto)

  3. Cross-section of a life: the bombs exposed and revealed women’s interior-based existence as never before. (Getty Images)

  4. A cosy, if cramped, scene at Holborn station, September 1940. (London Transport Executive)

  5. As the threat to Britain intensified, every mother had to choose between her children’s safety and her maternal instincts. (Getty Images)

  6. Volunteers like Joan Wyndham helped trained nurses to staff the first aid posts established across the city. (From Love in Blue)

  7. Teenager Phyllis Noble, photographed at the time of Dunkirk, 1940. (From Coming of Age in Wartime)

  8. First aid post, Notting Hill Gate, London. (Imperial War Museum)

  9. For women, joining up often meant carrying out domestic tasks in a military context. (Imperial War Museum A23966)

  10. A London Labour Exchange, 1941. (Imperial War Museum HU90889)

  11. The Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes, or NAAFI, which ran canteens and shops for the forces, was ‘a forgotten army’. (Getty Images)

  12. Dorothy (‘Doffy’) Brewer went for training with the ATS in autumn 1941. (From The Girls behind the Guns)

  13. Barbara Cartland with her ATS hat on, plus lipstick. (From The Years of Opportunity)

  14. Unsuspecting ATS recruits arriving at Aldershot in 1941. (Fox Photos)

  15. Wartime diarist Nella Last and her son Cliff. (From Nella Last’s War)

  16. Clara Milburn and her son Alan. (From Mrs Milburn’s Diaries)

  17. Women’s Institute members bottling jams and jellies. (Imperial War Museum)

  18. In the Y-service WAAF Aileen (‘Mike’) Morris became expert at eavesdropping on enemy transmissions. (From The Enemy is Listening)

  19. Code-breaker Mavis Lever was sworn to secrecy about her work. (Mavis Batey)

  20. The Decoding Room at Bletchley Park, nerve centre of wartime decryption. (Bletchley Park)

  21. Dressed for the job, women shipyard workers manoeuvre a steel girder into position. (Imperial War Museum HU36242)

  22. ‘I felt that no one could possibly win the war without me!’ In 1940 QA Lorna Bradey believed the world was at her feet. (Ralph Kite)

  23. For Pip Beck, her job as an R/T operator at Bomber Command seemed the fulfilment of all her romantic dreams. (Peter Brimson)

  24. ATS kit inspection in a typical services dormitory. (Imperial War Museum)

  25. Jean McFadyen, who joined the Timber Corps. (Jean Park)

  26. 6,000 members of the Timber Corps worked in the forests year-round cutting timber for everything from pit props to coffins. (Imperial War Museum)

  27. Land girl Kay Mellis from Edinburgh. (Kay Wight)

  28. Thinning turnips in the Lake District. (Imperial War Museum HU63799)

  29. A queue of hopeful housewives has formed in front of a fish stall. (Associated Newspapers Ltd)

  30. Kerbside recycling, 1940s-style. (Getty Images)

  31. Many housewives transformed their front gardens into vegetable plots. (Imperial War Museum)

  32. Rag-and-bone women from a London branch of the WVS, collecting aluminium. (Getty Images)

  33. On VJ-day Helen Forrester joined friends to celebrate. (Helen Forrester)

  34. Doris Scorer and her friends at the Works were bent on keeping up appearances. (From D for Doris, V for Victory)

  35. ‘Utility’ styles skimped on details, eliminating cuffs, frills and fullness to save fabric. (Associated Newspapers Ltd)

  36. As skirt lengths rose, legs became more visible, and the stocking shortage became ever more problematic. (Associated Newspapers Ltd)

  37. Christian Oldham chose to enlist in the Wrens because of the hat and the ‘nice straight uniform’ designed by Molyneux. (From I Only Joined for the Hat)

  38. British girls were swept off their
feet by the arrival of the sexy GIs. (Imperial War Museum)

  39. Verily Anderson with Marian and Rachel, 1945. (Eddie Anderson)

  40. Nightclubs and dance halls were humming throughout the war. (Getty Images)

  41. Anne Popham and Graham Bell in his RAF uniform. (Anne Olivier Bell)

  42. Schoolgirl Nina Mabey grew up to become Nina Bawden, well-known author of Carrie’s War. (From In My Own Time)

  43. SOE coder Margaret Herbertson both experienced and contributed to the Allied victory in Italy in 1945. (From In Obedience to Instructions)

  44. Women welders were beset with danger from flying slag, burns and ‘arc eye’, partly because they often chose style over safety. (Getty Images)

  45. How to stay in fashion while fitting the caterpillar track to a tank. (Getty Images)

  46. ‘Mummy’s girl’ Thelma Ryder worked twelve hours a day making piston rings for aircraft. (Thelma Rendle)

  47. Joyce Grenfell and her accompanist, Viola Tunnard, arriving in Baghdad, 1944. (From The Time of My Life / Estate of Joyce Grenfell)

  48. Vera Lynn in the Far East, 1944. ‘I was an ordinary working-class girl. I was singing to my own kind.’ (From Goodnight Sweetheart)

  49. Backstage at ENSA HQ. (Corbis/Hulton Deutsch Collection)

  50. A QA tending a wounded soldier in an Italian field hospital. (The Trustees of Army Medical Services Museum)

  51. QA Iris Ogilvie and a fellow nurse staging an upbeat publicity shot taken in front of a Bayeux hat shop, shortly after the Normandy landings. (Imperial War Museum)

  52. QA Joy Taverner never questioned her early faith – ‘until Belsen’. (Sue Green)

  53. The war is over. A WAAF returns home. (Getty Images)

  54. Celebrating VJ-day in Aberdeen. (From The Day Peace Broke Out)

  55. Christmas 1946: GI brides and their babies await passage to their new homes. (Associated Newspapers Ltd)

  56. Happy holidays in the long, hot, post-war summer of 1947. (Topham)

  57. Frances Faviell. (From A Chelsea Concerto)

  58. An old woman shovelling debris in the Russian Zone of Berlin. (Getty Images)

  59. Vicar’s wife and activist Irene Lovelock, flanked by two other leaders of the British Housewives’ League. (Sport and General Press Agency)

  60. The harvest of peace, July 1948: the inauguration of the National Health Service. (Topham)

  61. Happy ever after? Helen Vlasto’s wedding day, 28 November 1946. (From Change into Uniform)

  62. Peter and Phyllis Willmott in 1948, at the start of their forty-two-year marriage. (From Joys and Sorrows)

  63. Laura Jesson chooses home and hearth in Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter. (ITV/Rex Features)

  Illustrations in the Text

  p. 27 ‘But What About the Gases that Burn?’, advertisement in the Daily Sketch.

  p. 29 ‘With the Home Guard’, wartime postcard.

  p. 43 ‘Your New Ration Books’, public notice issued by the Ministry of Food.

  p. 51 ‘My nerves went to pieces …’, Horlicks advertisement.

  p. 91 Evening Standard story on the rescue of Lifeboat 12.

  p. 95 An illustration from the Fire Party Handbook showing how to put out incendiaries.

  p. 112 ‘The Shape of Things to Come’: Bevin’s attempt to persuade women to accept conscription, cartoon in the Daily Sketch.

  p. 121 Doris White’s illustration of herself and her mum arriving in Wolverton, from D for Doris, V for Victory.

  p. 131 Humorous postcard showing the problem of substandard underwear elastic.

  p. 145 Sketch of ATS ‘kitting-out’ session, cartoon by ATS recruit ‘Panda’ Carter.

  p. 147 Women in pubs, from Punch, 28 July 1943.

  p. 153 A Kentish land girl’s view of cabbage-cutting, sketch in the diary of Barbara Hill.

  p. 177 ‘Shoot straight, Lady’, advertisement in the Daily Sketch.

  p. 183 Female clippie on the bus, from Punch, 30 August 1944.

  p. 185 Factory worker and baby, from the Daily Sketch, 1942.

  p. 196 British women and American GIs, from Punch, 1 November 1944.

  p. 223 ‘I had a simply wonderful leave …’, from Punch, 5 May 1943.

  p. 226 ‘Jane’ in the Daily Mirror.

  p. 240 Sister Lorna Bradey’s citation, ‘Mentioned in Despatches’.

  p. 255 Vera Lynn, the voice of the war, from the cover of a publication of wartime music and lyrics.

  p. 262 Doris White’s illustration of glider-making, from D for Doris, V for Victory.

  p. 290 ‘Up Housewives and at ’em!’, advertisement in the Daily Sketch issued by the Ministry of Supply.

  p. 299 Sketch of a concentration camp survivor by Eric Taylor.

  p. 325 Women enraged by obstructive fishmongers, from Punch, 5 May 1946.

  p. 330 The irrelevance of the election to many women, from Punch, 18 July 1945.

  p. 334 ‘It’s a new kind of bomb, darling …’, from Punch, 29 August 1945.

  p. 348 Wren Rozelle Raynes’s sketch of herself setting out to seek her post-war fortune, in Maid Matelot.

  p. 351 Newlyweds viewing a new ‘house’, from Punch, 31 October 1945.

  p. 358 ‘Tighten your belts everybody, please …’, from Punch, 18 August 1948.

  p. 376 ‘Greetings from Rainbow Corner’, wartime postcard.

  p. 405 Winter 1947, from Punch, 12 March 1947.

  p. 417 Dior’s New Look, Punch, 19 May 1948.

  p. 431 Shopping by the help-yourself system, from the Daily Express, 20 January 1947.

  p. 441 ‘With these modern inventions housework’s a pleasure’, from Punch, 11 December 1946.

  Author’s Note

  In July 2005 the Queen unveiled a memorial in Whitehall dedicated to ‘The Women of World War Two’. This massive bronze structure, twenty-two feet high, is studded with a row of oddly spooky disembodied uniforms. Hanging from the monument are the clothes and belongings of the servicewomen, factory workers, farm-workers and women who worked in hospitals, emergency services and volunteer bodies across the nation between 1939 and 1945. They are suspended in a featureless void, with no faces, no personalities. In its way the monument is a perfect metaphor for our state of national amnesia. Six million-odd women threw their energies into the home front. 640,000 British servicewomen played their part in helping to win the war. Of these, 624 died for their country.* But many of them are still alive.

  Surely their endurance, their adventures, their sacrifices, their personalities are worthy of a deeper appreciation. This book asks, who were they? And what did it feel like to be them? I wanted to find out not only what they did in the war, but what the war did to them and how it changed their subsequent lives and relationships.

  The chapters that follow are arranged chronologically, with the personal stories of a fifty-strong cast of characters in the spotlight against a backdrop of important social, political and international events: a momentous decade, seemingly familiar to many of us, but seen entirely through the eyes of the women who lived it. My approach to historical research is, as far as possible, to merge it with biography, and the telling of stories. I believe that the personal and idiosyncratic reveal more about the past than the generic and comprehensive. (A small note here: my intermittent – but, I think, authentic – use of the word ‘girl’ to describe the young women of the 1940s may sound a little patronising today, but back then it was their own preferred term, and was also universally used in the press and literature.)

  Among the many elderly women whom I interviewed and whose stories appear in these pages is my mother, Anne Popham, as she then was. Not because her experiences were unusual or heroic, but precisely because they weren’t. There have been numerous books celebrating the courage of women agents parachuted behind enemy lines in France, women in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, women pilots from the Air Transport Auxiliary who delivered Spitfires to their airfields. Odette Hallowes and Dame Margot Turner have earned their place in history alongside D
ouglas Bader and Stanley Hollis. My mother is now ninety-four years old. Like most of our mothers and grandmothers, and like the majority of women in this narrative, she grew up in a world that seemed small and sedate and did nothing starry or distinguished in the war. When it was declared in 1939 she was ordinary, frightened and unsuspecting. But six years of conflict reordered that world; along with an entire generation, she awoke to her own post-war potential. In all these respects she was entirely typical of the many millions for whose sake I have borrowed my title. (Millions Like Us was a propaganda movie made by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat in 1943, to persuade women to join the war effort.)

  If I could have chosen another title, it might have been ‘We Just Got on with It’ – the mantra of every woman I spoke to who lived through the war. So this book is not only an attempt to characterise that faceless war memorial, it is also my tribute to a generation of brave, stoical, unselfish, practical and uncomplaining women, whose values, along with their deeds, seem to be passing into history.

  Prelude

  A little over eighty years ago a very ordinary girl named Phyllis Noble was growing up in a terraced house with an outside toilet in Lewisham, south London. She was born in 1922. Her dad was a jobbing builder, and like many in the 1930s his trade was falling off; the Nobles’ financial situation was not improved by his fondness for the pub. Phyllis’s mum looked after the extended family of grandparents, in-laws and her own three children, who all lived under the same roof. As a role model Mum never overstepped the limits; she was first, foremost and exclusively a housewife, whose life revolved around the daily routine of shopping, cooking and washing. Despite the family’s straitened circumstances Phyllis had a happy, rumbustious childhood. The kitchen in their cramped terrace house was a haven, and even when Dad had had a drop too much the family was united, roaring and joking when he let out one of his spectacularly loud farts. Phyllis was clever; but when she succeeded in winning a scholarship to a grammar school in Greenwich, Mum, disgusted at the expense of the uniform, launched a family battle to stop her daughter going. In any case getting educated would, in her view, be a pointless waste of time, since there was no alternative to the trap that she had herself been forced to enter twenty years earlier: that of marriage and motherhood.