From Raucous Street Celebrations To Those Waiting To Hear If Loved Ones Had Survived - The Story Of VE Day Through The Eyes Of Ordinary Britons

On the morning of Monday, May 7, 1945, a young clerk from Grays, Essex, left home with an unusual goodbye to her family: ‘See you after the war!’

‘At last, I am beginning to feel fluttery inside,’ she noted, as she returned to Knightsbridge and the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) unit where she was serving.

Rumours of a German surrender had been circulating for days: ‘There is an atmosphere of exhilaration in the office with everyone cracking feeble jokes and laughing enormously at each other’s efforts.’

She had already bought red, white and blue ribbon, a paper Union Jack and ‘a tawdry Stars and Stripes on a stick’ in anticipation of a party.

But as the hours wore on that afternoon, she and her colleagues heard nothing. ‘What a day!’ she scrawled later, in frustration. ‘At 5.15 the evening papers come in and are scanned for concrete news. The war is over – that’s obvious – but when is Churchill going to say so?’

The impatient young woman’s recollections are part of an extraordinary archive of wartime experiences gathered by Mass Observation, a social survey set up in 1937 to create a snapshot of life in Britain.

The Mass Observers were volunteers who agreed to write diaries describing their daily lives. In addition, some were part of a National Panel that responded to the project’s eclectic, open-ended questionnaires, which asked their opinions on everything from behaviour at war memorials to beards.

This was not a ‘representative sample’ of the population, such as one might find questioned in an opinion poll today, but a group of self-selecting, strong-minded individuals who were attracted by the idea of recording their experiences, thoughts and feelings for posterity.

WW2 American soldiers and British girls celebrate VE DAY in Piccadilly Circus London on 8 May 1945

A truck of revellers passing through the Strand in London following the announcement of Germany’s surrender and the end of hostilities in Europe

The People’s Victory: VE Day Through The Eyes Of Those Who Were There by Lucy Noakes, published today by Atlantic at £22

By 1945, many hundreds were contributing and today, as the 80th anniversary of VE Day approaches, their words paint a compelling portrait of both the terrors of war and the surge of joy that bubbled up as the conflict came to an end.

Tuesday, May 8, was officially designed as Victory in Europe Day – when both prime minister Winston Churchill and King George VI would address the nation – but once the BBC had interrupted a concerto at 7.40pm on Monday evening to announce that fact, there was no stopping the crowds.

Despite it being CB [confined to barracks] night, the clerk and her co-workers were given permission by their company commander to go out – with strict instructions to be back by midnight: ‘We rush back for our hats and jump on a bus to Hyde Park Corner,’ she wrote.

Thousands of others had the same idea. In Trafalgar Square, crowds danced and sang The Marseillaise and Knees Up Mother Brown. In Haymarket, people lit little bonfires, fed by newspapers. The centre of London became one mass of yelling, laughing, singing, shrieking people.

‘Most of the men are in uniform,’ noted our ATS clerk. ‘All services and nationalities. The Canadians are noisy, the sailors are merry, the airmen are drunk (or pretend to be), the Americans have a girl apiece . . . All the way to Knightsbridge, happy groups pass, and people still hope to get buses home. This is midnight, Victory Eve – and, oh, my poor feet!’

These are the images of VE Day that have been burned into the national consciousness: cheering, patriotic crowds overflowing with excitement and thankfulness.

But the testimonies of the Mass Observers paint a far more nuanced picture. By VE Day, after six years of deprivation and loss – more than 270,000 British combatants and 63,000 civilians would eventually be confirmed dead or missing – many were too exhausted and sorrowful to raise any enthusiasm for partying.

Others, with sons or brothers still fighting in the Far East or festering in Japanese prisoner of war camps, actively resented the scenes of jubilation. For them, the war was not over.

Young children in bomb scarred Battersea in south London (England) with their Union Flags. May 8, 1945

VE Day Celebrations, London, May 8, 1945, in Trafalgar Square

‘I have no plans for VE Day. It can’t mean much to us as my daughter’s husband is a prisoner and we have heard nothing since December,’ one woman told Mass Observation.

Another said there was little cause for celebration for a widowed friend: ‘Peace won’t bring back her husband, killed in [the] Coventry blitz, nor her house, destroyed [at the] same time.’

A woman in North Yorkshire wrote: ‘Indeed, I felt like weeping on the actual VE Day. I thought of all the lads that would never return, of their families, of the crippled, of the war with Japan still to be won.’

Mass Observation writers were rarely public figures, and we often know little about them other than their ages, sex and location.

They wrote either in the form of diaries or as responses to the Directive questionnaires, and each was given a code number to ensure their privacy, though two – Nella Last, the daughter of a railway clerk in Barrow-in-Furness, and Naomi Mitchison, a Scottish novelist, poet and landowner whose husband Dick was elected as a Labour MP in 1945 – later became known when their diaries were published. Mass Observation also employed a small pool of ‘professional’ observers, referred to as Investigators, often themselves volunteers, who were sent out into wartime Britain to question the people they met and to record what they saw.

In these reports, Mass Observation attempted to classify people by gender, age and social class, for example someone might be categorised as ‘F45D’, which translates as ‘Female, aged 45, Social Class D’ (manual labour), or M25B: ‘Male, 25, Social Class B’ (intermediate managerial, administrative, professional), and so on.

Living on the Carradale estate on the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland, Naomi Mitchison lived in far grander style than most Mass Observation diarists. The novelist made regular trips to London, where the family had a second home, and arrived in the capital on the sleeper train for VE Day.

VE (Victory in Europe) Day celebrations in the East End of London, marking the end of the war in Europe

Soldiers pulling copies of ‘Stars and Stripes’ from the press of the London Times at 9 pm on 7 May 1945. An extra edition was put out to announce the news of Germany’s surrender. The headline reads ‘Germany Quits’

Taking the Underground, she was struck that the Tube stations where people had been sheltering at night were now clear: ‘Most of the bunks had gone already and I wondered where people were sleeping. Still the odd feeling of London being safe!’

That afternoon, she went into the West End with some friends. ‘I bought a small USSR flag for Val [her daughter], she was wearing a blue skirt, light blue blouse and red scarf and looked beautiful.

‘I didn’t get any myself but wore my Croix de Lorraine [the symbol of the Free France forces during the Second

World War]. ‘We had lunch at the Cafe [Royal] at 12.45 . . . When we got out there was quite a crowd. Almost everyone was tired and wanting to look, rather than do. They were sitting where possible, lots on the steps of St Martins.

‘Most people were wearing bright coloured clothes, most of them red, white and blue in some form. (I was wearing my kilt and a blouse. Much too hot, as I found.) Most women had lipstick and a kind of put-on smile, but all but the very young looked very tired when they stopped actually smiling.’

For the ATS clerk who had been carousing in Piccadilly the night before, it was a quiet day at home: ‘We stayed in listening to the radio, and had a family party at tea time. In the centre of the table was a dish of canned pineapple, which Mother had saved through all the long years for this day.’

Her mother wasn’t the only one who had been saving something special to eat. A Sheffield accountant wrote that: ‘In January 1941, we purchased some tinned chicken and, as we have never been called upon to use it, we promised ourselves a treat on Peace Day . . . It proved something of a disappointment, for, although it is genuine chicken – bones, skin and meat – it is spoilt by aspic jelly. A tin of sausages, purchased in November 1940, proved much more acceptable for lunch.’

In Fleet, Hampshire, an electricity sub-station worker described how his family enjoyed ‘our much-discussed tin of brisket of beef’. They had bought it five years earlier and ‘it was reserved for use if we had no meat for a week, or for peace, whichever came first. Peace won, fortunately.’

During the course of the war, Nella Last had reflected on the differences between Churchill and the previous prime minister Neville Chamberlain, concluding: ‘If I had to spend my whole life with a man, I’d choose Mr Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked’.

Churchill’s speeches, with their promise to ‘fight on the beaches. . . the landing grounds . . . the fields . . . the streets [and] the hills’ and his assertion that in a thousand years’ time ‘men will still say ‘this was their finest hour’ helped create the mythology of the war.

In this May 8, 1945 file photo a vast crowd assembles in front of Buckingham Palace, London to cheer Britain’s Royal family as they come out on the balcony, centre, minutes after the official announcement of Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II

British men, women and children celebrating ‘Victory in Europe Day’ in the street on May 8, 1945

Churchill gave two speeches on VE Day. The first was broadcast over the wireless from Downing Street at 3pm, and was described by one Mass Observation writer who was standing in Whitehall, where it was relayed by speakers: ‘Big Ben strikes three . . . the crowd send up a mighty cheer.

‘And then follows Mr Churchill and, for the time being, the voice of the Prime Minister is the only voice to be heard in Whitehall. People hang on to every word he has to say. When he tells them that, as from midnight tonight, hostilities will cease there’s loud cheers, and again when people hear that the Channel Islands will likewise be freed as from midnight tonight.

‘But there’s whoops of joy and waving of hats and flags when he comes to that point in his speech when he declares that ‘The German war is therefore at an end’.’

The second speech was given from the balcony of the Ministry of Health in Whitehall, which became the focal point of the day, even more so than the appearance of the Royal Family at nearby Buckingham Palace.

Mass Observation had an investigator in place as the crowds, and the atmosphere, built up: ‘Lower Whitehall, 1.45pm. Whitehall is jammed with people. Thousands and thousands line the pavements. (Policeman estimates the crowds at 50,000.)

‘A continuous stream of people walk in the roadway and the policeman calls ‘Now move along there, please keep moving’. Everybody’s pushing one another and laying the blame onto someone else. But it’s done in good humour.

‘The only time it does get ruffled is when some latecomer tries to wrangle a place in the front row and the crowd doesn’t stand on ceremony.’ At least one fight broke out.

In his second speech, Churchill told the people: ‘My dear friends, this is your hour.

‘This is not a victory of a party or of any class. It’s a victory of the great British nation as a whole. We were the first, in this ancient island, to draw the sword against tyranny. . .

‘There we stood, alone. Did anyone want to give in?’

(The crowd shouted ‘No!’)

‘Were we down-hearted?’

‘No!’

Two British sailors in a fountain in Trafalgar Square, London, with Joyce Digney (left) and Cynthia Covello, members of the Land Army, who travelled to London to celebrate VE Day

Crowds in Westminster as Big Ben strikes 3pm, the moment when Prime Minister Winston Churchill made his statement from Whitehall, broadcast to the nation, declaring that the war in Europe is over

The partying continued into the night. After resting at home for a few hours, Mitchison and her husband ventured out for dinner. In Piccadilly, ‘there were a lot more drunks and broken bottles than earlier, and a few people crying or having hysterics or collapsing, and a lot of ambulances’.

They decided to catch the Tube back to their London home in Hammersmith. People were dancing near the station when they arrived, and she stopped to ‘dance a reel’ with ‘a nice drunk Glasgow Sergeant’ and then ‘joined in one or two ‘snake dances’ ‘.

They left swiftly when a ‘very drunk and rather repulsive lady tried to get off with Dick’.

After a short stop at a local pub where ‘people were singing with the minimum of tune’, they went home to their riverside house, where ‘we went onto the roof and looked at the searchlights whirling beautifully around and reflected onto the river.’

VE Day was coming to an end. Other diarists were still celebrating, determined to wring every scrap of excitement and pleasure out of the day – whether in the crowds of central London, around the bonfires, or in packed pubs in cities, towns, villages and suburbs across Britain.

The long war in Europe was over. Some diarists reflected on the moment, others looked back over the past years, while others looked forward – often with anxiety.

Princess Elizabeth is greeted by crowds as she tours the East End of London on the day after VE Day

One rather affluent lady diarist had started the war by packing away a candelabra and ‘wondered when, if ever, it would come out again, for I feel this is the end of my class and way of life’.

Now, as the war ended, a housewife in Sevenoaks found herself equally at a loss. The war had given even domestic drudgery a sense of meaning and value. Suddenly, she found herself ‘deeply depressed and . . . as if [I] were floating in nothingness’.

Hitler had been defeated, but the wartime coalition with the Soviet Union was breaking down and India was calling for independence. Ahead lay a summer election and the long task of reconstruction.

Britain had survived the war, but not unscathed; the country and everyone in it stood on the edge of an uncertain future.