The Day We Went to War (53 page)

For those on a tighter budget there were always gramophone records at two shillings (10p) each. Decca Records, proudly claiming it was keeping ‘the flag flying with entertainment for the troops & the home . . . as in 1914 so in 1939’, featured the Ambrose, Jack Payne and Lew Stone bands in its December advertisements. Adelaide Hall’s recordings of ‘Deep Purple’ and ‘Solitude’ were also included as was Tommy Handley’s novelty number, ‘Hints on Blow-Outs for Black-Outs’.

For children, there was no shortage of toys in the shops at Christmas in 1939. Teddy bears, ‘made in finest quality gold-coloured or white mohair plush’ and ranging from 10 inches to 26¼ inches in height sold from 2s.3d (11p) to 22s.6d (£1.13). Dolls’ houses could be had for 10s.11d (55p), while deluxe ones
sold for 75s (£3.75). For boys, a Hornby No. 1 Special Passenger Train Set cost 33/6d (£1.68), and Meccano sets ranged in price from 3/3d (16p) to 22/6d (£1.13). But besides traditional Christmas presents, there were many others that had taken on a more warlike aspect; clockwork balloon barrages, model tanks, Bren gun carriers and searchlights at 4/11d (25p). A F.R.O.G. Interceptor Fighter retailed at 5s (25p) and an Astra mobile anti-aircraft gun at 6/6d (33p). Girls’ dolls were still readily available, but now with smart-looking gas-mask carriers slung across their shoulders. And there were miniature uniforms for Red Cross nurses, pilot officers and naval officers selling at 5/11d (30p). Topical board games in the shops included the popular novelist Dennis Wheatley’s ‘Invasion: a thrilling battle of wits in which players have as their playing pieces the armed forces of the Navy, Army and Air Force. Complete with map, 160 playing pieces, dice and shaker’, which sold for 7/6d (38p). Even cheaper was ‘The Dover Patrol. Great Game of Naval Tactics’ at 4/6d (23p) and the picture puzzle ‘Soldiers of the King’, which retailed at five shillings (25p).

But for many families in Britain even that sum was beyond their means. Two days before Christmas,
Picture Post
highlighted the plight of the family of forty-nine-year-old John Warrington of Clarissa Street, Hagerston, East London. Married with eleven children, Mr Harrington had had a number of labouring jobs in the Thirties, before losing the last one when war broke out. He was one of the 1,270,000 registered unemployed in Britain that December. As Mr Harrington had served during the First World War, he rejoined the Army, only to be discharged after two months because of a weak chest. ‘Now, with Christmas in sight, he is without a job once more.’ Mrs Warrington told the magazine, ‘I would be pleased if he could get something. People think because I send my children out in decent clothes, we don’t need anything. But the two flats we live in cost us £1 a week in rent alone.’ Although ‘the children are healthy and gay’, the article concluded, ‘when war came it took
away their father’s job. It lessened their mother’s housekeeping money. But it didn’t take away their appetites. And whether their father gets a job or not, they will at least still have their appetites at Christmas.’

Whatever their circumstances, the highlight of Christmas Day 1939 for many people in Britain and the Empire was the King’s broadcast that afternoon. Since coming to the throne in December 1936, King George VI had not followed the practice of his father in delivering an annual Christmas broadcast. Because of his stammer, broadcasting, indeed any form of public speaking, was an ordeal that the King dutifully but agonisingly endured. But, with the same sense of duty with which he assumed the kingship after the Abdication, he and his advisers decided that he should broadcast to his peoples on Christmas Day 1939. While the text of the broadcast was being prepared, a clipping from
The Times
was sent to Buckingham Palace. It contained some words found written on a postcard in the desk of a recently deceased doctor in Bristol. His daughters had used the words on homemade greeting cards, one of which was sent to Mrs J.C.M. Allen of Clifton. Mrs Allen, thinking the words appropriate to the current war situation passed them on in turn to
The Times
.

Broadcasting on Christmas Day began at 7.00am with the programme
Christmas Greetings – A Sackful of Stories, Verses and Records
. The Christmas Day morning service at 10.55am came from the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. That was followed by half an hour of music from the Foden’s Motor Works Band. At 1.35pm there was a programme of national and popular songs in the programme
The Soldier Sings
. Then at 2.15pm came
The Empire’s Greeting
. The
Radio Times
, in advertising the programme, had described how, ‘On Christmas Day . . . when most people at home will be nearing the end of their Christmas dinners, the sound of Christmas bells will ring out from all the home and overseas transmitters of the BBC. Across the five continents and seven seas
London will be calling, sending Christmas greeting throughout the world.’

The programme featured messages from a Royal Navy destroyer, from men of the BEF out in France and from an RAF ’plane. From the West Country came a message from a farmer and his wife who had two London evacuee children as guests at their Christmas table. A Welsh male voice choir followed and then there were link-ups with Scotland, Northern Ireland and Northumbria. Messages from the Empire came next; a Newfoundland fisherman, a Canadian pilot, a New Zealand farmer, a dressmaker in Sydney, a Malayan naval rating, an Indian Army officer, and lastly a member of Cape Town’s Coastal Defence Service. The programme ended with a shepherd in the Cotswolds passing on the Empire’s greetings to the King-Emperor.

Then, just after three in the afternoon, the King himself, in a ‘hesitant, upper class, un-dramatic voice’, began a nine minute broadcast to his subjects in Britain and the Empire:

The festival which we know as Christmas is above all the festival of peace and of the home. Among all free peoples the love of peace is profound, for this alone gives security to the home.

But true peace is in the hearts of men, and it is the tragedy of this time that there are powerful countries whose whole direction and policy are based on aggression and the suppression of all that we hold dear for mankind.

It is this that has stirred our peoples and given them a unity unknown in any previous war. We feel in our hearts that we are fighting against wickedness, and this conviction will give us strength from day to day to persevere until victory is assured.

At home we are, as it were, taking the strain for what may lie ahead of us, resolved and confident. We look with pride and thankfulness on the never-failing courage and devotion of the Royal Navy upon which, throughout the last four months, has burst the storm of ruthless and unceasing war.

And when I speak of our Navy today, I mean all the men of our Empire who go down to the sea in ships, the Mercantile Marine, the minesweepers, the trawlers and drifters, from senior officers to the last boy who has joined up. To every one in this great fleet I send a message of gratitude and greeting, from myself as from all my peoples.

The same message I send to the gallant Air Force, which, in cooperation with the Navy is our sure shield of defence. They are daily adding laurels to those that their fathers won.

I would send a special word of greeting to the armies of the Empire, to those who have come from afar, and in particular to the British Expeditionary Force.

Their task is hard. They are waiting, and waiting is a trial of nerve and discipline. But I know that when the moment comes for action they will prove themselves worthy of the highest traditions of their great Service.

And to all who are preparing themselves to serve their country, on sea or land or in the air, I send my greeting at this time. The men and women of our far-flung Empire, working in their several vocations, with the one same aim, all are members of the great family of nations which are prepared to sacrifice everything that freedom of spirit may be saved to the world.

A new year is at hand. We cannot tell what it will bring. If it brings peace, how thankful we shall all be. If it brings us continued struggle we shall remain undaunted.

In the meantime, I feel that we might all find a message of encouragement in the lines which, in my closing words, I would like to say to you.

‘I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

‘And he replied, “Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.”’

May the Almighty hand guide and uphold us all.

Advance copies of the speech had been sent to newspaper offices and there was a veritable stampede in Fleet Street to trace the author of the quotation. From America and the Dominions came cables requesting the same information. When asked, John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, thought that the lines had the ring of G.K. Chesterton about them. Other poetry experts thought that they might have come from the pen of John Bunyan or of Thomas à Kempis. But it was not until midnight on Christmas Day that the BBC was in a position to give the definitive answer. The author was sixty-four-year-old Miss Minnie Louise Haskins.

Miss Haskins, by this time retired, had been a lecturer at the London School of Economics. In December 1939, she was living in Crowborough, Sussex and had actually not heard the King’s broadcast that afternoon. She had, however, heard a BBC summary of it later that evening and thought that the opening words were ‘oddly familiar’. Only when the quotation was finished did she recall that over thirty years before she had written something very similar in a slim book of verse entitled
The Desert
. It had been privately printed in 1908 and sold in aid of missionary work in India.

Within a few days of the King’s broadcast, and despite objections from members of the clergy that St John’s Gospel and John Bunyan had phrased it better, Miss Haskins found herself a celebrity. She was interviewed by the press and for the newsreels, and her book of verse was promptly republished.

The rest of the day’s broadcasting included a competition in which ‘soldiers in France will join in a parlour game with their parents in a BBC studio at home’. The inevitable Sandy Macpherson had a half-an-hour slot at 5.00pm, followed by ‘Hullo, Mum’, a link-up between evacuees in a Gloucestershire village and their parents in Stepney. A soldiers’ service from France was broadcast at 6.20pm and then came ‘A Radio Christmas Party: comedians, Christmas songs, musical games, and join-in listening in to other
parties elsewhere . . . a pill-box fort near the front line, an Army concert from one of the bases in France, a children’s hospital ward, and a wartime edition of
Flying High
from an RAF hangar’.

Gracie Fields appeared at 9.15pm in an ENSA concert from ‘somewhere in France’ and then there was
A Christmas Cabaret
with Jack Hylton and his Band and Cyril Fletcher. After the news at midnight, the day’s broadcasting closed down at 12.15am. Boxing Day’s radio highlights included steeplechasing from Windsor, football between Sheffield Wednesday and Chesterfield and a live broadcast of the London Coliseum’s pantomime
Cinderella
. ‘In view of all that,’ the
Radio Times
proudly trumpeted, ‘who cares for the blackout? Who cares if it snows?’

If in 1939 the secular aspects of Christmas predominated, the religious element was by no means forgotten nor neglected. Striking an optimistic note, Archbishop of York William Temple reminded readers of
Picture Post
that: ‘On Christmas morning German Christians, French Christians, Polish Christians, Finnish Christians, British Christians, Russian Christians – let us never forget the heroic multitude of Russian Christians – nor the Japanese and Chinese who in the Name of the Christ are all this time making the unity which will unite their nations as friends in days to come . . .’

In an accompanying picture essay, the magazine published two photographs of villagers at Oberammergau at a Christmas service. It reminded readers that ‘for six years, directly and indirectly, the Nazis have been trying to destroy Christianity in Germany’. But it was confident that ‘these men and women in the village of the world-famous Passion Play will outlive the concentration camp, the swastika, the Gestapo’.

In his Christmas Day broadcast, the King had spoken of ‘the great family of nations’ that made up the British Empire and Commonwealth. Only a week before, the first Canadian troops had arrived in Britain. Now, on Boxing Day, a contingent of Australian airmen arrived to serve with the Royal Air Force’s Coastal
Command. In a message to them, Australian air minister J.V. Fairbairn said, ‘A great responsibility rests upon you as members of the First Australian Air Force squadron to come on active service in this country. You will be comrades in a great and just campaign with the men of the RAF, and Australia is confident that you will play your part in whatever spheres you may be called upon to serve.’

And the next day it was announced that the first Indian Army mule companies had joined Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force in France. There had been fairly generous Christmas leave allowances for the British Expeditionary Force, but comedian Jack Warner raised a laugh on the BBC’s
Garrison Theatre
when reading a letter from his ‘Bruvver Syd’ out in France: ‘PS: I thought I was coming home on leave this weekend, but Lord Gort thought different!’

Among those, like Syd, unable to get back for Christmas was Rifleman William Smedmore. Writing to his sixty-four-year-old mother at the family home in Glamorgan Street, Pimlico, William told her: ‘We are in good billets here. But not as good as last Christmas, at home with you. I’ll be home next year without fail.’

For those servicemen stationed around Britain and unable to make it home for Christmas, Mr and Mrs E. Maguire of 74 Lynette Avenue, Clapham had come with a novel idea. Writing to
Picture Post
a month before Christmas, they had asked the magazine: ‘If you can find us some eight to a dozen chaps (we are quite indifferent as to who or what they are) we would be glad if they would be our guests for Christmas dinner and a slice off the pudding! The only conditions attached are that they make themselves at home and help us to make the party go with a sing-song afterwards.’