Wartime Facts and Fancies

Writing a book about a different era requires research. It is the little things that pose the most difficult problems; you would think that it would be easy to find out whether the hiring of boats in Hyde Park continued during the war. In fact this tiny fact took nearly a whole afternoon to track down and was only resolved when I viewed some old Pathe News footage from their archive.
Research always turns up surprising things. Here are a few facts that I came across that the modern reader may not be aware of. Many of these create provenance for the locations and characters in the plot.

The first naval casualty of the war was the sinking of the battleship HMS Royal Oak and this occurred within the first six weeks of the war on the14 October 1939. The Royal Oak was torpedoed by a U-boat whilst at anchor in Scapa Flow. There are conspiracy theories that the sinking was due to sabotage.

The impression gained from numerous movies that I saw in my childhood and many books and dramas that have been set in wartime was that Britain was continually under attack during the war from German bombing raids. In fact the intensive Blitz on London only occurred from September 1940 to May 1941. Of course other cities were targeted and hit and the greatest loss of life outside London was recorded in a raid on Belfast in April 1941. There is a fascinating website which plots and dates the fall of every bomb dropped on London during the Blitz.

Sporadic Air raids did occur after the Blitz but they weren't an everyday occurrence. Strikes by V1 and V2 ‘flying bombs’ did not start until 1944.

Silhouette of Landon Skyline in the Blitz

Land army girls were paid for their work (28 shillings a week minus 14 for board and lodging) and they were not permitted to do domestic work in the places they were billeted: i.e. they were there to work on the land and not in the kitchen.

Since restaurants were in business during the whole of the conflict it was thought that this meant that the wealthy could evade the effects of rationing. Therefore, in a somewhat illogical act, the maximum price for a meal was set and a series of basic restaurants offering plain fare for the less wealthy were set up by the government. These were known as British Kitchens.

Although difficult to come by, makeup was not rationed even though the machinery for its manufacture could have been easily adapted for the war effort (there is not a great difference between a metal lipstick case and a metal cartridge case). This was a deliberate attempt to bolster the morale of the women left at home (and indirectly that of their menfolk in the forces).

Rationing went on long after the war was over until July 1954 in fact: I was born in 1950 and I still have my children’s ration book.

The war effort wasn't only about troops and fighting great battles. These would have been impossible without the support of the workforce at home. One of the largest temporary munitions factories was on Merseyside. It employed 23,000 (mostly women) and worked 24/7 in rotating shifts. My Aunt was one of these and she would tell of the stress of working alone in the detonator room where one false move could be fatal.

A good 80% or more of the information on the net about what actually happened in Britain during the war is centred on and about events in London. There are only scattered references to what happened in the rest of the country. It is not surprising therefore to find that Hitler considered that to conquer Britain he only needed to conquer London.
There are many individual stories and reminiscences of life during wartime Britain. 'WW2 People's War’ is an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The archive can be found here.