War Stories: The Experiences of Women in the Second World War

1

In the Beginning

At 10 a.m. on Sunday, 3 September 1939, the BBC told its listeners to stand by for an announcement of ‘national importance’. Every fifteen minutes thereafter, listeners were told that the Prime Minister would make an announcement at 11.15 a.m. Music and a talk on ‘How to make the most of tinned foods’ were broadcast in between.

Finally, an announcer declared, ‘This is London. You will now hear a statement from the Prime Minister.’ After a pause, Neville Chamberlain intoned in a flat, doom-laden voice:

I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street. This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany.

His speech concluded:

Now, may God bless you all and may he defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting against, brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution. And against them I am certain that right will prevail.

Winston Churchill, who was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty that same day, pronounced with a typically orotund flourish in the Commons the next day:

This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man.

Now, for both men, the gloves were off. No need for the diplomatic niceties like ‘Herr Hitler’, which they had used before – they were now free to unequivocally condemn a malevolent dictator.

After this broadcast, a series of short, official announcements were made. These included a prohibition on the blowing of whistles and the blaring of horns as they might be confused with air-raid warnings.

Minutes after the declaration of war, huge numbers of people stood outside their front doors looking up at the cloudless blue sky, expecting German bombers to appear overhead at any moment. Others stayed inside and filled baths and basins with water to tackle the expected incendiary bombs, while some hastily nailed blankets over their windows in preparation for the expected gas attack.

Then, at 11.50 a.m., an air-raid warning sounded in London, followed soon after by the ‘All Clear’. It was later disclosed that an over-eager spotter had seen a plane in the sky just off the south coast at 11.30 a.m. and assumed, wrongly, that it was an incoming German bomber. In fact, it was a French transport plane en route to London. One unnamed person died of heart failure as a result of this false alarm, the very first person to die in the war.

It was also on the very first day of the war that the RAF ‘bombed’ Germany, although there was no TNT involved, only paper. A total of 6 million propaganda leaflets were dropped, weighing a total of 13 tons. Among many claims made in the leaflet was the ‘fact’ that ‘The German people do not have the means to sustain protracted warfare. You are on the verge of bankruptcy!’ The leaflets reportedly kept the German civilian population well stocked in toilet paper for many months.

It would be totally wrong, however, to think that the declaration of war came out of the blue. In fact, the lead-up to hostilities was protracted, uncertain and stressful. It was a period when, either through blind optimism or self-delusion, many people refused to believe that Britain could be going to war again, less than twenty-one years after the conclusion of the First World War. And most galling of all, the next war was going to be fought against the same enemy.

COUNTDOWN TO WAR

As early as 1932, the Deputy Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, pessimistically pronounced, ‘I think it is well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through.’ Baldwin, by this time, knew that the so-called German Air Sports Association (Deutscher Luftsportverband) had morphed into the Luftwaffe (literally ‘air weapon’) and was training pilots in Russia of all places.

Eleanor Frost kept a diary for most of the war. Research shows that she was a very wealthy widow living with her daughter and elderly mother in Leigh Woods, a leafy suburb of Bristol. Eleanor Frost’s wealth came from the family business, Frost & Reed: ‘Art dealers since 1808 with offices and galleries in London’s Mayfair and New York’. To confirm the source of her considerable wealth, Eleanor wrote in her diary on 8 September 1939, ‘The Annual General Meeting of Frost & Reed today – a dividend of 5% on ordinary shares. Not bad considering the alarms and excursions of the last year.’

Bridge House in Leigh Woods, Bristol, where Eleanor Frost, her mother and daughter and many servants, lived for most of the war.

On 17 January 1938, Eleanor wrote:

Today I went to the first class of the Anti-Air Raid Course given for Clifton women. Miss Hall-Houghton is the moving spirit. She painted a grim picture of the possible suddenness and awfulness of war from the air. Well, if we all know all we can, it will make us an instructed public, less liable to panic and possibly useful.

Significantly, this was written more than a year and a half before the declaration of war.

On 10 February, she wrote, ‘Saw A Star is Born. Went as a relief from these Gas Air Raid Precaution lectures and gas mask drill which seem a bit of a strain whilst I am also having my teeth out – two together.’

On 28 March she was much more optimistic about the political developments that day: ‘The international situation seems immensely improved. In Mr Chamberlain’s speech he shows great statesmanship, courage with caution, tenacity of purpose with a sense of appropriate firmness.’

Chamberlain, at this time, dominated the political stage in Britain. With his grizzled moustache, prominent teeth and quaintly reassuring starched wing collar, he was determined to pursue a policy of appeasement with Germany. But he was probably not just an out-of-touch old gentleman with a furled umbrella who, in Harold Nicolson’s words, ‘flew off to see Hitler with the bright faithfulness of a curate entering a pub for the first time’. He made the judgement that Britain had to buy time, however humiliating this policy might be.

From here on, preparations for war gathered pace. The people of Bristol, the author’s home city, were advised to identify cellars, basements, church crypts, tunnels and caves suitable for use as air-raid shelters. In addition, public shelters were also built in many cities. Many people, however, distrusted these and chose to use them as rubbish dumps or public toilets. They very soon smelt strongly of urine.

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Of all the women I interviewed who were old enough to remember this period, most spoke of dreading another war and their desperation to keep the peace. Hazel Bray, from Ashburton in south Devon, who was born in 1920, was warned by her father about the threat of war very early on:

He’d been a sailor in the Royal Navy in the First World War. But he died young, in 1932, when I was only 12. But I’ll always remember what he said to me just before he died, ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to live through another war. I won’t, but you will’. And that was nearly nine years before war was declared!

Hazel Bray.

The pseudonymous diaries of another Bristol woman, who I will call ‘HJF’ to preserve her anonymity, give telling insights into what women were thinking, doing and feeling at this time. She wrote in the introduction to her diary, ‘To the generation of women yet to come, I offer this my diary, which gives some slight insight of how a very ordinary Bristol housewife lived in the years 1938 to 1945.’

On 26 August 1938, she wrote, ‘The news this evening seems brighter. I think we shall all be so thankful to get something definite. The uncertainty is killing.’

Then on 14 September:

War seems inevitable. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is flying to see Hitler. Has the great British nation to wait upon an upstart like him? Where are our great men of the Victorian era? Made some more jelly. In case of war I must stock my larder with all the preserves I can make.

Almost two weeks later, on 27 September:

N. came. He was in very low spirits as he fears war is coming. He certainly knows its horrors as he was gassed in the last one. We listened to Mr Chamberlain on the wireless making every effort for peace.

This was the so-called Munich Agreement, when Chamberlain flew to Germany three times in two weeks for talks with Adolf Hitler. Hitler, in contrast, never once visited Britain. Chamberlain finally returned from Munich with a piece of white paper, which he waved theatrically, and pronounced that it meant ‘Peace for our time’. He was then driven straight from Heston Airport to Buckingham Palace and five minutes later, he and his wife were standing on the balcony, waving, with the king and queen by their side – an unprecedented honour for two ‘commoners’.

But Chamberlain’s return wasn’t universally well received. Some 15,000 people protested against the agreement in Trafalgar Square on 1 October, and one Labour politician, Hugh Dalton, suggested that the piece of paper that Chamberlain was waving was ‘torn from the pages of Mein Kampf’.

While this was happening in London, Hazel Bray was at a teacher-training college in Salisbury:

I remember the principal of the college interrupted Vespers to announce to all of us that, as a result of Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler, there wasn’t going to be a war after all. But I didn’t believe her. I knew we were just buying time, a year perhaps, before war was declared. It was inevitable.

Several other women referred to the Munich Agreement. Diana England, for example, said:

My mother was so delighted when Chamberlain came back from Munich and proclaimed ‘Peace in our time!’ that she gave each of her three children a book – the Oxford Book of English Poetry. But she also said that, as much as she disliked Hitler, she detested ‘those frightful Bolsheviks even more’.

Diana’s mother had good reason to be worried about the possibility of a second war against Germany. Her husband had been wounded twice in the First World War, had a disfiguring facial wound and a piece of shrapnel buried in his stomach.

Joan Poole had this to say:

I didn’t really believe that it would come to war. We believed that Chamberlain would find a way of averting it. And we were right, for a time at least. And anyway, I don’t think I worried too much about things like war. Like most girls of my age, I was far more interested in make-up and having a good time.

Dr Mary Jones was a medical student at the time:

During the 1930s I was fully aware that a war was probably imminent – that there was trouble ahead. But when Mr Chamberlain came home from Munich, I thought, like a lot of other foolish people, that that would be the end of it. But, of course, it wasn’t.

On 30 September, HJF wrote:

Daddy arrived home at 4 a.m. from Fry’s factory. He says he was on a machine that fixes bands on the gas masks … Is this war, and will our lives be constantly upset like this? [‘Daddy’ was the name HJF always used to refer to her husband.]

Another piece of forward planning was the possible evacuation of children. On 1 October HJF wrote:

Replied to Jean’s [her daughter] Headmistress’s leaflet re. sending children away from Bristol should war break out. We decided as Jean was nearly 14 years of age and she does not want to leave, to let this question rest for the time being.

As it turned out, Jean never was evacuated and, as a much-loved only child, she is often referred to in HJF’s diaries.

Diana England was sent away to boarding school at a young age and there, she admitted:

I was very cocooned, with very little contact with the outside world. We weren’t even allowed to walk into the local village or listen to the wireless so I really knew very little about the impending war. But I do remember that my headmistress mentioned to us girls that she’d visited Germany during the school holidays and had been alarmed at the number of German military planes she saw.

Ruby Spragg was a working-class girl from central Bristol:

My father, Harry Davis, had been in the regular army for twenty-five years. He was always a military man who marched rather than walked. Anyway, after the First World War, he served in the British Army of Occupation and this convinced him that they would ‘rise again’. And he was right, of course. But he also used to say to me, ‘No one will ever beat us at war and they’ll pay for it if they try.’ In fact, he used to regularly go on and on about it to my mother in the kitchen. I don’t think she listened half the time. She just used to get on with her cooking or the washing up.

Another thing I remember – when Hitler came to power, my father always referred to him as ‘that bloody little corporal’. He himself had been a regimental sergeant major so he knew all about ranks in the army.

As a young girl, I suppose I listened to my father and believed what he said, especially when he said, ‘The Germans will never invade this country. And they’d never defeat us. Never!’

Joan Fell, from Exmouth in Devon, said:

In 1938 I was at school and I remember at the time there were quite a few German boys in Exmouth, supposedly on holiday. I met some of them and they were friendly and polite, but I wonder now whether they’d been sent to snoop around the place – there was, after all, an important Marines base just up the road at Lympstone.

This anxiety was echoed by Hazel Bray:

We had two Geography teachers, a husband and wife, Mr and Mrs Peddoe. They weren’t English, they came from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Anyway, we didn’t like them, and one day, in the middle of a Geography lesson, a Military Police officer came into our class and spoke to the Peddoes and then ordered two military policemen to put handcuffs on them and arrest them. It was the last we saw of them. We assumed they must have been spies and as a result they were probably shot. I can’t say we were sorry.

Like Joan Fell, Diana England also came into contact with young Germans of her own age:

We had some German girls at our school for a term. They spoke extremely good English I remember, and one of them, her name was Griselda, said to me when we were talking about the possibility of war, ‘I don’t want to fight you, Diana.’ She then offered to shake my hand and I let her.

Rose Jennings was born in 1920 and had this to say:

Towards the end of the 1930s, the talk was almost always of the imminent war, of how it was bound to come in the end. My father was a Rotarian and some German Rotarians came to stay with us and they told us about what it was like living under Hitler. When Chamberlain came back from Munich, I was convinced that it hadn’t settled matters, that Hitler wasn’t likely to abide by the terms of their agreement. I think, though, that other members of my family tried to push it to the back of their minds. But I couldn’t and I was the one who measured up our windows for blackout curtains. The rest of my family used to laugh at me, I remember.

Iris Gillard had her own thoughts about the political situation at that time:

I didn’t think war was inevitable. I thought George VI was a wise and interesting man and he might somehow help to prevent it. But then Chamberlain came back from Munich and said, ‘Peace in our time!’ I just thought he was a gullible fool … By that time, I was certain war was coming. As for Hitler, I thought he was a dreadful little man, and in some ways I couldn’t wait for the war to start. The sooner we got rid of him the better!

During this period, HJF wrote frequently in her diary about the imminent war:

3 February 1939: An Air Raid Warden called at 9.30 tonight to try the size of the gas masks we shall require. All of us take a medium size. Please God we shall never use them.

19 March: There was a meeting of the English cabinet last night to consider Romania’s SOS to us. Picked primroses and violets in ‘our lane’ in Banwell.

A week later she first mentioned her interest in getting some sort of job in preparation for the war that now seemed almost inevitable:

27 March: ARP [Air Raid Precautions] asks all women drivers to send in their names for ambulance-driving, if necessary, so sent in mine.

In April, war preparations were becoming more pressing:

14 April: Went to the Whiteladies Picture House to see the ARP film ‘The Warning’, showing what things would be like in the event of war and air raids. Makes me very sad and depressed.

20 April: To an ARP lecture for ambulance drivers. I was given a First Aid Handbook. I do hope they will not expect me to bandage the injured as well as drive the ambulance.

27 April: The ARP lecture on the Circulation of the Blood, First Aid Treatment and wounds by pressure and tourniquet (the latter not to be applied round the neck!) and also on the treatment of fractures. I am getting bewildered!

4 May: Attended a third ARP lecture. Feel that the lifting of the stretcher with another member of the class on it is too heavy for me.

2 July: Had a picnic tea of raspberries and cream at Charterhouse. Listened to Mr Chamberlain on Air Raid Precautions.

A month later, HJF and her family had their last holiday together, on the Scilly Isles:

7 August: We went together to a lecture on Birds and Flower Life in the Islands. Talking to a woman inhabitant there she seemed to dislike England and the English for when the question came up as to whether there was going to be another war she said to me, ‘England makes the war and expects us to send our men to fight for her.’ I was shocked at her attitude.

25 August: I have been notified that I have been listed to serve as an Ambulance Driver at the Bedminster Division depot and that I am to report for duty when a message arrives, should war break out. These are anxious days.

But back to the war preparations of Eleanor Frost:

5 July: We are busy completing our preparations for the ‘civil defence’. The dugout is finished and now it only has to be fitted with the necessary stores and equipment. I am doing this and supervising the month’s supply of food in the house which we are all asked to have. Mother is supervising the effective dark screening of all windows.

On 4 August she wrote succinctly, ‘A quarter of a century since the start of the Great War.’ Later that week, Eleanor went on holiday to Cornwall with her daughter Edith and her elderly mother, staying in a smart hotel overlooking the sea in Polzeath. There was only one problem with the hotel: ‘They are feeding us too much meat and far too little fruit. My inside is barely functioning even with air evacuant.’

She was now closely monitoring the worsening international situation and so, apparently, were some of her fellow guests:

7 August: The crisis has become more and more acute and today about half a dozen people left on that account. I still do not believe it will develop into war.

On 26 August, HJF wrote, ‘The war news is very grave. Hitler’s letter to us is not yet published. Out in car and saw sandbags and sentries outside the Filton aeroplane works.’

It was on this day that many kerbs in central London were being painted white, the twelfth-century stained glass was being removed from Canterbury Cathedral and the National Gallery was closed while its pictures were being taken down, for ‘safe-keeping’ in a quarry in Wales.

27 August: Received another letter saying that I must be prepared for duty, day or night. I bought several tins for storing in the event of war. The news this evening seems brighter. I think we shall all be so thankful to get something definite; the uncertainty is killing.

At the end of August, things were going from bad to worse. On 31 August, Eleanor Frost wrote:

Things look black internationally. Walked to Port Quin and while there the wireless was switched on in a cafe and Edith heard, ‘Consider that the war is inevitable.’ She came back and told me – we both felt firm and calm but awful inside. Determined not to tell Mother until after lunch.

Later, Eleanor added, ‘To our unbounded relief the whole sentence had been "We do not consider" etc.’

On 1 September, she wrote, ‘A gorgeous hot day. But at 1 p.m. came the news that Germany has invaded Poland. People began to leave our hotel in the afternoon and several very late and again early on Saturday morning.’

In fact, German tanks and motorised troops numbering 1.5 million men crashed through the frontier between Germany and Poland at 4.58 that morning.

Eleanor’s diary entry for 2 September reads, ‘It is very empty and quiet in the hotel and on the beach.’ And on 3 September:

We planned to leave at 10.30 but discovered we had a puncture at the last moment. We left ultimately at 11 and reached home at about 6. We arrived to an empty house and had to get food and extemporise ‘dark’ lights, make beds and so on. At 10 p.m. we were all completely tired out.

It’s perhaps curious that this was the day war was finally declared and yet Eleanor makes no mention of the fact.

Meanwhile, HJF was at home in Bristol:

2 September: Ambulance duty. Dreadfully bad weather and came home in complete blackout. Spent some time while on duty making black paper masks with cut slits for head and side lights of cars, according to the new regulation.

She then added ominously, ‘We are still awaiting Hitler’s reply.’ She didn’t have to wait for long.

THE DAY WAR WAS DECLARED

The historical background to the final declaration of war is as follows. On Friday, 1 September, the day Germany invaded Poland, Adolf Hitler broadcast his declaration of war with these words:

The Polish state has refused the peaceful settlement of relations which I desired … In order to put an end to this lunacy I have no other choice than to meet force with force … The German Army will fight the battle for the honour and the vital