A Wartime Christmas E-Book

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 228

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

For those who lived through wartime Christmases, the celebrations during those years had an especially poignant flavour. This unique anthology recreates those times of heartache and brief moments of pleasurable escape and happiness. Share with wartime veterans and their families memories of Christmas under fire; read about the gift of a pig for POWs' dinner from the Japanese emperor and how Glenn Miller's disappearance almost ruined the AEF Christmas show; enjoy ENSA veterans' anecdotes of Christmas concerts in the most awkward situations. From Christmas on the Russian Front, on board ship in heaving seas and a soldier's experiences in Egypt, 'It ain't arf hot' pantomimes and the Archbishop of York's Christmas message in 1940, to an account of life in the Warsaw ghetto, here is a collection of what made Christmas special during the years of the Second World War. Illustrated throughout, A Wartime Christmas showcases the hope, warmth and colour that the occasion inspired during those bleak times.

Leseprobe

Cover image from the Christmas Archives; background texture from istockphoto.com/billnoll

First published 1995

This paperback edition first published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© this compilation, Maria and Andrew Hubert, 1995, 2023

The right of Maria and Andrew Hubert to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 513 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

DEDICATION

We have tried to gather a goodly selection of happy and sad, funny and serious stories, and from as many different backgrounds as possible. The chronological accounts have been interspersed with lighter chapters, looking at aspects on the Kitchen Front, the Home Front, ENSA, and even a ghost story. Sadly, there are a great number of unsung heroes and heroines who have not had their stories told in this volume, and for all the regiments, squadrons, ships’ companies and the civilian groups we have mentioned here, there are so very many more not included. To them, as to those included, and to all war veterans everywhere – we offer this book of wartime Christmas as a tribute to your courage, endurance, humour and faith.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Spend at Christmas!Edward Hulton

from They Tied a Label on my CoatHilda Hollingsworth

Saturday Night ConscriptionNorman Bishop

from Dear Merv – Dear Bill: 1Mervyn Haisman and L.E. Snellgrove

Polish Carols – Symbol of Yearning for HomeJan Sliwinski

Merrily to BethlehemCarol, arranged by Kazik Hubert

Memories of a SurvivorTomasz Hubert

Wot No Christmas Spirit?Ron Williams

Christmas Message – 1939Archbishop of York

A Strange Christmas – 1939

The Ghost of El AgeilaF.G.H. Salusbury

Refugees’ Christmas

Christmas on the Kitchen Front

Christmas on the Home Front

from Dear Merv – Dear Bill: 2Mervyn Haisman and L.E. Snellgrove

from Harvest of MesserschmittsDennis Knight

A Pre-Christmas Present – from Adolf!Arthur Scholey

A Welcome Visitor and the Manchester Blitz

Christmas at BryniauMargaret Maxfield

Food Wasn’t EverythingArnold Kellett

Rommel’s Christmas

Iron Rations and Pyramids

Sand and an Old Umbrella TreeHarry ‘Don’ Turner

Un-Christmassy Headlines

The Fairy Tale of a Mild Winter on the Steppes!

A Right Royal Navy Christmas!

Christmas Patrol

Dreadful Stories

I Remember a Wartime Christmas

from Thank You PadreJoan Clifford

Polar Bears for ChristmasR.A. Rasey

from Winter in the MorningJanina Bauman

from The Woodpecker StoryVivian Jacobs

Reuters’ New Year ReportArthur Oakeshott

Something Awful Every Night: Stories of ENSA

Beethoven’s Fifth with Accompanying Sirens!

Pig Clubs and Heart Attacks

A Ship TorpedoedJ. Roberts

The BellsTrevor Allen

A Christmas Gift from an Emperor

Cockney Humour

Tadeusz Szumowski’s Wigilia

Peace on EarthNina Mansell

Acknowledgements

Introduction

HOW WARTIME CHRISTMAS CAME TO BE WRITTEN

My late wife Maria Hubert von Staufer (née Myra Turner 15 October 1945–21 September 2007) had a background of strong Yorkshire Christmas traditions when I met and married her. I brought my own Polish Christmas customs with me, created by my remarkable mother Angela (née Oakeshott, 24 August 1923–21 March 2022) to cheer up my very distressed and gloomy father Tomek (17 September 1921–1 January 2006), whose last Polish Christmas had been spent singing Christmas carols to drown out the sounds of torture and interrogation by the Russians who had invaded his part of Poland on his 18th birthday in September 1939.

This amalgamation of two cherished and very different traditions spawned ‘The Christmas Archives’, which ran very successfully creating exhibitions, TV and film sets and a lot of visual material for advertising use throughout the 1980s.

The whole archive was sold to the Japanese in 1991, with our then 19-year-old daughter Emma to act as conservator and consultant.

Maria’s attention then turned to collecting memories for possible publication and we completed Monmouthshire Christmas for Sutton Publishing (now The History Press) in 1994.

It was in April 1995 that I realised we were rapidly approaching the fiftieth anniversary of VE day and I suggested that we write A Wartime Christmas for publication that year. The publisher was concerned that the deadline was too tight. It nearly was. Fortunately, I had a huge network of Second World War veterans, who then led to others, with memories to share. I made initial contact and Maria charmed them, then we both beavered away on our word processors. The first edition was the result and it led to a Radio 4 programme , Christmas Under Fire.

There were two incidents that happened coincidentally, too late to be recorded in the original book.

The first was that my father, the sole survivor in 1995, who flew operationally with 317 (Polish) Squadron on 1 January 1945, when the Luftwaffe mounted the all-or-nothing operation ‘Bodenplatte’, was invited to Gent in Belgium, where he had been based that fateful day. He was credited at the time with shooting down one Focke Wulf 190 and damaging another (years later we learned it had crashed and the pilot survived).

By way of a memorial celebration for all the Polish airmen who flew and died that day, he was invited to fly a Cessna 150 Aerobat. As we learned much later, he gave a truly terrifying aerobatic display, landing with a big grin on his face to announce he hadn’t flown a plane since the war! That truth was hushed up only to emerge some time later.

The other even more intriguing story was when Maria went to open the Christmas display at Kanemori Shosen in Hakodate Japan. The owner, Tsunesaburo Watanabe, was fascinated by Christmas and the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Some time later, when visiting us in the UK, he let slip that he saw a Gilbert and Sullivan Christmas concert (The Mikado, no less!) put on by British POWs in a prison camp. It wasn’t until after Watanabe had died that I heard on Radio 4 recollections of such a concert where one of the POW camp officers named Watanabe arranged for costumes and props to be sent from Japan!

This seems too much of a coincidence.

I’d like to think that somewhere that my late wife and Watanabe are smiling down on this new edition.

Christmas does indeed work its own magic, even in the most desperate of circumstances.

NB, Some of the stories found in the original printing have been modified in the light of more recent research. Memories and official records don’t always match and it takes a fine judgement deciding where the modern equivalent of the wartime censor’s blue crayon should be employed.

SPEND AT CHRISTMAS!

EDWARD HULTON

In Picture Post (9 December 1939), the editor, Edward Hulton, exhorted people to spend, and then spend some more, for the war effort. As we are usually a little guilty about all the money we spend at Christmas, this must have provided people with the perfect excuse to do just that. One wonders, however, just how many ordinary folk had money spare that Christmas!

It is our duty to spend – either on Savings Certificates or ordinary goods. There must be no idle ‘talents’. And a long face never won a war.

What shall we do about Christmas? This is the season when we are usually thinking about making those purchases, which may be somewhat pointless, are often a vexation of spirit, but are nevertheless a great stimulus to trade. In the present circumstances many people are asking, ought we celebrate Christmas at all? There can be no doubt that this is the very year when we should think, not less, but more about Christmas – not only as an escape from the horrors of war, but as a remembrance of nobler ideals … In being cheerful and gay we are paying our tribute to life itself, which must go on, and which, after all, is what man is fighting for … Let us hope that women will make the season an excuse to be somewhat more decorative.

Official advertisement for War Bonds and National Savings Certificates – even as Christmas presents these released money for the war effort in return for a guaranteed profit. Good in the 1940s; not so good for those who hung on into the 1980s! (Christmas Archives)

Nowhere do we show a greater lack of proportion than in our spending habits. For the very poor there is no dilemma. But in normal times most of us have some surplus. Spending wisely is the one thing our parents never teach us. The whole subject of money is more taboo than sex … Let us seize this season to think again. We may spend on the new National Savings Certificates (and War Bonds), or on ordinary purchases. But no money must be left idle.

And if we are merry at Christmas, we shall be showing the Nazis that we are winning the war of nerves, and maintaining the gallant spirit which has overcome the adversities which are no novelty to the very windswept isle.

from

THEY TIED A LABEL ON MY COAT

HILDA HOLLINGSWORTH

Miss Hollingsworth’s account of her own evacuation during the Second World War tells of four very different Christmases. Propaganda always described those children who had found homes better than their own, happy times filled with sunshine and haymaking and full creamy milk, and snow and presents better than anything Mum could afford. But much of the reality went unrecorded, except in books such as this one. Here is an extract of Hilda’s first Christmas – the only really happy one – where the two sisters awake to find that, although Mum may not have come, Santa had.

‘’Ild, ’Ild, Wake up! ’E’s bin! Santa’s bin! Come an’ feel …’

Auntie had said we could switch on the light. Our woolly stockings bulged temptingly. Sticking out of the top of each was a celluloid doll with feathers stuck around waist and head. I delved inside. A rolled sheet of transfers. Picture colouring book. Paints, with names like Vermillion, Indigo and Yellow Ochre. A round wooden pillbox full of hundreds and thousands. A whip and top. Chocolate medal. A bright new penny. Then the apple and orange that today were just usual, and right deep inside the toe the three nuts which Mum always called Faith, ’Ope and Charity. I never knew why.

Evacuee children making the best of the situation at a London council party. (Christmas Archives)

I picked up the metal canister. It was disappointing. There was nothing inside it. I turned it upside down. ‘Gas Mask Container’ said the label. I laid it beside the woolly stocking. The real treasure was the other one: the coarse white net stocking edged with frilly crêpe paper. Its wonders had delighted us year after year. Rolled cardboard games of Ludo and Snakes-and-Ladders. A kazoo. A feathered streamer that squeaked and tickled. A cardboard trumpet and a tin frog clicker. A tin whistle. A big coloured picture of Father Christmas. A game of five-stones that we never played because it hurt our hands. A net-covered silver paper ball on thin elastic; I really liked that. Tiny tin scales with two miniature sweet jars full of tiny sweets to weigh on them. A box of coloured chalks. Another delight: Japanese water flowers. I think these were always my favourite because I never did get over the wonder of the little round wood shavings that opened and bloomed instantly in a glass of water.

The fat little flicker book. I flicked the pages and saw matchstick men running, jumping, swinging whilst matchstick ladies pushed prams, danced and skipped. It was marvellous: a sort of moving story that you could only see, never hear. Next came a paper fan and then a peashooter, the dried peas in a twist of paper. Mum had always taken this delight away; I wondered if Auntie would.

We were near the end now. A card of coloured Plasticine, and – deep in the toe – a little sorbo ball. It was the same every year. Nothing ever changed. We didn’t know it ever would. So we now sat facing one another wondering what to do next. The transfers. We each made a careful wet-spit patch on our forearm and applied the picture – mine was a galleon, Pat’s a stagecoach – face down. Then with much licking, we managed to wet it into position. Now we had to count to fifty. Pat waited to see me peel back the first corner. I held my breath, peeling slowly … watching the bright damp shiny colours miraculously choosing to stay on my waiting arm … Yippee! I’d got the whole picture first time! …

Roast pork and plum pudding; Auntie’s house was full of lovely smells – smells of a new part of Christmas that Auntie knew about. Our own Christmas smell was … well, I hadn’t really realized we had one just like Auntie’s, till I was helping arrange her bowl of nuts and fruit and crystallized figs. A smell from the fruit bowl has a Christmas smell … Oranges! Soon all three of us were sniffing at them. Auntie laughed. ‘Oh have one! But don’t spoil your dinners.’ That’s what was worrying me too. And I don’t suppose Auntie ever knew that we really peeled our oranges just to get the smell.

SATURDAY NIGHT CONSCRIPTION

NORMAN BISHOP

Norman Bishop, now in his seventies, amuses his customers with stories of how he used to ‘… travel in ladies’ underwear’, or how he met his wife in the blackout, so she didn’t know what she was getting. His war was spent with anti-aircraft batteries in South Wales.

I went off to war by accident. As a Territorial Army volunteer, I took leave from my office for a fortnight’s camp at Manorbier in South Wales. While I was away, war was declared, and I was now operational, so my fortnight’s leave from the office lasted for six years!

When I began active service, the equipment and clothing was very substandard. Being with the artillery, I found myself wearing 1914–18 vintage spurs and puttees! We had no proper facilities at all; we all camped under canvas, shaving in the open air. Not much fun in Newport with winter looming!

Christmases were such that the ‘Militia Men’ (as such conscriptees were known until 1941), would have taken any form of Christmas celebration, as long as it was alcoholic. Once the real war got under way, it was very important to keep morale up, and efforts were made to entertain the anti-aircraft gun crews.

The major problem was one of boredom. Although I was ultimately responsible for gun emplacements around Barry, Cardiff and Newport, which meant that on many nights there was ‘traffic’ for us, particularly with bombers overflying from France via Wales to the Mersey, individual gun emplacements could be on stand-by for many hours in the damp and cold, without any action.

Our HQ and ops room had a couple of local moves, eventually fetching up at a requisitioned large house – Penylan Court in Cardiff. The HQ coordinated the anti-aircraft fire from 3.7 in and 4.5 in guns which were mounted by twos, together with a complicated sighting device known as a predictor, in emplacements which could be moved around in order to confuse enemy planners.

By 1943, my job comprised standing behind a glass screen, plotting aircraft movements which were reported by RDF (radio direction finding, later called radar), and writing any relevant information such as height and size in mirror writing – a skill that was quickly learned.

Vital though my job undoubtedly was, I was not promoted above bombardier, as it was thought that the relative comfort of HQ with its heating, and ATS girls, were compensation enough, for the former rigours of life under canvas. I was encouraged, however, to tinkle the old ivories, in order to assist the general war effort, and there was no objection to swapping duties with others in order to cover special events.

Christmas was one of those special events. There was unfortunately one minor hitch. We had made up a combo using the available talent, but we had no saxophonist. In those days, a saxophonist was vital for any dance band worthy of the name, and Christmas without a dance, wasn’t worth celebrating.

This problem was circumvented by the addition of a ‘civvie’ saxophonist, who found himself temporarily conscripted on Saturday nights, high days and holidays.

So for a number of years, my service Christmas consisted of wangling exchanges for various duties, having Christmas dinner served by the officers (an old army tradition), and laying on some sort of music for a dance in the evening, complete with willing civilian. As for decorations, there were few. The important thing was to get the music going, keep the drinking and conversation good natured, and allow everyone to let their hair down, because tomorrow the war would still be waiting for them.

from

DEAR MERV – DEAR BILL: 1

MERVYN HAISMAN AND L.E. SNELLGROVE

Two schoolboy friends from south-east London, torn apart by the mass evacuations in 1939, created a valuable social document in their three-year correspondence. Here we reproduce their Christmas letters.

3 December 1939 – … We’ve been away three months now and I’m beginning to really miss Mum and Dad. Of course I can’t tell them that, as it would only upset them. I expect you’ll be having one of your big family Christmas parties as usual. They say we should have plenty of snow down here, so at least that’s something to look forward to. Write soon. Your friend, Merv.

2 January 1940 – Dear Merv, Happy New Year old bean! I told Roberts that it was so long since I’d last seen you, I’d begun to forget what you looked like. He reckoned I was very, very lucky!

Did you have a good Christmas? I must say I felt sorry for you for the first time since the war began, not being at home and all that. Just before Christmas I popped around to Kenward Road to give your mum and dad a Christmas card. I think they are missing you too, although they don’t actually say so. They said you didn’t write very often. I hadn’t the heart to tell them you were too busy sending me war communiqués. Which reminds me, thanks for the warning about Alma. I think her backside is better now, she certainly wiggles it a lot!

It’s freezing cold here, but we had a good family Christmas at my Aunt Ada’s house in Plumstead. All my strange uncles and aunts were there with their children, John, Ken, Ron and Brenda who are great fun. Cousin John was evacuated to Ashford in Kent but he’s back now and will be going to my school. We heard the King’s broadcast about talking to the man at the gate of the year, which went down well. They’ve got copies of it stuck up in Montagu Burton’s window in the High Street.

My grandfather who fought in the Boer War, and Dad who fought in the First World War, get a lot of amusement from the war bulletins on the radio, because the only raids we seem to carry out are not to drop bombs but leaflets telling the Germans to give up. I ask you! This is the army that took us four years to beat last time. Grandad’s favourite bulletin is, ‘A lorry was seen to overturn’. He says they could have done that in the Boer War before aeroplanes were invented.

We played Aunt Ada’s favourite game, Nuts in May, which has a lot of tugging in it and as John and Ken are as big as me, was a lot of fun. All my uncles sat for hours and hours playing cards, then spent just as long arguing over who laid the wrong trump and all that sort of rot. But on Christmas morning I was allowed to go round to the Nag’s Head with the men. Just as we’d started to really enjoy ourselves, Aunt Ada marched in and said dinner was waiting. When I’m grown up no woman’s going to drag me out of a pub.

Dad reckons this ‘phoney war’ as they call it, won’t last much longer and says that when it really does start, it’ll be worse than last time and take six years not four. He says that all we seem to have at the moment is an army of crooners singing, ‘We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried line’. Two of my uncles are young enough to be called up. I wonder if they’ll be with us next Christmas?

Back home, I went on writing my life of Napoleon. I’m up to the Battle of Wagram in 1809, so there’s still a lot to do. The exercise book situation is terrible. At school we’ve only been using sheets of paper. If I tried to smuggle any of it out of school, Haggar would enjoy skinning me alive because he’s already taken a dislike to me. He says I’m big-headed. I know I am but unlike him I’ve got something to be big-headed about. After all, where’s his life of Napoleon? Cheerio, write soon, Bill.

POLISH CAROLS – SYMBOL OF YEARNING FOR HOME

JAN SLIWINSKI

In December 1940 Jan Sliwinski published a book of Polish Christmas carols, the proceeds going to the Polish Red Cross. Polish carols are uniquely different. They have tunes which can be as simple as a nursery rhyme or as complex as a great and glorious oratorio. The task of the carol is, according to an old Polish manuscript, to ‘amuse and lull the Christchild to sleep’. In his dedication Jan Sliwinski remembers the soldiers with tears in their eyes, singing these carols from their very souls all through the long years of the Second World War, as they did when he was in Poland in 1915.

December in Poland can be sometimes very cold. The snow will crunch under your steps, the biting frost will make the firs and pines crack in their branches and the breath of men and animals will steam like boiling water.

I remember such a December in 1915 when we Polish legionaries in the Volhynian forests were standing under the starry sky for the midnight mass. The soldiers’ voices singing carols filled the air with a heavenly warmth and sweetness.

Wherever a Polish carol will be sung, there will be warmth and sweetness …

… These traditional Polish carols are meant to turn the blood of war into the balm of love. British children will sing them for their starving Polish brothers and sisters. May they always be performed for the benefit of children.

For six long war winters the Polish soldier has sung these carols in many foreign lands and found comfort in them. The Polish carol has become the unacknowledged symbol of the exile’s yearning for home.

MERRILY TO BETHLEHEM

A seventeenth-century folktune arranged by Kazik Hubert.

MEMORIES OF A SURVIVOR

TOMASZ HUBERT

Tomasz Hubert is one of life’s survivors. He has survived Siberia, starvation, typhus, plane crashes, flak, dogfights, car crashes, motorcycle crashes, fractured skulls (note the plural), meningitis and a stroke. Apart from gout and angina, he leads a normal life (if indeed his life has ever been normal).

Polish Christmases are always a serious matter of tradition. Preparations in a Polish household before the war always went on for weeks. The Polish materfamilias had a great amount of baking, pickling, salting and provisioning to do. There always would have been help from servants and daughters to make sure that everything from the barszcz (a festive beetroot soup) to the makowiec (poppyseed roll) were ready for Christmas Eve. Freshwater fish, particularly carp, formed the basis of Wigilia (the Christmas Eve celebration). Usually such fish were bought alive, as refrigeration had not really arrived in south-eastern Poland. That is how one of my elder sisters came to object upon finding a live pike in the bath!

After my father had died, my mother found it difficult providing everything, especially as I was the only man in the family, and I was a student. A great deal of effort had been made for that final Christmas before the war, and although it was a scene of frantic activity and some worry, it turned out to be a very good humoured affair. None of us had any idea that it would be the last Christmas we would celebrate together.

I was gliding when the order for general mobilization came through on the last day of August 1939. The next day, the war was fully under way by mid-morning. In Lwów we didn’t see very much action, until the Russians took a hand.

As I was a boy scout, I attached myself to a field hospital, which was a very shocking experience for someone approaching his eighteenth birthday. Once all resistance had been crushed, we were all ordered to report to our colleges or places of work, then they arrested us. My father had been a colonel with Marshal Pilsudski, in the fight against the Bolsheviks in 1919–21. I think that made me a marked man, a political prisoner.

That Christmas of 1939 found me in a one-man cell jammed in with so many others that lying down was impossible. We all sang carols to raise our spirits as there was no heating: it was bitterly cold. We were allowed a minuscule sugar ration for nourishment. A doctor who was imprisoned with us was very anxious that we should not do without our ration, as it was the only thing keeping us alive.

Some inmates traded their sugar for tobacco, which was signing their own death warrant in more ways than one. The Russians had allowed one Christmas parcel consisting of about a kilo or more of tobacco but only five packets of cigarette papers! Hunger gnawed at us, and having nothing else to do I took up smoking. The doctor didn’t think that was such a good idea either, but I did keep my sugar ration, and did not tempt anyone else into giving up theirs, by trading my tobacco or cigarette papers. So my Christmas present to myself for 1939 was the habit of smoking.

If I had thought that 1939 was bad, Vorkuta (a miserable unsafe slave mining camp in the Northern Urals) ensured that Christmas 1940 was even worse. I was among only four Poles, totally outnumbered by hundreds of Russian political prisoners, all victims of Stalin’s policies. We were hated by many of the Russian inmates as well as the Bolshevik guards, so Christmas was observed in silent recollection if we got the chance at all.