Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Pitkin
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Life in a wartime house
Das E-Book Life in a Wartime House: 1939-1945 wird angeboten von Pitkin und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
house,wartime,wwii,ww2,world war two,world war ii,world war 2,life in,pitkin guide,pitkin
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 42
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
Pitkin Publishing
The Mill, Brimscombe Port
Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2013
All rights reserved
Text © Pitkin Publishing, 2011, 2013
Written by Brian Williams. The right of the Author, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 978-0-7524-9179-0
MOBI ISBN 978-0-7524-9178-3
Original typesetting by Pitkin Publishing
LIFE IN
A WARTIME
HOUSE
1939–1945
BRIAN WILLIAMS
IMPORTANT DATES
THE WARTIME HOUSE
In the Second World War (1939–45) the people of Britain found their homes in the front line. Cities became targets for bombs, and just as houses and flats were wrecked by fire and high explosive, so too were families broken, hopes dashed, loves lost. For people under daily and nightly stress, home became a refuge and a rallying point; their homes were what they were fighting to protect. The war swept away some old barriers: united in a common cause, people mingled more freely, spoke to neighbours, helped passers-by and welcomed strangers into their homes – as refugees, evacuees, bomb-victims, or passing acquaintances in need of a sit-down and a cup of tea. At home everyone got used to ‘going without’ and the domestic battlefield was littered with the munitions of a new kind of war: air-raid shelters, blackout curtains, ration books, stirrup pumps, gas masks, cold dinners, chilly baths, hand-knitted socks, pig bins, Utility furniture and Woolton pie.
When in 1945 houses across Britain were hung with flags to celebrate victory, people could see only too clearly the damage that six years of war had wrought, with gaping holes where streets and homes once stood. In the heady days of celebration, people dreamed of new towns and streets, new homes in a brave new world. The most optimistic dreams were unrealized, but the landscape of Britain today reflects decisions taken by post-war planners, faced with the challenge of rebuilding a nation for which the wartime house had become a symbol of its people’s endurance under fire.
SIRENS SOUND
In March 1938 Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare broadcast to Britain. ‘If the emergency arose, I know you would come in your hundreds of thousands,’ he intoned, calling for volunteers to become air-raid wardens. His appeal at first attracted little response. It was only 20 years since the end of the Great War, ‘the war to end wars’, when the victors had spoken of a new world harmony and ‘homes for heroes’. Yet the 1920s and 1930s had brought only an uneasy peace, the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany. People were not ready for another war.
By 1938, with the worst of the world economic recession over, factories were busy again and housebuilding was booming. More than 4 million new homes had been built since the First World War; in 1938 a couple setting up home could buy a suburban semi-detached house for under £600, taking a mortgage with a building society. Councils were building homes for rent. The London County Council had 86,000 such homes and nearly 400,000 tenants, on estates such as Becontree in Essex (120,000 people in 1939), and Downham in south-east London, which for its 29,000 residents had just one cinema and one pub.
Rows of new private homes sprawled onto green fields and along stretches of coast. The semi-detached homes and bungalows irritated ‘progressive’ architects; commercial builders and most buyers shunned ‘modernist’ homes (functional, undecorated and open-plan) in favour of mock-Tudor (or mock something else) with brick walls, pitched tiled roofs, bay windows with wooden frames, glass-panelled front doors, small gardens and garages. To their owners, these homes offered a mix of uniformity and individuality. The ‘semi’ was compact: unlike many a Victorian town house it had no rooms for servants – only the rich could still afford maids and cooks. Smaller still were older terraced houses and workers’ cottages, home to millions in town and country; some pre-1914 homes lacked inside toilets and bathrooms, and had gaslight rather than electricity, but the worst of the 19th-century slums had been replaced by council houses and flats.
