HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-09-28T11:13:53.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/tag/ww2-wartime-britain/feed/atom HistoryExtra <![CDATA[D-Day could have ended in disaster – but one Scottish hero changed everything]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-a-weatherman-really-save-d-day-from-disaster-how-5-forecasts-changed-the-course-of-history/ 2026-09-28T11:13:53.000Z 2026-09-21T15:00:26.000Z 1. A national warning
A ruinous storm in 1859 gives rise to the Shipping Forecast
On 25–26 October 1859, the most severe storm to hit the Irish Sea in the 19th century raged. “The wind screamed like a living thing,” was how one witness described a night when winds reached hurricane force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. The storm took 800 lives and 133 ships. As it progressed, twice as many people were lost at sea around the British Isles than in the whole of the previous year. Yet out of the devastation was born one of the most significant innovations in the history of meteorology.
The weather event was dubbed the Royal Charter Storm after a famous steam clipper. On the last leg of a journey from Melbourne to Liverpool, Royal Charter was driven ashore on the north coast of Anglesey with the loss of around 460 lives, including all the women and children aboard. In the era of the Australian gold rush, a cargo of gold insured for the equivalent of £35m in today’s money was also lost. There were only 40 survivors, most of whom owed their lives to the heroism of Maltese sailor Joseph Rogers, who managed to get ashore with a rope. The disaster remains the highest loss of life in any single shipwreck on the Welsh coast.
Unsurprisingly, given the death toll, public attention soon focused on the need to prevent a similar tragedy. Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy, founder of the Meteorological Office, which had been collecting observations from around the British coastline since 1854, believed his department could provide this service.
FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle on the circumnavigation that helped shape Charles Darwin’s thinking, was an experienced mariner who understood how to forecast changes in the weather based on observations of pressure, wind speed and direction. Analysing the Royal Charter gale and others, he proved that weather observations could be obtained using the new electric telegraph and undersea cables, creating the ability to forecast poor weather. Along with new weather forecasts, he proposed a national storm warning system.
A first warning was issued on 6 February 1861. It read: “Caution: Gale threatening from south-west and then northward. Show signal drum.” The warnings used a combination of canvas cone and drum shapes by day and lights by night, which were hoisted on a staff to warn ships of an approaching gale.
Yet not everyone took heed. On 9 February, a severe storm struck the north-east coast of England. Around 200 vessels, which had put to sea despite the warning, were lost. The Whitby lifeboat capsized with the loss of all but one of the crew during its sixth rescue.
However, further warnings were heeded and the number of lives lost around Britain fell by about a third. The reliability of FitzRoy’s methods was such that Queen Victoria requested weather forecasts before sailing to her retreat on the Isle of Wight. The warning system, believed to be the world’s oldest national forecast service, is now known as the Shipping Forecast.
2. Battlefield intelligence
Meteorologists power British advances at Passchendaele in 1917
The reply was unequivocal bordering on tetchy when the Meteorological Office offered its assistance to the military in 1914. “The Army does not go to war with umbrellas,” noted the War Office. But after disastrous losses in the air, artillery misfires and the introduction of gas warfare, attitudes changed. The Meteorological Field Service, universally known as Meteor RE, was established in 1915 and operated from the British Expeditionary Force General Headquarters at Montreuil, France.
Meteor initially provided frontline warnings when conditions were potentially suitable for the deployment of poison gas by either side, or when observations could be made from balloons to improve the accuracy of artillery. Later, aircraft of the Meteor Reconnaissance Flight improved the quality of these observations and provided forecasts for the fledgling Royal Flying Corps (RFC).
But forecasting really came to the fore towards the end of the battle of the Somme in 1916. Engaged in a conflict of static trench warfare in waterlogged terrain and with winter approaching, commanders realised that an understanding of expected weather conditions had to play a key part in military planning.
The earliest known operational military forecast provided by the Met Office was written by the British meteorologist Major Ernest Gold on 24 October 1916. Soon the forecasts included charts and a selection of observations. At first, the charts were hand-drawn, which limited their production and distribution. However, their value became so evident that ‘clay copiers’ were introduced, enabling them to be shared far more widely.
This enhanced technology truly came into its own during the battle of Passchendaele – the opening stages of which were fought in exceptionally wet weather. In Ypres across the 31 days of August 1917, 127mm of rain tumbled from the skies, around 60mm more than average. With trenches immediately filling with water and parts of the battlefield turned to swamp, combat operations were severely compromised.
When the weather finally improved in late September and October, the British were ready to strike, thanks, in part, to the Met Office’s forecasts. The drier weather of September hardened the ground and brought early morning mists, which gave cover to advancing British infantry. When the mists cleared during the morning, German counter-attack formations were revealed to air and ground reconnaissance.
Armed with this intelligence, the British were able to launch offensives at the Menin Road Ridge (20–25 September), Polygon Wood (26 September–3 October) and Broodseinde (4 October). Together, these engagements led to British possession of the strategically important ridge east of Ypres – before the rain returned in October.
Ernest Gold’s diary includes notes from meetings and telephone calls with General Plumer, commander of the Second Army, and his chief of staff, General Harrington, warning them of deteriorating weather. Perhaps the British Army could fight the war with umbrellas, after all.
- Read more | The First World War’s deadliest battle was stalling, but everything changed when Little Willie arrived
3. A storm before D-Day
The Met Office saves thousands of soldiers’ lives in 1944
After long months of preparation, the Allied invasion of western Europe was set for 5 June 1944. The only thing that could delay D-Day was bad weather.
Timing was crucial. The invasion had to coincide with the Soviet summer offensive in the east to ensure maximum pressure on German resources. But moon and tide conditions were favourable on only three days: 5, 6 and 7 June. The odds of even broadly acceptable weather were at least 13-1. The requirement for a full moon at the same time as the desired weather roughly trebled the odds.
Enter Dr James Stagg. He was the Met Office official charged with negotiating the meteorological minefield that confronted the Allies in the nerve-shredding countdown to D-Day. Stagg’s job was to bring together the differing perspectives of meteorologists from the US Air Force, UK Met Office and Admiralty in order to provide accurate forecasts to General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. It was, to put it mildly, a fiendishly difficult job brief.
In terms of data, the Allies had a significant advantage. By June 1944, German forces had not only been pushed back in the air and at sea, they had largely failed to crack Allied codes. This meant that German forecasters likely lacked critical weather observations from the Atlantic. The chief meteorologist of the German 3 Air Fleet advised of poor weather conditions on 6 June. German commanders decided not to trigger their warning system, which had been designed to alert troops defending Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Atlantic Wall to potential invasion. Reassured, Rommel himself returned to Germany for his wife’s birthday party.
Thanks to the work of the Enigma codebreakers at Bletchley Park, Allied forecasters had access to all of the German weather observations. But that didn’t mean they could agree on what the weather would bring. Initially, the American team strongly supported a favourable forecast for 5 June but the Met Office and Admiralty believed the weather would be bad. Following significant disagreements, Stagg briefed Eisenhower to expect poor conditions on the French coast – and so the invasion was postponed. The forecast was correct and thousands of lives were saved. Stagg was now under intense pressure to find a weather window on 6 or 7 June. In his diary, he wrote: “I am now getting rather stunned, it is all a nightmare.”
On 4 June, observations from the Atlantic had begun to indicate a brief window of better weather two days hence. Stagg’s diary again reflected the knife-edge nature of the decision when, responding to praise for his forecast from Admiral Creasy, he wrote: “I wonder. He should wait till he sees how things go.”
As it turned out, conditions were marginal. But finding that elusive weather window enabled Stagg and his forecasters to give the Allies the element of surprise. And as the greatest amphibious assault in history got under way, that element of surprise would prove crucial.
4. Forecasting by numbers
In 1965, meteorology enters the computer age
As a pacifist who drove ambulances during the First World War, Lewis Fry Richardson spent his breaks working out how to use mathematical equations in meteorology. Published in 1922, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process was years ahead of its time as it showed how to use mathematics and physics to predict the weather from a starting set of observations – and how this could be done for more than one location at the same time by splitting up an area into a chequerboard design to create gridded forecasts.
Richardson was the first to propose this form of forecasting, although his work was nearly lost when a draft of it was sent to the rear lines during the battle of Champagne and went missing, only to be unearthed months later under a heap of coal.
He calculated that to complete his forecasts in real-time he would require 64,000 “computors” (people carrying out calculations). Richardson imagined a “forecast factory” rather like a theatre in the round and full of boxes representing the grid squares. Computors in each box carried out calculations and passed on their results, all under the direction of a central conductor keeping everything moving on schedule. Conceptually, he was essentially describing the working of a supercomputer.
Experiments in the 1950s and 1960s built upon Richardson’s work to create a simple mathematical model of the atmosphere. The first operational computer forecast using numerical weather prediction (NWP) arrived on 2 November 1965. The technique enabled the Met Office to produce twice-daily forecasts at three levels in the atmosphere across the North Atlantic and western Europe. Even with today’s more sophisticated forecasts, Richardson’s basic equations are still present.
Using computers to produce weather forecasts dramatically enhanced forecasts to extend further into the future. It gave earlier warning of severe weather events, as well as allowing forecasting for different parts of the globe. Some of the earliest impacts were seen in aviation forecasting. As early as April 1966, NWP showed that deep low pressure would bring strong high-level winds in the mid-Atlantic and heavy snowfall to much of the UK, including London. Pilots and airlines were alerted to the risks associated with these conditions.
Models have constantly improved. When the Falklands War broke out in 1982, meteorologists took just 48 hours to extend their forecasting model into the South Atlantic. These days, the Met Office supercomputer is based in the cloud and can perform 60 quadrillion calculations per second. A far cry from Richardson’s original design, but nevertheless an evolution of his original idea.
5. Hurricane? What hurricane?
In 1987, a BBC forecaster issues an infamous denial
On 15 October 1987, BBC forecaster Michael Fish delivered Britain’s most infamous weather forecast. “Earlier on today,” he said, “a woman rang the BBC and said she’d heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t.” He was correct, but he was talking about a storm over the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean. He said it wouldn’t reach the UK and it didn’t. However, a rapidly deepening area of low pressure from the Bay of Biscay did.
Forecasters had flagged the risk of severe weather days in advance, but early models showed the worst of it staying just south of England. As things played out, though, a clash between unusually warm tropical air and cold polar air forced the warm air upward, creating a deep area of low pressure. The sharp temperature contrast produced a particularly intense weather system.
Several ingredients made the Great Storm so memorable, but its track was probably most significant. Hitting the south coast, it pushed north and east, reaching the Humber estuary at about 5.30am on 16 October. This path included densely populated areas.
Gusts exceeded 100mph, uprooting 15 million trees, tearing roofs from houses, flattening vehicles and severing power across much of southern England. One family in Kent recalled waking as “the house shook as though grabbed by a giant hand”. Roads were blocked, trains halted, entire counties were plunged into chaos and 18 people died. The highest gust recorded over the UK was 115mph at Shoreham in Sussex at 3.10am. A Guardian article, “Mayhem brings London to halt”, described how power supplies, telephone connections and transport infrastructure collapsed. It also reported that Woolworths had sold 25,000 brooms and 50,000 candles as people tried to cope in the aftermath.
The apparent mismatch between the forecasts and the storm’s severity sparked national debate. The Great Storm became a catalyst for investment and improvement in the science, technology and communication of forecasting, which has since transformed the way the UK understands and responds to severe weather.
After 1987, the Met Office created the National Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS) to give government, industry, emergency responders and the public a clear, coordinated system for severe weather alerts. The warnings help people prepare. Back then, alerts were sent by fax and email to emergency services and media outlets for broadcast on TV and radio. Today, most people get forecasts and warnings through apps, social media and the web. Since 2015, storms have been named to provide a shared reference point.
The Great Storm stands as a reminder that accurate forecasting saves lives and that, when the worst weather hits, it enters national folklore. Just ask Michael Fish.
Catherine Ross is the library and archive manager at the Met Office
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Did the Spitfire really save Britain in WW2?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-the-spitfire-really-save-britain-in-ww2/ 2026-09-28T10:15:18.000Z 2026-08-19T15:00:59.000Z On a bright morning in early March 2026, a cluster of excited children crane their necks to trace the source of a rhythmic roar above Duxford. Elsewhere on the windswept airfield, a news camera angled skyward follows the dance of a sleek aircraft across the sky. The plane’s distinctive silhouette, unmistakable even to pupils still at primary school, is that of the Supermarine Spitfire.
It’s not unusual to see Spitfires flying from this airfield, which is home to IWM Duxford, Europe’s largest aviation museum. Summer shows draw hordes of plane enthusiasts to watch displays including simulated dogfights, breathtaking aerobatics and massed formations of Second World War aeroplanes. In 2025, a ‘Big Wing’ of 15 Spitfires and seven Hurricanes awed crowds.
The flight of this lone Spitfire, however, carries particular significance. It marks 90 years since the Supermarine Type 300 first took to the skies on 5 March 1936. After landing the prototype following an eight-minute flight, chief test pilot Joseph ‘Mutt’ Summers is said to have remarked: “Don’t touch anything.” This epithet has become part of Spitfire mythology, interpreted as evidence that the aircraft was perfect from the outset. In truth, the comment was likely more practical than prophetic: Summers simply did not want ground crew adjusting his preferred cockpit configuration.
Whatever the intent, his words augment the aura that now surrounds the aircraft. Indeed, so vaunted is its place in the British public consciousness that it would be easy to assume the Spitfire must have been the decisive weapon of the air war. Yet the reality is that other planes outperformed the fighter in speed, altitude, range and firepower as the Second World War progressed.
All of which raises a question: how did the image of a Spitfire soaring above the white cliffs of Dover become synonymous with Britain’s defiance during the Second World War – even shorthand for the conflict itself?
Back to the drawing board
To answer this question, we need to start by heading to the drawing office of the Southampton-based aircraft manufacturer Supermarine. Established in 1913, the company started out developing flying boats – hence its nautical name. In 1917, it recruited a young engineer called Reginald Joseph Mitchell. ‘RJ’ quickly earned a name for himself at Supermarine, helping the company to collect the prestigious Schneider Trophy – awarded to the winner of a hotly contested seaplane race – no fewer than four times.
In October 1931, the British Air Ministry invited designs for an all-metal fighter aircraft with a high rate of climb, an impressive top speed and good visibility. Mitchell and his team got to work, integrating the various innovations they had developed while building racing seaplanes. Their first design, the Supermarine Type 224 – a gull-wing monoplane – was selected for prototyping but its performance during testing in 1934 was disappointing, and the RAF ordered a complete rethink.
Mitchell’s next attempt was the Type 300, featuring an elliptical wing that balanced strength and speed. The plane was powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 engine that was relatively lightweight yet powerful, and reliable enough to deliver both high speeds and the ability to climb some 760 metres (2,500ft) per minute.
According to test pilot Jeffrey Quill, the prototype had “a great number of imperfections”. The main issue was its narrow stability margins, which made it difficult to handle. Most concerning of all, to the Air Ministry at least, was the predicted cost of building and maintaining the fighter, especially compared with the more economical Hurricane. Had its early flights been less successful, the Air Ministry might have favoured only the Hurricane and jettisoned the new model. Instead, the Type 300’s performance proved compelling enough to secure an order for 310 aircraft in June 1936.
The Spitfire – its name suggested by the chairman of the Vickers company, which owned Supermarine, who called his fiercely spirited daughter his “little spitfire” – entered operational service in 1938. The first aeroplanes were received by 19 Squadron, based at RAF Duxford. William Arbon, a barman in the officers’ mess, recalled that half of the aerodrome’s population turned out to watch the grand arrival of 19 Squadron’s first Spitfire on 4 August. The excitement was palpable as test pilot Jeffrey Quill “did his shoot-up of the ’drome and showed us what the Spitfire could do”.
The open-cockpit Gloster Gauntlets that the squadron had been flying for the previous three years seemed antiquated compared with the Spitfire’s sleek efficiency and power. “There’s no doubt about it,” Quill later recalled, “the Spitfire was a most exciting aeroplane to fly, particularly in the days when the average aeroplane was an old biplane.” Its top speed of 364mph – vastly quicker than the Gauntlet’s 230mph – was achieved with an engine that reminded Quill of a three-litre Bentley. The Spitfire was, to quote Quill, a “pilot’s aircraft”. But in the tense months leading up the outbreak of war, the RAF was far more concerned with fielding enough planes to fight an air war with Germany than it was with the opinions of its white-scarf pilots.
Strengths and weaknesses
For the pilots of 19 Squadron, the arrival of the Spitfires sparked an all-out effort to achieve the 1,000 hours in the air needed to secure the aircraft’s operational status. This intensive flying regimen revealed the Spitfire Mk I’s strengths – notably its manoeuvrability, stability and power – but also its weaknesses. Compared with the 360-degree view from the Gloster’s cockpit, visibility from the Spitfire was restricted – particularly during take-offs and landings – with the long nose obscuring the pilot’s forward view. The plane’s narrow undercarriage made it difficult to taxi, take off and land, too.
Another small hitch quickly discovered by the overworked pilots was just how easy it was to override the warning horn indicating that the landing gear wasn’t fully extended. Several of 19 Squadron’s Spitfires were damaged following belly landings in those early days. On the first public demonstration of the Spitfire at Duxford’s 1939 Empire Air Day, Sergeant JA Potter completely forgot to lower his plane’s undercarriage. The Air Ministry fined him £5 for his carelessness.
Despite this blunder, the Empire Air Days of May 1939, attended by about a million people, garnered huge admiration for the Spitfire. “The streamlined beauty of the [Spitfire’s] efficient sinister lines attracted a great deal of attention from the vast crowd,” said the Cambridge Independent Press and Chronicle following the Duxford Empire Air Day. Even before the Spitfire fired its first shot in anger, it had captured the public imagination.
In May 1940, the British Expeditionary Force faced a crisis in France. Yet Hugh Dowding, chief of RAF Fighter Command, begged the Air Ministry not to send precious fighter squadrons to the continent. He could see what would arrive all too soon: the vicious aerial clash that became known as the Battle of Britain.
Cultural geographer Pyrs Gruffudd has suggested that the vast skies and distinctive light of south‑eastern England have become inextricably linked with the RAF in shared memories of the war. In the popular imagination, it is the Spitfire that soars through these ‘Battle of Britain skies’ – though its Fighter Command stablemate, the Hawker Hurricane, engaged the Luftwaffe in far greater numbers during that pivotal summer.
Of Fighter Command’s 56 squadrons in July 1940, 29 were operating Hurricanes, 19 were flying Spitfires, six had Bristol Blenheims and two had the Boulton Paul Defiant. Unsurprisingly, given the Hurricane’s preponderance among the RAF’s available aeroplanes, 60 per cent of the Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed during the Battle of Britain were shot down by those planes, earning the fighter its reputation as the unsung hero of that aerial conflict. Crucially, the Hurricane was more resilient than the Spitfire. Its Irish-linen-covered structure was easier to repair than the Spitfire’s all-metal skin, with bullet and cannon damage patched up in mere hours.
Dog fight
Geoffrey Page was one of the few pilots to fly both aircraft during the Battle of Britain. He likened the Hurricane to a bulldog, a “tough working animal”, and the Spitfire to a greyhound, “a sleek, fast dog”. While Hurricanes were tasked with intercepting German bomber formations, Spitfires engaged the escorting fighters, their manoeuvrability making them a better match for fast, heavily armed Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters. Both of these fighter planes, guided by the innovative Dowding air defence system, were vital to victory in the summer of 1940. To quote Jeffrey Quill, it’s “absolute rubbish” to suggest the Spitfire won the Battle of Britain alone.
Regardless of the division of labour, the spectacular sight of these lithe planes dogfighting with 109s over England’s south coast cemented the idea of the Spitfire as the hero of the Battle of Britain. Spitfires were mentioned more than twice as frequently as Hurricanes in the British media during the summer of 1940. And it was the sleek silhouette of the Spitfire that darted across propaganda posters and newsreels.
In 1940, minister of aircraft production Lord Beaverbrook harnessed this popularity with the launch of the Spitfire Fund and Pans into Planes aluminium campaign (“We will turn your pots and pans into Spitfires and Hurricanes, Blenheims and Wellingtons,” promised Beaverbrook). Comparable to modern crowdfunding initiatives, these aimed to collect money and materials. To widen the Spitfire Fund’s appeal, the aircraft and its components were priced up, with costs ranging from sixpence for a rivet to £5,000 for a whole Spit.
It was a clever marketing tactic. Every individual, from schoolboy to housewife, could feel as if they had a stake in a front-line fighter aeroplane. Meanwhile, a business, corporation or wealthy individual that donated enough could have their chosen name emblazoned on the side of a Spitfire. Squadrons were filled with planes sporting names ranging from Lloyd Bank’s The Black Horse to Skysweeper, sponsored by Hoover.
An impressive total of £13m was raised through the Spitfire Fund, contributing to the production of more than 2,500 aircraft. Over the course of the war, a significant proportion of the population became invested in the success of the Spitfire not only emotionally but also, crucially, in terms of cold hard cash. In a conflict mythologised as the ‘People’s War’, the Spitfire became the ‘People’s Plane’.
Adaptation and evolution
The Spitfire served across multiple theatres and in diverse roles thanks to its remarkable adaptability. The aircraft’s strong stressed-skin construction and powerful Merlin (later Griffon) engine gave the design flexibility for the evolution of new variants.
In the Mediterranean and north African campaigns, Spitfire Mk Vs fitted with Vokes Air Filters operated from desert airstrips and aircraft carriers. In 1942, Spitfires proved pivotal in securing control of the skies over Malta, a strategically vital stronghold that had been under near-constant Italian and German air attack since 1940. Canadian ace George Beurling scored 27 of his 31 aerial victories defending Malta in a Spitfire Mk Vb.
Although the large expanses of water, tropical climate and threat of the nimble Japanese Mitsubishi Zero mitigated against the Spitfire being used extensively in the Asian war, later Spitfire marks were deployed effectively in India and Burma (now Myanmar). Moreover, the Spitfire’s adaptability extended beyond its fighter duties. During the war, the airframe was modified for photo reconnaissance use and ground attack, and navalised Seafires flew from aircraft carriers. By 1944, Griffon-powered Spitfires were intercepting V1 flying bombs.
However, though the Spitfire was pressed into all manner of roles, it was only a matter of time before an even more versatile aircraft superseded it in many situations. The North American Aviation P-51 Mustang, for example, arrived in the European theatre in 1943. It took over bomber escort duties from the Spitfire, which didn’t have the range to accompany American bombers deep into Germany. And though the Spitfire was an acceptable ground-attack aircraft, it was outperformed by the rugged British Hawker Typhoon and American Republic P-47 Thunderbolt.
Then there was the De Havilland Mosquito. Developed as a wooden twin-engined light bomber, it also flew as a night fighter, a pathfinder, a reconnaissance aircraft and on anti-submarine missions. It was so fast that, when it became operational in 1941, it could outfly the Spitfires sent to escort it. So in terms of multi-role aircraft, the ‘Wooden Wonder’ takes the honours. It was as a high-performance interceptor that the Spitfire was virtually unmatched – at least until the arrival of the jet-engined Messerschmitt Me 262 in 1944.
Postwar legend
The Spitfire continued to serve after the war’s end, retiring from front-line RAF service only in 1954 – the last piston-driven front-line fighter, and the only British fighter to be manufactured before, during and after the war. Even in later years, as the deployment of jet fighters became the norm, the Spitfire was beloved by pilots for its light handling and superior manoeuvrability. Flying a Spitfire in 1947, John William Fowles was amazed by how “the old Spitty could literally run rings around” faster aircraft thanks to its tight turning circle.
Though the curtain had come down on the Spitfire’s operational career, it was still very much airworthy in the imaginations of a generation of adolescents growing up in Cold War Britain. A combination of Airfix models, comic books and films such as Battle of Britain (1969), starring Michael Caine and Sir Laurence Olivier, brought the exploits of the Spitfire and the drama of 1940 to new audiences. (During filming of that movie at Duxford, dogs had to be deployed to guard the Spitfires from hordes of onlookers.)
Also in 1969, the RAF’s collection of airworthy Second World War aircraft was officially renamed the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, framing the Spitfire and its contemporary aircraft as living memorials and ensuring that the British public could continue to witness these fighters in action.
After 90 years, the Spitfire’s reputation endures today not because it was the greatest aircraft of the Second World War, but because its elegant design, responsive handling and capacity to evolve made it an indispensable asset in the Allies’ arsenal. Its visibility in the Battle of Britain and clever wartime publicity helped cement its legend. It is at once an engineering achievement, a national symbol and a powerful memorial. In wartime skies or modern air shows, the distinctive roar of the Spitfire has always sparked recognition and pride. And its place in our shared cultural memory shows no signs of fading.
Hattie Hearn is a historian and curator, author of How to Fly a Spitfire: A Nut-and-Bolt Guide to the World’s Greatest Aircraft (Frances Lincoln, 2026, illustrated by Adi Gilbert)
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[In 1940, Winston Churchill made a decision that may have won WW2. So why did it make him cry?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1940-winston-churchill-made-a-decision-that-may-have-won-ww2-so-why-did-it-make-him-cry/ 2026-07-12T14:31:04.000Z 2026-07-12T14:30:21.000Z At just before 6pm on Wednesday 3 July 1940, the first shells were fired towards the coast of Algeria. Across the shimmering water of the harbour at Mers el-Kébir, the crews of a group of French warships had no idea what was coming. Earlier in the day, French sailors had been relaxing on deck. A bathing party had been ashore for a morning of recreation. It was, by all accounts, a perfectly ordinary day.
What followed was less than 10 minutes of ferocious shelling, the result of which was devastating. French battleship Bretagne took a direct hit, lurched forward and capsized in just minutes – the vast majority of the crew would not survive. Her sister ship, Provence, was ablaze. One of the most powerful battleships in the world, Dunkerque lay grounded, her hull torn open. In the oil-black water where the ships had been peacefully moored minutes before, bodies floated among the wreckage.
Rescue boats picked their way through the debris. Some survivors were so caked in oil that those trying to save them could find no grip – and so they were pulled from the water by their hair. The fleet's chaplain, Father de Gueuser, moved slowly through it all in a small rowboat, reciting prayers over objects he could not identify. He blessed them all, just in case.
In total, 1,297 French sailors were killed that afternoon. They were not killed by the Germans. They were not killed by the Italians. They were killed by the Royal Navy – acting on an order signed by Winston Churchill. The attack at Mers el-Kébir remains the deadliest clash between Britain and France since the battle of Waterloo, 125 years before. And it may also have been the decision that won the Second World War.
The world Churchill inherited
To understand why Churchill gave that order, it is important to understand the world as it looked from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street in the summer of 1940. It was a world in freefall.
Churchill had been prime minister for 55 days. In that time, he had watched Italy throw in its lot with Hitler, adding 1.7 million soldiers, six battleships and 100 submarines to the Nazi cause. Churchill had overseen the evacuation of over 330,000 Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk – hailed as a miracle, though the miracle had left behind 700 tanks, 64,000 vehicles and 76,000 tonnes of ammunition on the sand. Britain's ability to fight a land war was, in practical terms, finished. Churchill inherited a RAF that only had around 650 serviceable aircraft.
To add to the predicament, most of western Europe had fallen. France – Britain's closest ally, the nation with whom Churchill had personally pleaded to keep fighting – had signed an armistice with Hitler on 22 June, in the same railway carriage, in the same forest clearing, where Germany had surrendered in 1918. Hitler's choice of location was deliberate. He wanted the humiliation to be absolute.
Across the Channel, Britain stood entirely alone. Even Hitler assumed Churchill would eventually come to the table and seek terms. Chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that the Führer wanted to give England “one last chance for peace”. Churchill had no intention of taking it – but he needed to prove that to the world, and most urgently to Washington.
The one military card Churchill still held was the Royal Navy. Britain remained, just about, the dominant naval power in the world – and through that dominance, in theory, it could still control the vital shipping lanes on which an island nation depended. However, the Royal Navy’s size would be overshadowed if Germany swallowed the French fleet into its own. Churchill was determined that would not happen.
The fleet that could change everything
France had the fourth-largest navy in the world – 800,000 tons of warships, seven battleships, 12 light cruisers, 71 destroyers, 78 submarines.
As France collapsed and sought armistice terms, Churchill appealed directly to French leaders not to let their fleet fall to Germany. He warned that to do so would “scarify their names for a thousand years of history”. His appeals went unheeded.
Churchill had confronted Admiral Darlan – commander-in-chief of the French navy – directly. “Darlan, I hope that you will never surrender the Fleet.” Darlan was emphatic: “There is no question of doing so. It would be contrary to our naval traditions and honour. We will never hand it over to Germany or Italy."
These were reassuring words. However, words were not enough. The armistice terms France had been offered were far more generous than expected – Hitler was being lenient, allowing the French to retain about two-fifths of their territory. The French negotiators knew that any further cooperation with Britain risked jeopardising their position. Darlan's promise was sincere in the moment. But Hitler could not be trusted to keep his promise. Germany's navy, the Kriegsmarine, was small – one of his genuine weaknesses. Adding even a fraction of the French fleet to it could shift the entire balance of the war at sea. Churchill could not afford to take Darlan at his word.
Late on the night of 2 July, Churchill sat with his First Lord of the Admiralty and First Sea Lord, debating whether to act. He had already received a letter from Vice Admiral Somerville, who was to command the operation, urging him in the strongest terms to avoid force. Churchill read the letter aloud and set it aside. Around half past midnight, Lord Beaverbrook – the newspaper magnate Churchill had drafted into the War Cabinet to transform aircraft production – was summoned to Downing Street. For an hour, Churchill walked him through the plan. Beaverbrook was unequivocal: attack was necessary. Germany would appropriate the French ships whether the French captains liked it or not. Britain's survival came first.
That was enough. Churchill authorised Operation Catapult – a simultaneous, co-ordinated attempt to seize or destroy French vessels across multiple locations. He ordered his admirals to prioritise the destruction of Dunkerque and Strasbourg, the two most powerful vessels in the French fleet posted at Mers el-Kébir.
After the admirals left at 2am, Churchill and Beaverbrook walked into the garden at the back of Downing Street. It was a blustery night, barely 14 degrees. As they talked, Beaverbrook saw tears in Churchill's eyes. “This is heartbreaking for me,” he said. He was convinced the decision was necessary. He also knew what it would cost.
Twelve hours that changed history
The task of delivering the ultimatum fell to Captain Holland – nicknamed 'Hookey' for his badly misshapen nose, the Royal Navy's finest French speaker and a man who genuinely loved France. His appointment as envoy was, on the face of it, an inspired choice by Vice Admiral Somerville, as Holland was highly respected by the French naval leadership.
He was dispatched ahead of the main fleet in the destroyer HMS Foxhound, carrying four options for the French commander at Mers el-Kébir, Vice Admiral Gensoul. The French could sail their ships to Britain and fight on. They could sail to a port in the West Indies or America, to be disarmed for the duration. They could scuttle where they lay. Or they could hand the ships over to the British. What they could not do – under any circumstances – was allow a single vessel to fall into German hands. If none of the four options was accepted, the code word was ANVIL. Then the British would take matters into their own hands, using force to put the French warships out of action.
Gensoul was a proud and brooding patriot with a deep-seated suspicion of the British. He was acutely insulted that Captain Holland – a man three ranks his junior – had been sent with an ultimatum, rather than a senior officer for proper negotiation. He refused to meet Holland in person for hours. All the while he was not simply being stubborn – he was buying time, quietly rearming his fleet, waiting for darkness, preparing either to escape or to fight back.
Throughout the day, Churchill waited anxiously in the Cabinet Room at Downing Street, cigar in hand, receiving regular updates from Somerville. His orders had been clear – the matter had to be resolved before nightfall. As the hours ticked by, Somerville extended his deadlines repeatedly: 1330 hours, 1500, 1530, 1730. At one point Holland stopped his signaller mid-transmission, unable to bring himself to send the final ultimatum. He had not slept since 2 July.
A brief, agonising near-breakthrough came in the early afternoon. Gensoul finally agreed to receive Holland aboard Dunkerque. The two men talked. Gensoul appeared to soften. For a moment, a peaceful resolution seemed possible. But the clock had run out. Somerville's final deadline was 1730. Soon, Holland was back in his motor cutter, pulling away from Dunkerque's side.
As the guns of Force H opened fire 14 minutes later, Holland was still in the water between the two fleets. He watched as enormous columns of orange flame erupted from the harbour. He did not look away.
War, alliance and the long shadow
The immediate aftermath was, for Churchill, one of the most charged moments of his entire premiership. In his memoir The Second World War, Volume II: Their Finest Hour, he would describe Mers el-Kébir as “a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned. It was a Greek tragedy. But no act was ever more necessary for the life of Britain and for all that depended upon it.”
The attack poisoned Franco-British relations. Skirmishes between the two nations broke out in Dakar, Syria and Lebanon. Trust between Britain and France would not fully recover for years.
But in Washington, the reaction was everything Churchill had hoped for. For all the British PM’s soaring rhetoric about fighting on the beaches and never surrendering, President Franklin D Roosevelt had remained privately uncertain that Britain would hold. Words were one thing. Ordering the Royal Navy to destroy its closest ally's fleet – at a cost of nearly 1,300 lives – was another entirely. As Churchill's private secretary, John Colville, later recalled, one of Roosevelt's closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, told him directly: “It was Mers el-Kébir which convinced President Roosevelt, in spite of opinions to the contrary, that the British really would go on fighting – as Churchill had promised, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.”
Shortly afterwards, Roosevelt signed the Destroyers for Bases Agreement – 50 American destroyers transferred to Britain – the first decisive step on the road to American involvement in the war. Lend-Lease (a policy that enabled the US to provide Allied nations with food, oil and military equipment) followed. Then the US navy began escorting convoys. The groundwork for American entry was being laid, and Churchill always believed Mers el-Kébir was the moment that made it possible.
- Read more | Before the Nuremberg Trials, this was Winston Churchill’s shocking plan for Nazi war criminals
The ultimate historical verdict came on 27 November 1942, when German troops occupied Toulon. The French navy scuttled its remaining ships – Strasbourg, which had been able to escape the British attacks at Mers el-Kébir, was among them – rather than let a single vessel fall into enemy hands.
“The voluntary destruction of the fleet at Toulon has just proved that I was right,” Darlan wrote defiantly to Churchill in December 1942, just a few days before the admiral’s assassination. In one sense, Darlan was not wrong – the French admirals had never intended to hand their ships to Germany. But would Hitler have seized them anyway?
What if Churchill had held back?
It is the great what-if of the early war. Had Churchill flinched – had he chosen to trust Darlan's promise, to give diplomacy more time, to hope for the best – the French fleet would almost certainly have remained intact through 1940 and into 1941.
Whether Germany would ultimately have seized it is unknowable. What is rather more knowable is what would not have happened: Roosevelt likely would not have been convinced that Britain was willing to fight on. Certainly not as soon as he did. The Destroyers for Bases Agreement might never have been signed. American support, when it came, might have come too late – or not at all. Without the naval convoys, the weapons, the men, it is very difficult to see how Britain would have survived the winter of 1940 and beyond.
History has largely judged Churchill's decision as correct – a brutal, sorrowful necessity at an impossible moment.
He called it a hateful decision. And he was right about that. But some decisions are both hateful and necessary, and the rarest quality in a leader is the willingness to make them anyway, in full knowledge of the cost, when the alternative is something worse. On the sweltering afternoon of 3 July 1940, in the harbour of a small Algerian port that almost nobody in Britain had heard of, Winston Churchill demonstrated that quality. It may well have saved Britain.
Edward Abel Smith is an author, feature writer, documentary maker and podcaster. His latest book is A Hateful Decision: Churchill’s Darkest Hour and the British Attack on the French Navy (Transworld, 2026)
]]> Dr Seán Lang <![CDATA["We shall never surrender": 14 quotes that have defined the past century]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/10-quotations-that-defined-the-20th-century/ 2026-03-16T13:06:06.000Z 2026-03-13T15:54:08.000Z
1. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”
Franklin D Roosevelt, 1933
The United States lay devastated by the Great Depression, an economic collapse without precedent that destroyed the country’s global image as a land of opportunity and reduced millions of Americans to poverty and destitution. The governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had run for and won the presidency on the promise of a massive recovery programme, dubbed the ‘New Deal’, but he knew he could do nothing unless the American people first regained their self-belief.
In his inaugural address on 4 March 1933, Roosevelt reassured them that they had nothing to fear, except fear itself – “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
The New Deal lasted throughout the 1930s until World War II set the country back towards full employment. Through the programme of reforms, regulations and projects, Roosevelt understood the power of words. He explained policies simply and clearly to radio listeners in his ‘fireside chats’, reassuring Americans that they had what it would take to improve their own lives and that the government would help. Roosevelt was elected an unprecedented four times, but it was that first inaugural message that set the tone for his time in office and helped give back the US its self-belief.
2. “We shall never surrender”
Winston Churchill, 1940
By June 1940, it seemed that Hitler had won his war. He had conquered Poland; launched a devastating assault in Denmark and Norway; and attacked in the west, invading the Netherlands and Belgium, and storming through northern France to cut off the British army and much of the French. It was only a matter of time before France was forced to surrender and German troops entered triumphantly into Paris. To any impartial observer, it seemed obvious that Britain had no choice but to seek a peace settlement with Hitler. But Winston Churchill, Britain’s pugnacious and controversial new prime minister, decided to ignore those pressing him to do just that.
In an electrifying speech to the House of Commons on 4 June 1940, later broadcast on the BBC, he declared that Britain would fight on and never surrender – that “we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be”. Churchill knew that Britain’s navy and air force would make a German invasion hazardous, though not impossible, and that the only chance of defeating Nazism was to keep going until the United States could join the war. His words defined the stubborn defiance and ‘Dunkirk spirit’, which saved not just Britain but the world from a Nazi victory.
3. “The atom bomb is a paper tiger”
Mao Zedong, 1946
The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 redefined the world. Leaders had always been able to plunge their peoples into war, but now they could wipe out whole cities, even countries, with a single order. While the United States was the only one with nuclear capability at first, the Soviet Union was not far behind thanks to communist spies in the west passing nuclear secrets to Moscow.
In an interview with American journalist Anna Louise Strong in 1946, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, described the atom bomb as a “paper tiger”, something that looks more dangerous than it is. Mao meant that all governments depended on the support of the people, and they would never consent to using atomic weapons. The phrase was taken another way: no government would dare use such weapons for fear of provoking a response from the other side. This was the idea behind the doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ during the Cold War, as the power and number of nuclear weapons intensified. Even then, the world came perilously close to disaster on more than one occasion.
4. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”
Mandy Rice-Davies, 1963
This ordinary retort marked an unlikely watershed in British social history. Marilyn (better known as Mandy) Rice-Davies was a model and dancer working in London’s Soho, where she met Christine Keeler and her friend and protector, Stephen Ward. A successful osteopath, Ward was well-known in high society, hosting parties and introducing girls like Keeler and Rice-Davies to his well-connected friends, including the Secretary of State for War John Profumo and the Conservative peer Lord Astor. A public scandal ensued when the truth of Ward’s parties was revealed, especially with reports that Keeler had slept both with Profumo and a Russian naval attaché, Eugene Ivanov, which made the affair a diplomatic furore.
Rice-Davies was a witness at Ward’s trial. It was widely held at the time that people in high society were trustworthy and honourable, incapable of the lewd behaviour associated with ‘lower’ classes. When it was put to Rice-Davies that Lord Astor denied her claim of an affair, the assumption was that his word was worth more than hers. Her cheeky response – “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” – suggested that the aristocracy were no more honourable than anyone else. The remark caused a sensation.
5. “I am the greatest”
Cassius Clay, 1963
Muhammad Ali, who changed his name from Cassius Clay in 1964, was always much more than a boxer: he was a role model for young black people around the world and a major international celebrity, mixing his sporting triumphs with irrepressible charm and wit.
Boxing had long been a way for poor Americans to better themselves. Clay, who came from the segregated South, won the light heavyweight gold medal at the age of 18 at the 1960 Rome Olympics before turning professional and starting an immense career that saw him become world heavyweight champ three times. As well as a pugilist, though, Clay was a charismatic self-promoting poet always showing his gifts for trash talking. In 1963, shortly before announcing his conversion to Islam and his new name, he issued a record of rhythmically spoken poetry entitled I Am the Greatest.
Ali continued to describe himself proudly as ‘the Greatest’, but he put his reputation and career on the line, and even risked jail, by refusing to serve in the US Army in 1967 as the war in Vietnam raged. His case went to the Supreme Court and Ali became a symbol of growing American opposition to the war, and a figurehead of the civil rights movement. He was now a champion of the dispossessed as well as ‘the Greatest’ in the boxing ring.
6. “I have a dream”
Dr Martin Luther King Jr, 1963
Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic speech was delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, an enormous statue of the US president who had ended slavery in the United States. By the 1960s, however, true emancipation was still far off as African Americans faced entrenched legal discrimination and police violence. King, who had made his name leading protests against racial segregation, was speaking to a huge civil rights rally calling for jobs and fair treatment for America’s black population, but his speech went much further than that.
King’s style of oratory owed much to his background as a Baptist preacher and his imagery, of a dream in which black and white people lived in harmony and friendship – and where his children “will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” – was in line with the visionary sermons that many of his listeners had heard in church. The power of his words went far beyond the 17 minutes that his speech took and the 250,000 people gathered on that day, 28 August 1963. They became not only a defining moment of the civil rights movement, but of US history.
7. “The banality of evil”
Hannah Arendt, 1963
In May 1960, Israel took the world by surprise when its secret service agents kidnapped and abducted a German living in Argentina who gave his name as Ricardo Klement. In fact, he was Adolf Eichmann, one of the key figures in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’, the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. He was put on a plane to Israel and in 1961 he faced a criminal trial in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish German-American writer and academic, asked the New Yorker if she could cover the trial for them. They agreed.
In Arendt’s eyes, the bespectacled Eichmann, wearing a cheap suit instead of his Nazi uniform, seemed like any other middle-ranking office clerk; he could just as easily have been working for an insurance company or a bank. She coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to highlight the way evil can flourish not just by good people standing by, but by ordinary people in ordinary jobs carrying out instructions without ever questioning their morality.
Her analysis ran into a storm of controversy. Jews were unhappy at her criticisms of what she saw as a show trial by the State of Israel; more recently, Holocaust scholars have pointed out that the viciously antisemitic Eichmann was very far from being a small cog in the machine: he was a proactive and energetic enforcer of the Final Solution, most notably directing the mass murder of the Jewish population of Hungary.
However, Arendt’s idea that evil does not need supervillains, but merely enough ordinary people doing their ordinary jobs remains a powerful insight. She gave us the words to describe it.
8. “All you need is love”
The Beatles, 1967
The Beatles were at the height of their fame and influence by the 1967 ‘summer of love’. Pop music had developed into a young people’s lifestyle and outlook that their parents, of the wartime generation, found utterly bewildering.
The Beatles did not just produce hit records: they put forward a new philosophy, which overturned the older generation’s assumptions about behaviour, dress and morality. When their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared in May, it quickly took on cult status. A month later, the group unveiled a new song, ‘All You Need is Love’, as part of the first global live television link-up called Our World, which was watched by an audience of approximately 400 million.
The song had been purposely written with simple repeated lyrics to appeal to the international viewers, and so summarised the new attractive, easy-to-grasp philosophy in clear terms. As the song itself says, “It’s easy”. Older heads might point out that life needs a lot more than love, but in 1967 few young people were listening.
Pop music has been one of the defining cultural influences that mark the postwar world: it has overcome generational, social, political and cultural barriers with its infectious rhythms and simple messages. While ‘All You Need is Love’ may have always been an ideal, it has endured.
9. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”
Neil Armstrong, 1969
That, at any rate, is what Neil Armstrong meant to say when he stepped down from the lunar module onto the surface of the Moon on 20 July 1969. Either he slipped on his words, or they were obscured by a bleep in the transmission, because the version heard back on Earth did not have that crucial “a”. It did not seem to matter.
Armstrong was right: it was a giant leap, though at the time no one quite knew in what direction. Space exploration had excited people around the world since the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 and putting a human being on the Moon had seemed the ultimate prize. Where was all this endeavour to go after that? Science fiction suggested a world of space voyages, but the reality was to be much closer to home. Space technology moved into the world of satellites, first for telecommunications and later for everything from television to meteorology and traffic management. Inevitably, the military potential of space was quickly recognised. The Moon missions opened space up as a further area of operation for the nations of the Earth, so Armstrong was right, even if he got his words wrong.
10. “There is no such thing as society”
Margaret Thatcher, 1987
The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister, ushered in a revolution. Her immediate aim was to resolve the economic problems into which the country had sunk in the 1970s, which she did by promoting a new philosophy based on free enterprise and the rolling-back of state control.
In an interview for Woman’s Own magazine, Thatcher outlined her belief that, ultimately, it is not for the government to resolve people’s problems; individuals and families must look after themselves and their neighbours. In that sense, she said, “There is no such thing as society”.
The phrase provoked a storm of controversy. Supporters applauded her emphasis on individuals, while opponents denounced what they saw as her uncaring attitude towards the Welfare State, which many regarded as the most significant change in 20th-century British society. The phrase encapsulated two completely different political philosophies: a belief in the power of the state as a force for good or as an enervating drain on the people’s energies.
11. “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Ronald Reagan, 1987
The postwar Soviet Union seemed a menacing, repressive world, in the grip of its secret police and ruled by a set of grim-faced old men in coats, so the emergence in 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party came as a pleasant surprise. Not only did he seem more human and approachable, but he was clearly open to a closer and warmer relationship with the west. Even Mrs Thatcher commented that she liked Mr Gorbachev: he was a man she could do business with.
Gorbachev embarked on a wholesale reordering of Soviet life and institutions, beginning with perestroika (restructuring) and notably glasnost (openness), encouraging people to speak openly and honestly about their lives, their past and even their government. Western countries sat up and took notice. Was it changing into a western-style democracy? Were the days of tanks rolling into eastern European capitals to crush liberation movements truly over?
- Read more | Did Ronald Reagan 'Make America Great Again'?
US president Ronald Reagan decided to test him. In 1987, the president gave a speech at the Berlin Wall, the most potent symbol of the Soviet Union’s hostile rejection of the west. He welcomed the changes Gorbachev was making, but called on him to take the most far-reaching step of all: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
No one really believed he would, but it was thought that it might force Gorbachev onto the defensive. What no one predicted was that only two years later a mass movement of people, taking their cue from Gorbachev’s glasnost policy and calling openly for freedom of speech and movement, would force communist governments from power.
When in May 1989 a journalist asked Gorbachev if the wall might come down, he replied, smilingly, “Why not?” By the end of the year, it had.
12. “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights”
Hillary Rodham Clinton, 1995
The feminist movement had used a shorter version of this phrase since the 1980s, but it entered the mainstream when Hillary Clinton, wife of American president Bill Clinton, spoke at a United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.
The transformation of the position of women in society was one of the most striking changes to take place in the 20th century. In Britain and the US, the century had begun with the celebrated campaign for women to have the right to vote, and by the end feminism had developed as a movement and philosophy that sought to transform human society along the lines of equality.
Clinton was an apt figure to give voice to the aim. She was a lawyer who, in 1974, had been part of the Watergate investigation team that brought down President Richard Nixon. But her husband’s own presidency meant that she had to perform what was essentially a ceremonial role. She could support Bill in his duties, but could she hold office herself?
As long as women’s rights continued to be regarded as a category on their own, it seemed that women would never be accepted as equals – hence her impassioned iteration that women’s rights are not just rights for women: they have always been basic human rights.
13. “You’re a wizard, Harry”
Robbie Coltrane (as Rubeus Hagrid), 2001
When JK Rowling’s debut novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997, it was regarded as simply another imaginative children’s book from a first-time author. As word went round school playgrounds, however, the popularity of the series grew. Soon, crowds were gathering at bookshops to buy each new title as soon it appeared, along with Harry Potter audiobooks, videogames, tie-in toys and merchandise.
Then in 2001, the first of a highly successful series of Harry Potter feature films made its way on to the big screen. What had begun as a series of children’s books had become a global phenomenon, with the words “You’re a wizard, Harry” (spoken by Hagrid actor Robbie Coltrane in the first film adaptation) becoming part of cinematic history.
Hogwarts, Harry’s school of witchcraft and wizardry, is clearly a nostalgic throwback to the days of Britain’s famous private schools, with their uniforms, dormitories and special trains. But much of her message is more universal: a passionate defence of honesty and integrity against the dark forces of evil in the world, including those to be found in people who sit in authority. The formidable but kindly headmaster Albus Dumbledore is a sort of Old Testament prophet; the clash between Harry, whose parents gave their lives for him, and Voldemort (aka Tom Riddle), a boy who has given in to his dark side, is a modern stand-off between Jesus and Lucifer, the fallen angel.
Did Harry Potter come to embody a substitute religion in the secular post-Christian western world? Certainly, fundamentalist Christians denounced the books and forbade their children from reading them. We can be sure that historians will be looking closely at the Harry Potter phenomenon for many years to come.
14. “This is for everyone”
Tim Berners-Lee, 2012
One of the most significant moments during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics was also one of the quietest. After a stunning display that charted rural Britain’s transformation into an industrial powerhouse came a dance sequence depicting a 21st-century house party, complete with a full-size replica of a suburban home at its centre.
Then, the house lifted up to reveal a middle-aged man sitting at his computer sending out a tweet: "This is for everyone.” The man was Tim Berners-Lee, and in 1989 he laid the foundations for what would become the World Wide Web.
The web transformed the modern world just as totally as the Victorian industrialists had. Computers had always been huge, complex objects, the preserve of scientists and governments; until fairly recently, the most sophisticated item that people carried around with them was a pocket calculator. What Berners-Lee did was to create a way that would connect computers with each other, anywhere in the world, whether they were in people’s bedrooms or in the headquarters of international agencies. Suddenly, ordinary people had access to pretty much anything they might want to see.
This was a democratic revolution as well as a technological one. As any government knows, access to information is power, and it was now in the hands of ordinary people everywhere. Tech companies grew from small gatherings of like-minded geeks into formidable multinational powers, able to face down governments. Of course, such power also brings responsibility, but Berners-Lee’s message at the Olympics was that the web should always be for everyone. A simple message – but a truly revolutionary one.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/fascism-no-thanks-why-britain-rejected-extremism-in-the-1930s/ 2026-03-04T14:53:14.000Z 2026-02-16T15:30:41.000Z “Is this the age of dictators?” asked veteran journalist Sir Sidney Low. He was writing in September 1923, the month in which a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in Spain. At the same time, Benito Mussolini was reinforcing his new dictatorship in Italy, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was shaping the nascent republic of Turkey, and disruptions – including those fomented by Hitler’s Nazis – were building to a climax in Germany. Taken together, these developments led Low to wonder whether the world might be witnessing “the general decline of parliamentary institutions”.
Over the years that followed, his comments were to become commonplace. By 1938, there was autocratic rule in more than a dozen European countries across the continent, from Portugal to Poland and beyond to the Soviet Union. Even in some countries that remained democracies, substantial anti-democratic elements were growing in power and influence: in the 1936 Belgian elections, the far right won nearly 20 per cent of the vote, while the Communist Party took 15 per cent in French elections that year.
In Britain, however, there was no equivalent body of support for extremism in the interwar years. There was, of course, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under the leadership of Oswald Mosley – a Conservative MP who then sat as an independent before switching to Labour and eventually finding his way to fascism. But Mosley was never more than a peripheral figure. At its peak in mid-1934, the BUF briefly numbered around 45,000 members. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never got above 20,000 members in the 1930s. By comparison, the Labour Party claimed up to half a million members, and there were 6 million trade unionists. The CPGB’s best electoral showing came in the 1931 general election when it fielded 26 candidates, averaging fewer than 3,000 votes each – 0.3 per cent of the total – while Mosley’s New Party got 0.2 per cent. In 1935, the BUF didn’t even put up candidates. It’s not that Britain narrowly escaped the extremism that swept across Europe in the interwar years – it never came even vaguely close.
Safe across the water
There were multiple reasons why Britain didn’t succumb to the appeals of fascism or other extreme ideologies. There was the security of being an island, and the stability of a long existence as a nation within fixed borders. There was the fact that, horrific as the numbers of British fatalities were in the First World War, they were dwarfed by those of other combatant nations. Similarly, although the Great Depression brought hardship to many, Britain was not affected as badly as other countries.
There was also the nature of the Labour Party, committed to the parliamentary process, as were the trade unions. And indeed the nature of the Conservative Party under the One-Nation leadership of Stanley Baldwin – as well as the electoral system that made it so difficult for rival parties to emerge.
- Read more | When Mosley's fascists took on East End London and lost: the Battle of Cable Street explained
In his 1937 account of life in the industrial north, The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell made the suggestion that “cheap luxuries” kept the working class quiescent. “It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution,” he wrote. But low-level consumerism was not unique to Britain. If the country chose “to make the best of things”, it was surely because the national culture was already averse to radical disruption.
It’s relevant, for example, that this was the great era of voluntary associations. There had been working men’s social clubs in industrial towns and cities for decades, but numbers grew substantially in the aftermath of the First World War. By 1922, its diamond jubilee year, the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union could boast 2,300 affiliated clubs with more than a million members. The Women’s Institute, which was founded in Canada and had reached Britain during the war, grew in the 1930s to around 300,000 members. Rotary Clubs, founded in Chicago, had around 19,000 members, and the League of Nations Union more than 400,000. Perhaps most important of all was the British Legion, which merged various ex-servicemen’s groups in 1921. Within a decade, it had a membership of 300,000 – around one in 10 of those who had served in the forces.
Beyond these big networks, Britain nurtured a vast array of local societies and groups dedicated to single interests: photography, prison reform, amateur dramatics, vegetable growing, jazz records and a thousand other issues and hobbies. What they had in common, pointed out the novelist Phyllis Bentley, was a high level of self-regulation. “Each of these societies has a properly elected committee and chairman,” she wrote, “and conducts its business by means of an agenda, a proper procedure of moving and voting resolutions, an annual report and a balance sheet open to all members.” The British, she observed, were a people “unexcelled in the proper conduct of public business by entirely voluntary but strictly self-regulated methods”. This was the institutionalised form of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”, a term coined by the philosopher and politician to express the importance of societal bonds formed at a local and family level.
There were also political clubs – some 2,000 Conservative, nearly 1,000 Liberal, the early stirrings of Labour – but it was the institutions that weren’t based on party that really mattered. The non-aligned status of the various societies allowed for diversity of opinion, and for finding common cause. The societies operated on the basis of cooperation and coalition. It was from voluntary societies and trade unions, argued Baldwin, that the people had learned “the elements and principles of a democracy” which “they will never let go”. Democratic practice was thus embedded in everyday life, far beyond politics.
Cultural caution
Indeed, there was a striking absence of politics in British social life, and even more so in cultural life. The cinema, for example, was regulated by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), a body whose only remit was not to offend and which approved nothing more provocative than resilience in the face of adversity.
The espousal of doctrines of revolution or free love were banned, as were “references to controversial politics”, including “relations between capital and labour”. So a proposed movie of Walter Greenwood’s Depression-era novel Love on the Dole was rejected by the BBFC for having “too much of the tragic and sordid side of poverty”. Permitted, however, was the comedy Off the Dole in which George Formby was “sacked” by the Labour Exchange after four years of not working, and which displayed nothing more contentious than the gentlest of political satire. (“A member of parliament is a man who gives your life for his country.”) Also banned by the BBFC was anything “calculated to wound the susceptibilities of foreign people”, as well as “the insistence on the inferiority of the coloured races” and “scenes calculated to inflame racial hatred”.
- Read more | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions
It was a very British take on censorship, quite unlike that of most European countries. It wasn’t any particular political viewpoint that was banned, but politics as a whole. “We may take pride,” said Lord Tyrrell, president of the BBFC, in 1937, “in observing that there is not a single film in London which deals with any of the burning issues of the day.” The BBFC had been established – and was still run – by the industry itself and, although its writ was never challenged, it had no statutory authority. This system of self-regulation was, acknowledged Labour politician Herbert Morrison, “a curious arrangement” but, he added, “The British have a very great habit of making curious arrangements that work very well.” In any event, it was surely preferable to the intense government control seen in Germany under Joseph Goebbels, or in Russia, where the head of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumyatsky, was executed as a traitor in 1938 for not doing his job well enough.
Reithian values
An equally curious arrangement governed the BBC, founded in 1922, which operated first as a private company and then as a public-service corporation under royal charter. It had a monopoly on radio broadcasting in Britain and became the most significant cultural institution in the country. By the end of the 1920s there were 3 million radio licences, 9 million by the end of the thirties – virtually every household in the country had a radio. It was a little odd, though. Even in its early commercial days, the BBC was never a conventional operation that responded to audience demand. Nor did it ever become an organ of government. Instead, general manager (later director-general) John Reith created his own vision of public service broadcasting, and mostly resisted external pressure from those who wished to shape this new medium.
There were restrictions, of course. Like the cinema, radio was not a place for disruption. The government, explained Reith, had given “an explicit instruction to avoid anything in the nature of religious, political or industrial controversy”. There wasn’t even a great deal of news. The newspaper industry, fearful of being made redundant, successfully lobbied the government to ensure that the first radio bulletin of the day wasn’t broadcast until 7pm, so that it wouldn’t harm sales of morning or evening titles.
That curfew was broken – never to return – during the nine-day General Strike of 1926, when independent newspaper production was suspended and the radio became the chief source of news for many. During the dispute, Reith complained about the government – “I do not think they treat me altogether fairly,” he wrote in his diary – but he strove to keep coverage calm and detached. Even in this moment of national crisis, the BBC was not a propaganda station – largely because Baldwin overruled those in his cabinet (most notably Winston Churchill) who wanted to commandeer the airwaves.
More broadly, as political coverage expanded, the BBC allowed for a variety of voices but had a clear bias towards parliamentary democracy: communists and fascists were seldom heard on the radio. It was ecumenical but definitely mainstream. So too was its approach to religion. Despite his own Presbyterian faith, Reith believed that religious broadcasting should be based on “a non-sectarian Christianity, confined, in respect of doctrine, to those simplest essentials to which all Christians of the west can adhere”.
With only one national channel, augmented in most regions by a local station, the intention was to occupy a shared middle ground. As with the cinema, there was no wish to ruffle feathers. And, also like the cinema, the BBC was essentially self-regulating.
For other cultural forms, there existed a patchwork of censorship that had evolved over generations without any sense of logic or coherence. The London stage was under the tight control of the Lord Chamberlain, while variety theatres were overseen by local councils. Books and exhibitions required no prior approval but were subject to the Obscene Publications Act. The Post Office was empowered to intercept mail, and customs officers to seize material brought in from abroad.
None of this was draconian. It simply smothered: a comfort blanket that insulated against conflict. The resultant lack of cultural engagement with burning political issues on stage, screen and radio was part of the reason why the country felt – and was – so much more stable in the 1930s than most of Europe. Culture in Britain was far quieter than in its neighbours.
There was something more that underpinned these cultural manifestations: a conviction that dictatorship ran against the grain of the nation. “Autocracy is abhorrent to the British mind,” wrote a columnist in the West Sussex Gazette in 1933, “and the kind we see in operation in Germany seems to us almost incredible.” The totalitarian state, with its intrusion into private life, offended a culture that had always prided itself on privacy and independence; somehow, it all looked so alien.
The leader-worship accorded to Hitler, Stalin and their ilk – the ubiquity of their images on posters, placards and public portraits – felt wrong. That role was already taken by the monarchy, whose iconography was woven into the social fabric, from the national anthem to banknotes and coins, postage stamps and pillar boxes. The words “an English Hitler”, reflected novelist Louis Golding in 1931, were “comically contradictory of each other”. (Which didn’t stop people from trying them out: the previous year, Labour minister Arthur Greenwood had used precisely that phrase to describe Winston Churchill.)
No need to get shirty
Equally alien, if not downright silly, were fascism’s quasi-military uniforms – all those monochrome shirts. “The number of nations that may be led to salvation, generally an undemocratic salvation, need to be limited only by the number of colours that shirts may be dyed,” mocked the Roscommon Herald. They became a standing joke in the literature of the time. There were Green Shirts in John Buchan’s 1935 novel The House of the Four Winds and again in Richmal Compton’s William the Dictator, White Shirts in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (both 1938), and unspecified Imperial Shirts in Agatha Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940).
Best of all, in his 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse introduced Roderick Spode, a parody of Oswald Mosley who leads the Black Shorts. As Gussie Fink-Nottle explains: “There were no shirts left.” In the same book, Wodehouse ridiculed “those pictures in the papers of dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words”.
That was another part of the problem with such figures: the posturing and the bragging rants looked out of place in a British context, in the same way that fire-and-brimstone evangelicalism doesn’t work in a home counties accent. When Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, he replaced his conventional tweeds and suits with a black polo-neck sweater tucked into black trousers, held up by a wide black leather belt, and his onstage persona adopted a more declamatory tone and exaggerated arm gestures. But he looked unconvincing, as though he was playing a dictator in an amateur dramatics society show.
If there was a single cultural symbol of Britain’s instinctive distrust of the dictator, it was perhaps ‘The Lambeth Walk’ – the song, and accompanying dance, that swept the country in 1938. A highlight of the musical Me and My Girl it was a simple and instantly catchy tune that cried out to be whistled cheerily by postmen and plumbers. The lyrics were even simpler, notable for the shout of “Oi!” and for the happy-go-lucky bridge: “Everything free and easy; do as you darn well pleasey.”
The song seemed to speak of a people free from an overbearing state – an anomaly in an increasingly authoritarian world. And it was embraced across the whole of society – danced, according to Mass Observation reports, “in Mayfair ballrooms, suburban dance halls, cockney parties and village hops”.
- Read more | From Mosley to the summer riots of 2024: the opportunistic evolution of Britain’s far right
Some 350,000 copies of the sheet music for ‘The Lambeth Walk’ were sold in Britain in its first year, and it was exported successfully, too. It was recorded by dozens of artists including American bandleaders Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington, as well as Europe’s greatest jazz group, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. As the continent lurched towards another conflict in the year of Munich and the idea of “peace for our time” proved illusory, The Times predicted that the song would “be the ‘Tipperary’ of the next world war”.
In Nazi Germany, however, the song encountered stiff opposition. It was banned at the Shrovetide Carnival festivities in Munich and at the University of Heidelberg – where Joseph Goebbels had been awarded his PhD – and Hermann Göring reportedly forbade Luftwaffe bands from playing it. “This is degenerate music and the people who dance it are also degenerate,” thundered Der SA-Mann, newspaper of the Brownshirts.
From a British perspective, this was a fundamental clash of cultures and values. “There is nothing free and easy in Nazi Germany,” said the Liverpool Echo. “‘The Lambeth Walk’ must seem out of place in the land of the goose step.”
If that comparison seems a little fanciful – perhaps trivial – it made sense at the time. And even Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, drew exactly the same conclusion. “I understand that Hitler regards the Lambeth Walk as too democratic a dance for Germany,” he said. “All they can do there is the goose step.”
Alwyn Turner is senior lecturer in cultural and literary history at the University of Chichester. His new book is A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars (Profile, January 2026)
This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
]]> Gavin Mortimer <![CDATA[The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-sas-played-a-vital-role-in-defeating-hitler-so-why-did-britain-disband-them/ 2026-01-27T12:06:45.000Z 2026-01-23T15:30:41.000Z “Light-hearted banditry”, “ruthless pirating”, a “phantom army” – it’s fair to say that the Special Air Service (SAS) didn’t always attract the most complimentary headlines. In the white heat of the Second World War, when this and other British special forces achieved unlikely successes through a series of daring raids, disparaging press reports could be discarded as merely tomorrow’s chip paper. Nonetheless, they fuelled the impression that the SAS operated outside the rules of the regular British army, and were used as ammunition by some who aimed to whip special forces into line – or even shut them down altogether. That threat became a reality after the conflict ended.
David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, coined a description – “freemasons of mediocrity” – for a certain kind of staff officer who looked upon his men with suspicion and, in some cases, hostility. These ‘freemasons’ regarded the SAS and other irregular outfits – the Long Range Desert Group and the Chindits – at best as private armies, at worst “café gangsters”.
This view extended to the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), which spent the spring of 1944 waging a bloody guerrilla campaign in the Aegean to tie down German troops ahead of the invasion of France. Its actions prompted a sharp exchange between Winston Churchill and Simon Wingfield Digby, the Conservative MP for West Dorset. “Is it true, Mr prime minister,” enquired Wingfield Digby, “that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union Flag, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cut-throats?”
“If you do not take your seat and keep quiet, I will send you out to join them,” retorted Churchill.
One could argue that Churchill was the founding father of Britain’s special forces. It was he, shortly after coming to office in May 1940, who instructed the formation of a commando force to launch a “vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive” against the Axis.
Men such as Stirling, Paddy Mayne (Stirling’s second-in command) and George Jellicoe (the commanding officer of the SBS) first learned the art of guerrilla warfare with the commandos. Churchill’s son Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, and wrote to his father describing how they were destroying dozens of enemy aircraft in daring raids – accounts that made the PM “terribly proud”. When Churchill visited Cairo in August 1942 to discuss the next phase of the north African campaign with his generals, he found time to lunch with his son and Stirling.
Churchill dined with Stirling again at the end of May 1945, following the latter’s release from Colditz, having been captured in January 1943. Stirling had plans to re-deploy the SAS Brigade to the far east, and he wanted to sound out their principal benefactor. But within weeks Churchill was gone, voted out of office by a British public who believed a new leader was required to rebuild the country. The SAS would soon follow the wartime leader into temporary retirement.
Uncertain future
Even if Clement Attlee hadn’t been elected prime minister in July 1945, the SAS and Britain’s special forces might still have faced an uncertain future. The country was practically bankrupt, having spent almost £7bn (a quarter of the national wealth) on the war effort. Defence spending would obviously be slashed, and those ‘private armies’ were an obvious place to start. After all, what was the point in maintaining a guerrilla force now that the war was over?
The SAS paraded for the final time at their Essex HQ on 8 October 1945. Four days later, Brigadier Michael Calvert, commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, sent a memo to 12 of the most senior officers of the SAS, SBS and Long Range Desert Group entitled ‘Future of SAS Troops’. He explained that the War Office had asked for his “recommendations for the future of SAS in the next war and its composition in the peace-time army” as part of its review into Britain’s military capabilities. Calvert feared that the bureaucrats within the War Office – those “freemasons of mediocrity” – were determined to disband the SAS.
One of the most forceful and erudite replies came from Major Roy Farran, DSO and MC, a senior SAS officer who had served in north Africa, Italy and France. He began by stating that, though special forces warfare was still in its infancy, its potential was enormous – particularly because it could exploit the rapid recent developments in air power, communications and motorised transport. “Since it is now so easy to place troops across the enemy lines of communication, I feel that it is important to have a unit of the Special Air Service-type trained to operate individually with the minimum support and with the maximum amount of improvisation,” he wrote.
Farran had already identified Britain’s likely next foe and envisaged how special forces could be used in the event of a conflict. “I believe there will be great opportunities for guerrilla troops in the event of a war against the Soviet Union, which I suppose is the only possibility at the moment,” he told Calvert. Such a war would be either a defensive or offensive one. “In the former case a unit like the Special Air Service could inflict damage on the enemy and slow up his advance out of all proportion to its size… In an offensive war the SAS would increase the speed of our advance by spreading panic and confusion in the enemy’s rear.”
But the prescient Farran also envisaged that, before a large-scale war with the Soviets, Britain could well find itself entangled in insurgencies as its empire began to break up. Counter-insurgency, he declared, was a role to which the SAS and SBS were ideally suited, adding: “If the principle of the SAS does not continue, I cannot believe that the army is thinking along progressive lines.”
Another important figure contacted by the War Office was Lieutenant Colonel Tony Simonds, the commander of MI9’s A Force, who had worked with the SAS in Italy in the autumn of 1943. The main task of MI9 – a secret department within the War Office – was to assist Allied military personnel in enemy territory to evade and escape. Simonds recommended the establishment of three SAS regiments: one for Europe, based in Britain; a second for the Middle East, based in Cyprus; and a third for the far east, based in Singapore.
Simonds wrote that “the role of guerrilla forces in any future war is to defeat the enemy, behind his defended front lines, while the orthodox forces prevent the enemy from advancing”. However, he also suggested that the SAS should “familiarise themselves topographically, militarily, socially and politically with the area. To know and to study the various factions and elements of their area… and to know which personalities should be eliminated should it become necessary in British interest.” That latter role had been the modus operandi of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War – acting more like secret agents than special forces.
Ultimately, however, the arguments put forward by Calvert and other senior special forces officers fell on deaf ears, and their regiment and units were disbanded.
End of an error
It didn’t take long before the War Office realised its mistake. In January 1946, Jewish paramilitaries in Mandatory Palestine derailed a British train – the first serious guerrilla act in an insurgency that grew increasingly violent as the fight for the establishment of a Jewish state intensified. It was the first of many such insurgencies as Britain’s empire began to fracture.
In 1947, Major Pat Hart, a staff officer in the SAS during the war, learned that the SAS was going to be revived as a territorial regiment under the command of Colonel Brian Franks. Hart was appointed Franks’ second-in-command of 21 SAS – a designation that merged the 1st and 2nd Regiments of wartime fame. According to Hart’s recollection, a War Office study group had been formed in 1946 to re-examine the future of Britain’s special forces. “The result of the study was the recommendation there should be a continuing presence in the army, so the knowledge gained should not be lost, and whilst it could be called anything, probably the best thing was to call it SAS,” he said.
Recruitment began in September 1947. Of the first 200 soldiers signed up, 59 had served with the SAS during the war. One of those was Pat Duggan. “While the majority in the forces were pleased to return to their former lifestyles [in 1945], many of us, hemmed in by the norms of a peaceful civilisation, felt only frustration and spent our time dreaming of, or searching for, something that resembled our wartime role,” he reflected. “When the SAS was reformed as part of the TA [Territorial Army], we homed in like pigeons – a roll-call of the dispossessed.”
Having so many experienced soldiers in their ranks made it easier to train the new recruits in their unorthodox methods. “We were creating an SAS unit that would be available to do any sort of SAS job once it was trained,” explained Hart. “We went off on Nato exercises, as part of the training, and it was very helpful for Nato command to have an SAS unit there.”
The first active deployment of 21 SAS was to Malaya (then a British colony, today peninsular Malaysia) to help quell a two-year-long communist insurgency. The uprising – which the British knew as the Malayan Emergency – threatened colonial rubber plantations and tin mines, so the government called on the talents of men skilled in guerrilla fighting.
“There were a few contacts,” recalled John Gardner of the SAS. “A few seconds, perhaps minutes, of intense shooting, then silence. Blood trails were followed, and some CT [insurgent] bodies were found and brought in, but many blood trails led to nothing… during these weeks we lived in a general state of alertness, even at night half awake, of dirt and sweat, our blood sucked by the many leeches.”
The SAS remained in Malaya throughout the 1950s – years that proved a crucial learning curve for a regiment that was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic.
Johnny Cooper, one of the original 66 recruits to the SAS when the unit was formed by Stirling in 1941, was a squadron commander in Malaya. “We were carrying out trials to develop a two-week ration that was possible for a man to carry,” he recalled. “The object was to avoid the weekly air drops which were a complete give-away and lost us the vital element of surprise.” As a result, the SAS produced a ‘starvation ration’ consisting of dehydrated rice-based food carried in a four-gallon petrol tin.
A global audience
It was no coincidence that in 1952 – shortly after Winston Churchill had been returned to Downing Street – it was decided to raise a regular-army SAS regiment: 22 SAS. Over the following decades, the SAS was sent to fight insurgencies in other remote corners of the British empire and spheres of influence – Aden, Borneo, Oman – before being deployed to Northern Ireland in the 1970s. But perhaps the most high-profile of all its operations occurred in the spring of 1980 when it ended the Iranian embassy siege in London in dramatic style, watched by a global television audience. It was a feat that underlined the regiment’s reputation as the world’s pre-eminent special force.
Throughout these operations, one aspect of the SAS was immutable, and that was the temperament of each recruit. In 1956, Dare Newell, the SAS regimental headquarters major, wrote to several wartime special forces officers to ask what characteristics they thought essential for an SAS soldier. From their answers he compiled the selection criteria.
“A man’s personal qualities and make-up count more than technical efficiency in his own arm of the service. Technical efficiency can be taught; the personal qualities required for long-range, long-term operations in enemy territory, however, are part of a man’s character and, although they may be developed over a period, they must be learnt in childhood.” The qualities deemed essential were initiative, self-discipline, independence of mind, ability to work without supervision, stamina, patience, and a sense of humour.
These characteristics continue to underpin the SAS ethos today. Warfare and weaponry evolve, but not human nature. One of the 12 recipients of Mike Calvert’s worried memo in October 1945 was Major John Verney of the SBS. “We came to know one another’s physical and mental capacities, and with them our own,” he said of his wartime service. “Strength and skill were respected, and a fair degree of both were essential, but there were other qualities, such as a cool head, or a good temper, that might well prove more valuable.”
CLONE WARS
Countries worldwide have established forces based on the British SAS template
The reputation of the SAS, encapsulated by its ‘Who Dares Wins’ motto, is global. Its influence is evident in France’s 1er Régiment de Parachutiste d’Infanterie de Marine (1erRPIMa), the US Delta Force and Germany’s GSG 9. New Zealand and Australia have their own SAS regiments, both raised in the 1950s and using the same motto as their British counterpart. It is also alleged that the SAS has trained Ukrainian special forces for many years. The wartime SAS included two regiments of French troops who fought under British command. In June 2024, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, President Emmanuel Macron visited the French SAS memorial in Plumelec in Brittany. According to France’s Ministry of Defence, the 1erRPIMa “has its roots in the SAS of World War II, [and] is based on daring, determination and endurance”; its motto is Qui ose gagne – a direct translation of that of the British SAS. The founder of Delta Force, Charles Beckwith, was one of America’s most innovative military thinkers in the late 1950s. A member of the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Beckwith was posted to 22 SAS as part of an exchange in 1962. During that time, he conceived the idea of an American equivalent. On his return to the US, Beckwith received encouragement from General Sam Wilson, a Second World War veteran who had been trained by the British Chindits in south-east Asia. In a 2016 interview, Wilson explained that he had met David Stirling in the course of helping to establish Delta Force. Like Delta Force, Germany’s counter-terrorism unit GSG 9 was formed in the 1970s in response to a series of high-profile terrorist atrocities. When GSG 9 rescued all hostages from a hijacking at Mogadishu airport in Somalia in 1977, it was assisted by two SAS soldiers. Over the course of three decades, David Stirling’s band of “renegade cut-throats” had become a blueprint for special forces units across the globe.
This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Keep calm and carry on singing: why Britons fell in love with opera during World War Two]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/keep-calm-and-carry-on-singing-why-britons-fell-in-love-with-opera-during-world-war-two/ 2026-01-07T15:01:03.000Z 2026-01-07T15:00:58.000Z Glasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The soprano Joan Hammond, who sang the title role that night, later recalled that there were always newcomers in the audience wherever the Carl Rosa performed, searching for something different to do – but also for some kind of transcendental escapism. Invariably, they cheered the singers to the rafters. Surprising though it may seem to us today, opera was hugely popular during the Second World War.
This was part of a broader surge of interest among the British in the so-called high arts – a sudden and rather urgent desire to ‘become cultured’ and to enjoy the best that life had to offer – when every day might be your last.
Guy Ramsey reported in the Daily Mail in 1943 that “every day in every way Britain’s musical and dramatic taste is becoming more and more ‘highbrow’”. Tram drivers were listening to Tchaikovsky, waitresses were revelling in Wagner, and operas were drawing large audiences at provincial theatres. This war, Ramsey wrote, was more personal than any before it, and felt closer to home. Serious times called for serious art, and popular variety shows no longer seemed in step with the national mood.
Workers’ playtime
Opera had already enjoyed reasonably wide popularity in Britain during the interwar years. In London, the enterprising impresario Lilian Baylis had set up companies at the Old Vic in the 1920s and Sadler’s Wells in the 1930s that were explicitly aimed at fostering a love of opera among local working-class communities. And over in the East End, people could regularly watch operas at the People’s Palace, a large entertainment complex on the Mile End Road.
Touring opera companies regularly visited towns and cities around the country, and were eagerly anticipated by people of all social classes. Operatic music could also be widely heard in restaurants, hotel foyers and cinemas, and broadcasting and gramophone records had done a great deal to popularise and democratise the art form. But the opera boom of the early 1940s was in a different league.
It would have been logical if opera had ground to a halt during the war, given the large resources conventionally needed to stage performances. To be sure, the most prominent venues did close: the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden was turned into one of the most popular wartime dance halls, and Glyndebourne in East Sussex became a home for evacuees from London.
Sadler’s Wells soldiered on during the early months of the war, staging matinees to get around the problem of blackouts, but soon enough the Blitz put paid to this, and the theatre became a refuge for the newly homeless. However, the company moved its operations to Burnley and toured extensively from there, putting on works including The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, Rigoletto and La bohème with a scaled-down cast, piano accompaniment, a simple painted backcloth and a sofa.
The Times praised Sadler’s Wells for “Making converts to the art of music-drama” in places such as Oldham, Accrington and Stockport. Performances were so popular that theatres were desperate to book the company. The manager of the Hull New Theatre reported that his postbag was constantly full of letters from audience members “representing a cross-section of the community” who wanted to see the troupe.
Periodically, when it was safe to do so – and even when it wasn’t – the company returned to London to perform in the West End. The soprano Elisabeth Parry recalled a performance at the Haymarket Theatre in 1944 when the show went on even while alarms rang and ‘Doodlebugs’ (V1 flying bombs) could be heard buzzing overhead. Audience members remained in their seats, and the singers and orchestra carried on as if nothing was happening.
The success of the Sadler’s Wells tours showed that the British would happily embrace opera if only they were given the opportunity. Journalists expressed frustration that there had never been a move to set up a similar opera company in every major city around the country, because there was clearly plenty of demand. “No doubt there are as many busmen as there are butchers, bakers, baronets and bankers who enjoy a good opera when they can get it,” argued The Times. And the Times Literary Supplement proposed that, with a dozen more companies along the lines of Sadler’s Wells, “we should have a genuine art of opera in England as we already have a genuine public for it”.
Sadler’s Wells worked in partnership with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which also arranged concerts in which professional musicians, including opera singers, performed in factories, air-raid shelters and hospitals. CEMA’s broad aim was to “carry music, drama and pictures to places which otherwise would be cut off from all contact with the masterpieces of happier days and times”.
Operatic performances also featured in the Holidays at Home initiative organised by the Ministry of Labour, which turned open areas in cities into makeshift seaside resorts, and put on a wide range of entertainments. One such scheme in Liverpool, which included performances of opera, ran for 11 weeks in 1942 and attracted an audience of three quarters of a million.
Arias on the airwaves
Of course, there was also plenty of opera on the radio. In 1941, regular monthly broadcasts of studio operas resumed for the first time since the outbreak of war. The emphasis was primarily on well-known classics such as La Traviata and The Barber of Seville because, as the conductor Sir Adrian Boult said, “The evidence is general that the musical public turns to these sources for mental and spiritual recreation more eagerly than ever today.” BBC listener research from 1943 revealed that the numbers listening to variety shows were down by 20 per cent, whereas audiences for classical music and serious drama were on the rise.
Victor Hely-Hutchinson, the BBC’s director of music from 1944, wrote that one of the few benefits of the war was the rise of an immense public enthusiasm for good music. “Go to an orchestral concert, or a fine operatic performance,” he said, “and you will find a corporate appreciation and desire for music of a kind, and on a scale, that has never been seen in Britain before.”
Radio broadcasts allowed audiences to enjoy the highest standards of singing, which were not always evident in rough-and-ready touring productions. “Stayed at home tonight to listen to Faust – complete – on the wireless,” wrote one unnamed office worker in a diary submission for Mass Observation in 1942. “Feel very grateful to the BBC for giving us first-class opera; it is not often we get first-rate opera in Manchester, and there is nothing worse than good music badly executed.”
Many people, men in particular, first encountered opera in the forces. Some took part in amateur operatic productions of works such as Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at military bases in Britain. Others stationed in the Middle East with Paiforce (the Persia and Iraq force) had the opportunity to hear operatic arias in concerts organised by the Entertainments National Service Association. Some of the most respected British opera singers of the day, such as Walter Widdop, Dennis Noble and Miriam Licette, toured that region. But by far the most significant boom in enthusiasm for opera among soldiers was seen in Italy.
In 1944, the Daily Express reported that “one of the biggest surprises of our ‘invasion’ of Italy has been the way the men have become opera fans”. Some enterprising army captains reformed the mothballed opera company at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Word soon spread that watching opera was a good way to spend an evening, and British troops took to queueing around the block to get tickets.
The 1,600-seat theatre was always full to capacity, and two performances a day had to be scheduled to meet demand. A similar enterprise was also set up at the bomb-damaged and abandoned Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, Sicily and, as the Allies moved north, more companies were founded in major cities across the country.
Naomi Jacob, who in 1948 wrote a book about opera aimed specifically at the soldiers who had come to love it in Italy, recalled that when the idea had first been mooted, there had been a lot of scepticism about whether British and American troops would be willing to listen to opera. But houses sold out in advance, and audience members often came back several times. Jacob reported that “no better audience ever existed… they were punctual, they gave rapt attention, and their appreciation was unstinted”.
From September 1943 to the end of the war, countless British servicemen watched performances of opera in Italy. The composer and broadcaster Spike Hughes reported that “in every town the same thing happened: the British soldier took to grand opera as if it were in his blood”.
Exposure to Italian opera in Italy helped soldiers to become more discerning listeners. In Britain before the war, opera was performed in English translation everywhere except Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, two ‘luxurious’ venues that sat apart from the national norm. But here, suddenly, was an audience that had shown itself perfectly capable of appreciating opera in the original language.
The Rome correspondent for the Sunday Express reported that “an ‘opera-conscious’ audience is being created for Britain after the war, but if any theatre magnate wants to cater for them he must offer something better than a third-rate touring company”.
Optimism for opera
Hopes were high, then, for what Britain’s operatic landscape might look like in the postwar period. Even the most sceptical commentators were coming round to opera: the Daily Express reported that “the most ridiculous art-form ever invented” was “proving more popular than anybody ever imagined”.
Of course, many people who had encountered opera in pared-back productions during the war had no idea what it really could be. The public was, as The Liverpool Daily Post put it, “as ignorant of the real taste of opera as a wartime infant is of the taste of bananas”. But appetites had been whetted, and Britons emerged from the war wanting to see not only more opera but better opera.
To a large extent, these expectations were met. The theatre director Tyrone Guthrie argued after the war that London was becoming the musical centre of the world, with opera at its heart. In the autumn of 1947, audiences in the capital had the opportunity to watch no fewer than 23 different operas performed by five companies.
A new company based at the Cambridge Theatre in Seven Dials performed Italian opera in Italian to groups of former servicemen and West End shopworkers. For a while, even glamorous Covent Garden presented a form of “opera for the people”, running regional auditions and recruiting talented opera-singing coalminers, secretaries and milkmen as soloists for a new company.
Some of these initiatives were only short-lived. Even so, there was very much a buzz in the air around opera after the war, with the Musicians’ Union declaring in 1947 that classical music had become “a necessary part of the life of the people”. The wider acceptance of opera as bona fide popular entertainment seemed to be summed up by the fact that when the San Carlo Opera Company from Naples visited just after the war, it performed not only at Covent Garden but also at Butlin’s holiday camps in Filey and Skegness.
Sadler’s Wells, meanwhile, made a triumphant return to its Islington home, where on 7 June 1945 it staged the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes – a rapturously received work that seemed to signal a hopeful new beginning for British operatic composition. New troupes formed to take touring opera around the country in the late 1940s. The 1940s also saw the foundation of Welsh National Opera – a group of talented amateurs at the outset but later a major player on the British operatic scene.
Perhaps most importantly, thanks to the huge explosion of interest in the high arts that had taken place during the war, the nation was far more open-minded towards the possibility of funding it afterwards. Up to this point, public subsidy had only ever been a pipe dream. Now CEMA provided a model for the new Arts Council of Great Britain, which leaned heavily towards favouring opera. Thanks to subsidies, opera could be staged at Covent Garden year-round rather than just for a three-month summer season, and prices could be kept low. The Arts Council also undertook local measures to foster music-making and music appreciation, setting up clubs in workplaces and lending gramophone records. Meanwhile, opera featured prominently on the BBC’s new Third Programme.
“Fifteen years ago I should have felt obliged to defend opera as a form of art,” said the critic and academic Edward J Dent in a lecture delivered at Liverpool University in 1945, “but that is no longer necessary.”
Opera continued to be enjoyed by large, socially mixed audiences through the 1950s, sixties and seventies, and was drawing record audiences in the eighties and nineties. But by those later decades, the media had begun to circulate a simplistic idea that opera was elitist, and by the turn of the millennium the idea was so entrenched that it was deterring newcomers to the genre. Opera was also becoming more expensive, declining on television and disappearing from the school curriculum.
Today, opera still has something for everyone, but it has receded from the mainstream cultural conversation. Regrettably, it has become necessary, once again, to defend it as a form of art.
Alexandra Wilson is a senior research fellow at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her latest book is Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (Oxford University Press), published in September 2025
This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> Kavita Puri <![CDATA["Imagine starting a life with so little": the stories of South Asians in Britain]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/imagine-starting-a-life-with-so-little-the-stories-of-south-asians-in-britain/ 2026-01-16T15:19:53.000Z 2025-11-08T09:00:06.000Z I remember looking in the BBC archives for stories of the first arrivals of South Asians in the postwar years, and being surprised at how little programming had been made documenting the experiences of my parents’ generation. That was well over 10 years ago now. From then on, I began to record testimonies of people who came to the UK from South Asia after the Second World War for my Radio 4 series Three Pounds in My Pocket. The title of that programme was inspired by the fact that, for years after the war, strict currency controls dictated that those arriving from India could not bring more than £3 into the UK. Imagine starting a new life in a new country with so little.
Over time, I went on to record accounts from the descendants of that three-pound generation, hearing about their struggles and achievements. Many of the people I first interviewed – including my father – are no longer with us. I feel so grateful that I was able to capture their stories: memories of what these former subjects of the Raj had imagined Britain to be, what it was actually like when they arrived, how they were received and, so many decades on, where they now felt ‘home’ was.
Asians comprise the largest minority ethnic group in Britain today, yet it’s always struck me how little the history of South Asians in Britain is known – among South Asians themselves as well as across the country as a whole. It’s noticeable that in 2025 there is still no central British South Asian cultural archive, and that South Asian Heritage Month is only in its sixth year.
South Asians have had a presence in Britain for centuries, as Rozina Visram’s seminal 2002 book Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History discusses. The first such settlers came as sailors and servants, brought by the East India Company. In time, students, ayahs (nursemaids), princes and professionals arrived. In 1892, Dadabhai Naoroji was elected as Liberal member of parliament for Finsbury Central, becoming the first MP of South Asian heritage. He supported free education, votes for women and home rule for Ireland, and campaigned for representation for Indians in the government of India.
Large-scale immigration from the subcontinent started after the 1948 Nationality Act was passed. It conferred on subjects of British colonies and the Commonwealth the right to settle in the UK. But the South Asian experience has not been as well documented as that of those coming from the Caribbean. Dr Florian Stadtler, co-author of Asian Britain: A Photographic History (2013), believes one of the reasons is because “there was no Windrush moment”. But it could also be because the term ‘South Asian’ encompasses so many people from different places on the Indian subcontinent, with their own distinct regional histories, languages, cultures.
An important new digital hub has just launched. South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories (southasianbritain.org) aims to explore the complexity of this longer story. It discusses themes ranging from family and politics to multiple migrations and resistance, as well as education and intellectual life. There are some wonderful oral testimonies. Bari Chohan, for example, explains how some of his family came to Britain in the 1870s, setting up homeopathic clinics across the country. His great-uncle married a nurse, and they were one of the first mixed-race couples in north-east England. His father, who was in England at the outbreak of the Second World War, fought with the British Army. There’s so much history in that one family’s story.
Understanding and acknowledging this long presence of South Asians in Britain is important. As identity in politics comes to the fore once again, and questions are asked about who is British and who belongs here, these stories take on a greater significance. South Asians have lived in, contributed to, fought and died for Britain. It’s time this is more widely recognised.
This column was first published in the October 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA["We sang, we danced and we all held hands": celebrating VE Day]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/we-sang-we-danced-and-we-all-held-hands-celebrating-ve-day/ 2026-05-08T13:54:26.000Z 2025-05-08T08:00:34.000Z The long and brutal war in Europe was finally over. At 2.41am on 7 May 1945, Germany signed an unconditional surrender agreement at General Eisenhower’s HQ in Reims, 80 miles north-east of Paris. Later that day, the BBC announced the news and the first celebrations began.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared the following day a national holiday, VE Day (Victory in Europe), and checked the supply of beer was large enough to satisfy the thirst of a happy nation. In Southampton, VE Day opened with a symphony of blaring ships’ horns shortly after midnight. Later, beacons blazed, bunting fluttered in the afternoon sun and joyful parties echoed around every corner of Britain. Children tied effigies of Hitler to lampposts or burned the führer on bonfires.
At 3pm, Churchill broadcast from Downing Street: “My dear friends, this is your hour. This is not a victory for any party or class. It’s a victory of the great British nation as a whole.” But Churchill also reminded the partying millions that the conflict was not yet over. A fanatical, undefeated Japan still controlled swathes of territory in the far east.
In 2005, the BBC marked the 60th anniversary of VE Day by setting up a huge project called the WW2 People’s War. With help from thousands of volunteers, charities, libraries and museums, the corporation collected an astonishing 47,000 testimonies, both from those who had been serving in the armed forces and from the home front. This was not history as seen from the lofty perspective of politicians or generals, diplomats or historians. Rather, the project gathered the memories of ordinary British men and women – a ground-floor history.
The WW2 People’s War (and my book of the same name) stand as comprehensive accounts by those who fought, grieved, loved and survived through years of conflict – and how they reacted when the fighting in Europe was over. Most of the testimonies on the following pages are taken from this archive.
A riotous party
Unsurprisingly, many of those who gave interviews had vivid memories of VE Day itself. Frank Mee from Stockton-on-Tees, who was 16 in May 1945, clearly remembered the party: “I went off to a dance and it was riotous, flags draped around the hall and lights full on, everyone kissing everyone else. I drew the line at the hairy-faced sailors and stuck to the girls, making sure I went round several times. We sang, we danced, and we all held hands singing every song we could think of…
“We walked home feeling as if a huge cloud had lifted off our shoulders and I must admit I never once thought of the war in the far east still going on, as we sang and danced in the streets. Each time we met a group going the other way, we shared bottles and kissed all the girls. To a 16-year-old with raging hormones it was seventh heaven.”
The scenes were similar in Glasgow. Tommy Mac was 14 and his testimony gives a sense of a topsy-turvy day when temporary connections gave rise to memories that lasted a lifetime: “She was an older girl, perhaps 16 or so. Still, she was to be my companion for the rest of the day. We made our way hand in hand from where we lived to find the main celebration in George Square… I didn’t see many drunks, now I think on it. There was no need. The spirits were lifted high enough as it was. It was quite wonderful to see all the men and women in uniform hugging, kissing and generally flirting
with the civilian population.
“During all this time, I never once let go of my companion’s hand. I danced with her, hugged her, kissed her too. I don’t know how many times. I never did find out what her second name was. All I knew was her name was Norah, my lovely Norah. In all my life I have never forgotten her, and although we were close to being as intimate as possible, there was never any impropriety. We stayed together until 4am when we finally kissed and said goodbye, each hugging the other. I never saw her again, and to this day I sometimes wonder whether Norah remembers as well. My lovely Norah, with you I shared the most memorable day of my life.”
• Read more | A brief guide to VE Day
Eight-year-old Barbara Vanderstock’s father had been away fighting for five years and by VE Day had still not returned home to Croydon. But his absence didn’t stop his family from joining in with festivities: “Never mind, we were going to celebrate. Mum organised a massive bonfire in the garden and all our friends came. The flames were as high as the house. We all sang songs of victory – ‘Roll out the Barrel’, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘We’ll Meet Again’, a song I later learnt from dad made soldiers in the western desert weep.
“Next, we went round to the street bonfire party where older boys carried lighted flames and marched in procession, ironically a sight reminiscent of the prewar Nazi rallies… There were flags, trestle tables, homemade paper hats, orange juice, jellies, and cakes and we sat there surrounded by laughing grown-ups who would give us anything we wanted.”
But VE Day wasn’t just about bonfires and dancing. It also heralded the renewal of simple pleasures, as if a forgotten world of sensations had suddenly been found again. Mary Burgess from Liverpool enjoyed a carefree walk with her nephew, who identified himself only as ‘Tanker’ in the archive. He recalled: “The striking aspect of it all was the banks of daffodils everywhere. It was as though the whole world was new, was young again – and clean.”
They joined a queue for ice cream: “Never have I tasted ice cream so creamy, so sweet and so cold. And the texture was just right perfect! So, there we were: Mary and I walking along in the spring sunshine, licking ice creams down to the last milky drops, which we sucked noisily out of the cardboard corners, and happier than we had been in years. That was when the war ended for me and that was when there seemed to be a future.”
Central London was the scene of the biggest celebrations. Thousands attended public thanksgiving services at St Paul’s Cathedral. The royal family came out onto the Buckingham Palace balcony several times, waving to the joyful crowds. Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth II, moved anonymously as a 19-year-old through the happy evening crowds in her Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) uniform. She later described it as “one of the most memorable nights of my life”.
The other foe
Not everyone could face VE Day’s unrestrained jollity, especially those who had seen action. Ulric Cross, a Bomber Command navigator from Trinidad, was the most decorated West Indian in the RAF, nicknamed the Black Hornet. Cross fully intended to join the celebrations in London but, on witnessing the joyful crowds, he headed home. Having seen so many friends killed, he felt too uncomfortable to celebrate: “Everybody was overjoyed and I just didn’t feel like taking part in it. I just felt a lot of people had been killed. This was not a cause for celebration… A lot of my friends were killed… [But] I was extremely glad the war was over.”
Or at least almost over. As Churchill had been careful to mention on 8 May, the Allies still faced “another foe”. This was abundantly clear to Odell Johnson of the US 453rd Bomb Group, which was assigned to fight the Japanese as the war in Europe wound down, but first had to return to the USA for training. On VE Day itself, as his troop train pulled past tenement buildings into London, Johnson witnessed a sight that made him laugh: “On the fourth or fifth floor, stood this elderly woman on the fire escape… In her hands she had a pair of red, white and blue bloomers.” Johnson was astonished at the size of the patriotic knickers: “[They] would have fitted the biggest elephant you ever saw. She stood there, waving at us Yanks going home on VE Day and wishing us well.”
As Johnson was shipped out of the UK via Southampton, Ted Stocker was busy flying in the opposite direction, repatriating British prisoners from German camps. “We had the privilege of flying back over England on the evening of VE Day when all the bonfires were lit. It was a magnificent sight!… I did get a drink sometime early on the morning of the ninth as the girls in the telephone exchange found a bottle of gin that had something left in the bottom. I had a very tiny tot of gin. That was my VE Day.”
Far from home
If George’s VE Day pleasures were limited, he did at least make it back to Blighty. In contrast, thousands of British troops were miles away from the celebrations in the UK, maintaining order in Germany and countries the Nazis had occupied. WAAF Mary Pettit, for example, was stationed in Brussels: “What a sight! The whole city was lit up by searchlights, rockets, flares, Very lights [flares] everywhere. British, Belgian and American flags were flying, crowds were in the streets singing and laughing, car horns were sounding. As the evening sky darkened, the famous buildings were silhouetted against the glow from bonfires and fireworks. The old trams were clanking along as usual, but now with people standing or dancing on their roofs.”
Mohammed Hussain was an Indian machine gunner stationed in Austria. When the soldiers learnt of Germany’s surrender: “There was a spontaneous eruption of joy. Within a few minutes the entire atmosphere had transformed from one of death to one of a potential new life.”
Nineteen-year-old actor Beryl Andrews was touring Germany in an ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) production. Her words similarly capture a sense of emotions being released. On VE Day, she was entertaining British troops at Emsdetten, North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany: “During the show someone came in at the back and called out, ‘The war is over!’ With one accord the whole audience rose to its feet and cheered madly, it was wonderful. I don’t know how we finished the show, we felt choked with emotion. I shall never forget hearing during the interval hundreds of happy voices singing, ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’.”
Starting a fire
Some, though, had to be on duty. Flight Lieutenant Albert Ricketts was also stationed in Germany. His whole base was stood down for VE Day, except Albert, who was ordered to fly to Canadian Army HQ to pick up a senior officer, Major-General Gerald Templer: “[He] greeted me with the words, ‘We must be the only silly buggers working today.’”
That evening, in the absence of fireworks, Albert and his colleagues fired a Very pistol, or flare gun, instead. “The person using the pistol fired one cartridge straight up into the air and the wind carried the burning cartridge onto one of our aircraft setting it on fire, so it was completely wrecked. Somehow or other we managed to cover up this unfortunate accident.”
• Read more | "The war without an end": what happened in Europe after VE Day?
Ron Goldstein of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars had served in north Africa and Italy. The long battle against the Germans up through Italy was brutal and the campaign did not end until 2 May 1945, just six days before VE Day. Ron spent the day itself on duty near Venice: “There we were in this field in the middle of nowhere, when someone on another tank called out, ‘They’re going mad back home, get the BBC on your set or you’ll miss all the fun!’ I turned my set to the Forces station and, for the benefit of those outside the tank, hung all the earphones over the side of the hull. The crackle of the headphones soon drew a small crowd around the tank and we all listened in amazement to an unknown announcer describing the scenes in Trafalgar Square.
“I remember quite clearly that my emotions at the time were mixed. On one hand it was good to feel that perhaps some of my loved ones back home were taking part in these scenes. On the other hand, I – and in hindsight I’m sure most of my comrades – felt somehow cheated that we, who had risked life and limb and had been away from home for so many years, were not there in England to share in the triumph.”
A few days later, Goldstein received bad news that could only have compounded his sense of ambivalence: “I received a letter to say that my brother, Jack, had been shot down over Germany and had been posted as missing. It reached me within a week of the war ending in Europe.”
While on VE Day itself, anxiety for the future was largely buried beneath the exuberant partying, Ron Goldstein’s memories offer a sharp reminder of how contingent the future still seemed – and was. In the domestic arena, for instance, many returning from service abroad wondered if their partners had found new love. And for those waiting at home, would their partners be the same after witnessing so much horror on the battlefield or in a prison or internment camp?
A quote from Birmingham resident Eunice Edwards captures the uncertainty: “Everybody longed for the end of the war, to come home and get back to normal. Alas, no one could go back to 1939. Everything had changed. Some people had married and wanted new houses; some had lost loved ones and couldn’t rejoice. Some people got married after long separations and others got divorced as soon as they could. Some girls had married soldiers from America and Canada and went away to start new lives. It was a case of new beginnings for all of us.”
Even for those not facing personal upheavals, there was a sense of needing to begin anew, as reflected in the reflective words of Kathleen Godrey, who was based at Bletchley Park and served with the WAAF: “Now it seems hard to imagine or even remember the shabbiness of our lives… No houses had been painted for years, no trees planted, no roads repaired. In cities where the parks should have been protected by elegant railings, there was either barbed wire or nothing at all. The railings and even saucepans had gone to win the war and in London most buildings which had been bombed were still standing in ruins. We all had to start a new life.”
Conflict continued
Some had to wait longer than others for a fresh start. On 8 May 1945, Enola Gay, the B-29 from which an atomic bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima in August, had yet to even enter service. In the far east, the fighting was still intense and thousands of British citizens were incarcerated in Japanese camps on VE Day. Cut off from the outside world, they had no idea the war in Europe was over.
As Britain celebrated VE Day, Sergeant Len Baynes from Cambridgeshire was a prisoner of war in Thailand, who had been set to work repairing the infamous Burma Railway of Bridge on the River Kwai fame – a track that 12,000 Allied prisoners had died building. When a train transporting wounded Japanese soldiers pulled into a station, Baynes felt sympathy for the enemy: “Nearly every truck contained several dead. Many had terrible wounds, undressed and covered in flies. Others had amputations only covered in field dressings… Our men, their prisoners, walked the length of the train lifting those out who could stand, and filling mess tins and water bottles for others.”
When he finally returned home aged 23, Len’s family scarcely recognised him: “I left home a fresh-faced young man and now I looked [to them] like an old man.”
In her internment camp for women and children, deep in Sumatra’s interior, British nurse Phyllis Briggs also knew nothing about events in Europe. It was not until 24 August 1945, nine days after Japan had surrendered, that her guards told Briggs the war was over in both Europe and the far east. She had been interned for more than three years.
In the final months of conflict, the number of women dying in Briggs’ camp rapidly increased: “The coffins were very rough boxes made of boards that did not even join together properly. We used to cover the coffin tops with ferns to make them look more decent and fill the gaps… I shall always connect ferns with dear friends who had gone. Miss Dryburgh, Nan Wier, Miss Livingstone, Mary Cooper, Macfie – all real friends dying one after another. Several Dutch nuns and Australian sisters died – always one or two deaths every day. The gravediggers found it difficult to dig deep enough, it took so much strength. In the end, it was the children who were the strongest and it was they who did the digging.” From an original group of 15 female internees, only five survived Japanese imprisonment.
New world order
For Phyllis Briggs and thousands like her, life after the war would never be the same again. Britain partied hard on VE Day, yet once the trestle tables were folded away and the bonfires burnt out, families across the nation – and in the various war zones across the globe – were confronted with the task of coming to terms with loss and dislocation in their lives. Soon they would vote out Winston Churchill, who had inspired Britons through even the darkest days of the war, and replace him as prime minister with Labour leader Clement Attlee. A new world beckoned.
In Croydon, eight-year-old Barbara Vanderstock’s father had missed spending VE Day with his family, but he eventually returned home to fresh beginnings: “We went to town on the decorations, crowning our efforts with a large poster, ‘Welcome Home Dad’… We went to sleep and we were woken up by dad, who was in his army uniform standing at the door. He said: ‘Hello Erbs’, and we said: ‘Hello dad.’ It was a strangely ordinary moment.”
John Willis is a historian and former TV executive. His latest book, The People’s War: Unheard Voices, is out now (BBC Books)
This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> Emma Mason <![CDATA[The history of VE Day street parties]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/ve-day-street-party-celebrate-pictures-ww2-history/ 2025-05-07T15:38:43.000Z 2025-05-07T07:30:38.000Z At 2.41am on 7 May 1945, at a schoolhouse near Reims in northern France, General Alfred Jodl, the German chief of staff, signed the unconditional surrender of all German land, sea and air forces wherever they might be fighting. General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, rang General Sir ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff. “The war is over,” he said.
“But no official announcement could be made” said Juliet Gardiner, writing for BBC History Magazine in 2005. “Stalin insisted that victory should not be proclaimed until German troops on the eastern front had surrendered to the Soviet general Zukhov in Berlin and the long-awaited news could be proclaimed simultaneously in London, Moscow and Washington.”
Yet rumours that the war had finally ended soon began to filter through to the British public. “The newspapers are full of rumours of surrender… feeling almost excited… everyone is speculating,” wrote Lyn Murphy, who worked for the director of an electrical manufacturer engaged in war production, in her diary for 7 May 1945.
“They shouldn’t keep people hanging about waiting like this. The government needn’t be afraid of people going mad, everybody’s very sober about it,” complained a middle-aged man to a member of Mass-Observation, the organisation that compiled reports on British wartime attitudes and morale, which was out in force now that victory was in the air.
On the afternoon of 8 May 1945, the British prime minister Winston Churchill made the radio announcement that the world had long been waiting for. He announced that hostilities with Germany would cease at one minute past midnight, and that “our dear Channel Islands”, the only part of British territory to have been occupied, “are to be freed today”. After nearly six long years, the war in Europe was finally over.
Time to party
The celebrations began almost immediately. But there were no official plans for VE Day – notice of the public holiday had been so short that most weren’t sure how to celebrate. Gardiner, who later interviewed people who experienced VE Day firsthand, said: “A London window cleaner probably spoke for many when he declared ‘the holiday is the main issue… very few have any definite plans, and these almost exclusively consist of getting drunk.’”
Most people had expected the church bells to be rung: “I thought they’d be clanging all day long,” reported a Surrey woman, “but there was no signal. Just hanging around… No All Clears, no bells. Nothing to start people off.”
The weather looked set to be fair – though the papers forecast possible rain later. But even that was a novelty, said Gardiner. Throughout the war it had been forbidden to publish the weather forecast in the newspapers or broadcast it on the wireless, for fear of giving the Germans information that might be useful in planning bombing raids.
Some people went to church to give thanks for the peace at hastily arranged services, while others strolled around their local streets admiring the flags and streamers that had been hung out. Children set to work making Union Jack flags with cardboard and crayons.
Although VE Day was strictly speaking a continental European event, it was celebrated all over the world. In London, more than a million people took to the streets and huge crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace to see Churchill standing on the balcony alongside King George VI. The king's daughters, Princess Elizabeth – the future Queen Elizabeth II (pictured far left) – and Princess Margaret, appeared alongside them. In Paris and New York, similar crowds gathered along the Champs Elysée and in Times Square.
Michael Mason, 13, who had been evacuated from his home in central London to a village in Hertfordshire in 1939 and was still there on VE Day, said: “I caught the early bus… to London. I wanted to spend the day with my mum and dad. The scenes in the capital were incredible. It was one huge celebration. A tremendous wave of pent-up feelings had broken loose. The streets were crammed with joyful revellers.”
The partying went on into the night: “Crowds surged back to Buckingham Palace to call for the king and queen again, lines of conga dancers wove along Piccadilly, revellers jumped into the fountains in Trafalgar Square,” wrote Gardiner. “The police were tolerant, instructed to intervene only when there was danger to life or limb, to let a war weary people go a little wild just for one night. In fact, there was remarkably little trouble or drunken behaviour – partly because most pubs had already run dry by eight o’clock.”
Majorie Cantwell, who was nine in 1945 and living in Ealing, west London, thought that “VE Day was the best day of my life. All morning we had been collecting things for the bonfire (including an old piano full of woodworm!)… when darkness finally fell we lit our bonfire and placed a Hitler “guy” on the top. It was in the middle of the road so we were all able to dance around it.
“Later two radios were placed side by side in the window of a nearby house and BBC dance music was relayed into the street. All the grown-ups danced and sang until they were exhausted. When the dance music went off the air, my dad entertained everyone with his banjo and people sang and danced some more. We all went to bed that night tired and happy and I felt that nothing could ever harm us again.”
Look back at the 8 May 1945 celebrations in pictures…
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