Children waving flags on VE Day, 8 May 1945. ‘In bomb scarred Battersea, the little Londoners celebrated V E Day among the ruins of their homes’. (Photo by Daily Herald Archive/National Science & Media Museum/SSPL via Getty Images)

Eighty years ago today, Britain celebrated a hard-won victory against Nazi regime following six long years of hardship and sacrifice. It is important to commemorate the collective sacrifice and shared effort that Britons and their allies suffered to achieve this victory and the images of stoic Britons at war and on the Home Front are intrinsic to how we think of the Second World War. But, more recently, historians have begun thinking about the impact of the War on everyday life beyond that of rationing and ‘digging for victory.’ As part of my own research, I am interested in how the War facilitated new forms of criminal activities by women and children but also how new legislation disproportionately impacted vulnerable families and risked criminalising poor women. Through memoirs we can particularly see how the experiences of War fostered new tensions and challenges, particularly in cities such as Liverpool and Belfast, which were badly affected by Nazi bombing raids that caused significant civilian deaths, shortage of housing, and led to mass evacuations and hardship.

Helen Forrester’s two autobiographical novels, By the Waters of Liverpool and Lime Street at Two, help to understand the hardships caused by war and how difficult it was for families in need to obtain help in times of crisis. Working for a social work charity as War loomed, Forrester described that more people need help as men got called up and the allowance was inadequate to support the families left behind: ‘These allowances were so pitifully small that they hardly paid the rent for many people. Women threatened suicide as they were increasingly bullied by hire purchase firms, mortgage companies or rent collectors because they could no longer pay.’[1] Forrester also challenges the entrenched stereotype of communal sacrifice and everyone ‘doing their bit’ and instead draws attention to how some people turned on each other as the dislocating impact of War loosened bonds of shared help and cooperation and fostered crimes that caused additional harms to those in need. ‘I learned to be very afraid of looters,’ Forrester wrote, and described the office where they had clean, second-hand clothing that was available for those who sometimes arrive in nightclothes having lost their possessions, meaning ‘everything had to be replaced – and Bootle was poor, terribly poor.’ But in one horrifying encounter, Forrester recalled finding two men and a woman stealing these clothes and they managed to flee without ever being caught. ‘I learned a lot of sad truths. It was a revelation to me that the poor would steal from the poor,’ Forrester lamented.[2]

Bomb damage in Liverpool during the Second World War. A woman searches the wreckage of her home for belongings, after a German raider had dropped bombs on it during a raid to a block of flats in Belvidere Road, Liverpool, 27th September 1940. (Photo by Staff/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

James Doherty’s Post 381: the memoirs of a Belfast air raid warden also provides a sense of the chaos, upheaval and fear caused by attacks on the city. It shows how little confidence there was from inhabitants towards authorities, particularly as the War followed decades of turbulence and economic problems, which had disproportionately adversely affected Belfast’s Catholic population. The city ‘remained a place of fear and rumour’, noted Doherty.[3] His account described how thousands of Belfast inhabitants would leave home at night and slept out in the open countryside and defied government pleas to stay home. We see this panicked response in Mary Beckett’s novel Give them stones, which centres on Martha’s life as a working-class woman in Belfast throughout the twentieth century. In the aftermath of the Blitz of Easter 1941, Martha’s brother Danny described the wrecked streets in the Protestant area of Belfast and ‘He said he’d heard the Protestants saying that the Pope was in the first plane to show the Germans not to bomb the Catholic areas.’ Like many, Martha’s mother decided they should leave the city and head to the country: ‘We gathered up our nightclothes and walked over broken glass and gritty dust. Lorries were being loaded up with people anxious to get out’. However, the family are turned away by their two aunts who live in country until they realise they are family, ‘They knew about the crowds coming and it seemed to terrify them, it’s queer how the thought of Belfast people breaking out away from their backstreets strikes the fear of God into country people.’[4] My Great Uncle’s own account of some of his experiences in the Liverpool Blitz also talks about people fleeing the city, describing how ‘those nights of bombing and death of loved ones, had clearly affected peoples’ morale, and so it became a normal sight to see lorries and carts, full of people and belongings, making their way along Walton Road, out to the countryside of Fazakerley and Aintree. There they were prepared to sleep in the fields rather than face the horrors of more bombings.’[5]

Clearing works after a German bomb attack on a industrial plant in Belfast Spring 1941 (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

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As in Beckett’s Belfast novel however, there was significant hostility towards working-class Liverpudlians seeking safety. Mass Observation Diarist 5397, a female teacher, reported helping to evacuate children from Liverpool to Shrewsbury in 1940 and stated that she  ‘felt sorry for receiving area for district – the mothers and chn (children) are a mixed crowd…  dirty immoral and quarrelsome and drinking.’ She made the same trip several days later when she ‘had to nurse dirty baby which smelt’ and her colleague ‘doused it in scent to try and make it sweeter.’ And reported that she thought their hosts ‘will be amazed when they find dirty dock women to be their guests.’[6] Another Mass Observer reported that there was resentment within more affluent areas of Liverpool towards those had been bombed out from poorer districts, a young female typist noted discussions about accommodation for evacuees from Bootle, were ‘arousing fear indignation in the breast of the spick and span householders, Bootle people being notoriously dirty and “slummy.”’[7] The experience of war did not necessarily draw Britons closer together therefore, but drew attention to the differences, inequalities and divisions within society.

The War also brought new tensions and problems with the arrival of allied troops. James Kelly, Northern editor for Irish Independent for fifty years, recalled the arrival of US GIs in January 1942 who turned Belfast upside down: ‘The first night in Belfast was a kind of Bacchanalian orgy’, he noted in his memoir, Bonfires on the Hillside, ‘It was the biggest booze-up ever seen in Belfast with reeling GIs and their “colleens.”‘ But his account highlights the violence that occurred following the GI’s presence in Northern Ireland, including a harrowing murder of a deaf girl by a GI in County Down, violent rows caused by the exorbitant charges Black Marketeers charged the GIs, and racial violence between the GIs.[8]

Jubilant nurses celebrate VE-Day in Liverpool. 8th May 1945. (Photo by Staff/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

Memoir sources also suggest that working-class communities may have been damaged irreparably by the experiences of the War. Docherty suggested that ‘The bombs and the fires changed and destroyed a way of life in which the local communities had grown up. Most of the residents and their parents before them were born in the area and were reluctant to leave. The old areas were steeped in folklore and tradition and the locals feared that they would be lost and strangers in any environment other than their own.’ Docherty noted the mills were central to community in Belfast, and suggested that ‘the hardship caused by its destruction is one of the untold stories of the blitz… life would never be the same in that part of Belfast.’[9]Perhaps the dramatic post-war introduction of the welfare state and the collective relief at the end of war has overshadowed these difficult wartime experiences, which certainly jar with the dominant narratives of the War. But looking at memoirs that demonstrate the hardship and trauma so many Britons experienced can only reinforce the sense of collective sacrifice that we celebrate on VE day.

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[1] Helen Forrester, By the Waters of Liverpool (Harper Collins, London, 2010), 106.

[2] Helen Forrester, Lime Street at Two (Harper Collins, London, 2010), 233-4.

[3] James Doherty, Post 381: the memoirs of a Belfast air raid warden (The Friar’s Bush Press: Belfast, 1989), 77.

[4] Mary Beckett, Give them stones (Bloomsbury: London, 1987), 30-1.

[5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/liverpool/localhistory/my_memory/air_raid_01.shtml

[6] Mass Observation Archive, Diarist 5397 b. 1913 teacher single Liverpool.

[7] Mass Observation Archive: Diarist 5341, b. 1916. Shorthand typist and hospital library assistant, single. Liverpool, 2 January 1941.

[8] James Kelly, Bonfires on the Hillside: An eyewitness account of political upheaval in Northern Ireland (Fountain: Belfast, 1995), 122-5.

[9] Doherty, Post 381, 101-2.