Our Street, page 25
We had several parties at the flat, where all the relations would come over for knees-ups. We didn’t have record players, just a piano and other musical instruments with which we made our own entertainment. The dancing would be very boisterous and I remember the wooden floor of the flat bouncing up and down when we were all doing ‘Knees up, Mother Brown’ … The old boys downstairs must have thought the Germans were there with their land mines.
Singing has always been a morale booster. Like whistling in the dark, it helps keep a good face on things, even when you’re confronted with the ‘bogeyman’, and it draws people together, making them feel part of something bigger than themselves – so important at times of crisis or distress. Many of the songs people remembered singing have lasted in popular memory for sixty years or so. Be they silly novelty ditties which urged us to hang out our washing on the Siegfried Line, dreamily romantic tales of nightingales singing in Berkeley Square or powerfully sentimental songs like ‘We’ll Meet Again’, they all serve to show what Noël Coward meant when he described the potency of popular music.
We could always have a singsong. There were some lovely songs that came out in wartime, real lovely melodies, like the Vera Lynn songs and Glenn Miller – the sort of tunes you could dance to. But, as you know, at first they closed all the dance halls down.
It was quickly realized that there was a need for public diversion, and places of amusement and entertainment were soon opened up again – some within a week of their initial closure. But after reopening, it was interruption and disruption that would present problems for the next six years.
I was told an unverifiable but nonetheless amusing story about someone attending a football match at which, in a glorious moment of audience participation, members of the crowd were invited to take the place of favourite players who had been called up for national service – so long as they had the right-sized feet to fit the players’ boots. The reason I think it’s probably true is the many other football stories I came across of teams losing or winning with bizarrely high or low scores because of the unusual team make-up – the usual back line now being off somewhere on the front line.
Things got back to more or less normal – at least, as normal as possible. Places would stop open even in a raid, until the planes got close. Sometimes they would clear the place or inform you that it was dangerous, and then you made up your own mind.
If we tried to go to the pictures the siren would go off and we would leave, or we’d be on our way to a dance and, yes, the siren would go, and we’d try and make our way back home.
Regardless of the interruptions, people were still prepared to take their chance, as they craved distraction from the blackout, the rationing and separation from their loved ones. As can be seen from the vast amount of coverage in contemporary newspapers, cinema was one of the most popular diversions of all, a hugely popular way for the public to spend their free time, with people ‘going to the flicks’ as often as they could afford. Despite restrictions to programming and hours of opening, in the cinema you could escape into another world. Whether you opted for the dark cosiness of the luxuriously carpeted and curtained picture palace or the very basic facilities of the fleapit, you were now able to enjoy not only the main feature and the B film, but the all-important patriotically ‘spun’ newsreel, and the more overtly official, ministry-produced propaganda shorts. These brief films covered everything from slightly hectoring tips on how to recognize Nazi spies to cheery extollings of the virtues of fuel savings in the home.
There were certainly plenty of premises to choose from. They weren’t as seemingly ubiquitous as the pubs that stood on just about every street corner, but there were more than enough to supply the most ardent filmgoer with entertainment. And with programmes showing everything from The Wizard of Oz to Gone With the Wind and with movie stars like Carmen Miranda and Betty Grable, Clark Gable and Bing Crosby, is it any wonder that cinema was so popular? Especially considering the added bonuses that came from spending your leisure time there: you used their fuel, thus saving your own precious supplies, and the picture house could double as an informal shelter during an air raid!
During a lull in the air raids my mother said to my sister, ‘Why don’t you go to the pictures?’ It was only at the top of the road where I lived. So we said, ‘All right.’ And she said, ‘I’ll have the baby while you go.’ So we were nicely sitting in the pictures, seeing a Bette Davies film, Now Voyager, and we was nice and comfortable, when all of a sudden it came on the screen – an air-raid warning.* Well, my sister turned to me and she said, ‘Tell me what happens,’ and she ran, and I said, ‘All right.’ I sat there, watching the film, and every so often there was a loud crash! Bang! Still I sat there. I was thinking, ‘Ooh, I must see the end of it.’ Looking sideways, there was no one either side of me at all and I thought [there must be] plenty of people behind. The time went on and I was getting to a lovely part of the film, so nice, and I looked around and … there was about me and another two people in there, and I thought, ‘Oh, God, I’d best go home now.’ I still stayed for five minutes and then there’s a great big loud resounding crash and I jumped up and that time I had to go home. As I came across Green Street … shrapnel was falling and everything – brick, pieces of brickwork and masonry – was all falling all around me. I was doing a little run and then going into a doorway, and running again until I finally got into my house and run down the air-raid shelter. My sister was sitting there with my mum and her little girl, and my sister said to me, ‘What happened?’ I said, ‘I nearly got killed, that’s what happened!’ I never did see the end of the film …
… at the cinema, if an air raid started, it was up to you – you either stayed on watching the film, trying to hear what they were saying over the bomb blasts, or you left for the shelter. We didn’t go much as money was short, but if we did, we stayed, because once you went out you weren’t allowed back in unless you paid again. Also, the raids always seemed to come half an hour before the film ended, so you missed the end. The same applied to the music hall, which we all loved. During the raids the comics would come on and tell jokes with dust from the shaking building falling all over them and the stage. We were all encouraged to join in a singsong – gas masks at the ready. Many’s the time ‘There’ll Always be an England’ would drown out the noise of the bombs.
This evacuee and her companions still made the effort to haul themselves along to the flicks, despite the fact that they were all in the advanced stages of pregnancy.
The hospital where I was booked to have my baby was hit by a bomb, so I was asked to evacuate to have her. About twenty-six of us, all within three or four weeks of delivery, were sent to a nursing home in [Somerset]. We were all young and fairly good-looking. Sometimes we would go to the pictures in the afternoon. There would be soldiers there by the dozen. As we sat there, we could hear them saying, ‘I’ll have the blonde one,’ or, ‘I’ll have the redhead.’ We arranged it so that when the lights came on all we pregnant ladies stood up together. You should have seen the soldiers’ looks of surprise! At least it was a good laugh for us.
Sadly, not all outings turned out to have such amusing conclusions. This story illustrates one of the particular cruelties of wartime: the arbitrary matter of who did or did not ‘cop it’ – the ‘Why them and not us?’ or the ‘Why us and not them?’ – that stays with people for the rest of their lives.
H– and I decided to go to the pictures one evening. I was always afraid, but said I would go anyway. As we were going in we met two friends in the foyer who told us the light warning that a raid was coming had been turned on. Like us, they were planning their wedding. We said cheerio and went in anyway – only to hear later that the block of flats where they had been going to had been bombed. She was one of the survivors, but her darling had been killed. What a wicked world.
It was the experience of living in that ‘wicked world’ that made people crave distraction from the reality of what was going on around them, and the wireless was then as much a part of people’s lives as the television is today. There had been television broadcasts before the war but for most people in the East End TV sets were beyond their pocket. However, on Friday 1 September 1939, two days before the declaration of war, television output came to a halt, and would be off the air for the next seven years. So television was no longer an option – even for those who could have afforded it – and the next day, Saturday 2 September, all the national and regional radio services merged into a single BBC station, broadcasting daily from 7 a.m. to 12.15 a.m. Such a radical change to a medium of real mass importance must surely have marked the moment when even the most reluctant had to admit that something momentous was about to happen.
We listened to the wireless a lot, and there were quite a few comedy programmes on, but the most important programme was always the news on a Sunday evening. They played the national anthems of the different countries as they fell to Germany, and sadly there got to be so many that they only played the first line of them.
We enjoyed listening to In Town Tonight, all the big fights and ITMA.
ITMA was one of the most widely recalled radio shows, even if it wasn’t everyone’s favourite. It had an amazing weekly listening public of 16 million – at a time when the UK’s population was just over 47.75 million.
ITMA stood for ‘It’s That Man Again’ – an allusion to the way newspapers referred to Hitler when describing his latest actions. It was a comedy show which began in 1939 and was to be broadcast until the death of Tommy Handley, its star, ten years later. As with The Goon Show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the more recent Fast Show, much of its success came from its repetition of catchphrases, its larger-than-life characters and its sly digs at the establishment, all of which captured the British imagination and rapidly entered into general currency. Colonel Chin-Strap was readily echoed as he encouraged refills for his glass with a cheery, ‘Don’t mind if I do’; Mrs Mopp’s slightly saucy ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ was widely and knowingly mimicked; and anyone a bit shifty-looking was mocked as being like Funf – the not very threatening or convincing spy who carried out missions for the Nazis. One of the programme’s pleasures was that it sent up the sometimes ludicrous machinations of ministerial bureaucracy – an all too familiar nuisance for those living through the war. The full extent of Handley’s popularity and the dedication of his public can be gauged from a description of the adoring send-off that followed his sudden death from a cerebral haemorrhage. Not only was the full six-mile route of his funeral procession lined by many thousands of devoted fans, but his memory was celebrated and honoured at services in both St Paul’s in London and Liverpool Cathedral.
Two other programmes that were more overtly morale-boosting – or perhaps that should be production-boosting – were also very popular. These were aimed at those in the workplace, busily producing for the war effort, but were as likely to be listened to in the home as the factory. Workers’ Playtime, broadcast at lunchtime, toured variety and musical acts all around the country, visiting the canteens of factories involved in the war effort. And, from mid-1940, there was the twice-daily broadcast of Music While You Work. This show featured big-name bands playing orchestral versions of popular songs, and was intended to buck up workers as they sang along to the stirring tunes during the mid-morning and mid-afternoon broadcasts – traditionally periods which saw dips in production.
Youngsters were also catered for by the BBC’s radio output with Children’s Hour, but in those days before electronic games and computers, children were keen to find the means to amuse themselves in rather more ‘hands on’ ways – even if, or possibly because, those ways might not be to the taste of most adults.
For amusement on cold winter evenings we had cards, books or dominoes, with which we used to construct houses and, no doubt influenced by the war, we would fill with flies with their wings removed and proceed to bomb. Another favourite sport [when evacuated] was to catch flies and throw them into the webs of fat hedgerow spiders. Typical boys’ fun? There was little radio [for children] and, of course, no TV.
Even during the war we used to rake the streets and get up to all kinds of business. Not like chavvies* today. But we had a good time, and learned one or two things about life. And what it felt like to graze your knees without going running to your mother telling tales and suing people ’cos you’d ‘got a baddie’!†
This young lad had a rather more sophisticated experience of wartime entertainment, which he was able to enjoy with his father – well, most of the time.
Dad was always interested in the theatre, but Mum wasn’t, so I used to go all over east London with him, seeing all the shows. Once at the Queen’s in Poplar – practically in the docks – the bombs were dropping all around, but no one thought nothing of it, and the show carried on. The chorus girls were still dancing and the comedians still telling jokes. Two shows a week we’d see. We’d go and visit Nan first, and Dad would give her her shilling for a Guinness – she liked a drop of that – then we’d go to see the show. The Queen’s, the Walthamstow Palace, East Ham Palace – by the station, where the old C&A used to be, Finsbury Park Empire. I liked the Queen’s and the East Ham Palace best. Dad also used to go to the Windmill with his mates, but I was never allowed to go there. That’s where they had the tableaux vivants – the nude shows, where, if the girls moved, it was breaking the law, but if they stood still they were all right. No, he never took me there!
Another favourite pastime that was best left to adults was going to the pub. While beer wasn’t officially rationed, it was often in short supply, and when it was available it could prove to be a very watery affair when compared to the familiar brews of pre-war days. But the pub was still a haven. It was a place to relax, somewhere to share the warmth of the fireplace and to enjoy the benefit of the lighting, and it provided a break from what was going on outside those warm, fug-ridden walls. It gave you a chance to enjoy yourself for an hour or two, and all the while saving your own precious stocks of coal, gas and maybe even electricity, if your home was that stylish.
But when the alcohol shortages took hold, opening hours were shortened and what the landlord could ‘allow’ his customers was sometimes severely curtailed. Prices rose and drinking glasses became as precious as the bottles themselves.
Around the docks, one of the most dangerous places in the country for civilians, it could be particularly difficult to take a stroll down to your local, even if it did have supplies of booze or a few packets of your favourite cigarettes.
A lot of the publicans [round there] had buggered off, but if you happened to know anybody they’d say, ‘Here, don’t put it around, but so and so’s opening tonight for two hours’ – the Red Lion or the Connaught – ‘But don’t put it around, like. We don’t want too many.’
You could usually get a drop of something to wet your whistle, but it’d be on the QT – someone’d tip you the wink and you’d be in there, fast as you like!
Despite all the problems, when pubs did open, they were as popular as ever.
The pubs did good business. It was a way of letting your hair down.
Other problems carried over from peacetime and, even with widespread shortages and reduced alcoholic strength, there were still those who couldn’t handle the drink that was available.
Me and my mates witnessed a lot of fights outside pubs in those days.
They’d have a sniff of the barmaid’s apron and that’d be it. All the jealousy about what had gone on at home, while they was away fighting for their country, would all come out and a fight’d start. So long as no one got too hurt, it was like free entertainment – you could have a few bob on the winner!
Of course, if you preferred, there were healthier ways to spend your leisure time. Within the grimy ruins of bomb-damaged London, there were the parks, the green lungs of the East End, to be enjoyed – although even they had been transformed by the war.
Places where people had once taken their almost pastoral ease were now doubling as utilitarian centres of salvage and wreckage dumps, ack-ack stations, sites of sties for communal pig clubs, centres in which locals could ‘Dig For Victory’ and locations for primitive, rain-sodden, trench-type shelters – all very far removed from their original purpose of being simple havens of fresh air, healthy exercise and refreshing relaxation. The importance of the parks as refuges of leisure was still recognized. Facilities were still provided for visitors, including free, ragged pre-war deck chairs in which to sunbathe and outdoor dances, which were well attended despite the lack of male partners.
These had been enthusiastically reinstated by the authorities, alongside the parallel reinstatement of bank holidays, as part of the ‘Holiday at Home’ drive, which was intended to save fuel and prevent road congestion by curbing unnecessary civilian movement around the country. Victoria Park, bordered by Bow and Hackney, had whole programmes of entertainment to tempt locals to stay put. These ranged from full, professional performances by the Sadler’s Wells ballet company to swimming galas in the now sadly demolished lido – what the Luftwaffe failed to destroy, ‘progress’ did instead.
But no matter what entertainment was put on for them on their doorsteps, some East Enders weren’t impressed. After facing the relentless demands made on them in their bomb-ravaged streets, they were determined to find a way – whether legal or not – out of town and down to the seaside, looking for a chance to disport themselves on the beach between the coils of barbed wire intended to thwart potential invaders.
There was one legitimate reason, other than evacuation, for Cockneys to leave the capital and that was to go hop picking in Kent. Hopping was a much-relished opportunity to really get away from it all, even though hard work – and bombers – were involved. It offered a genuinely rural respite, because, regardless of the war, there were still hops to be picked, money to be earned from doing so and, best of all, a ‘holiday’ to be had away from the raids over the East End.
