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| VE Day 1945. Prime Minister Winston Churchill with the Royal Family on the Buckingham Palace balcony to celebrate the end of World War 2 in Europe |
Readers who recall the Royal Family and Winston Churchill acknowledging the crowds on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on VE Day in 1945 will have survived WW2 bombings only to be targeted by a more insidious enemy today, the Covid-19 virus.
Official celebrations designed to inject the spirit of joy felt in 1945 have been cancelled. Instead there will be some TV programmes to mark the 75th anniversary of the allied victory. The Queen will address her subjects at 9 pm as did her father King George VI on VE Day.
Life in Britain and around the world had become very different until lockdown imposed dramatic changes in routine in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The concept of the nuclear family has gone. Marriage has largely been replaced by partnerships, civil or informal, previously regarded as living in sin.
Feminism dominates Anglicanism, Christianity is lampooned, churches are closing while other faiths are protected. Political correctness has become an unwelcome burden, often depriving people of the humour that sustained us in times of difficulty
Notions of gender contradict what used to be regarded as patently obvious while the snowflake generation threaten free speech by no-platforming speakers whose views they disagree with.
On the 75th anniversary of VE Day we are at war again but with an unseen enemy. Older folk who experienced bombings in WW2 and the discipline of National Service find themselves at greater risk from the virus but appear better able to cope, staying indoors as told while some, mainly younger people, ignore the advice, risking the lives of others in the process
In May 1940 when Churchill first addressed the House of Commons as Prime Minister he concluded, "You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory; victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival." The same spirit is needed today.
I recall sitting around the radio with my mother during WW2 listening to Churchill's speeches spurring the allies to victory and strengthening resolve at home. Uplifting broadcasts provided a welcome tonic for housewives bringing up their families in difficult times when their husbands faced more immediate perils abroad.
News bulletins are once again dominated by war reports. War against the Covid-19 virus but the BBC has changed its position from blanket support of the war effort to a more critical, gloomy picture. For example, viewers are constantly told that the UK has the highest number of Corona-19 virus deaths in Europe before adding, as if barely relevant, that demographic factors paint a different picture.
Some voices are spreading discontent, encouraging popular demands to relax the restrictions that have lessened the spread of infections. Hopefully governments will remain resolute in the face of opposition and not give in to unscientific populist demands.
Matters become more complicated while devolved administrations, anxious to be seen flexing their independent muscles, arrive at their own conclusions even though based on the same central, scientific evidence. When aired by the BBC such views can make them appear to be aligned with the Opposition.
The blog A Grain of Sand poses the question 'Is Aunty Biased', suggesting the BBC, founded on Christian principles, has "swung to an institutional mindset of sceptical liberalism".
I was intrigued the other day to see a reference to the BBC's Director of Content. Googling revealed not just a content director but an army of 39 ideas people ending with the Lead on Comedy Nations and Regions.
Today there is little original comedy to provide laughs compared with WW2 radio content such as ITMA, Workers Playtime, Band Waggon and Hi, Gang!
Instead the BBC supplements its regular news and current affairs slots with frequent repeats and a constant supply of soccer matches/comments/analyses while evening dramas provide a diet mainly of murder and misery.
Nevertheless, 75 years after VE Day, we will not be glued to the wireless worrying about air raid warning sirens. Instead my wife and I will be watching Auntie focus on doom and misery with a gap celebrating Churchill's promise of victory if we were to stand firm.
We did. Pulling together we are here to celebrate victory. 'Victory at all costs'.
'Older folk who experienced bombings in WW2 and the discipline of National Service find themselves at greater risk from the virus ...'
ReplyDeleteThere's a real poignancy in the fact that the press reports today an announcement by the Royal Hospital in Chelsea that nine of its 'Chelsea Pensioners' have died as a consequence of infection with Covid-19.
Yes, very sad and poignant.
ReplyDeleteMight I take issue with your comment "Today there is little original comedy to provide laughs ...". Back in the War there was only one BBC radio channel (plus, I think, a Forces network) and no TV. Today we have a multiplicity of "platforms", all of which have to be filled with "stuff", including comedy. And, of course, comedy itself has changed hugely. So I think your comparison is unfair.
I think there were two radio channels: the 'Home Service' and the 'Light Programme'. They were still around when I was a kid. Plus, as you say, the Forces network, which I seem to remember, mutated post-war into programmes for the UK army in the British zone of occupation which came to be called the BAOR - British Army of the Rhine.
DeleteComedy?
DeleteMuch of what is dished up on the BBC today is a far cry from a laughing matter, especially when the programme is billed as "comedy".
I too had assumed that the Light Programme was running during the war, so I checked before posting - it didn't start till 29/7/1945.
DeleteWell, I never knew that! But the date you give tells me that it started a month to the day before I was born, so doubtless there's the reason! ;-)
DeleteAn antisemite would in 1945 have been regarded with contempt.
ReplyDeleteNot sure you're right there - it was obvious enough among the older generation, at least in the place where I grew up during the 1950s.
DeleteThough of course it was always very discreet and thus, for the most part, deniable on challenge!
I grew up (1950s/60s) in a part of London with a large Jewish population, but I was never aware of any anti-semitism (which isn't to say it wasn't around). However this was an upper-middle class neighbourhood with a lot of Jewish doctors, solicitors, musicians etc, few of whom were particularly observant - indeed they looked down on the Orthodox communities in places such as Stamford Hill - in the same way as the local Anglican community was very wary of Nonconformists and, in particular, Irish Catholics. So I suspect that, in our area at least, the issue was much more one of class snobbery than anti-semitism; however things may have been very different in other areas, such as London's East End.
DeleteMy own background is interesting in that my family consciously identified as "English" and worshipped in the Parish Church, yet mt parents were German Jews who, recently married, had come to Britain in 1938 - our affiliation never seemed to be questioned by either the Jewish or Christian communities (although in more recent times I have once or twice been railed at by Christian Zionists who felt that I should have rallied to their cause).
Dare I suggest that, at least in some places, anti-semitism has now been supplanted by Islamophobia; not just a hatred for the religion but one often mixed in with racism?
I was born and brought up outside Manchester, which had - and, I believe, still has - the largest Jewish community in the British Isles after London. Both my parents (born 1906 and 1911) had lived their entire lives in Manchester, and they too shared some of the attitudes to which you refer in your post. Neither had any definite religious convictions - in the fashion of the time they termed themselves 'C of E', but that merely accorded with the general vague view in their era that 'everyone has to be something' and you were automatically C of E by default if you weren't anything else!
DeleteMy mother's polite aversion was towards Roman Catholics, a sentiment passed down, I believe, from her own mother who'd been raised in a working-class Primitive Methodist family at the end of the 19th century. When she reached maturity and married, she entirely abandoned that religion, eschewing its stern protestant rigours; but some of its prejudices stayed with her and were passed on in dilute form to her children. So my mother, while being entirely free of 19th century protestant zeal against 'papistical idolatry', retained a generalized sense that Roman Catholics weren't quite respectable and were infected by foreign notions. And for my mother, respectability was everything!
From things which he occasionally said, I think that my father wasn't entirely untouched by those ideas, but my sense was that he didn't give them much thought. But he - unlike my mum who to my recollection never mentioned any such thing - had a very definite suspicion of Jews, and he gave me the impression that such sentiments were commonplace in the circles in which he grew up. He never gave any coherent account of it, and it never seemed in any way to affect his personal feelings towards Jews whom he'd encountered socially or in the context of his work. Some he clearly seemed to like; and yet nothing shifted his suspicion of Jews in generality. That struck me as odd and irrational, and it was indeed inexplicables like that which prompted me to look for something offering beliefs and values more coherent than my parents' eccentric and unexamined inherited assumptions. Thus the start of my exploration of Christianity in my mid-teens.
But my original comment wasn't stimulated by my own family's ideas, but rather by something which happened around the mid-1950s in our local town on the outer fringes of Manchester. A consortium of prosperous local businessmen established itself, and bought a tract of land to develop as a golf club. The local newspaper, anxious as ever for local interest stories, sought out the chairman of the consortium to interview him. Why, the reporter asked, had they gone to the expense and effort of establishing yet another golf club in an area which appeared already to have an abundance of them?
The chairman was frank in his response. All of the consortium, he said, were Jews, and their experience was that no pre-existing local golf club would grant membership to Jews. That, of course, was never explicitly acknowledged - but the prosperous business world in Manchester was relatively small in those days, and someone on the committee would know who you were. Jewish golf enthusiasts in the area had got the message, and decided that the solution was to establish a club of their own in which tribe and creed wouldn't matter.
There was, of course, a chorus of indignant denials from other local golf clubs, but on the balance of probability I knew whom I was inclined to believe!
As to your final paragraph, I think it's human nature - and perhaps, given our insular situation and history, perhaps English human nature especially - to suspect 'the other in our midst'. And Muslims are distinctly 'other', and sometimes militantly and even aggressively so. Which leads me to think that there's at least some substance to your proposition.
Thank you, that is all most interesting. I think you're right about the Manchester Jewish community, I don't know the city myself. Speaking of anti-semitism in golf clubs, I immediately thought of "Mr Rosenblum's List" which is a humorous yet touching story (see https://tinyurl.com/ycsk272p for synopsis) - I enjoyed it a couple of years back. By the way, the "Helpful INformation" booklet isn't an invention of the author but actually existed, I have seen a copy in the London Jewish Museum.
ReplyDeleteAn intriguing story, and quite new to me - thanks for sharing it! The golf club in my local town to which I referred had better success than Jakob Rosenblum's venture; it appeared to prosper from the outset, and still exists over sixty years later.
DeleteI remember, long ago, trying to bend my head around the rationale underlying my parents' attitudes. Difficult, because I don't believe they was based on any coherent systematic ideology, but rather on a set of diffuse assumptions picked up from within their own families and social circles. Thus it's rather hard to pin them down with a name; the nearest that I got was 'English exceptionalism'.
I've never seen the mindset better demonstrated than in Robert Louis Stephenson's poem for children, published around 1880 and entitled 'Foreign Children'. It's easily accessible in several places on the net, for instance at https://www.bartleby.com/188/129.html Ironically I first encountered it, as a child of nine or ten, in one of my mother's old childhood Christmas annuals, circa 1920, and its politely expressed but effortlessly superior cultural assumptions struck me even then!