The colossal task of rebuilding Britain
After VE Day parties in 1945, the hard work began. What can we learn from this after lockdown? By Maureen Waller
‘We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing,” Winston Churchill told the euphoric British people on VE Day, May 8 1945, “but let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead.” He was referring to the ongoing war with Japan, which was expected to last another year or more, but his words might more usefully be applied to the massive task of post-war reconstruction.
The dropping of the atom bombs by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, bringing the war to a sudden, disquieting stop, took Britain by surprise. VJ Day on August 15 was a more muted affair. And after the relief that the war was truly over on all fronts, there was the inevitable anticlimax at the end of a colossal task.
Dominating everything was a sheer, blind weariness, as well as irritation at the continued shortages, discomforts and uncertainties of life. People expected the benefits of peace to be immediate – of course, they were not.
“Well, there’s nothing to look forward to now,” the comedian Robb Wilton quipped. “There was always the All Clear before.” When Mass Observation, the social research organisation, asked one man if he felt optimistic about the future, his reply summed up the prevalent mood: “No, I don’t. I feel it’s going to be the beginning of dreadful problems – it’s going to be a terrible time.” Another woman moaned, “They will nag us about winning the peace or something, just as they nagged us about winning the war.”
When the lights came on again, it was to reveal a shabby, run-down country; vast tracts of its cities, industry and infrastructure needed to be rebuilt, and it would take years.
Thanks to a sensible rationing system ensuring “fair shares for all”, the British emerged from the war leaner, fitter and healthier, but no one could have expected rationing to continue into the Fifties – or become even more stringent.
The situation was exacerbated by America’s abrupt termination of Lend-Lease – which had enabled Britain to import food and other goods on extended credit – on August 21. No one went hungry. It was the tedium and limitations that irked. The wife of a US journalist admitted defeat: “The cookery book I brought with me is about as much use as an atom bomb formula in a school laboratory.”
After 1943, the Government had built up large reserves of food, knowing that after the war there would be a pressing shortage. Now these stocks were to be diverted to the starving populations of liberated Europe and defeated Germany – the latter prompting resentment. “One certainly has to pay dearly for the privilege of winning a war these days,” one Londoner complained.
Queuing, a wartime invention, had become a way of life. Added to the misery of food shortages were fuel shortages, forcing people to collect what meagre supplies they could carry from emergency dumps, a situation that would prevail through the hard winter of 1946 and the freak conditions of 1947, when the weather brought the country to its knees.
It was the heyday of the criminal, the racketeer and the spiv, as the black market boomed. “Lorry loads of tea, sugar, butter, clothes, cigarettes and whisky were stolen from warehouses … furs, rings, clothing and petrol coupons … anything with a ready cash value was loot for the army of the underworld,” the head of Scotland Yard’s Ghost Squad recalled. Impatient with the never-ending scrimping, saving and making do, even previously law-abiding citizens joined the scam, as the notion “nudge nudge, wink wink ... it fell off the back of a lorry,” entered the jargon.
The war had left Britain virtually bankrupt. It would have to increase its exports and services to earn the currency to pay for its imports – not least for the raw materials needed for the five million new houses Labour’s Aneurin Bevan promised, if only demobilisation could be speeded up to provide the men to build them – but how to do that when industry was still mired in red tape?
“The Government has governed my business until I do not know who the bloody hell owns it,” one owner said. “I am suspected, inspected, examined, informed, required and commanded, so that I do not know who the hell I am or where I am, or why I am here at all … The only reason I am clinging to life is to see what the bloody hell is going to happen next.”
Unlike the US, which maintained a high level of peacetime industry ready to flood post-war markets with its goods, all British industry had been given over to the war effort. Taken by surprise by its abrupt end and not blessed with the best management, it was slow to make the turnaround.
Some faced the prospect of laying off workers during the transition period. Many employees, particularly highly paid munitions workers, were in for a shock at the low wages offered in peacetime. The lifting of wartime regulations meant strikes were back.
The economist John Maynard Keynes was dispatched to Washington to beg our foremost ally for a massive loan to keep Britain’s economy afloat. Negotiations were fraught. Congress, in particular, took a dim view of a Labour government with a socialist agenda promising profligate expenditure – nationalisation, welfare, a National Health Service offering “free” healthcare for all, no less – asking for funding. Eventually a loan of $3.75billion (equivalent to £42billion in 2020) and an additional $1.19 billion from Canada, both at 2 per cent annual interest, was extracted, repayable over 60 years.
In 1948, the Marshall Plan, lending huge sums to European nations to rebuild their economies, allowed the French and the Germans to modernise their industries and infrastructure, while Britain spent its share on fulfilling its military commitments, the running of its fading empire, and the establishment of the NHS.
Servicemen were frustrated by the slow pace of demobilisation, finally completed in 1946, leaving them to play catch-up on the jobs market, where they were not welcomed with any alacrity. Leaving the military, and the support and comradeship it offered, was disorientating. They received little sympathy from tired civilians, who felt they’d had a hard war, too, and they were unprepared for the grimness of civilian life, with its unfamiliar bureaucracy and shortages, the grey desolation of cities and the shabbiness of their homes – even if theirs was not one of the millions destroyed or damaged.
The housing shortage meant many couples had to move in with their parents, or share accommodation, which added to the tensions. “They were hard years because my husband was quarrelling with my mother,” one woman reminisced, “so I was like a referee, really, for nine years before we got our own home.”
After long separations and their varied and extraordinary experiences, husbands and wives had to learn to live together again. Men were shocked by how much their wives had changed. Gone was the sweet innocent girl they had married, to be replaced by someone careworn but more confident, less pliable, who’d looked after the children single-handedly, become a huntress for food, and gained a measure of independence, earning her own money in a wartime job.
“It was as if we were strangers,” one ex-POW captured at Dunkirk reported, sadly. “We seemed to have nothing to say. It was as if a wall had grown between us. We couldn’t go on like that. We’re getting a divorce.”
Indeed, the divorce rate shot up from 9,970 in 1938 to 24,857 in 1945 to a post-war peak of 47,041 in 1947.
Women were warned to make allowances for the strangers who had returned to them, soothing their homecoming. “When he came out, it was very, very difficult to get to know him again,” recalled one. “I think it was a time we could easily have split up. You had to go all through a sort of courtship again.”
Children, too, had had a difficult war, shuttled back and forth during waves of evacuation, their education badly disrupted, their families split up. Now Daddy was coming home and everything would change again.
One woman recalls, as a small child, waiting at the railway station with her mother for the first glimpse of him: “‘Is that one Daddy?’ I asked over and over again, as I had no idea what he looked like. Then suddenly one of them stopped and clasped my mother to him. My feelings were of surprise and disappointment – he was my father, but he seemed more interested in my mother; and she in him. I felt somehow I’d lost them both.”
“When is Daddy going away again?” was the hurtful cry echoed in many households.
Given the trauma of war and the hardships of the post-war era, what is perhaps most remarkable is the social stability of the great majority of families – and the resilience of the nation as a whole.
Just as the Second World War provided the impetus for change on an unprecedented scale, so, too, may Covid-19 accelerate change in the 21st century. The Government already had a huge task ahead of it: resetting an independent Britain’s place in the world – diplomatically, militarily, and as a trading nation – improving our infrastructure, rebalancing the economy, making broadband fit for purpose, taking greater care of the environment. The economic devastation wrought by this hideous virus makes all that even more imperative.
“Peace is not an end, but a beginning,” the leader of London county council said in May 1945. Will the same be said of the end of lockdown? They rebuilt. So can we.
Resurgam.
People expected the benefits of peace to be immediate – they were not
Many men were shocked by how much their wives had changed