11.15am, CITY OF LONDON
Tom Driberg and his taxi driver have pulled up at a City church to hear the broadcast. Together with the congregation they learn that Britain is once again at war. ‘That’s that,’ the vicar says slowly. Driberg thinks this ‘an extremely, characteristically English way of acknowledging the news’.
11.15am, TAKELEY
In the village hall, Moyra Charlton’s mother has assembled a group of volunteer helpers to assist with the arrival of evacuees from London. They were due soon after 10.00am, but still have not turned up. Moyra and the others, ‘Women Institute members, farmers, all the good solid Takeley faces’, now listen impassively to the Charltons’ portable radio set as Chamberlain speaks. Moyra’s eyes fill with tears as she looks around and sees ‘those grave, ruddy faces . . . and the golden country outside, with the church in the trees and the harvest not yet in’. But, thinks Moyra, ‘thank Heaven the suspense is over’.
11.15am, GOLDERS GREEN ROAD, LONDON
Britain’s leading radio and variety comedian, Arthur ‘Big-Hearted’ Askey, star of the hit show Band Waggon, turns on his radio. Arthur has had a hectic week filming and then appearing twice nightly at the London Palladium, and has not had time to catch up with the news. Now, he is shocked to hear the Prime Minister announce that we are at war. As Chamberlain finishes and sirens begin to sound, Arthur looks out of the window to see a patrolling air-raid warden. The warden, on hearing the sirens, manages to blow his own whistle. But then, without warning, he faints on the pavement.
11.15am, CHICHESTER, SUSSEX
Pamela Mountbatten, fifteen-year-old daughter of Royal Navy Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife Edwina, is out riding this morning. She has ridden up to the top of one of the ancient burial sites that overlooks the countryside. Knowing that Britain is now at war, she thinks, ‘How extraordinary that from now on, and who knows for how long, we are going to be at war, with all that that means.’
An air-raid siren situated by a police public call-box. ‘The first air-raid warning symbolised the end of the war of nerves and the start of the war of arms, above all the war from the air.’
11.15am, NORTH CHEAM, SURREY
Sixteen-year-old Iris Cutbush has just washed her hair and rolled it up in pipe cleaners so that when combed it will come out ‘all lovely and frizzy’. She hears Chamberlain’s broadcast and then the sirens. Iris is sure that the Germans are going to use poison gas, so she puts on her gas mask, still with the pipe cleaners in her hair. Mr Cutbush, a 1914–18 veteran, comes in from the garden, where he’s been mowing the lawn. He sees Iris and says, ‘What do you think you’re doing? You’re not going to be gassed. Take it off.’ Iris struggles with the mask, but try as she might, she cannot get it off. Eventually she pulls the mask off, but tears the rubber. Iris now ruefully reflects that it will not be ‘any good in a gas attack after that’.
11.15am, PIERS COURT, STINCHCOMBE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE
Novelist Evelyn Waugh, a Roman Catholic convert, has attended Mass and taken communion early this morning. After returning home, he has breakfast and listens to Chamberlain’s broadcast. ‘He did it very well’ is Waugh’s opinion.
11.15am, LONDON
Writer and former secret agent Compton Mackenzie hears the Prime Minister’s broadcast and registers Chamberlain’s ‘tired sad voice’. Last Sunday, Mackenzie returned early from abroad because of the crisis. He is still rather shocked at the way his porter at Victoria Station praised Hitler: ‘It’s a pity we haven’t got anybody as good as him here. What I mean is, look what he has done for his own people. Well, he comes from the people himself. He knows what they want.’ Mackenzie is also surprised to be told by an official at the Air Ministry: ‘We are not going to drop bombs on Germany. We are going to drop propaganda leaflets. Don’t you think that’s a wonderful idea?’
11.15am, CAMBRIDGE
German Jewish refugee Hans Koenigsberger is a student at Caius College, reading History. He has been in Britain since 1934, but his mother Kaethe only got out of Germany earlier this year. Together with Hans’s landlady they listen to the Prime Minister on an old radio set in the sitting room of his digs. The declaration of war comes as no surprise to the Koenigsbergers. They know only too well that the Hitler is not going to give in tamely to the British ultimatum and withdraw his troops from Poland. But the landlady has retained hopes that peace could be preserved. Now, as she hears that the country is at war, she keeps repeating over and over again, ‘They are wicked . . . they are wicked . . . they are wicked.’
11.15am, GLASGOW, SCOTLAND
As Chamberlain delivers his broadcast there is a huge rumble of thunder, and lightning flashes across the sky.
11.15am, CROYDON
Twelve-year-old convent schoolgirl Sheila Ward is getting ready to be evacuated as she and her family wait for Chamberlain to speak. Sheila and her brother have spent the morning packing up their books and stamp collections to be stored away ‘for the duration’. Their father has already written out their evacuation labels with their names, school addresses and identity numbers. Sheila’s is CDE 64/5.
11.15am, HAMPSTEAD
FANY Verily Anderson hears Chamberlain’s broadcast at a friend’s house. From it one can look down on all of London. Hearing the sirens go after the broadcast, Verily and her friends Phyl and Portia tear upstairs to the top window to see what is happening. From all over the London they can see ‘from the green of squares, the gardens, the parks, silver barrage balloons shining in the morning sun . . . floating silently up into the sky’.
Verily says to her friends, ‘If this is war, it’s much prettier than I expected.’ To which Portia replies, ‘It is the war. The Prime Minister said so.’ The ‘All Clear’ sounds and the girls soon learn that it has been a false alarm. Verily picks up on a false rumour that is soon going the rounds: ‘It was only the Duke of Windsor flying in. He wanted to be there at the start.’
11.15am, CAMBRIDGESHIRE
In a farmhouse kitchen, trainee Land Girl Edith Barraud listens to Chamberlain’s announcement with farmer Ted and his mother. Edith notes how tired the Prime Minister’s voice sounds. On hearing Chamberlain say, ‘this country is at war with Germany’, Ted’s mother exclaims, ‘Oh Ted, that means war!’ ‘Ah!’ Ted laconically replies. He then gets up and goes out to mix the cows’ grub for the afternoon feed.
11.15am, OXFORD
Dorothy Bartlett and her family are sitting round the radio set. It has been tuned in for some time when Chamberlain finally comes on the air. Dorothy and the others hear the Prime Minister’s ‘tired, almost exhausted’ voice tell them that they are now at war. After Chamberlain finishes speaking, they turn the radio off and each speculates what the news will mean to them. Already, Dorothy has received an official notification from the Territorial Nursing Service. It tells her to hold herself ‘in readiness for an emergency’.
11.15am, CHELTENHAM, GLOUCESTERSHIRE
Nan Wise, a fifteen-year-old pupil at Birmingham’s King Edward High School, has been in Cheltenham since Friday. She fears today that Chamberlain is going to let the Poles down, just as the Czechs were abandoned last year. But now Nan hears that the Prime Minister has announced that Britain is at war. She is tremendously relieved that Britain has honoured her pledge, but relieved too that she and her schoolfriends can now ‘settle down to enjoy their new-found world’. She is glad that they will not ‘have to return, tails between our legs, to the old familiar rut’.
11.15am, ASHFORD, KENT
Schoolboy Rodney Giesler, of mixed English and German parentage, hears Chamberlain’s broadcast and is ‘absolutely inconsolable’ at the news.
11.15am, THE KING AND QUEEN PUBLIC HOUSE, HARROW ROAD, PADDINGTON
Peter Coats, a Territorial Army officer in the Middlesex Yeomanry, is going the rounds of his unit’s various posts in Paddington. One of them is located in the vestry of St Mary’s Church, where the actress Mrs Siddons is buried. At 11.00am, an hour before opening time, Coats and hi
s sergeant enter the pub to hear the prime-ministerial broadcast. Coats is a close friend of the Chamberlain-admiring Conservative MP, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. He does not, however, share his friend’s blind enthusiasm for the Prime Minister. But now as Coats listens to Chamberlain’s ‘sad old voice on the wireless’, he feels sorry for him. Coats and the sergeant start making their way back to St Mary’s when the sirens sound. Coats experiences mixed emotions: slight panic, exhilaration ‘and a desire, at all costs, not to seem afraid’. The thought flashes through his mind that in the space of a few minutes London would be sharing the fate of Warsaw, turned into blazing rubble. Instead, the ‘All Clear’ sounds. Coats has been frightened. But he hopes that he has not shown it. He hopes too that ‘perhaps it would be easier the next time’.
11.15am, CARN, INISHOWEN, SOUTHERN IRELAND
Glasgow schoolboy Bob Crampsey is on an extended holiday at his aunt and uncle’s. But he is homesick. With war threatening he wants to go back to Glasgow. Fortunately, Bob’s father has arrived earlier this morning to take him back. Mr Crampsey came over on the Royal Ulsterman, which was ‘crammed to the rails with evacuees’. He then motored down from Belfast. Now Bob, his father, aunt and uncle sit in the stone-floored kitchen, listening to the battery radio as Chamberlain announces that Britain is at war with Germany. As they hear the Prime Minister’s words, Bob sees his father and uncle exchange glances. Instantly, he knows they are thinking back to the Great War, in which both men fought. Then quietly, as ‘God Save the King’ dies away, Mr Crampsey tells Bob to get ready for the journey home.
11.15am, CHARING CROSS ROAD, LONDON
Sir Kenneth Clark listens to the Prime Minister in a café not far from the National Gallery. Finally, Clark thinks, Chamberlain has come to acknowledge ‘the reality of evil’, which the British people have ‘dumbly recognised for the last two or three years’.
11.15am, BALCOMBE STREET, MARYLEBONE
Barrister and volunteer ARP stretcher-bearer Robert Bayne-Powell records his reflections on hearing Chamberlain speak: ‘Chamberlain spoke shortly and well. So it has come as I feared it would. God grant us victory and, after it, the wisdom to make a treaty which will not seem to the vanquished so necessary to be revised as the “Versailles Diktat”. Germany, in the event of our victory, should be helped economically, but crushed politically, perhaps by dismemberment into the pre-1870 states.’
11.15am, EVESHAM, GLOUCESTERSHIRE
Popular travel writer and novelist Cecil Roberts is motoring back to London from Liverpool. Last night he broke his journey in the attractive Cotswolds town of Evesham. Going out this ‘sweet and clear’ morning to get a Sunday newspaper, he hears the sound of Chamberlain broadcasting from an open window. He is invited in by the young housewife, who has a baby in her arms. Ten people are crammed in the little parlour, listening to the Prime Minister. Among them is the young husband, a railway porter, sitting with a little girl evacuee on his knee. Chamberlain finishes and the National Anthem is played. Everybody stands and looks gravely at each other. Roberts catches the eye of the husband. He seems to be saying, ‘I know this means that in a few weeks I shall be a soldier. Next year at this time my wife may be a widow and my girl have no father.’ As the last bars of ‘God Save the King’ fade away, his wife turns off the radio. ‘Mr Chamberlain spoke beautifully,’ she says, her voice choking with tears.
11.15am, MINISTRY OF ECONOMIC WARFARE, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS BUILDING, LONDON
Twenty-four-year-old junior Foreign Office official John Colville has just arrived at the LSE building. He is being seconded from the FO to work at the new ministry. But as yet he and his new colleagues have nothing to do. A radio is produced and switched on. Colville and the others listen to Chamberlain’s broadcast. Colville thinks it is made ‘with slow, solemn dignity’. On hearing the news that Britain is now at war, Colville experiences a sense of numbness. But, the young civil servant is soon ‘rudely revived by the sirens moaning out the war’s first air-raid warning’.
11.15am, BIRMINGHAM
Frank T. Lockwood is a commercial artist with Cadbury Brothers Ltd at Bournville. He has only just got back from holiday at Fairbourne, where fifty evacuees arrived yesterday. With his family, Frank, who served with the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF during the Kaiser’s War, listens to the Prime Minister’s broadcast. Frank has the overriding impression of Chamberlain’s ‘genuine sadness’ as he hears the Premier announce, ‘with emotion’, that Hitler has rejected the British ultimatum. Frank considers that Chamberlain has given ‘a reasoned and memorable speech’. But even today, with Britain at war, Frank thinks it seems very strange to hear the Prime Minister speaking of ‘Hitler’ and not ‘Herr Hitler’. After Chamberlain finishes, Frank decides to carry on improving domestic air-raid precautions. As he works at the back of the house, Frank can see ‘a considerable number of barrage balloons’ up in the blue sky.
11.15am, JERSEY, CHANNEL ISLANDS
Writer Norman Scarlyn Wilson, author of some of the bestselling ‘Teach Yourself’ books, listens to the Prime Minister in the lounge of his hotel. Wilson is struck by the effectiveness of Chamberlain’s simple words. ‘Here was no great oratory, no sonorous periods, no phrasemaking, but words one could understand, words born of sincerity and honesty of purpose.’ As the Prime Minister finishes, Wilson and his fellow guests stand for the National Anthem.
11.15am, SS ATHENIA, ATLANTIC OCEAN
Second Radio Officer Donald McRae picks up the news of Britain’s declaration of war from the radio station at Valentia.
11.15am, BARKING, EAST LONDON
Twenty-two-year-old dance-band vocalist Vera Lynn is at home with her parents. Today is her father’s birthday and the family are sitting out in the garden, enjoying the sunshine, when they hear on a portable radio that Britain is now at war. Over the last three or four years, Vera has done well, and she is now appearing with Britain’s top dance band, Ambrose and His Orchestra. Today, with war declared and all places of entertainment due to be closed indefinitely, Vera is worried about the future and thinks, ‘Just as I’m beginning to get well-known, bang goes my career.’
11.15am, ESSEX
Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, fourteen-year-old son of a Labour MP, is on holiday with his family. The day before yesterday, his father had to leave the holiday home to return to Parliament. Now Tony and his brothers listen to Chamberlain on a radio set they have hired for the holiday. Tony thinks Chamberlain is much too self-pitying. Today, he has no sympathy for the Prime Minister, nor for his policy of appeasement. Tony is very politically aware for a teenager, and for some time now has regarded war as inevitable. Last year he even bought his own gas mask for five shillings (25p).
11.15am, MITCHAM, SURREY
Dorothy Tyler is a nineteen-year-old athlete who competed in the Berlin Olympics three years ago. Usually on Sundays she trains at the News of the World track at Mitcham. But this morning she is at home with her mother and two brothers to hear the Prime Minister’s broadcast. Dorothy’s first reaction is a selfish one. She won’t now be able to go to Helsinki to take part in the 1940 Games. This is a great disappointment as she is a world-record holder and favourite for a gold medal.
11.15am, CHESHAM BOIS, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
Thirty-nine-year-old Great War veteran Derek Barnes listens to ‘Chamberlain’s tired, heart-broken voice telling us that we were at war with Germany for the second time in twenty-five years’. As the Prime Minister speaks, Derek looks round his quiet, sunny, green garden. His two-year-old baby son ‘is staggering about the lawn, picking daisies with the podgy earnestness of the two year adventurer’. Derek remembers how, in August 1914, as a teenager he had ‘cheered and cheered and prayed only that the war might last enough for me to join the army’. ‘And,’ he sombrely recalls, ‘it did.’ Now he and his wife blink back the tears. Their immediate reaction this morning is ‘entirely selfish, entirely personal’. Derek’s own overriding emotion is that of anger. He is inflamed ‘with fury at the futility of
governments which had failed to give realization to the universal longing of their inarticulate peoples for peace and gentleness’. Pacing up and down the garden he shouts to his wife, ‘You couldn’t find a single German man or woman who doesn’t want peace. Not a soul in all of England or France, either! And yet these bloody governments, with their blasted politics, land us all in this!’ But even as he sounds off, to his own intense amazement and forgetting his age, Derek recognises in a flash, ‘I must go to this war – leaving all that I loved behind me – precisely because I loved it.’
11.15am (12.15pm), HOTEL ANGLETERRE, COPENHAGEN
Ewan Butler and the other correspondents who have managed to get out of Germany in time, gather in a colleague’s hotel room. There, they hear on his radio, ‘the tired, sad voice of Neville Chamberlain’, announce that Britain is at war. The correspondents open champagne and drink a toast to victory. Butler then goes down to the bar, where he encounters two stout prosperous Danish businessmen he met there last night. ‘Ah!’ they cry out cheerfully, ‘so you are at war! Come and have a drink!’ And Butler, relieved that the waiting is now over, gratefully joins them.
11.15am (12.15pm), ENGLISCHER GARTEN, MUNICH
Atomic scientist Professor Hoenigschmitt is taking a Sunday-morning stroll in Munich’s English Garden. He is only a hundred or so yards inside the park when he hears what sounds like a shot. He sees a figure slumped on a park bench quite near to the entrance by Hitler’s prized House of German Art. Rushing up to the bench, the Professor immediately recognises the slumped figure as that of Unity Mitford. He has met her in the past at the house of a mutual friend. He urgently calls for help and the police arrive. They flag down a Luftwaffe car and order the driver to rush Unity to Munich’s university clinic. Unity is hovering between life and death, ‘very white and corpse-like’, when she arrives at the clinic.
The Day We Went to War Page 16