Whatever their circumstances, the highlight of Christmas Day 1939 for many people in Britain and the Empire was the King’s broadcast that afternoon. Since coming to the throne in December 1936, King George VI had not followed the practice of his father in delivering an annual Christmas broadcast. Because of his stammer, broadcasting, indeed any form of public speaking, was an ordeal that the King dutifully but agonisingly endured. But, with the same sense of duty with which he assumed the kingship after the Abdication, he and his advisers decided that he should broadcast to his peoples on Christmas Day 1939. While the text of the broadcast was being prepared, a clipping from The Times was sent to Buckingham Palace. It contained some words found written on a postcard in the desk of a recently deceased doctor in Bristol. His daughters had used the words on homemade greeting cards, one of which was sent to Mrs J.C.M. Allen of Clifton. Mrs Allen, thinking the words appropriate to the current war situation passed them on in turn to The Times.
Broadcasting on Christmas Day began at 7.00am with the programme Christmas Greetings – A Sackful of Stories, Verses and Records. The Christmas Day morning service at 10.55am came from the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. That was followed by half an hour of music from the Foden’s Motor Works Band. At 1.35pm there was a programme of national and popular songs in the programme The Soldier Sings. Then at 2.15pm came The Empire’s Greeting. The Radio Times, in advertising the programme, had described how, ‘On Christmas Day . . . when most people at home will be nearing the end of their Christmas dinners, the sound of Christmas bells will ring out from all the home and overseas transmitters of the BBC. Across the five continents and seven seas London will be calling, sending Christmas greeting throughout the world.’
The programme featured messages from a Royal Navy destroyer, from men of the BEF out in France and from an RAF ’plane. From the West Country came a message from a farmer and his wife who had two London evacuee children as guests at their Christmas table. A Welsh male voice choir followed and then there were link-ups with Scotland, Northern Ireland and Northumbria. Messages from the Empire came next; a Newfoundland fisherman, a Canadian pilot, a New Zealand farmer, a dressmaker in Sydney, a Malayan naval rating, an Indian Army officer, and lastly a member of Cape Town’s Coastal Defence Service. The programme ended with a shepherd in the Cotswolds passing on the Empire’s greetings to the King-Emperor.
Then, just after three in the afternoon, the King himself, in a ‘hesitant, upper class, un-dramatic voice’, began a nine minute broadcast to his subjects in Britain and the Empire:
The festival which we know as Christmas is above all the festival of peace and of the home. Among all free peoples the love of peace is profound, for this alone gives security to the home.
But true peace is in the hearts of men, and it is the tragedy of this time that there are powerful countries whose whole direction and policy are based on aggression and the suppression of all that we hold dear for mankind.
It is this that has stirred our peoples and given them a unity unknown in any previous war. We feel in our hearts that we are fighting against wickedness, and this conviction will give us strength from day to day to persevere until victory is assured.
At home we are, as it were, taking the strain for what may lie ahead of us, resolved and confident. We look with pride and thankfulness on the never-failing courage and devotion of the Royal Navy upon which, throughout the last four months, has burst the storm of ruthless and unceasing war.
And when I speak of our Navy today, I mean all the men of our Empire who go down to the sea in ships, the Mercantile Marine, the minesweepers, the trawlers and drifters, from senior officers to the last boy who has joined up. To every one in this great fleet I send a message of gratitude and greeting, from myself as from all my peoples.
The same message I send to the gallant Air Force, which, in cooperation with the Navy is our sure shield of defence. They are daily adding laurels to those that their fathers won.
I would send a special word of greeting to the armies of the Empire, to those who have come from afar, and in particular to the British Expeditionary Force.
Their task is hard. They are waiting, and waiting is a trial of nerve and discipline. But I know that when the moment comes for action they will prove themselves worthy of the highest traditions of their great Service.
And to all who are preparing themselves to serve their country, on sea or land or in the air, I send my greeting at this time. The men and women of our far-flung Empire, working in their several vocations, with the one same aim, all are members of the great family of nations which are prepared to sacrifice everything that freedom of spirit may be saved to the world.
A new year is at hand. We cannot tell what it will bring. If it brings peace, how thankful we shall all be. If it brings us continued struggle we shall remain undaunted.
In the meantime, I feel that we might all find a message of encouragement in the lines which, in my closing words, I would like to say to you.
‘I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
‘And he replied, “Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.”’
May the Almighty hand guide and uphold us all.
Advance copies of the speech had been sent to newspaper offices and there was a veritable stampede in Fleet Street to trace the author of the quotation. From America and the Dominions came cables requesting the same information. When asked, John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, thought that the lines had the ring of G.K. Chesterton about them. Other poetry experts thought that they might have come from the pen of John Bunyan or of Thomas à Kempis. But it was not until midnight on Christmas Day that the BBC was in a position to give the definitive answer. The author was sixty-four-year-old Miss Minnie Louise Haskins.
Miss Haskins, by this time retired, had been a lecturer at the London School of Economics. In December 1939, she was living in Crowborough, Sussex and had actually not heard the King’s broadcast that afternoon. She had, however, heard a BBC summary of it later that evening and thought that the opening words were ‘oddly familiar’. Only when the quotation was finished did she recall that over thirty years before she had written something very similar in a slim book of verse entitled The Desert. It had been privately printed in 1908 and sold in aid of missionary work in India.
Within a few days of the King’s broadcast, and despite objections from members of the clergy that St John’s Gospel and John Bunyan had phrased it better, Miss Haskins found herself a celebrity. She was interviewed by the press and for the newsreels, and her book of verse was promptly republished.
The rest of the day’s broadcasting included a competition in which ‘soldiers in France will join in a parlour game with their parents in a BBC studio at home’. The inevitable Sandy Macpherson had a half-an-hour slot at 5.00pm, followed by ‘Hullo, Mum’, a link-up between evacuees in a Gloucestershire village and their parents in Stepney. A soldiers’ service from France was broadcast at 6.20pm and then came ‘A Radio Christmas Party: comedians, Christmas songs, musical games, and join-in listening in to other parties elsewhere . . . a pill-box fort near the front line, an Army concert from one of the bases in France, a children’s hospital ward, and a wartime edition of Flying High from an RAF hangar’.
Gracie Fields appeared at 9.15pm in an ENSA concert from ‘somewhere in France’ and then there was A Christmas Cabaret with Jack Hylton and his Band and Cyril Fletcher. After the news at midnight, the day’s broadcasting closed down at 12.15am. Boxing Day’s radio highlights included steeplechasing from Windsor, football between Sheffield Wednesday and Chesterfield and a live broadcast of the London Coliseum’s pantomime Cinderella. ‘In view of all that,’ the Radio Times proudly trumpeted, ‘who cares for the blackout? Who cares if it snows?’
If in 1939 the secular aspects of Christmas predominated, the religious element was by no
means forgotten nor neglected. Striking an optimistic note, Archbishop of York William Temple reminded readers of Picture Post that: ‘On Christmas morning German Christians, French Christians, Polish Christians, Finnish Christians, British Christians, Russian Christians – let us never forget the heroic multitude of Russian Christians – nor the Japanese and Chinese who in the Name of the Christ are all this time making the unity which will unite their nations as friends in days to come . . .’
In an accompanying picture essay, the magazine published two photographs of villagers at Oberammergau at a Christmas service. It reminded readers that ‘for six years, directly and indirectly, the Nazis have been trying to destroy Christianity in Germany’. But it was confident that ‘these men and women in the village of the world-famous Passion Play will outlive the concentration camp, the swastika, the Gestapo’.
In his Christmas Day broadcast, the King had spoken of ‘the great family of nations’ that made up the British Empire and Commonwealth. Only a week before, the first Canadian troops had arrived in Britain. Now, on Boxing Day, a contingent of Australian airmen arrived to serve with the Royal Air Force’s Coastal Command. In a message to them, Australian air minister J.V. Fairbairn said, ‘A great responsibility rests upon you as members of the First Australian Air Force squadron to come on active service in this country. You will be comrades in a great and just campaign with the men of the RAF, and Australia is confident that you will play your part in whatever spheres you may be called upon to serve.’
And the next day it was announced that the first Indian Army mule companies had joined Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force in France. There had been fairly generous Christmas leave allowances for the British Expeditionary Force, but comedian Jack Warner raised a laugh on the BBC’s Garrison Theatre when reading a letter from his ‘Bruvver Syd’ out in France: ‘PS: I thought I was coming home on leave this weekend, but Lord Gort thought different!’
Among those, like Syd, unable to get back for Christmas was Rifleman William Smedmore. Writing to his sixty-four-year-old mother at the family home in Glamorgan Street, Pimlico, William told her: ‘We are in good billets here. But not as good as last Christmas, at home with you. I’ll be home next year without fail.’
For those servicemen stationed around Britain and unable to make it home for Christmas, Mr and Mrs E. Maguire of 74 Lynette Avenue, Clapham had come with a novel idea. Writing to Picture Post a month before Christmas, they had asked the magazine: ‘If you can find us some eight to a dozen chaps (we are quite indifferent as to who or what they are) we would be glad if they would be our guests for Christmas dinner and a slice off the pudding! The only conditions attached are that they make themselves at home and help us to make the party go with a sing-song afterwards.’
‘We can find you a dozen with the greatest pleasure,’ the magazine replied. ‘We can find you a thousand if you want them. We will find soldiers or groups of soldiers, for any other readers who feel generous.’
If Britain’s Christmas, brightened by the River Plate victory and with ample food, drink and presents available, was a reasonably normal one, Germany’s was a much more austere and depressing one. Unlike in Britain, both food and clothes rationing were firmly in place, but special concessions were made for the holidays. There was a slight raising of the food ration for the whole month and a special Christmas bonus. Not that they amounted to much. In practice it worked out at an extra egg, one-eighth of a pound of butter, the same amount of ersatz honey, a little chocolate candy and about two ounces of sweets per person. The sugar ration was also increased. On the clothing front, men were allowed a tie, and women, a pair of stockings, without having to surrender any of their precious coupons.
In Berlin’s huge department stores and shops there was very little that customers could actually buy without special permission. The stores themselves had done their best to put on a festive front. The giant AWAG department store (formerly the Jewish-owned Wertheim’s), had spent lavishly on a children’s fairyland display in the main foyer, with animated animals, dwarfs, elves and fairies waving wands. But there was little worth having on sale. All the children’s toys had gone a fortnight before Christmas, and none had been made since the outbreak of war. And in desperation, another store, the famous KaDeWe was reduced to selling Easter rabbits as its stock of other Christmas cuddly toys had sold out. Only the AWAG’s book and record departments were well stocked, and even then in the latter, one had to hand over an old record before one could buy a new one. Just before Christmas, on coming out of the store, a Berliner remarked, ‘I’ve been going in there every day for the past week and can’t find anything that is not either purchasable only by permission of the government or totally foolish to give.’
Nor did the war news give many Germans cause for satisfaction. The scuttling of the Graf Spee off Montevideo came as a great shock to the public, as the action off the River Plate had been depicted as a German victory. And many believed that the claim of thirty-four RAF bombers shot down next day over Heligoland was ‘eyewash’ by Dr Goebbels to get them to forget the less-than-heroic end of the pocket battleship.
Dr Goebbels himself was much exercised at two major rail accidents in which over 200 died. He also fumed in his diary that ‘Berlin “society” is still celebrating merrily as if the war had nothing to do with them. The dregs! To the rubbish heap with them!’ The awful weather over Christmas – snow, rain, frost and sleet ice – did little to improve the propaganda minister’s temper. He spent the holidays reading a Somerset Maugham novel, which only went to confirm his belief in the ‘inner rottenness of English society’. And, ‘sterile and idiotic’ was Goebbels’s withering and snide judgement on the King’s Christmas Day broadcast. In his own Christmas message to the German people, Goebbels had told them:
‘This is a “war Christmas” celebrated by a determined people . . . with that profound faith which is always a prerequisite of victory . . . Although peace is the real meaning of Christmas, we shall talk peace only after victory.’
While Dr Goebbels was spending Christmas with his family, Hitler was inspecting his troops on the Western Front. On 23 December he visited a reconnaissance squadron of the Luftwaffe and then the infantry regiment Grossdeutschland. He finished the day by participating in the Christmas celebrations of his own bodyguard unit SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, giving the men an address on the ‘meaning of the present struggle’. On Christmas Eve, he visited flak units and after again addressing the men was presented with a hand-carved German eagle, but without, it was noted, the swastika. In the afternoon, Hitler visited the Hauptkampflinie (main front line) and then tank and armaments factories in the Saarbruecken area. Afterwards, and for the first time since 1918, the Fuehrer found himself on French soil near Spichern, in a section abandoned by Gamelin’s men back in October. Christmas Day was spent with a Luftwaffe fighter unit and the reconstituted List Infantry Regiment in which he had served during the Great War. The German press made great play with the fact that the Fuehrer, in contrast to Chamberlain, Daladier, Churchill, Eden and Co., was among his fighting men at Christmas.
‘In the afternoon Christmas celebration . . . many children present . . . they are very sweet and charming, the public are in good fettle despite all their troubles, my speech is greeted with great applause and there is great delight when Father Christmas arrives.’ Dr Goebbels, 23 December 1939.
‘Midday with the Fuehrer. He tells me about his Christmas trip to the West Wall, which impressed him deeply. The mood at the front could not be better. The troops were beside themselves with joy. The Fuehrer’s visit came as a complete surprise to them.’ Dr Goebbels, 28 December 1939.
Unlike Berlin, Christmas in drôle de guerre Paris was almost pre-war, like Britain’s. There was no shortage of turkeys, oysters, foie gras or champagne, according to journalist Alexander Werth. Twice over the holidays, Werth visited a night club where chanteuse Lucienne Boyer entertained an audience of ‘lots of young men in uniform, and young women, drin
king champagne, and also fat bald podgy people’, whom the journalist took to be war profiteers. The uncrowned king and queen of French show business, Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker, alternated each night at the Casino de Paris, while other music halls, theatres and cinemas did a roaring trade. For children, the shops on the grands boulevards had plenty of toys and presents in stock. At Lancel’s, on the Boulevard Raspail, one could buy terracotta Aberdeen terriers raising a hind leg over a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. And, ‘to keep our soldiers warm’ in the Maginot Line, quite a few stores were offering tarred paper vests.
The newspapers and journals were full of officially inspired optimism, with stories of ‘poor old Fritz’ shivering away in the waterlogged Siegfried Line. Victory was taken for granted. Germany, already rationed, would sooner rather than later succumb to the Allied blockade. Meanwhile, writing in the December 1939 issue of Les Annales de la Guerre, Captain Georges Montgredien dwelt longingly and lovingly on the French Army’s own food-and-drink situation: ‘Midday everything is ready. There is a hors d’oeuvres, meat, vegetables and dessert . . . The messing officer reads out the menu, wishes everyone bon appetit and gives the signal for the regimental tune to be struck up.’
Montgredien noted that when it came to aperitifs, his commanding officer was ‘very strict’. Only the poilus in the advance posts were to get Pernod, the rest had to make do with the lower-alcoholic-content St Raphaël. The Captain finished his idyllic account with the telling sentence, ‘Provided the enemy’s artillery lets us alone and provided there is a bit of sun, one can, for a moment, forget the war and think it all a picnic.’
But there was no ‘picnic’or Christmas truce at sea in 1939. Just as its crew members were having drinks before their Christmas dinner, the London steamer SS Stanholme hit a mine that had been laid by the U-33 at the beginning of November. She sank within five minutes. The ships’ boats were smashed by the explosion, but two of the crew managed to lower a raft. For about a quarter of an hour, they rowed round where the Stanholme had gone down, picking up survivors. But soon the raft itself started to sink, and it was the only the timely arrival of a lifeboat from a Norwegian ship that saved the eleven survivors of the sinking. One of them was the wife of the chief engineer, forty-two-year-old Percy Jenvey:
The Day We Went to War Page 35