Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  After much lobbying, women welders were permitted entry to the Amalgamated Engineering Union in 1943, but there was little solidarity with their male counterparts, who felt threatened by their incursion on to the shop floor. In fact, there was general reluctance by the women to join unions; workplace politics were seen as a male concern. Just as men felt that tough women in overalls doing a ‘man’s job’ was a challenge to their masculinity, so women on the whole preferred to take the line of least resistance. There was a tacit acceptance on both sides that, after the war was over, when the fighter planes and tanks would no longer be required, Rosie the Riveter would return to being Rosie the housewife, cook and bottle-washer. Social structures in the 1940s had little room for working-class women to change their position in this respect. One investigation of attitudes among young women war workers showed that the average factory girl had little or no awareness of what she did as contributing to the war effort. According to the author of the research, this girl was half-hearted, self-centred, apathetic and unambitious for a career. ‘I’ll only be there till I marry’ was, apparently, the underlying assumption of nearly all women factory workers.

  Understandable, perhaps, that home seemed preferable, given the danger, boredom and oppression of factory work. It took Arthur Askey and Gracie Fields’s famous popular song, ‘The Girl That Makes the Thing-ummy Bob (That’s Going to Win the War)’ to remind the public that her insignificant part in a larger process would ‘strike a blow for Britain’. Making a thing to drill a hole to hold a spring to drive a rod to turn a knob to work a thing-ummy bob might not seem heroic – ‘especially when you don’t know what it’s for’ – but the catchy lyrics helped give her a boost.

  And there was another side to the story of the woman wartime worker: one that might have given credence to the worries of the moralists, who feared that such women, with money in their pockets, would take advantage of their new-found liberty. In their off-duty time the Yorkshire women welders let their hair down with abandon:

  From Helena Marsh, March 1942

  Violet and I are having a good time just now … We’ve gone to all dances and the places where one always gets merry, and have we been merry? I’ll say we have.

  From Violet Champion, 10 March 1942

  We went to Joan’s wedding last Saturday … And, oh boy, did we have some fun. Helena had one over the eight and went flat out.

  From Amy Brooke, July 1942

  I went with Harry, the Air Force boy on Sunday … We … had a couple of drinks together and then I had a cuddly Woodly, very nice.*

  From Amy Brooke, October 1942

  I went to the Canteen Staff Dance on Saturday night. I had a real time and what do you think? I won the Spot Waltz Prize: a pair of Mauve Satin French Knickers and my partner won 60 Capstan Cigarettes. Just imagine the look on my face, when I opened my parcel to show him what I had won. I went crimson and did not know where to put myself. Ah ah, I bet you wish you had seen me … I had a partner all night. I did enjoy myself.

  Interviewed years later, one of the group – Joan Baines – recalled that in her view war time was ‘a happy time because everybody … were all right nice … You used to have some fun.’ Amabel Williams-Ellis’s book about women in factories also points to the wealth of opportunities they offered for social life – particularly for the ‘mobile’ women transported to live in hostels. Sometimes there were up to a thousand girls living under one roof; carnivals would be organised, and dancing partners from local RAF or army camps brought in by the bus-load.

  And if ever these young women felt deprived of boyfriends, from 1942 that lack was more than compensated for by the arrival in this country of the American forces.

  Yanks

  For Britain, 1942 was a low point in the war, dominated from the outset by the fall of Singapore. In the first half of that year, the conflict in the Pacific continued to swing in Japan’s favour as they notched up victory after victory, and the entire eastern hemisphere seemed to be falling into Japanese hands. In North Africa, Rommel’s Afrika Korps was battling to regain mastery. Meanwhile, the German army was pushing through Russia on its way to Stalingrad. But although the Russian campaign had caused the blitzing of British cities to abate, naval losses in the Atlantic remained severe. In Britain, the cry redoubled for a ‘Second Front Now’; American leaders were pressing to invade German-occupied Europe, and in August 1942 Churchill agreed to mount the tragic Dieppe Raid, which resulted in 3,367 casualties.

  But this deeply disheartening period coincided with events at home that were more calculated to raise morale and revive jaded spirits, particularly for women:

  One day … a gang of us heard a brass band playing ‘Over There’. Yes, the Yanks had come … They soon took over. They had bigger lorries, bigger tanks, better uniforms, bigger mouths, and, rumour had it, bigger … !

  Between then and D-day, a tidal wave of Americans, 2 million strong, flowed through this country, some en route to far-flung battlefields, others to stay. From Piccadilly Circus to Sutton Coldfield, from Cotswold villages to city centres, you couldn’t avoid them: the GIs (so-called after the words ‘Government Issue’, which appeared on their equipment) were everywhere. And after three years of bombs and blackout, the Yanks’ noisy, big-hearted, ‘anything goes’ sex appeal was joyfully welcomed by many British women. But the arrival of thousands of homesick 18–30-year-old men (‘overpaid, over-sexed and over here’) also sent alarm bells ringing. The seduction techniques of the GIs were so proficient that a joke started to do the rounds: ‘Heard about the new utility knickers? One Yank – and they’re off.’

  There was fear that the US bases would become hotbeds of vice, attracting swarms of ‘good-time girls’. Hastily, the WVS and the churches set up over 200 ‘Welcome Clubs’ to entertain the American troops in a more seemly manner. Hostesses were hand-picked, and dozens of young men from Idaho and Alabama found themselves invited out to genteel Sunday afternoon tea-parties – though sometimes they had to bring their own food, as the English rations just wouldn’t stretch. The GIs were grateful; they were thousands of miles from home, missing their Mom’s pumpkin pie, yearning for warm human contact in a chilly, grey island. That loneliness was matched only by the British women’s thirst for the transatlantic glamour and luxury lifestyle they imported. When the GIs from Steeple Morden 8th Air Force base returned the compliment and invited a contingent of locals to a Red-Cross-organised dance, the girls started out overwhelmed and baffled: what was this ‘Jitterbug’, ‘with its collections of strange steps and athletic contortions’? But it was the Americans’ epicurean largesse that left them gasping:

  It was the food – Food with a capital F. That was the crowning glory of that first Red Cross dance.

  Spread in front of them, on groaning tables, was potato salad, macaroni salad, cold meat, rolls, butter, pickles, chocolate cake … After three years of spam, potatoes and cabbage, the girls fell upon it and ate till they could eat no more.

  And now, as it dawned on the affluent Americans how pinched and deprived life in Britain had become, they became ever more bounteous. Gifts flowed: chewing gum, cigarettes, flowers, cookies, candy and above all – dearer than gold itself – nylon stockings. With their menfolk on the other side of the world, exhausted with coping and fed up with shortages, British women were only too ready to be wooed with Hershey bars and Lucky Strikes. A girl with a generous GI boyfriend could really feel like a girl again. As Madeleine Henrey wrote:

  They brought into our anxious lives a sudden exhilaration, the exciting feeling that we were still young and attractive and that it was tremendous fun for a young woman to be courted, however harmlessly, by quantities of generous, eager, film-star-ish young men … They introduced new topics of conversation, an awareness that life was not after all only tears and suffering. I felt myself, in common with the entire feminine population, vibrating to a new current in the spring air.

  Our relationship with America has always been one of deep ambivalence: e
nvy of its glamour and wealth, coupled with contempt for its perceived naivety; a fascination with its pioneering spirit, alongside mistrust of what may seem to us to be vulgarity and Philistinism. The new world feels patronised by the old, while the old feels left behind by the frenetic modernity of the new. The magnetism of Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler was potent – Gone with the Wind ran for four years from 1940 to 1944 – yet the improbably named American divorcée Wallis Simpson, key player in the 1936 Abdication crisis, confirmed her country’s slightly degraded image. Inevitably, all this and more entered the sexual equation when the American army landed on these shores. In Love, Sex and War 1939–1945, the author John Costello details many of the infractions and incongruities that resulted from this sudden sexual and cultural free-for-all. His book describes the willingness of British girls to service the soldiers’ needs in return for sweets and nylons; the tricky misunderstandings that arose from the GIs’ slangy advances (was ‘Hiya baby!’ impudent over-familiarity or a friendly conversational gambit?); the random and frequent molestation and harassment of servicewomen by American soldiers; outbreaks of domestic crime and rape; infidelity; racism.

  ‘Don’t forget, Beryl – the response is “Hiya, fellers!” and a sort of nonchalant wave of the hand.’ GIs and the communication problem, as depicted in Punch, 1944.

  For along with tinned peaches and chocolate, the American army imported its colour bar. English women didn’t understand the rules. When African American soldiers arrived in the small Glamorganshire town of Porthcawl, the local girls were only too happy to go dancing with them. Soon after, the whites arrived. Reacting with absolute horror, they immediately instituted total segregation. Seventeen-year-old Mona Janise was dismayed: ‘Talk about sin in the Garden of Eden, we thought we had done something wrong but didn’t know what.’ Around the same time Frances Partridge wrote in her war diary about a public relations exercise set up by American officers for the benefit of local English ladies, ‘about how to treat the blacks’ – all of whom carried knives, apparently, and would most certainly attempt to rape their daughters. The ladies were advised never to invite them into their houses, ‘and above all never to treat them as human beings, because they were not’. Costello, however, suggests that – if British women had anything to fear – it was the predatory American soldier who, irrespective of his colour, refused to take ‘no’ for an answer.

  On balance, the culture clash worked in favour of the resident women. Dolly Scannell, a married woman with a small child whose husband had been called up to the army, was grateful to be employed as secretary to a major at an American hospital base in Essex. Dolly, a fun-loving East Ender evacuee, was living near by with her sister Marjorie; her in-laws had also moved out of London, and her daughter Susan was in nursery school – leaving thirty-year-old Dolly to enjoy the freedom, general hilarity and perks of her new job. The GIs teased her and adored her; she was voted the girl ‘with the most terrific gams’ on camp, but turned down her prize: a weekend in Colchester with the GI of her choice. Once word got out about her ‘gams’ she had no peace – the soldiers found any excuse they could to come to her office and inspect her from the hemline down. ‘I was secretly a little bit pleased and took to wearing nylons to enhance my prancing legs.’ The stockings were, of course, one of the bonuses.

  As Dolly worked for an officer she was collected every morning in a jeep, with a driver who would salute her as she greeted him. Delicious lunches were another benefit of the job. The typists ate with the officers; there was steak, and fruit. Dolly brought a large linen napkin from home and piled it full of oranges and pineapple slices for the children. From time to time they asked the army personnel back for tea and a game of cards; the ‘amorous ones’ were firmly discouraged and not asked again.

  But later Dolly wondered whether she had missed out. Chores, children, a full-time job and a nun-like conscience about her husband Chas inhibited her from taking up the offers that came her way. One day a food parcel arrived for one of the US sergeants; it contained a wondrous cake:

  It was covered with cherries, marzipan, nuts and angelica. The sight of it was enough to take one’s breath away in those days of austerity. The Sergeant said, ‘That’s for you, Dorothy, if I can have a cup of coffee with you one day.’ ‘Indeed, you’d be very welcome any time,’ I said delightedly. I took the cake home and watched the children’s faces. The cake was as marvellous inside as it was out. I have never tasted anything like it and Marjorie said, ‘What a generous man he must be, Dolly.’

  The following night she was on her way to bed when she was disturbed by a clamour at the door. The sergeant was down below, bellowing for his coffee – ‘You promised me,’ he yelled. He wouldn’t go away. Eventually she threatened him with the police, and he skulked off, muttering, ‘Bloody dames, they’re all the same, lead you on, take all you’ve got and give you nothing.’ But it wasn’t till the next day at work that Dolly finally realised that coffee wasn’t all the sergeant had had in mind. He was still furious. ‘ “When I gave you the cake … you said, any time it would be your pleasure.” So he had been deceived by my polite expression.’

  Another young GI took a different approach. He took Dolly aside and told her earnestly that being separated from his wife back home was ‘affecting his health’. He had been to see the medical officer, who, he said, had advised him to form a liaison with Mrs Dolly Scannell, who for her part was separated from her husband. ‘He thought it would be a good idea, not hurting anyone, if you and I could form some sort of association, and be faithful to each other.’ Dolly sent him packing.

  Her friend Maudie was more prepared to compromise. Maudie worked on an air force base and took it in turns to sleep with the pilots. She didn’t regard it as infidelity; she loved her husband, and he loved her. But she also hated loneliness, and hated an empty bed. Sharing it kept her happy and contented; she took no risks and encouraged no delusions. ‘Each resident knew that she was waiting for her husband,’ recalled Dolly Scannell. ‘What she offered them was a temporary haven and I believe she made life bearable for the pilots on their dangerous nightly missions over enemy territory.’ Many like Maudie saw no harm in alleviating their loneliness and frustration, while comforting their American boyfriends.

  Inevitably, many liaisons were also deeply romantic. The clean-cut, manly Yanks were the embodiment of Hollywood enchantment: those blurred idols that had kept British girls entranced in picture houses made flesh. In their arms one could be Veronica Lake, or Betty Grable. On summer evenings, Margaret Tapster used to dance to the sound of big bands with her beau, Sergeant Kurt Wagner; cheek-to-cheek, she caressed the collar of his costly, well-fitting uniform, breathed in his expensive aftershave and drank up his meaningless flattery, so voluptuous when spoken in a southern drawl: ‘You have the cutest little ears honey, like pink seashells … Your hair smells like the jasmine flowers on our back porch.’

  But in reality women like Margaret attracted the GIs for reasons other than their seashell ears. Compared to American women, the passive, weary British female often seemed pleasantly unchallenging. One grateful American man published an article in which he explained that he had chosen to marry an Englishwoman because of her submissiveness and eagerness to please:

  While American women insist on a big share in the running of things, few European women want to be engineers, architects or bank presidents. They are mainly interested in the fundamental business of getting married, having children and making the best homes their means or conditions will allow. They feel they can attain their goals by being easy on the nerves of their menfolk.

  So it was hardly surprising that love blossomed, many relationships fast developing into commitments. Starry-eyed eighteen- and twenty-year-old girls saw their dreams coming true. Not much older, the American soldiers, away from home on their first adventure, were looking for companionship, sex and the promise of domestic bliss which so many of these English girls seemed to offer. ‘[Eddie] told me he had gone back to the barr
acks that Saturday night and told his friends he had met the girl he was going to marry,’ remembered Hilda, who had danced with Eddie once at her local American air base in Northamptonshire. They were married within three months. Ruth Patchen was working for anti-aircraft command in London when she met her future husband, Staff Sergeant Wendell Poore, on a bus. Wendell proposed a few months later; he couldn’t afford a ring, so he pulled a picture of a diamond out of Life magazine and gave it to her. Despite family opposition, they started planning their wedding; when the war was over they would live in Cut Bank, Montana. Often, long and happy marriages were the outcome.

  But reality caught up with some of these GI brides. Nineteen-year-old Mary Angove, who had volunteered for the ATS in 1940, was based at Seaton Barracks near Plymouth in 1942 when the Americans arrived. The first she saw of them was a soldier in a tin hat who looked like a German. That night the over-excited GIs rampaged around the camp, cursing, shouting and calling names at the girls through their blackouts. In light of what happened to Mary later, it seems these soldiers may have been a bad batch:

  Probably they got a good dressing-down from their colonel in the morning. Luckily they left us alone after that … But I did date one or two of them. I met Kenneth one night when I stopped at the fish and chip shop in the village on my way back to camp. It was getting late; you had to be in at 10, otherwise you’d be put on a charge. Anyway, this Yank was in front of me, and he offered to get mine. So I said, yes thanks, and he walked me back to barracks and we made a date. But I didn’t turn up.