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A lively diary chronicling the ups and downs of running a grocery
shop in a Yorkshire town during the rationing years of the Second
World War Kathleen Hey spent the war years helping her sister and
brother-in-law run a grocery shop in the Yorkshire town of
Dewsbury. From July 1941 to July 1946 she kept a diary for the
Mass-Observation project, recording the thoughts and concerns of
the people who used the shop. What makes Kathleen's account such a
vivid and compelling read is the immediacy of her writing. People
were pulling together on the surface ('Bert has painted the V-sign
on the shop door...', she writes) but there are plenty of tensions
underneath. The shortage of food and the extreme difficulty of
obtaining it is a constant thread, which dominates conversation in
the town, more so even than the danger of bombardment and the war
itself. Sometimes events take a comic turn. A lack of onions
provokes outrage among her customers, and Kathleen writes, 'I
believe they think we have secret onion orgies at night and use
them all up.' The Brooke Bond tea rep complains that tea need not
be rationed at all if supply ships were not filled with 'useless
goods' such as Corn Flakes, and there is a long-running saga about
the non-arrival of Smedley's peas. Among the chorus of voices she
brings us, Kathleen herself shines through as a strong and engaging
woman who refuses to give in to doubts or misery and who maintains
her keen sense of humour even under the most trying conditions. A
vibrant addition to our records of the Second World War, the power
of her diary lies in its juxtaposition of the everyday and the
extraordinary, the homely and the universal, small town life and
the wartime upheavals of a nation.
The remarkable wartime diary of nurse Kathleen Johnstone ‘Warm,
chatty and endlessly absorbing, this delightful diary brims with
intelligence and humour.’ Wendy Moore, author of Endell Street:
The Women Who Ran Britain’s Trailblazing Military Hospital The
second world war could not have been won without the bravery and
selflessness of women on the Home Front. Women like Kathleen
Johnstone. This first-hand story of one extraordinary but
unheralded member of Britain’s ‘Greatest Generation’ brings
home with extraordinary lucidity and compassion the realities of
wartime Lancashire. In 1943, Kathleen, then thirty, was a
nurse-in-training at the Blackburn Royal Infirmary. For the next
three years she kept a meticulous diary of her day-to-day
existence, leaving behind a vivid record of the real-time concerns
of a busy, thoughtful woman on the frontline of the war at home.
Kathleen’s days were never the same. She writes in clear and
lively prose about life in the hospital: of her fellow nurses, her
patients, about death and dying, and the progress of the war as
wounded soldiers returned from Normandy in the summer of 1944. She
muses on being working class, wartime austerity, and her anxiety
about examinations. Here too are dances, Americans and a POW
boyfriend in Germany. Kathleen’s observations are witty, wry and
astute – but above all relatable, even today. Poignant and
engrossing, Kathleen Johnstone’s tale of trauma, romance and
friendship will leave a lasting impression.
The Bedford Diary of Leah Aynsley, 1943-1946, provides a
fascinating insight into the daily life of a working class woman
during the Second World War. Edited by Patricia and Robert
Malcolmson, The Bedford Diary of Leah Aynsley, 1943-1946, provides
a fascinating insight into the daily life of a working class woman
during the Second World War. Leah hoped that her diary, which
shegave as a bequest to Bedfordshire Archives Service, would:
'often be useful to settle arguments as to what happened on such
and such occasions.' She also thought that: 'being written by a
working-class person among whom I suspectnot many will keep such
diaries . [it] may be interesting in future centuries'. Leah moved
with her parents and two brothers to live in Queens Park, Bedford,
in 1921 while in her twentieth year. During the war years she
worked for W. H. Allen & Sons Engineering Works and the diary
includes her thoughts on her job there and the work that was
undertaken by the firm. The diary also details her day to day
activities, generally confined to cycling distance of her home. But
she had a busy and active life - working on her allotment in
Bromham, attending BBC concerts in the Corn Exchange as well as
going to local lectures and folk dances. Throughout the diary Leah
comments on aspects of war-time Bedford including the influx of
American airmen, rationing, Home Guard duties, bombing raids,
air-raid warnings and preparations for invasion. Her style -
understated, measured, factual, domestic but engaging - isno better
captured than in her entry on Victory Day: 'V DAY. Well, the day is
nearly over now. Very quiet around here. I have not heard any
victory bells. The street has blossomed out into flags, bunting and
fairy lights. The local shops were open - even the fish shop - and
the baker called as usual ... Churchill broadcast at 3 p.m. ... A
very pleasant day in May.'
A vivid picture of wartime Lincolnshire, and an engagingly readable
account of the life of a busy parish priest. Arthur Hopkins arrived
in the Lincolnshire town of Boston in November 1942 to take up the
post of Vicar of St Thomas's Church in the working-class parish of
Skirbeck Quarter. He was already writing almost daily instalments
of a diary for the social research organisation, Mass Observation.
Generously conceived, it is written almost as if it were a series
of letters to a friend abroad, providing descriptions and comments
on everyday life in wartime. Little was beneath his notice. This
was a man who had attended university with the King after the Great
War and had prominent relations, but was also egalitarian in his
leanings and sympathetic to the "common people". His is the diary
ofa thoughtful and perceptive individual who had a realistic sense
of himself, his society, and the fragility of life; the engagingly
readable entries reveal fascinating details of wartime Lincolnshire
and the life of a busy parishpriest. The diary is edited here with
introduction and notes. Patricia and Robert Malcolmson are social
historians with a special interest in English diaries written
between the 1930s and 1950s. They have edited for publication over
a dozen of these diaries.
Intimate insights into the life of a woman in 1930s London, both
private and public. Gladys Langford (born in 1890) was a free
spirit, an aspiring writer (though not published in her lifetime),
an inveterate attender of plays, concerts, and films, and an astute
and sometimes acerbic observer of everyday life in 1930s London.
Married in 1913 (the marriage was later annulled), and chained as
she saw it to schoolteaching for most of her adult life, Gladys's
days were sometimes unhappy but also full of incident, and featured
a relationship with a longstanding but married lover, who was often
on her mind. Gladys's writing is crisp, colourful, and often
biting. Her diary, from 1936 to 1940, while frequently
introspective and full of self-doubts, is also a vivid portrait of
social life. She writes of her quirky friends, her family and
straightened family background, her schoolboys in Hoxton, and her
numerous Jewish acquaintances. She also has much to say about
London's public world - the behaviour of theatre audiences, street
entertainers, anti-Semitic outbursts, the roller-coaster moods of
people living through 1939, and fears of evacuation with the
outbreak of war. Patricia and Robert Malcolmson are social
historians with a special interest in Mass Observation, women in
World War Two, and English diaries written between the 1930s and
the 1950s.
The diary of a clerical wife during the Second World War provides
fascinating insights into life at the time. War had an impact on
even genteel civilians in unraided cities like Oxford (though
safety was never assured), among them Madge Martin (born 1899),
wife of the vicar of St Michael at the North Gate, Oxford. Her
pre-war life, full of travel, theatre visits, walks, books and
films, was jolted into very different realities: she found herself
undertaking more housework (by 1943 she had lost both her maids),
volunteering with the Red Cross, and housing her two sisters'
families, who self-evacuated at different times to Madge's home to
escape London's air raids. Her private diary, engagingly and
accessibly written, discloses much about her thoughts and feelings
and social relations; some tribulations (she endured serious and
frequent headaches); and her ambivalences concerning her role as a
parson's wife. It shows both the persistence of comfortable,
established lifestyles and necessary adaptations to theconstraints
of existing in wartime. It is presented here with notes and
introduction. PATRICIA and ROBERT MALCOLMSON are social historians
with a special interest in Mass Observation, women in World War
Two, and Englishdiaries written between the 1930s and the 1950s.
Nella Last's War established a housewife and mother from
Barrow-in-Furness as one of the most powerful and moving voices of
the Second World War, and inspired the award-winning television
drama Housewife, 49. In this next instalment of her unique diaries,
Nella Last describes how ordinary people re-built their lives after
the war was over.
While the Allies' victory was a cause for hope and celebration,
much privation and anxiety remained. 'The only peace is that there
are no active hostilities, ' Nella wrote, 'but the corrosion of the
war years is eating deeper into civilisation.' In her sensitive and
playful account of daily life in the austerity years, written like
her diaries for the Mass Observation project, Nella Last captures
the thoughts and feelings of post-war Britain.
"'If the historians could see clearly enough, this could well be
called the age of frustration...after all, for ordinary people,
it's the little things that count, whether for good or ill.' Nella
Last"
Kathleen Tipper's diary, kept for Mass-Observation from July 1941
till peace in 1945 and beyond, offers a unique personal insight
into one young woman's war. Kathleen Tipper was just twenty years
old in September 1939. Her parents had met while making munitions
in the Woolwich Arsenal during the Great War and Kathleen lived
with them and her younger brother and sister at the family'scouncil
house in Appleton Road. Eltham. Grammar-school educated, she worked
as a clerk for a shipping company near the Strand. Like so many of
the young women around her she was poised to take advantage of the
new opportunities for work and leisure that London in the thirties
offered as never before. But Kathleen's life - indeed, the lives of
all Londoners - would change for ever in the six years after
declaration of war on 3 September. This was a moment of quite
extraordinary drama. And Kathleen's diary, kept for
Mass-Observation from July 1941 till peace in 1945 and beyond,
offers a unique personal insight into one young woman's war. We
keep her company through the daily comings and goings of family,
friends, work and relaxation - all played out against a backdrop of
cataclysmic events brought home through cinema, radio and the daily
press. We travel on buses and trains and listen tothe conversations
going on about her. We hear the opinions of 'blonde glamour girls',
of disgruntled civil servants, of the men and women working the
barrage balloons that sway like tipsy bluebottles in the London
sky. We witness the effect on her of newsreels and Information
Ministry films. We hear her wishing she'd been born a boy so that
she could share more fully in the risks and excitements of warfare
at the front. We see her disillusionment with people in 'positions
of authority', especially those there by virtue of class
inheritance, and she helps us understand better some of the forces
that shaped Labour's victory in 1945. It is, perhaps, the
ordinariness of this extraordinary time in London's history that
comes through most strongly from this fascinating document. Keeping
hold of ordinary things was the best way to make sense of a world
gone mad. Kathleen Tipper lays bare thesefibres of endurance in the
greatest crisis to face London and the Londoner in modern times.
'I can never understand how the scribbles of such an ordinary
person ... can possibly have value.' So wrote Nella Last in her
diary on 2 September 1949. More than sixty years on, tens of
thousands of people have read and enjoyed three volumes of her
vivid and moving diaries, written during the Second World War and
its aftermath as part of the Mass Observation project - and the
basis for BAFTA-winning drama Housewife 49 starring Victoria Wood.
The Diaries of Nella Last, brings together into a single volume the
best of Nella's prolific outpourings, including a great deal of
new, unpublished material from the war years. Capturing the
everyday trials and horrors of wartime Britain and the nation's
transition into peacetime and beyond, Nella's touching and often
humorous narrative provides an invaluable historical portrait of
what daily life was like for ordinary people in the 1940s and
1950s. Outwardly Nella's life was commonplace; but behind this mask
were a penetrating mind and a lively pen. As David Kynaston said on
Radio 4, she 'will come to be seen as one of the major twentieth
century English diarists.'
Insights into life in England during the second world war. Kathleen
Hey's diary provides an insider's view of an industrial city in
wartime Yorkshire. As a shop assistant in a working class district
of Dewsbury, she documented the stresses and complex exchanges in a
grocery - from both sides of the counter. Regular customers,
usually close neighbours, were eager to learn what scarce and
coveted items might be in stock, and sometimes went in several
times a day to discover what was available, as well as to chat
about the war, complain about the provisions they were getting, or
seek assistance with their ration books. While the frustrations and
satisfactions of shop-work are at the heart of her diary, she also
wrote about leisure, popular culture, public events and political
debates, civil defence, domestic tensions, and her hopes for the
post-war future. Life was often unpredictable; events happened
unexpectedly - and could be recorded by her immediately; one social
encounter might give rise to a surprising and revealing
conversation. Hers is a richly detailed, observant, wide-ranging
and sometimes amusing account of wartime social life. It is
presented here with full introduction and explanatory notes.
PATRICIA and ROBERT MALCOLMSON are social historians with a special
interest in English diaries written between the 1930s and 1950s.
From the summer of 1938, British women from all walks of life
joined the Women's Voluntary Services (WVS). This disparate band of
women came together for the common good - to help serve and protect
their communities. By 1941 a million women had enrolled. These
brave and dutiful women played a vital role in Britain's victory.
The positive impact of the WVS on wartime society was universally
acknowledged. They were instrumental in implementing the
large-scale evacuation of children from bomb-targeted cities, in
the care of the wounded, and in keeping those in war service fed.
Lady Reading, founder and fearless leader, was one of the most
influential women in twentieth-century Britain. The story of the
WVS has never been fully told before. Social historians Patricia
and Robert Malcolmson bring this vital part of the Second World War
to life in a vivid and engaging way through the diaries and records
of the women serving their country on the Home Front. Women at the
Ready promises to be a magnificent saga of sacrifice and
determination.
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