CHAPTER 4
‘Boy, 12, was youngest British soldier in First World War’ read the shocking headline of an article by Julie Henry published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper on 31 October 2009. ‘The child, said to be too short to see over the edge of a trench, was recalled by another under-age soldier, George Maher, who was only 13 when he was sent to the Somme during the First Wold War,’ she wrote. Ms Henry went on to explain that when Mr Maher’s real age was discovered – he had told a recruiting officer that he was 18 to enable him to join the 2nd King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment in 1917 – he was hauled before an unsympathetic officer.
Mr Maher, who died aged 96 in 1999, had originally told his story to historian Richard Van Emden for his book Veterans: The Last Survivors Of The Great War. ‘I was locked up on a train under guard, one of five under-age boys caught serving on the front being sent back to England,’ he explained to the author adding, ‘The youngest was 12 years old. A little nuggety bloke he was, too. We joked that the other soldiers would have had to have lifted him up to see over the trenches.’
The Aeroplane was founded in 1911 and is still going strong. Back in 1940 for only 2s the magazine’s readers, many of them ‘air-minded’ youngsters, could purchase a series of ‘Aircraft Identification’ supplements. This is the cover from the first in an extensive series published throughout the war years.
Such was the fervour to join Kitchener’s rapidly expanding army the moment war was declared in August 1914, a rush exacerbated by the widespread belief that it would be over by Christmas, that many red-blooded patriots feared they’d be left out of the fighting. Consequently, despite pretty clear regulations which stipulated that you had to be 18 to join the army and at least 19 before you could serve abroad, dozens of youngsters flocked to the colours in the hope that they might slip through the screening net and join up. A startling number of boys got away with lying about their age, recruiting officers were reluctant to quench the patriotic desire to do what was right for ‘King and Country’ and often allowed individuals to sign the enlistment form without requiring sight of birth certificates, and many officers, tasked with filling the ranks as quickly as possible, were perfectly happy to accept a recruit’s word and did not demand to see written proof of age.
Another book by Richard van Emden, Boy Soldiers of the Great War, records that eighty-six boy soldiers aged 17 or under were killed on 25 September 1915, the first day of the Battle of Loos. This date is just one of countless days of bloody engagement between 1914 and 1918.
This page shows a classic three-view recognition silhouette of the RAF’s Boutlon Paul Defiant 1 turret fighter. Although the typed specification panel says that the Defiant gave a good account of itself over Dunkirk, in reality it proved inadequate against Luftwaffe fighters and was quickly withdrawn from front-line duties.
Other than the chance that they might end up in the trenches, many children suffered in another significant way. The First World War saw the biggest loss of fathers in modern British history – half a million youngsters lost their dads.
Children who went to France were forced to grow up fast but so were those who stayed at home. Donald Overall told the BBC News Channel that when still at a tender age his mother told him his father was dead and that he would now have to be the man of the house. ‘I thought “mum, I’m only five years old”,’ Mr Overall recalled, ‘But I had to stand up and be counted – and I did.’
It should also be remembered that those children whose fathers returned apparently fit and unharmed often discovered that their parent had changed in a frightening way, bearing the ‘invisible’ scars of shell-shock. Furthermore, adolescents were confronted by legions of grown-up men who had returned with very visible scars. Just how young imaginations dealt with being confronted by grown-ups with missing limbs or the sight of men who had lost both their legs dragging themselves along on primitive wooden platforms fitted with bicycle wheels or, if they were more affluent, seated in proper wheelchairs. Whether or not they had experienced this, the youngsters of this period grew up fast.
‘Boys Just the Book You’ve Been Looking For’, the Aeroplane Instructional Drawing Book.
The minimum age for joining the British Army at the outbreak of the Second World War was still 18. After the horrors of the Great War, the ‘war to end all wars’, which left hardly a family in Britain unaffected, there was, not surprisingly, rather less of a clamour to join the ranks at the outbreak of another European conflict. Conscription rather than patriotism ‘encouraged’ most young men to take up arms.
But, like the generation before them, the children of 1939 were also forced to grow up fast. Evacuation was one of the literally divisive ways whereby youngsters were forced to come to terms with the realities of this new conflict.
During the late 1930s British children enjoyed a steady diet of American science excitement on the wireless and during Saturday morning cinema. Their cousins across the Atlantic also got to see monthly magazines such as the best in the field Amazing Stories. This edition dates from July 1940. Robert Fuqua’s dramatic illustration on the cover depicts a scene from A.R. Steber’s When the Gods Make War.
In 1938, as Lord Privy Seal, in Neville Chamberlain’s Cabinet, John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley, was put in charge of air-raid preparations. One of the things initiated was the development of a kind of air-raid shelter made of prefabricated pieces which could be assembled in a garden. Bearing his name, he will forever be remembered for this life-saving contraption. It is less well known, however, that he was also responsible for drawing up preparations for evacuating civilians from areas at high risk of bombing. It should also be remembered that it wasn’t just fear of bombs dropping from enemy aircraft that terrified people but also the thought that poison gas might also be similarly unleashed from the skies.
Planned for implementation by the Ministry of Health, the Government Evacuation Scheme was developed during the ‘Munich Crisis’ in the summer of 1938. The country was divided into zones, classified as ‘evacuation’, ‘neutral’ or ‘reception’, with priority evacuees being moved from the major urban centres and billeted on the available private housing in more rural areas.
Anderson’s ‘Operation Pied Piper,’ which began on 1 September 1939, relocated more than 3.5 million people, of which about 800,000 were children. Further waves of official evacuation and re-evacuation occurred from the south and east coast in June 1940, when a seaborne invasion was expected, and from affected cities after the Blitz began in September 1940. The plan was put into action in September 1939. However, many returned home after a few weeks. Others stayed in the countryside for the rest of the war.
It is often forgotten that following the 1940 invasion scare and the night Blitz there were other evacuations. Living in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, my maternal grandmother refused to let her children be evacuated unaccompanied in 1939. My mother, the eldest of three sisters stayed with her mother and siblings throughout the Blitz and beyond. However, after the first ‘doodlebug’, the infamous V1 pilotless flying bomb, struck London on 13 June 1944, only a week after D-Day, a further evacuation was implemented and the government acquiesced, allowed mothers to accompany evacuated children this time.
In contrast to the pulp fiction enjoyed by American youth, British boys had to make do with more wholesome fare such as Boy’s Own Paper. The cover depicts a mountain hiker – ‘Have you ever thought of a mountain holiday?’ Also inside, readers discovered that twins John and Melvin Roylance ‘collected £700 all in aid of the Wings for Victory appeal!’ Who needs ray guns?
After assembling with her own mother and sisters, and her aunt and cousin, my mother and her familial group of evacuees got on a bus to London’s King’s Cross railway station where they boarded a train for Lancashire.
It was now time for the two families to assemble in another school hall, this time in Oldham, where the children were given cakes and soft drinks and there was tea and biscuits for mothers. Because my mother’s group comprised an adult and three children, each less than 10 years of age, a potential handful, they were picked last. My mother recalls that her aunt and cousin were snapped up and went to a very nice home. Mother tells me that her group was eventually adopted by ‘an old witch’, apparently devoid of any redeeming features. Indeed, I was told that all the money sent to his wife from my grandfather, a Bofors gunner serving with the Royal Artillery in Burma, was appropriated by the home owner. The only respite from a very strained environment came when one of the local men, who had been present at the reception hall when my mother’s family arrived in Oldham, invited them to his nearby bungalow at weekends. According to my mother he, his wife and young son were ‘a lovely family’ and provided an oasis of warmth.
After six weeks my grandmother had had enough and scooping up her three daughters proceeded to return to London – just in time to experience the V2 ballistic rocket, a much deadlier threat which they endured in favour of being unwelcome guests in a stranger’s home hundreds of miles away.
BOO-BOO the Barrage Balloon, published by Raphael Tuck, London, 1943, one of the many illustrated books for children produced during the Second World War despite paper rationing. This is now a very rare book, with only a few being known to survive in private collections.
Of course, as is the experience of the front-line soldier, fighter pilot or sailor, most of the time children experienced boredom rather than the terror of an enemy trying to kill them. Soldiers traditionally whiled away their free-time by fashioning so-called ‘trench art’ from bits and pieces of discarded military equipment, pilots retired to a local pub or the mess after the day’s sorties have finished and sailors spent hours tattooing each other. Youngsters amused themselves by reading comics, playing games with their friends or by absorbing themselves in a solitary pursuit involving arranging serried ranks of lead soldiers or fashioning a model from scratch from either balsa, lime or box wood.
In a time before technology supplied ‘fun’ on tap – no television, no transportable recorded music, no computer games, no mobile phones (and not very many residential static ones either), no smart phones and apps – youngsters had to devise their entertainment for themselves. They did so with vigour and because a century or so ago children spent much of their time playing outside with very real friends, not virtual ones delivered via social media platforms, they were often healthier and socially more adept than their twenty-first-century counterparts.
One of the reasons children were expected to entertain themselves was because in the average home there simply was insufficient disposable income to buy toys. Nevertheless, despite this, youngsters enjoyed themselves and because there was little or no traffic, the streets and roads were safe to play in.
When this stirring edition of the weekly War Thriller comic was published on 18 May 1940 the evacuation of the BEF from France was still a week from beginning and British schoolboys were still convinced that the Anglo-French armies would stand firm.
These urban playing fields became the home for games of marbles. Boys were proud of their marble collections and would swap among themselves to build a collection of the size and colour variety they wanted.
Girls used sticks to beat wooden hoops along the pavement – the boys tended to prefer iron ones, which they ran alongside using a kind of large hook to keep the hoops going.
By their very nature paving slaps were found to be very useful for playing hopscotch and could easily be marked out with chalk. Girls generally favoured hopscotch and devised numerous variations of this innocent game which kept them entertained for hours.
About 2in long and about 1½in in diameter, wooden whipping tops fitted with metal pegs at the base and with grooved sides around which a length of string about two feet in length was wound, would be thrown onto pavements and with a brisk jerk the top was sent spinning on its peg. The winner was the boy or girl who kept a top spinning for the longest.
Other popular outside activities at the turn of the last century included football, cricket and … skipping! Wealthier children could expect to play with superior quality skipping ropes containing ball bearing races in their turned wooden handles which prevented the rope from twisting out of shape as it swung round. Children playing in the streets outside tenements or in the new housing estates built to home factory workers made do with simple lengths of rope.
Playing ‘Diabolo’, not to be confused with the contemporary video game, was another enormously popular childhood pastime. A real product of the Industrial Revolution because the first examples employed discarded cotton reels from the mills, this activity involved keeping a wooden cylinder spinning by manipulating it on a length of cord tied to two sticks, each of which was held in the player’s hands. The advent of early plastic moulding following the First World War saw this temporary expedient replaced with a synthetic piece, resembling two inverted egg cups joined at the base, the inward curve guiding the cord which propelled the whole contraption.
Games were also a feature of children’s parties. Blow football, pinning the tail on the donkey, snakes and ladders, and quoits and blow football proved popular distractions before cake and jelly. Although Mrs Beeton does not list ‘picnic’, ‘party’ or ‘children’ in her index she does mention lemonade – the cloudy type of course!
By the end of the First World War education was only compulsory for children up to the age of 14 and was only raised to 15 in 1944 with the passing of the 1944 Education Act. The children of wealthier parents had the option of further education of course and a system of secondary education integrating higher grade elementary schools had been introduced in 1902. The 1917 Secondary Schools Examination Council was established to administer the new School Certificate and Higher School Certificate. Prior to the Second World War less than 2 per cent of 18-year-olds went to university, there being around 50,000 students in some 30 universities or university colleges in Britain in 1939, and the majority of these were male with women constituting less than a quarter of the university student population.
For most ordinary school children in the inner cities during wartime, about the only dramatic change in what many considered the drudgery of lessons was frequent air-raid drills and of course, on occasions, the real thing when youngsters quickly fled to the shelter in the face of enemy bombs.
Incorporating the Bulletin of the National Association of Spotters’ Clubs, Aeroplane Spotter was published on alternate Thursdays, ‘For The Alert’. It promised to equip ‘air-minded’ schoolboys with everything they needed to keep up to date with developments in aeronautics.
It wasn’t just bombs dropped from the air which threatened youngsters. In December 1914 the German high seas fleet managed to get near enough to the northeast coast of England to shell coastal towns there, spending nearly an hour raining 1,150 shells on Hartlepool alone and leaving 102 people dead including 9 soldiers, 7 sailors and 15 children. Britons were outraged when further casualties were inflicted on Scarborough and, picturing damage from German naval artillery to a civilian house, a popular British recruiting poster of the time sported the headline: ‘No 2 Wykeham Street, Scarborough … four people were killed in this house including the wife … and two children, the youngest aged 5’.
Although the first air raid on Britain took place on 21 December 1914 when a German aeroplane dropped a few puny bombs on Dover, it was not until January 1915 when two German Imperial Navy Zeppelin airships, the L3 and L4, heading for industrial buildings on Humberside made landfall over the East Anglian coast, bombing as they went, that the full potential of aerial warfare dawned on the British.
Zeppelin L4 dropped the first bomb to fall on British soil at Sheringham, on the north Norfolk coast. Fortunately, it did not explode. However, bombs dropped at Kings Lynn did detonate and 14-year-old Percy Goate became the first British child to die as a result of enemy action in Britain.
Further Zeppelin raids struck inevitable terror throughout the war. Towards the end of the conflict the capability of German fixed wing aircraft had improved considerably and in June 1917 in the first daylight raid by Gotha bombers 162 civilians were killed in London. Among them were eighteen schoolchildren slaughtered when a bomb fell on their primary school in Poplar.
During both world wars children did their bit to support the war effort, often being roped in as emotional blackmail to encourage people to contribute to war bond drives and keep the war economy from flagging. During the Great War schoolchildren were encourage to organise ‘flag days’, selling patriotic paper emblems which raised money for funding the war effort. In the Second World War many schools organised ‘Spitfire funds’, raising money towards a target published on a kind of price list – a Spitfire or Hurricane cost £5,000, with £20,000 for a twin-engined aircraft and £40,000 for a four-engined bomber. Considering that a single torpedo allegedly cost more than £10,000 at the time, the price of a Spitfire represented a real bargain.
Newspapers published weekly running totals and printed lists of donors and their specific contributions, such as ‘My week’s pocket money – Fred Smith aged 7’, ‘My first week’s old age pension – 10 shillings towards our Spitfire’, etc. More than 6,000 school savings groups were started in 1940.
Famous for their maps and atlases, London’s George Philip & Son also produced this rather ingenious die-cut calculator which helped plane spotters dial up the armament and performance figures of different modern war planes.
Toys were a treat, especially for working class kids who might only expect such delights for birthdays or at Christmas. Because many toy factories, such as Lines Brothers, their Tri-ang factory at Merton producing more than 1,000,000 Sten Guns during the Second World War, were engaged in war work there was a shortage of new toys anyway. Those parents who could afford them soon discovered that what supplies of toys, such as FROG’s ‘Interceptors’ and ‘Penguins’, respectively flying and non-flying model aircraft, pre-war products of Tri-ang’s factories, or Meccano sets, Hornby railways and Dinky Toys made in the late Frank Hornby’s (he died in 1936) Binns Road factory in Liverpool, were available were soon in short supply. By 1910 about 200,000 hollow-cast lead toy soldiers were leaving William Britain’s north London factory each week and his success encouraged other British firms, such as Johillco and Crescent, to participate in this burgeoning market. By 1914 it is estimated that W. Britain was manufacturing something in the order of 15,000,000 figures a year, most of which went to the home market. Britain’s best customer was W.H. Gamage, proprietor of the People’s Emporium in Holborn.
For only 1s 6d enthusiastic youngsters could purchase ‘Flying Boats’, one of Geoffrey Heighway’s new Micromodel card kits which were introduced in 1940. This set included delightful replicas of both the Sunderland and Catalina.
By 1941 Britain had converted their manufacturing tools to help the war effort. Rival Johillco’s Islington factory was unable to take advantage of the opportunity to fill, or at least part fill, the void caused by Britain’s absence from the market because it had been destroyed in the Blitz and didn’t reopen until 1946. Interestingly, had Britain continued with the pre-war level of toy production the same quantity of military playthings, toy soldiers and the like would not have been produced that had been twenty years before. After the First World War the almost universal clamour for peace had made such items much less popular and encouraged the manufacturer to explore new avenues. Britain’s famous ‘Home Farm’ set, agricultural accessories and zoo animals being the result of this shift in emphasis.
The lack of new toys and the relative expense of the limited supply remaining in toy shops encouraged children to swap their old toys at ‘toy exchanges’ or simply construct their own novelties from paper or card.
Of course a lot of the available playthings, again made of paper or card, had a wartime theme. Pop-out card models had been popular since the Boer War and as soon as aircraft, tanks and submarines took the stage during the First World War numerous publishers produced such card kits. However, in 1940 something really quite special arrived on the paper model market when Geoffrey Heighway introduced Micromodel. Miniaturising the established concept of the printed paper model, he enabled ships, great building or even a set of locomotives to be printed on an assortment of small paper sheets which all wrapped up into a compact package the size of a postcard. Enormously popular, these delightful creations were also ideal for delivery via the post. Priced at just 1s per packet, the first of Heighway’s printed card Micromodel sets was ‘The Romance of Sail’, a collection of six miniature sailing ships. This set was followed by further wartime issues which included ‘Weapons of War’, ‘Tanks’, ‘Allied Fighter Planes’ and ‘Flying Boats’.
Young boys devoured the ABC of Aeroplane Spotting, played card games with pictures of soldiers and sailors on them or perhaps threw a dart at a board with a picture of Hitler where the bullseye would normally be located!
In 1919 Harry Gibson formed H.P. Gibson & Sons Limited and traded successfully until his premises in London were completely destroyed during the Blitz. By this time, however, Gibson’s company had launched a number of successful board games, each with military themes, which had proved popular with British children during both world wars.
Three games in particular, ‘Aviation’, ‘Dover Patrol’ and ‘L’Attaque’, which was originally designed by a French woman, Mademoiselle Hermance Edan, in 1908, plus a more complicated incorporation of all three, a game called ‘Tri-Tactics’, kept youngsters as engaged as PC games like ‘Call of Duty’ do today.
When the blackout was imposed on London and other major cities across Britain from 1 September 1939, apart from making it more difficult for enemy bombers to navigate after they had crossed the nation’s coast, it also encouraged entire families to stay indoors after sunset.
It was anyway pretty dangerous to go outside. Street lights had been switched off at the mains, vehicle headlights were masked to show only a crack of light, and stations were lit by candles, an enforced darkness Britain endured until 23 April 1945. A limited blackout had been introduced in 1915, but then the lights were only dimmed rather than extinguished all together and only when a Zeppelin was known to be en route. The Germans had held their first blackout exercise in Berlin in March 1935, an event comprehensively reported in the British press. So, by 1939, the British authorities left nothing to chance. It’s difficult for us to imagine today how much this transformed everyday life, but the impact of darkened streets could be overwhelming. Little wonder then, that with only partially illuminated automobiles driving along unlit roads, by the end of the first month of war there had been 1,130 road deaths attributed to the blackout.
The The Black-out Book, a publication that went some way to alleviating the boredom of the enforced darkness caused by wartime, featured a quotation by G.K. Chesterton, well-known author of the Father Brown detective books.
Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge a whim.
With over 500 games, puzzles, jokes, literary snippets and features such as ‘A thought for the petrol-rationed motorist’, ‘What happened to the shilling?’ and ‘What to do when sleep won’t come’, The Black-out Book provided a useful distraction during the Blitz.
British tanks and British aircraft reign supreme in both these ‘Painting and Story Books’. The reality, as the youngsters learned when they grew up after the war, was that other than machines like the Spitfire and Lancaster most British weapons were distinctly inferior to those of the enemy.
Author Sydney Box was a writer and film producer and, from 1946, the managing director of Gainsborough Pictures. Responsible for such classics as The Seventh Veil (1945, which won him a best screenplay Oscar), Holiday Camp (1947) and Quartet (1948), he also produced over 100 propaganda shorts for the government and the armed services during the Second World War. Most of his screenplays were written in collaboration with his wife, Muriel, and their collaborative work was published under the pseudonym ‘Evelyn August’.
Comics, a perennial favourite with children since Edwardian times, were also a faithful companion for the young in wartime. Before the arrival of what we now know as comics, so-called ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ flourished from the 1830s onwards. Primarily horror stories, they were filled with vampires, werewolves, pirates and tales of daring highwaymen There were also more wholesome publications aimed at youngsters including the Boys’ Own Magazine, Every Boy’s Magazine and Young England and, from 1866, Chatterbox. In 1879, when the British Army suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Zulu at Isandlwana, the Boys’ Own Paper first appeared. This was followed in 1892 by Cassell & Company’s story paper Chums, an equally famous publication which sustained youngsters prior to the First World War.
Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips, progenitors of the classic format of sequential comic strips which we take for granted today, came on to the British market just before the turn the twentieth century, but it wasn’t until the late 1930s that perennials such as the Dandy (December 1937) and Beano (30 July 1938) established the format we take for granted today. On the other side of the Atlantic kids comics developed in a uniquely different way with the arrival of Action Comics #1 a month before the Beano first appeared in Britain. Featuring the first appearance of Superman, Action Comics #1 entered the record books in 2011 when this first edition sold at auction for a record $2 million, becoming the most valuable comic book of all time.
Young people in Britain were also served by authors who catered just for them. Young girls enjoyed Carolyn Keene’s famous Nancy Drew stories, which first appeared in 1930, as well as the Judy Bolton mystery stories series, which were first published in 1932 and kept female readers enthralled until 1967.
Another hugely successful female author, but this time one who catered mainly for boys having penned Just William, the first of a huge series of novels about school boy William Brown in 1922, was Richmal Crompton. A suffragette, she had initially trained as a schoolmistress, teaching classics, but after been struck with polio, she took up writing full-time instead. Crompton penned thirty-eight ‘William’ books all together; her last, William the Lawless, was published posthumously in 1970.
Collectors of wartime ephemera, however, are most keen on the books she wrote at the time of the Munich Crisis, starting with William the Dictator in 1938, and continuing with William and Air Raid Precautions (1939), William and the Evacuees (1940), William Does His Bit (1941) and William Carries On (1942). Early editions of any of these hugely popular works (Crompton sold more than 12 million copies of her books in the United Kingdom alone) in good condition (no ‘foxing’ – see the Chapter 7) and complete with their illustrated dust-wraps now command increasingly high prices.
In William and Air Raid Precautions, one of my favourites, our eponymous hero gets caught up in the zeitgeist of the times and decides to set up his own civil defence post: ‘I’ve thought of lots of games you could play with gas masks, but no one’ll let me try. They keep mine locked up. Lot of good it’ll be in a war locked up where I can’t get at it. Huh!’ Having decided to form an ARP Junior Branch, William and his friends Ginger, Henry and Douglas set about creating a sign for their new post which Douglas fashioned from cardboard torn from the box in which his mother kept her best hat and on which, in blacking ‘borrowed’ from the kitchen, was scrawled the legend:
Air Rade Precorshun
Junier Branch
Entrance Fre.
Great stuff. Readers had more than 250 pages to enjoy, many of which were richly illustrated by Thomas Henry who had been drawing Crompton’s William since 1919 when he first appeared in magazine serialisation. Though he worked with her for forty-three years, Henry allegedly only met Crompton once, at a book festival luncheon in Nottingham!
Boys and girls alike enjoyed Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series in equal measure, the first book, Five on a Treasure Island, first appearing in 1942.
When they weren’t reading or involved in family games, children, like their parents, spent hours listening to the radio. Princess Elizabeth, The Queen made her first public speech on 13 October 1940, a radio address to the children of the Commonwealth.
In wishing you all ‘good evening’ I feel that I am speaking to friends and companions who have shared with my sister and myself many a happy Children’s Hour.
Thousands of you in this country have had to leave your homes and be separated from your fathers and mothers. My sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all.
Richmal Crompton’s famous Just William series of thirty-nine books chronicle the adventures of the mischievous schoolboy William Brown. Published between 1921 and 1970, though the 11-year-old protagonist never gets any older, each William book reflects the time in which it was written. First published in 1938, William the Dictator contains ten stories each designed to show autocracy in a bad light. It is now one of the rarest William books.
After addressing children from each country within the Commonwealth and expressing her and her sister’s desire to visit such far-off lands as soon as peace would allow, she finished her speech by saying:
Before I finish I can truthfully say to you all that we children at home are full of cheerfulness and courage. We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our own share of the danger and sadness of war.
We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well; for God will care for us and give us victory and peace. And when peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.
My sister is by my side and we are both going to say goodnight to you.
Come on, Margaret.
Goodnight, children.
Goodnight, and good luck to you all.
William and Air Raid Precautions dates from 1939. Wartime provided Richmal Crompton with much inspiration and in this book and William and the Evacuees, which followed in 1940, it provided the mischievous schoolboy with a vivid backdrop.
Between the 1920s and the outbreak of the Second World War, the BBC broadcast two distinct nationwide radio services: the BBC National Programme and the BBC Regional Programme. Together with a service specific to London, the Regional Programme included programming originating in six regions. However, on 1 September 1939, the BBC merged these two programmes into one national service from London. One of the reasons they said they did this was to prevent enemy aircraft from triangulating the locations of the different transmitters and using them as navigational beacons to aid targeting. This new service was named the Home Service, which was also the internal designation at the BBC for domestic radio broadcasting to keep it distinct from the fledgling Television Service and Overseas Service departments.
Since 1922 the BBC had broadcast Children’s Hour, transmitted daily from 5p.m. to 6p.m., the time of day during the week when children could be expected to be home from school. Aimed at an audience aged about 5 to 15 years, it was imbued with the somewhat puritanical values of Lord Reith who joined the British Broadcasting Company Ltd after the First World war and by the late 1930s had risen to the lofty position of Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation which had been created under a Royal Charter.
Children’s Hour was hugely popular, and presenters, such as Derek McCulloch, as ‘Uncle Mac’ of Children’s Favourites and Children’s Hour fame, became major celebrities. McCulloch was also the head of children’s broadcasting for the BBC from 1933 until 1951. Ending with the sign-off line, ‘Goodnight children, everywhere’, McCulloch’s children’s programmes attracted a wartime audience of more than 4 million children.
As an escape from the hardships and suffering of the American depression following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 newspapers in the United States offered their readers a variety of illustrated new strips. Buck Rogers first appeared in 1929, with Dick Tracy following in 1931, Flash Gordon in 1933, Li’l Abner in 1934 and Prince Valiant in 1937. These features became so popular that commentators declared that many American citizens chose their daily newspaper based on the comic strip within it.
It wasn’t long before these fictional characters developed a huge fan base and a ready market for merchandisers, ranging from cereal premiums to books and magazines dedicated entirely to a particular character.
In 1932, the Buck Rogers’ radio programme, notable as the first science-fiction show on radio, relating the story of hero Buck who finds himself in the twenty-fifth century but fortunately accompanied by the beautiful and strong-willed Wilma Deering and the brilliant scientist-inventor Dr Huer, hit the airwaves. It was broadcast four times a week for fifteen years, from 1932 to 1947.
Flash Gordon, a science-fiction adventure comic strip originally drawn by Alex Raymond in 1934, soon migrated to radio where the adventures of Flash, Dale Arden and Dr Hans Zarkov (sounds familiar?) really took flight. Stories took the three of them to the planet Mongo, home of Emperor Ming, the evil ruler of the planet.
During this time American and British children, but mostly boys I guess, devoured similar science-fiction stories in a hugely popular American publication, Amazing Stories, which was launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback’s Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction.
In 1935 Dick Tracy had moved from comic cuts to the radio, when Mutual produced the show for North America’s New England region until in 1937 NBC took the show, and broadcast it across the United States until 1948.
Dick Barton Special Agent was the BBC’s answer to Dick Tracy, but it arrived too late to entertain British youngsters who had to be content with Children’s Hour instead. Broadcast on the BBC Light Programme from 1946 to 1951, Dick Barton was the BBC’s first daily serial, airing at 6.45 each weekday evening. It featured ex-Commando Captain Richard Barton (Noel Johnson, later Duncan Carse and Gordon Davies), who, with his mates Jock Anderson (Alex McCrindle) and Snowy White (John Mann), solved all sorts of crimes, escaped from dangerous situations and saved the nation from disaster time and again. At its peak it had an audience of 15 million.
Despite the emergency restrictions which limited the quality and supply of printing paper soon after Allied troops had landed in France on D-Day, publishers made sure children could read about some of the technology used.
While British children didn’t perhaps share the excitement of listening to their comic-book heroes on the wireless, they could, at least, revel in American pulp fiction on screen, enjoying Flash Gordon, who featured in three serial films starring Buster Crabbe: Flash Gordon (1936), Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938), Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940) and a twelve-part Buck Rogers serial film produced in 1939 by Universal Pictures Company at their local picture palace.
In the 1940s children in Britain didn’t go to the ‘cinema’, or to see a ‘film’ or a ‘movie’, they went ‘to the pictures’. And on Saturday mornings many cinemas organised special, cut-price film shows especially for children. The programmes generally consisted of cartoons, a ‘B’ movie and the main feature, all interspersed with newsreels and serials designed to encourage youngsters to go again the following Saturday so as not to miss an instalment.
The usherette, or ice-cream lady as she was known by the children, would perform a variety of duties to assist in the smooth operation of the establishment and to ensure the safety of all patrons. Her duties included collecting tickets and showing people to their seats, selling ice creams and refreshments during the intermission and cleaning up after the hordes of children rushed for the exits at the end of the programme!
Regular visitors to ABC Cinemas (Associated British Cinemas), a cinema chain established in the 1930s, would inevitably join the ‘ABC Minors’, the first major Saturday cinema club for children. At the beginning of each Saturday morning session, the ‘ABC Minors Song’ would be played to Abe Holzmann’s famous march, while the lyrics were presented on the screen with a bouncing red ball above the words to help all the children sing off the same hymn sheet as it were.
We are the boys and girls well known as
Minors of the ABC
And every Saturday all line up
To see the films we like, and shout aloud with glee We like to laugh and have a singsong
Such a happy crowd are we.
We’re all pals together.
We’re minors of the A–B–C.
The final line ‘A–B–C’ was shouted at full blast by the assembled audience.
While youngsters shared their parents’ enthusiasm for patriotic films such as First of the Few, known as Spitfire in the United States, the 1942 British film directed by and starring Leslie Howard as R.J. Mitchell, the designer of the Supermarine Spitfire, alongside co-star David Niven, who played RAF Squadron Leader Geoffrey Crisp, and no doubt enjoyed William Walton’s stirring score, there’s little doubt that the big hitters came out of Hollywood. And, despite the war, the Californian studios didn’t disappoint.
Early in 1940 Walt Disney’s animated film Pinocchio was released to acclaim. However, its undoubted artistry was eclipsed later that year with the world premiere of Fantasia. Released in a unique, multi-channel format, Fantasound, the film also marked the first use of the click track, a series of optical marks made on the film to indicate precise timings for musical accompaniment while recording the soundtrack, the forerunner of today’s multichannel surround system.
In 1940 Bugs Bunny also made his debut, first appearing in the animated cartoon A Wild Hare. Dumbo followed in 1941 and the tear-jerker Bambi in 1942. These big American animated blockbusters not only appealed to worldwide audiences, or rather the audiences of unoccupied Allied nations, they also avoided getting into trouble at home by compromising the United States’ neutrality until it entered the war in December 1941.
Until then restrictions proclaimed that cinematic or radio dramas could not involve stories featuring sabotage, subversion, or spying within the United States. Heroes could not be seen to favour one side or the other and broadcasters could not openly side with any of the combatants. Certain productions managed to circumvent these proscriptions by playing the patriotism card and celebrating the American way of life.
In February 1940 radio listeners had tuned in to hear movie director Louis de Rochemont laud the Maginot Line and speak of the invincibility it gave to France against a possible German assault. Subsequently, viewers of Movietone and Pathé News newsreels saw that this invincible bulwark proved to be no obstacle against blitzkreig.
Children listening to ‘Captain Midnight’ (aka Charles J. Albright) in late 1941 heard their hero striking ‘fear into the hearts of foes of democracy and freedom’ in Japanese-occupied China. The actors on one broadcast of the Lux Radio Theater in 1941 donated their salaries to the China Relief Fund.
American children fought the Second World War in front of their radio sets. They joined the likes of Don Winslow of the Navy, the story of a naval aviator who bombed ships, attacked Nazis and hated Japanese. ‘America’s ace of the airways’, ‘Hop Harrigan’, an 18-year-old freelance aviator, was every listener’s ‘big brother’, an American warrior to the core. Harrigan did everything and always very well. He flew bombing runs, engaged in dogfights with enemy aircraft, rescued his wounded pal while dodging German machine-gun bullets and even escaped from a concentration camp.
American heroes abounded. There was Terry and the Pirates, The Sea Hound, Jungle Jim, Superman, Tom Mix, The Green Hornet and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, a creation of General Mills which presaged this famous American giant’s later involvement in merchandising.
When the United States did enter the war, the federal government decided upon a course of voluntary self-censorship and as early as January 1942 (when the United States had not been at war for a month), the Office of Censorship published its Code of Wartime Practices for American Broadcasters which stated the official position on programmes that might provide information helpful to internal spies and saboteurs, or the enemy’s military.
Although they were never subjected to aerial bombardment, even Americans wondered what future wars might bring as the cover of this 28 February 1939 edition of Look suggests.
Stations were urged to watch carefully those quiz and discussion programmes where such things as secret coded messages, telegraphed requests for specific songs or announcements of forthcoming meetings might suggest a subversive intent.
The United States government stated: ‘Free speech will not suffer during this emergency period beyond the absolute precautions which are necessary to the protection of a culture which makes our radio the freest in the world.’
Free speech was not foremost in the minds of the authorities in Nazi Germany but at least in 1938 the government introduced the so-called ‘people’s receiver, the Volksempfänger, dubbed the Goebbels-Schnauze (Goebbels’ snout), a radio set for every family in the Reich and all for a cost of only 35 marks. One of the reason’s Goebbel’s propaganda department was so enthusiastic about the distribution of this receiver was that the population would have no excuse for ignoring the Führer’s speeches and now boys and girls, and their parents of course, could settle down beside the wireless and, tuning in to Großdeutscher Rundfunk, could listen to die Stunde der Jungen Nation (the hour of the young nation) and listen to the leader rant on in his distinctively rough Austrian accent.
On the radio, German children could also hear Walter Groß, head of the Nazi Party’s Racial Policy Office, speak to them about racial purity. What follows is an excerpt from a radio talk, entitled ‘Blood is Holy’, aimed at youth that he gave on 7 August 1935. It outlines the fundamentals of Nazi racial thinking in a way intended for children.
Dear German Boys and Girls!
As we talk about blood and race this evening, we are discussing a theme that is in the centre of today’s intellectual and worldview battles. You all know that those who oppose our movement for political or worldview reasons have been forced more and more over time to grant the political and economic achievements of National Socialism. They can no longer be denied even by the most hostile critic. As soon as the discussion turns to National Socialism’s intellectual foundations, however, as soon as the idea itself is debated upon which everything we do is based, there are objections. And as in the past, National Socialism’s racial thinking is called into question or openly opposed. We see that if we survey the world press, as well as in discussions with groups within the country who still believe that they can reject individual aspects of the National Socialist worldview.
I have previously spoken about what we mean by racial thinking in the broad sense.
Today we once again raise anew the flag of life against the doctrine of death, and serve the future with the faithful affirmation: The blood given to us by God is holy.
Let’s hope that many German schoolchildren saw through Groß’s words, though I’m sure they chimed with young boys who had joined the Hitler Jugend and the girls in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (the League of German Girls).
Generally, the young are more amenable to new ideas than older people. Recently, most of the early adopters of smart phones, apps and social media platforms proved to be teenagers or younger. Youth embraces the new and perceives the full potential of innovation. It was ever thus.
One thing all youngsters had in common during the First World War was a fascination with flight – after all, its development had been a truly international thing. From the pioneering flights of Prussian Otto Lilienthal, the ‘Glider King’, so-called because he was the first person to make well-documented, repeated, successful gliding flights, to the Wright brothers, pioneers of the first powered and sustained heavierthan-air human flight, in December 1903, aviation was the most exciting thing on, or rather off, Earth.
British boys devoured the exploits of First World War fighter ace Albert Ball VC, who scored forty-four victories before he crashed to his death in 1917 aged only 21.
German youth lauded their own air hero, Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, the Red Baron, who incidentally upon hearing of Ball’s death remarked that he was ‘by far the best English flying man’.
The British also had James Thomas Byford McCudden VC, who survived until July 1918, by which time he had downed fifty-seven enemy aircraft and with six British medals and one French one, received more medals for gallantry than any other airman of British nationality serving in the First World War.
International aces also included Germans Max Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke, René Fonck and Georges Guynemer from France and American Edward V. Rickenbacker. Heady times for youngsters who followed their heroes’ every exploit.
The inter-war years proved no less of a stimulation to ‘air-minded’ young men. Sir Alan Cobham had been in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War but became famous after the war as a pioneer of long-distance aviation. In 1921 he made a 5,000-mile air tour of Europe, visiting seventeen cities in three weeks. On 30 June 1926, he set off on a flight from Britain (from the River Medway) to Australia where 60,000 people swarmed across the grassy fields of Essendon Airport, Melbourne when he landed his de Havilland DH.50. He was knighted the same year.
In 1927 Cobham starred as himself in the 1927 British war film The Flight Commander and in 1928 he flew a Short Singapore flying boat around the continent of Africa landing only in British territory.
In 1932 he started the National Aviation Day displays – familiarly known as ‘Cobham’s Flying Circus’, which gave many people their first experience of flying and delivered the thrill of aviation to ordinary people. In fact, air shows proved so popular in Britain that the RAF Pageants, the ‘Hendon Air Days’ held at the famous London aerodrome every summer from 1920 to 1937, attracted enormous crowds of spectators.
Piloting the single-seat, single-engine, purpose-built Ryan monoplane Spirit of St Louis, 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh made history when he flew non-stop from New York to Paris, a distance of nearly 3,600 miles (5,800km), in 1927. He entered the record books as the first person in history to be in New York one day and Paris the next and received the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit.
Lindbergh’s anti-war and isolationist stance during the build-up to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 might have lost him a few fans in Great Britain at the time, but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he threw himself wholeheartedly behind the American war effort and his prestige remained unabated.
Britain’s equivalent was not a man but a woman. Amy Johnson would be remarkable at any time but being a pioneering female English aviator, flying solo or with her husband, Jim Mollison, she proved remarkable during the 1930s.
Johnson achieved worldwide celebrity when, in 1930, piloting her de Havilland DH.60 Gipsy Moth named Jason, she became the first woman pilot to fly solo from England to Australia, a flight of over 11,000 miles (18,000km). She received a CBE in recognition of her achievement. In July 1931, Johnson and her co-pilot Jack Humphreys became the first pilots to fly from London to Moscow in one day, completing the 1,760-mile (2,830km) journey in approximately 21 hours. In July 1932, Johnson set a solo record for the flight from London to Cape Town, South Africa and in 1933, with Mollison, flew nonstop from South Wales to the United States. In May 1936, Johnson made her last record-breaking flight, regaining her Britain to South Africa record in G-ADZO, a Percival Gull Six. In 1940, the recently divorced Johnson joined the newly formed Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), rising to become its First Officer. Incidentally, the ATA was one of the rare, early champions of sexual equality. Both men and women did the same job, were treated equally and took home the same pay.
In January 1941, while flying an Airspeed Oxford for the ATA, Johnson went off course in adverse weather conditions. After running out of fuel over the Thames Estuary she bailed out and although the crew of a nearby ship witnessed her decent, she landed in a heavy swell in the intense cold and her body was never recovered. In 1942, a film of Johnson’s life was made. They Flew Alone starred Anna Neagle as Johnson and Robert Newton as Mollison. The movie was distributed in the United States as Wings and the Woman.
By the beginning of the Second World War British youth was thoroughly ‘Air Minded’. Young boys and many young girls (who had been encouraged both by the exploits of Britain’s Amy Johnson as well as America’s Amelia Earheart, the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean) were genned up about every modern development in the exciting field of aviation.
Youngsters devoured books and magazines about aviation. Indeed, most of the aircraft recognition manuals that were all the rage during the Second World War, though ostensibly designed to help those in the Home Guard, ARP, Observer Corps and other civil defence organisations, were actually purchased by schoolboys. Plane spotting was de rigueur and although such boys were too young to join the RAF, they were old enough for the Air Cadets.
The product of the efforts of Air Commodore J.A. Chamier, formerly a pilot officer in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, who upon retirement from the then RAF in 1929 became Secretary-General of the Air League. In 1938 he established the Air Defence Cadet Corps (ADCC). This was not before time because it was obvious that war was inevitable and Britain would soon need the skills of trained young men to swell the ranks of the rapidly expanding RAF, capable of piloting the new, fast, single-engined metal monoplanes.
In return for a weekly subscription of 3d, cadets learnt the skills that would be needed if and when they joined the RAF or Fleet Air Arm. On 5 February 1941, the Air Training Corps was officially established, with King George VI agreeing to be the Air-Commodore-in-Chief, and issuing a Royal Warrant setting out the Corps’ aims. The dramatic growth of the ATC was spectacular and within a month it had grown to virtually twice the size of the old ADCC and by the end of its first year had over 400 squadrons. A new badge was designed for the ATC and distributed in August 1941. Air Commodore Chamier devised the organisation’s motto ‘Venture Adventure’, and this was incorporated into the design of the badge.
While many young boys (girls couldn’t join the ATC until the 1980s, before that they had to content themselves with membership of the Girls Venture Corps Air Cadets formed in 1940 as part of the National Association of Training Corps for Girls) were able to make visits to wartime airfields and occasionally enjoy a flight in one of the station’s resident flying machines, the exigencies of war prevented much hands-on experience in modern warplanes. Youngsters had to content themselves with flights in gliders instead. Fortunately, as it was with the youth in Germany, gliding was a craze among air-minded youth in Britain. Gliding was first introduced around 1939, and formally became part of the official training programme soon after with around ninety Gliding Schools (GSs) in Britain by the end of the war.
If anything Nazi Germany was far ahead of Britain when it came to encouraging youngsters to engage with adventurous pursuits like gliding. This is not perhaps surprising given Hitler’s pronouncement in Mein Kampf:
I am beginning with the young, we older ones are used up, we are rotten to the marrow. We have no unrestrained instincts left. We are cowardly and sentimental. We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at these young men and boys! What material! With them I can make a new world.
As early as 30 January 1933, when Nazis in Berlin celebrated Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany with massive torchlight parades, Hitler Youth units were among those in the marching columns. The Nazi Gleichschaltung (forced coordination) period which followed saw all German institutions and organisations either Nazified or disbanded. Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth, now sought to eliminate all 400 of the other competing youth organisations, throughout Germany. Not surprisingly, the Communist and Jewish youth organisations were immediately disbanded.
The late Alfons Heck was an enthusiastic recruit to the Hitler Youth. However, when he emigrated to the United States after the war he began to reflect on his time in this organisation, writing two books, A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika and The Burden of Hitler’s Legacy.
At 14, all Hitler Jungvolk were required to join the senior Hitler Youth branch, the Hitler Jugend, and Heck applied to the elite Flying Hitler Youth (Flieger Hitler Jugend), engaging on a year-long glider course. He described this extended period of glider training from late 1942 until early 1944 as the happiest of his life. At 16 Heck became the youngest student to receive Germany’s Aeronaut’s Certificate in glider flying.
When Hitler first came to power Germany was forbidden to possess an air force, and the Luftwaffe was slowly built in great secrecy. Ironically, given the turn of events less than ten years later, German military flying principally took place within the Soviet Union. Gliding was an ideal way to train young men in all the aeronautical skills an operational pilot would need without breaching the strictures of the Armistice agreement signed at Versailles. With the active support of the Nazi party, there were 50,000 glider pilots by 1937 and at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, gliding was a demonstration sport, and scheduled to be a full Olympic sport in the 1940 Games.
Although many of the youngsters in both Britain and Germany were urged to do their bit for their homeland, at least those in the United Kingdom faced only the darkness of coal mines if they were drafted against their will as one of the ‘Bevin Boys’. German boys in the Hitler Youth, on the other hand, faced the real prospect of dying in the streets of Berlin, stick grenade in hand, confronting battle-hardened Soviet soldiers who had travelled hundreds of miles through the ravaged motherland, savagely put to the torch by the fathers and uncles of the trembling boys awaiting them.