VE Day in Holland: an Englishwoman writes home

My Gran, Primrose, was born and raised in the north-east of England, mainly in the vicarage at Lamesley, outside Gateshead. Working as a shipping clerk in Newcastle during the 1930s, she met and later married my grandfather, Bernard, a Dutchman plying the North Sea selling bunker oil. They settled in a farmhouse outside Voorschoten, to the east of the Hague. They stayed there throughout the war, whilst the Netherlands was suffering German occupation, during which time they had two children, Clare and Timothy (my father). A couple of miles to the north-west was the V2 launch site at Wassenaar, as this map shows:



My dad and uncle recently discovered a letter from Primrose, apparently written on VE Day (but dated May 9th), which made that experience incredibly real for me, from the fears, loss and privations of war to the yearning for word from a family across the sea to the relief and hope for the future. Read it below.

---

Eskeleth 

Voorschoten 

9th May 1945 

Darling Mummy

On VE day we are sitting in the garden in glorious weather, with our two sturdy infants toddling around the lawn. And the thoughts I have above everything else in these thrilling,marvellous days are: 'How are they at home? How are they doing? When shall I hear from them? ', etc. We are all well and quite healthy in spite of the strain of the last five years and the terrors and unspeakable famine of the last six months. Oh, what a glorious thing freedom is! It seems the most important thing in our lives now and a thing I shall treasure the rest of my life. How I have longed for news from you, especially since I had your last message some time round about March last year.

Timothy is wandering about picking buttercups and daisies – he is a picture with his rosy cheeks and very blond curls. Clare is waving to a British bomber overhead, bringing the desperately needed food to an airfield nearby. Both children speak English and some Dutch. Clare longs to go to “G'anny” and “Eng'and”, not to mention how her mother longs. We expect to be allowed to leave in about two months' time. Meanwhile, we hope to return to a more or less normal life and to enjoy the food sent from England. You have no idea what life has been like these years and this winter has been ghastly. The V2 rockets were fired off from Wassenaar and The Hague, an you can imagine the ravages done as 50% exploded here, and the Allies bombed the district (very heavily at times) all day long. We have been out of our house twice. Last May the SS turned us out and occupied the place for months. We returned just before Christmas and Bernard had to hide for months, like all men under 40. Everyone had to have secret hiding places in their houses and to have a wireless was a very risky thing – meant concentration camp or death. However, we kept ours and listened every day [to the BBC] under the stairs. I shall have a lot to tell on my return home. And what a lot I want to know about you all. To be separated from you all under these dreadful circumstances has been very hard to bear. My visit home will be a long one, probably lasting three months or so. I feel very tired, having had no holiday since 1939 and very little help indeed. With two tiny children it is at times too much for me. How marvellous that the summer is here – people had no coal or food last winter, no electricity or gas – can you imagine the chaos? A large part of our daily diet has been sugar-beets (horrible) and tulip bulbs. We were glad to have them. It has been a blessing to live in the country.

I shall write more news next time but don't want to make this too long. I have an English friend and her husband and child living here. Their house was destroyed in the bombardment of 3rd March last, when a huge part of The Hague was burnt down, including our English church, which had been closed since 1940. This morning we went to a service in the village for the peace thanksgiving. The British troops are arriving all the time and I hope to meet some soon and bring them home. We long to speak to a soldier from England. Yesterday saw still a few Germans about looking very miserable. Vile creatures, how they are loathed here. Lots and lots of love to you all, darlings, and I long for a word from you.

Your loving Primrose.

PS Love from Bernard, Clare and Timothy. Daisies from the children.

Getting rid of Twitter's promoted links

Do you ever get annoyed by promoted tweets? I do, so I made this bookmarklet for when I'm using the Twitter web application:

unpromote

Drag this to your browser's favourites bar and click it when you're on Twitter, it will get rid of that annoying spam. OK, it's probably not worth the hassle, but you never know.

Collections distractions #4: A schoolboy describes a burning zeppelin to his father

Here's a letter I stumbled across a while back, not a surprise as such but startlingly real. It's a letter in which a boy tells his father, in quite a considered, illustrated account, about the burning of a zeppelin right by the house to which he had, I suppose, been evacuated. All four pages can be read in these high-res scans: sheet 1; sheet 2.

Zeppelins were terrifying new technology and were responsible (amongst other things) for many civilian deaths in WW1. They must also have been quite terrifying to be on, being so slow, visible and ludicrously flammable. I was reminded of all of this, and particularly this letter, today whilst talking to some of the people I met at Who Do You Think You Are Live. A gentleman from the RAF Museum told me how it had taken until the middle of the war to realise that, by combining some technologies that had been around for a decade or more, it was possible to set light to enemy balloons (not actually in the way that happened in this account, though, with an incendiary bomb dropped from an aircraft above).

And it all brought back my very first week at IWM, 4 years back, when we new recruits did an object handling session. The mystery object that my group was given turned out to be a felt overboot, worn outside the leather boots of a zeppelin airman (it gets damn cold up there). It was recovered from a Suffolk field after its owner jumped to escape a conflagration of the sort that Patrick Blundstone described. The felt was still blackened from the burning hydrogen.
This is not the boot, but it's not dissimilar:


Boot (felt), Imperial German © IWM (UNI 12723)

As always, remember that I'm not a historian and many or all of the statements in this post may be incorrect!

One for Roger

I'm determined to write at least a quick one tonight. Today I heard that Roger Tolson had died. Roger was until recently the Head of Collections at IWM, and prior to that the heart of the Art Department. I didn't see him much over the last couple of years but worked with him quite a lot before that. He was a lovely guy, warm and insightful and patient, passionate about art and our collections more widely. On more that one occasion he went out to bat for me, notably in order to enable us to put our treasured oral history collection online.
I didn't know Roger well enough to be able to claim that I know what he loved best in our collections, but I'm just going to pick a couple of things from our First World War artworks with him in mind, a small sample of its variety.

Wire © IWM (Art.IWM ART 2705)


Indian Army Wounded In Hospital in the Dome, Brighton © IWM (Art.IWM ART 323)


Royal Irish Fusiliers: 'Just come from the Chemical Works, Roeux: 21st May 1917' © IWM (Art.IWM ART 3013)


A Daylight Raid On London, 7th July 1917: Seen from the roof of the Royal College of Science with the Brompton Oratory in the foreground © IWM (Art.IWM ART 1070)
 

Monitor at Anchor in Bay, Imbros, 1.45pm, June 22nd 1915 © IWM (Art.IWM ART 4360)

Roger, I'm so sorry that we won't see you any more.

Collection distractions #3: West African Troops in India During the Second World War

At least here in the UK, we tend to think about the British Empire in terms of the relationships between Britain and its dominions, and the British and the people of those countries. Of course that's very blinkered, but probably true nevertheless. Seeing the picture below suddenly reminded me that the people in those many and varied parts of the world had their own relationships too - they weren't only connected through the personage of whoever was on the throne in London at the time. Of course, when these West African and Indian soldiers met was an extraordinary situation - these people and their homelands having been drawn into a second gigantic war that started so far away but turned the world upside down. And I have no idea how they felt about Britain, the British, the Empire, or one another, but seeing these faces mixed together was like turning on a light for me.


WEST AFRICAN TROOPS IN INDIA DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR © IWM (IND 2864)

Within five years of this picture being taken India gained independence, which reached Ghana, the last of the West African territories, in 1965. Shortly after that the British Empire was pretty much history, but like the two world wars themselves its legacy is easily detected.

Collection distractions #2: Stereoscopic photos at the IWM

Well today's collection distraction* is a number of stereoscopic photographs, mainly from the First World War**. These are pairs of images shot with a single camera and intended to be viewed with something akin to binoculars to get a 3D effect, and we have a few hundred (I reckon), around 150 digitised. I was prompted by seeing one and the very next day seeing a tweet about the New York Public Library's brilliant Stereogranimator, which takes the images and merges them into either an animated GIF or an anaglyph - those pictures where you need an old-fashioned pair of 3D glasses with one red and one blue lens. You get to make them with a tool they offer, and you can either use one of NYPL's own (pairs of) images, or upload from Flickr. Nice app, even if the results can be variable.
So here is one of our images and its "stereogranimated" version:

4th Australian Brigade Pierrots at the 15th Australian Brigade Sports at Bois de Mai, Cardonnette, near Amiens, 8 June 1918.© IWM (Q 8180)

GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Quite a few of our images seem to have come from this sports-day, but that's not really why stereoscopic images were popular at the time. Here's an illustration of their military use:

German stereoscopic camera fitted with periscope for trench use on the Western Front. © IWM (Q 23938)

I don't know if such an apparatus was responsible for this view of the devastation at Verdun in 1916, (no animated GIF I'm afraid) but if you take a look at the zoomable version the scale of destruction is horrifying. The third dimension could surely have helped to tease out some understanding of this confusion.
Here's another battlefield use, albeit not more memorial than practical:


Battle of the Soissonnais. Prisoners taken by the 34th Division on the morning of 29th July 1918 when they captured Hill 158. © IWM (Q 8190)



GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Go and take a look at the whole lot.

* yeah of course I had to come up with some sort of tagline for this supposed series of posts. This is subject to change. But it does reflect the fact that I am distracted far too often from what I should probably be doing by something amazing in our collections.
** I'm going to try to be a good boy and use this phrase instead of "World War I" like the rest of the world. I'm on-message, me.

Collection distractions #1: IWM's First World War films

This week at Imperial War Museums we finally made available a newly digitised set of films dating to the First World War (and just before/after). These added hundreds to those we had already digitised, bringing the total to around 1200 hugely varied early films. In fact I think there may be more that listed at that link, because some have not been tagged with their period (feel free to remove the period filters). Digitisation was funded with the generous assistance of the EFG1914 project, part of the European Film Gateway. Take a look at what they have. You are welcome to reuse many of the films you can see on our website - just click the "share and reuse" link to grab the embedding code, where it's available. At the moment I'm afraid it's streaming Flash but I have that in my sights, together with higher quality renditions (those annoying watermarks should go in due course). Today I've picked a couple of aviation-related films that have caught my eye:

British Women's Air Force
Not as glamorous as it sounds...
Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutters taking off from HMS Argus
This one I can't embed, but go and take a look. It's quite cool seeing how they're brought up to the deck on lifts, and they seem to take off at almost walking speed.
Unfolding the wings of a Short bomber and various other shots of aircraft - flying boats etc. I don't know much about these early planes but I'm constantly surprised at how these things could even fly, at the speed of development that took us from the Wright brothers barely getting off the ground a few years earlier to these varied and formidable weird machines.
German fliers and planes on the Western Front, 1916-1918.
Talking of unexpected machines, when I first saw pictures of the Gotha bombers I was taken aback. Here's a whole variety-pack of German aircraft, including Gothas (which first brought the terror of war from the air to London), as well as dog-fights (some of it fake), aerial photography, and (in reel 2) observation balloons on fire, the Red Baron, and Hermann Goering. Ugh. Here's reel 1: