There are certain classes of state occasion where the instinct is to grasp for some deep, elemental Britishness. Jubilees, royal weddings, that sort of thing. Get Gary Barlow on the phone. Ask what Judi Dench is up to. See if we can make Paddington Bear breakdance. We’re going big.
The pageantry around the 80th anniversary of VE Day has gone the whole hog: the ringing of bells, the lighting of beacons, flypasts, processions, royal waving, sandwiches under endless miles of bunting. On Monday, Keir Starmer served tea and cake outside Downing Street, with all the relaxed bonhomie of a man who’s just lost a by-election. It’s that kind of an occasion.
And like all of these big national occasions, sometimes the twee-ometer maxes out. We were all invited by VE Day’s pageantmaster(!) to join a livestream starring 95-year-old Chelsea Pensioner and 2019 Britain’s Got Talent winner Colin Thackery, with whom the nation would “sing the great British Hymn ‘I Vow To Thee My Country’, standing side by side in gratitude, honouring the many sacrifices that secured our freedom”. I bear no ill will to dear Colin, but this is the party equivalent of a powdered egg sandwich.
Then there are the slightly more pizzazz-y celebrations. On VE Day itself, Zoe Ball will host a live concert from Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall, where the bill includes such luminaries as “I Believe In A Thing Called Love” spandex enthusiasts The Darkness and pub quiz perennials Toploader. “Our great grandparents, and grandparents, our families, our nation went through so much,” Ball says in a press release. And now, 80 years on, a grateful nation pays solemn tribute to the Greatest Generation with “Dancing in the Moonlight”.
But there are other, more elusive reasons I feel a bit odd about the VE Day hullabaloo. We’re celebrating 80 years since the downfall of fascism, while fascism looks pretty lively across Europe and America, and the end of war in Europe while war rages in Europe. It feels, at best, a bit presumptuous. At worst, it’ll tickle some people’s most jingoistic instincts. It’s hard to ignore the feeling that we’re cosplaying our recent past while ignoring, for a few days, where we are now.
So I had a big wobble about that and then, for good measure, I had a secondary wobble about being a boring killjoy.
But the fact is, lots of people felt weird about VE Day even on VE Day itself. We know the pictures of heaving masses of people celebrating in Trafalgar Square and Shaftesbury Avenue, and it’s easy now to flatten VE Day into the party of all parties. And yes, there was joy. Yet the Mass Observation (MO) project, which asked anonymised diarists to record their thoughts and feelings and those of the people around them, tells a very different story.
A knitted postbox topper in Tallington, Lincolnshire, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of VE Day (Photo: Joe Giddens/PA)Knowing by the first week of May that the war was coming to a close, the MO asked writers and investigators to record the public mood on 8 May 1945, both through their own thoughts and conversations overheard around them. They recorded bonfires and dancing, and the sounds of church bells and accordions in the streets. But they caught something more personal too.
“I had found Churchill’s speech singularly disappointing,” said one MO entry. “In fact, I thought the whole thing was a colossal anti-climax, but I suppose it was bound to be so to a certain extent.”
Another went home “with mixed feelings,” and the sense that “we were celebrating too soon”. Central London was jammed; elsewhere, things were quieter, more reflective.
In these diary entries, alongside the pockets of jubilation, you see private sadness, exhaustion, grief, bewilderment, and frustration. A woman hadn’t heard from her son, a prisoner of war in Singapore, for weeks. “I’m hoping he’s alive… You have to keep on hoping,” she wrote. “I couldn’t stay at home today; it’d choke me if I did. I had to get out and be with the crowds.”
Big cities saw spontaneous celebrations; elsewhere, things were more subdued. “Everywhere people are sitting on walls, or walking about with a curious aimlessness,” one noted. “It all seems very muddled and confused for a day of celebration.” One diarist in Yorkshire knew how to have a good time, at least: they cracked open the tinned chicken and sausages they had put aside for the day of peace five years previously.
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So if this commemoration leaves you a bit cold and uncertain, then you are, in a weird way, getting closer to what the actual experience of VE Day was for many who were there.
We talk about the war so much that we’ve forgotten how to think about it. We think of the end of the war as a great national exultation, and it was; but it was also a moment when millions of people looked back at what they had lost, and ahead to an uncertain future in a shattered and bankrupt country.
And that’s important, I think; not blandly recalling a cheering mass, but remembering the experiences of normal people whose whole lives were fractured by the war. It’s worth us now asking the same sorts of questions they did then: what do we want now? And how do we make the sacrifices that were made worth it? That generation built a new Britain.
Forget the cakes and tea and Spitfires and Vera Lynn: that spirit is the bequest of the wartime generation. One diarist wrote on VE Day that though they were relieved, the memory of a lost loved one would “damp my total enjoyment of anything for a long, long time”.
“This, though,” they went on, “is really no time for celebration but for dedication of our lives to work for those things we have fought for and for which so many have died. How soon will they forget? Shall it be in vain, again?”
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