BackStory Episode 11
Marguerite’s Grandfather Frost
Marguerite is back home in Hanover. Here is more detail about some family members, as well as the strange coincidence of my discovering, as I was writing this story during the Covid pandemic, that one such family member had written a novel in the 1930s about a virus-caused pandemic! In England, for Maude, and the Hall family, the Battle of Britain has begun. Read more about censorship, radar, the Home Guard and Operation Sealion. See also photos in Instagram: Fondlyyoursmarguerite (you can click on the Instagram icon at the end of the menu list above).
Episode 11 begins with Marguerite, back home in Hanover New Hampshire, writing in her diary about her Grandfather Frost, a self-professed ‘horse and buggy baby doctor’ who at the end of his working life taught Medicine at Dartmouth College.
Marguerite also writes of her first step-father, Alexander Laing, married to her mother Isabel in 1930 for a few short years. He had been a student at Dartmouth College in Hanover at the same time that Marguerite’s father Tom was there, leaving in 1925 to pursue writing and returning in 1929 to complete his degrees. When he won the Guggenheim Fellowship award and decided to use the money to sail around the world for a year, I wondered if this might have been the catalyst for his and Isabel’s divorce, which happened around that time.
Alex Laing wrote ‘The Motives of Nicholas Hertz: Being the Weird Tale of the Ironville Virus’, published in 1936. I couldn’t help noticing the coincidence of learning about this book the same year (2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic) that I was working on this story. Another novel, “Cadaver of Gideon Wyck”, became a best-seller just before Alex Laing won the Guggenheim prize.
In Maude’s letter to Marguerite, I have an opportunity to describe one of the few details my family has about my dad’s dad, that he was an electrical engineer and therefore had been exempt from conscription.
I was interested to discover that the Postal Censorship Department for Britain had been headquartered in the Littlewoods football pools building in Liverpool. Many of the later letters (still stored in their postmarked envelopes) between Marguerite and Bill (as he was later called) carried Censorship stickers, meaning they had been opened and read by censors. Knowing that Marguerite had been fascinated by codes, I researched this and discovered the many ways messages had been passed between countries in innocent-appearing letters.
The mail was of vital importance for morale during the war, for both military personnel as well as families on the homefront. The boxes of letters which Marguerite saved and which I have ‘mined’ for this story show that she wrote to her grandparents every day (I have chosen many of these letters for Marguerite’s correspondence to Maude). Later she wrote to Bill twice a day or more, as he did to her.
I learned that in 1941, a method was devised to help the enormous volumes of mail take up less space in transport – space needed for other vital supplies. This was accomplished by having mail service to and from the Armed Forces overseas microfilmed for transporting, and then printed out for the recipient. In England, this was the Airgraph Service, started by the British Postal Service with the Kodak photography company. In the U.S. it was called V-Mail (Victory Mail). Marguerite and Bill’s letters, however, appear to be on the original paper…very thin ‘onion-skin’ for both letter paper and envelope.
One more note about the enormous Littlewoods building where the Censorship department was– it also housed a factory for making barrage balloons. Elephantine (in size and shape) these huge balloons were tethered to the ground by cables which held them aloft in the sky above targets for low-level strafing or bombing by aircraft.
Maude writes of the Royal Observer Corps, using binoculars to scan the skies for incoming aircraft. She and most other civilians would not have known it, but radar was also being used. Radar was very new technology, only tested against aircraft for the first time in England in 1935. Britain’s success in the Battle of Britain was due in large part to their use of radar. At this time, it wasn’t always accurate, and its effectiveness depended on skill and judgment of the operators who interpreted the signals. Later, Germany developed its own version, as did other countries as well.
In July 1940, just before this letter from Maude which she wrote 2 days after “The Hardest Day”, the Luftwaffe had began attacking convoys of ships in the English Channel and soon after, RAF airfields in the southeast of England. This was the start of the Battle of Britain. A planned invasion of Britain on all sides by sea by Germany (Operation Sealion (Unternehmen Seelöwe) - was supposed to have taken place in September 1940. But first Germany needed air supremacy -- which fortunately they never gained. Had the Luftwaffe defeated the RAF in the Battle of Britain, Operation Sealion could have completed Hitler’s domination of western Europe.
The Battle of Britain: July 10 to Oct 31, 1940. The nightly ‘Blitzkrieg’ overlapped this time period; it began over London on Sept 7 1940, ending May 11 1941. Britain wouldn’t know it, but aerial bombing of their country would end then, as Germany turned its attention at that time to Russia.
But during this time, in mid 1940, the fear of invasion was very real and the Home Guard, as described by Maude, was important, especially for morale. Made up of volunteers, we can be sure that all the male members of communities ‘left at home’ and not conscripted would have included Will Hall and his dad and grandad (as well as the fictional Maude’s grandad).
The HomeGuard was set up in May 1940 as Britain’s ‘last line of defence’ in case of German invasion. At first a rag-tag militia, with scarce and often make-do uniforms and weaponry, it evolved into a well-equipped and well-trained army of 1.7 million men. They were readied for invasion; bomb disposal; manning anti-aircraft and coastal artillery. Increasingly, the training proved useful for younger men before their call up to the Army.
Maude ends her letter with a brief description of Londoners using the Underground train tunnels as bomb shelters. Soon Liverpool will receive its own Blitz from the Luftwaffe. Listen next month to Episode 12 of Fondly yours…