BackStory Episode 6
Wartime poster
In Episode 6 of Fondly yours…, it is August 1939, a few weeks before war is declared between England and Germany. Maude and her sister Eula have travelled by train from Liverpool to London to spend a few days there with their mother.
As has been happening all around the United Kingdom for more than a year, London has been preparing for an inevitable war. The belief is that Britain will be bombarded from the air. Britain’s Royal Air Force and Germany’s Luftwaffe have both been preparing their air forces for the war that will be declared between the two countries on September 3, 1939.
During their visit to London, Maude and Eula witness two morale-boosting events meant to fill the worried population with confidence in their country’s ability to protect them. The first is the fly-by of hundreds of the RAF’s planes, including ‘Fairey’ biplanes, valiant little warriors from the First World War. Although considered obsolete in 1939, one of these little planes, taking off from a prototype aircraft carrier, will score the first aerial victory of the war for an RAF aircraft, and the Faireys will have many further successes. Maude wishes that Will and Ronnie could see the planes. (Perhaps the boys did, and this might have inspired Will to join the RAF a few years later, as the war continued on much longer than anyone could have imagined.)
Keeping up public morale was a critical aspect of galvanizing the populace to take part in many activities that would be difficult but crucial to winning the war, not to mention keeping people safe. The people of Britain had already been educated about the need for nightly Blackouts; obeying Air Raid Precautions, and the at-a-moment’s-notice evacuation of thousands of children to the countryside. In addition, being an island country which imports the majority of its food and many other essential products, other measures would soon be a part of daily life including the rationing of food, fuel, and clothing.
During the war, it was the job of ‘Home Intelligence’, a unit of the government’s Ministry of Information, that was responsible for both monitoring and boosting the morale of the people.
Information about the public’s morale was gathered (usually in quite clandestine, eavesdropping ways) and it gave insight on popular attitudes, including feelings of “purpose and participation in the work of the country as well as grumbles and grievances.[1]”
Maude also writes of seeing the sights of London, including the priceless artifacts of the British Museum and art in the Portrait Gallery. Maude knows that her mother, whom she believes to be a foreign correspondent for a London newspaper, will be heading off soon to Paris, to the Louvre museum. What Maude does not know is that on August 25, art treasures in the Louvre are to be carefully packed up and sent to secret locations around France for safe-keeping for the duration of the war. In future letters from Maude, we will get subtle inferences of other secret work that Maeve Barrett is doing for both Britain and France.
Read a short story about the safe evacuation of La Victoire from the Louvre museum in the ‘Ekphrasis’ tab of my website.
[1] Jeremy A. Crang, Oxford University Press, Academic Insights for the Thinking World