We've all seen the pictures and read the stories in the history books
about the Kings and Queens with their power and privilege
and silks and furs.
But in this series, I want to discover the other side of history.
I'm already quite nervous.
The side we don't often hear about -
how ordinary British people lived their lives.
From the Tudors...
You'll see why it did attract my attention.
Disgusting!
...to the Victorians...
Throw a stone in Victorian London, you will hit a drunken cab man.
There's that many of them. We are not amused.
From the Georgians...
You take a saw. Oh, my God.
It's horrible, just seeing you do that.
...to the people who really fought the Second World War.
James could hear the ping of bullets and the clatter of shrapnel.
One thing's for sure, these people knew the meaning of the word tough.
I'll be finding the truth about their daily lives.
What they ate...
How long would that have lasted? Up to three years.
Ugh! ..how they made a living...
There's even value in a rat, when it's dead.
...and those vital necessities of life.
What did you do if you wanted a pee? Go in the bucket.
The bucket? This is British history, from the bottom up.
You've got to admit, I am terrifying.
The Nazis were the most terrifying enemies
in one of the nastiest wars in history.
But taking them on wasn't just down to men like him.
Britain fought the Second World War with a bunch of ordinary
office workers, grocers, bakers, and housewives.
We know the result, but what was it really like
for ordinary Britons caught up in it all?
Most of the people who still remember the Second World War
were only children at the time.
But even though they were just kids, a lot of them
still have vivid memories of having to seek shelter
because their country was under brutal attack.
AIR-RAID SIREN
In 1940, eight-year-old Babs Clark and her family found themselves
in the thick of it all, in London's East End.
So, what did Babe's mum do?
She grabbed the kids and headed for the countryside.
Bye- bye.
Thousands of parents had the same idea.
Nearly a million schoolchildren were packed off to the country.
Babs and her mum and sister Jean ended up in Torquay.
It was amazing.
They had a small cottage on a farm...
...and went to a local school.
Best of all, they could play on the beach every day,
safe from the bombs.
Or so they thought.
Babs, now in her eighties,
still remembers one particular incident like it was yesterday.
There was a couple of planes coming in from the sea,
and I was saying to my sister,
"I wonder what they are, jean?"
And it was two Messerschmitts,
and they machine-gunned the beach we were on.
Course, we came home full of it, telling my mum,
and I won't say the actual words my mum said,
but in other words it was, "So and so that for a game of soldiers -
"we're going back to London. I'd rather have the bombs
"coming down than the bloody Germans machine-gunning my kids!"
Babs and her mum and sister hot-footed it
back to the family home in Bethnal Green.
Which was yours? This one.
So, when you got back to London, what was your house like?
It was all right, apart from the fact we had to have a tarpaulin
over the roof.
Cos the roof had got blown off during the Blitz.
And you still lived there? Oh, yeah, yeah, course you did.
The family's unscheduled break in Torquay may well have
saved their lives.
And after Hitler had had his way with the East End,
it was even more fun than the beach.
If, well, a little dangerous.
More of a problem for growing kids was food.
The Government was keen to make sure nothing got wasted.
To make sure Britain didn't run out,
the amount of food everybody could eat was rationed.
And every time you wanted to buy something,
you got a stamp in this, your ration book.
For Babs' mum, it was a right old drag...
"Stuff this for a game of soldiers!"
...and provided for only a limited menu.
This is what Babs would have been allowed in her rations.
A couple of pints of milk, some sugar, little bit of cheese,
some jam, some marge, some lard.
One egg and some egg powder.
This much meat and a few sweets.
It would make a lovely meal, wouldn't it?
But it had to last Babs a whole week.
The Government was full of useful advice on how to make
everything go further.
But there was one thing that wasn't in short supply for Babs
and her family - greens.
We... Hate... Spinach!
We had our allotment and we grew a lot of veg,
and our allotment was in there.
My dad used to be quite proud of that allotment,
what things he grew.
Yeah.
What did your mum make you?
Stew, we used to have a lot of stews.
After tea, as night fell, Babs and her mum and sister would
head down to the newly built Bethnal Green Tube station.
East-Enders depended on the underground as the best place
to hide from Hitler's bombs.
My mum got a bunk down here for us.
A bunk?
Yeah, it was a three-tier bunk. Bottom, middle and top.
There was loads of space
because the rails hadn't yet been laid in the new station.
But it's surprising the bunks didn't collapse,
they'd been assembled by Boy Scouts from a flat-pack.
How far down that tunnel did you used to sleep?
I wouldn't like to say how many yards,
but it was a good 10, 15 minute walk. Really?
It was quite a way down.
And you didn't feel claustrophobic?
No, no. I mean, you had the bunks either side and the walkway
in the middle, and I think it was because we knew so many people,
my mum would stop and talk to them and you got to your bunk in the end.
What did you do if you wanted a pee?
Go in the bucket. The bucket?
Yeah, they had buckets, every so far along, with a curtain round it.
Very smelly.
Apart from the smell, it all sounds rather jolly.
It was like an underground town.
With a library, doctor's surgery...
Say "ah".
...and a hall for weddings or parties.
Every time a soldier came home, they had a jolly shindig.
Did you feel safe here?
Yeah. But there again, you see, I had my mum and my sister,
so I felt safe cos I was with them.
I wonder if you left anything down there? Bit of chewing gum.
I stuck it on one of the walls.
Could still be there, couldn't it? I reckon it still is there, yeah.
But the fun was about to come to a juddering halt,
as, once again, the realities of war hit home.
On 3rd March 1943, an incident took place at Bethnal Green,
which, in moments, became a major tragedy.
Coming up... Disaster in the Underground,
and Babs' family are caught up in the panic and turmoil...
There were so many people down the stairs,
they were all falling on top 'em.
...and the young office boy
who left his fiancee and dad for the front line.
In London's East End, during the Second World War,
people like eight-year-old Babs Clark
depended on the London Underground for their survival.
But one evening in 1943,
something truly tragic happened at Bethnal Green Tube.
It was a rainy night, the air-raid siren went off at 8:17,
people started coming down into the Tube, as they always did.
But at that moment, anti-aircraft guns began to start
firing in Victoria Park, just over the road there.
So more and more people came down.
And it was very dark, they'd only got one light
because of the blackout.
And there weren't handrails here then, like there are now.
And all the steps were really slippy.
And a woman tripped over with her son, and some old chap
fell on top of them and more and more people kept pressing down
until they were right up to the ceiling, crushing each other.
Although Babs survived, many didn't.
A memorial next to Bethnal Green Tube station,
erected surprisingly recently,
in 2017, marks the worst British civilian disaster in World War ll.
173 people were crushed to death.
What do you remember about that night?
I know I got pushed and I fell over something, and somebody fell on me.
There were so many people down the stairs, they were all
falling on top of them, and I just heard my sister saying,
"Oh, don't pull me out yet, I've got my little sister here."
And with that, whoever it was pulled the pair of us out.
Didn't know what had happened to my mum.
And my sister was going round asking
if people had seen anything of our mum, which they hadn't, and then
an air-raid warden said to her,
"Go in that room, she might be in there."
jean went in there, and it was all dead bodies
she had to look at to see if our mum was there.
Luckily, Babs' mum had survived.
And the next day, life went on as usual.
She still got us up the next morning, for me to go to school.
And the headmaster was in assembly, and he said, "There's been
"a bad accident at Bethnal Green Tube station."
And he said, "Any of you children that were in it, you can
"go home for the day."
Well, half the school come home with us! They all marched out!
Did you ever use that shelter again or was it closed down?
Oh, no, we used it the following night.
Babs and her family just kept calm and carried on.
The German bombing campaign deliberately set up to
undermine our morale,
but, talking to Babs, I get a real sense of the conviction
and determination that was shared by almost everyone.
And I reckon it was that, as much as anything, that got us through.
Many, though, faced a different kind of danger.
Hundreds of thousands of ordinary young men were learning
how to fight and to kill.
James Palmer was one of them.
James Palmer lived in Hulme, Manchester with his dad.
He was very larky, very jokey as a lad.
"Oh, by 'eck, do you think they're impressed?!
"I should flipping well hope so! Very good, what's next?"
By 1939, he was working as an office boy in a garage.
He spent a lot of time with his girlfriend Muriel.
And he was just about to turn 21.
James's birthday was on July 1st.
But it was a slightly glum affair.
War was on the horizon and young men between the ages of 20
and 22 were being recruited by the Government to boost Army numbers.
James must have opened his birthday cards with mixed feelings.
Especially as one of the cards wasn't a card at all.
It was his call-up notice.
Within two weeks, James was being seen off at the station
by his girlfriend and his dad.
James's parting from his father was emotional for both men.
His dad had served in the First War
and had seen the horrors of the battlefield first-hand.
And when his wife had died, he'd devoted himself to looking after
his son - and now he was going to have to let him go.
He must have been worried sick.
He knew all about war.
James wrote in his diary on the day he left...
Muriel was in tears, clinging to my arm.
Dad turned away as she kissed me.
A lump in my throat prevented me from saying much.
I was on my way to God knows where or what.
Where James was actually headed was Warminster,
to join the 13th Tank Regiment.
On his first day, James was presented with loads of stuff.
I'm meeting Alex Jones, a war veteran and Army historian,
to find out more.
So he would suddenly have been responsible for all this?
Absolutely. As soon as he arrived, he would have been given
a kit bag in the QM Stores.
And, of course, if the Army gives someone kit and equipment,
you know there's going to be inspections coming up.
He'd have had to have bulled his boots, he would have had to
have pressed his kit, he would have had to have blancoed
the webbing as well, so given it this kind of nice green protective
layer, which all the soldiers thought was utterly pointless.
"Don't say a word, absolute silence."
So, this is what his set-up would have been like.
He's not real, by the way. Just in case you were wondering.
He'd have had a cupboard like this, with all his stuff in it,
and his uniforms laid out.
And he'd have had a regulation blanket,
everything shipshape, all out there for the world to see.
But amidst all this boysy jollity, James met the corporal in charge.
Jock - a regular soldier.
On the first night, the lights go out, darkness,
you're supposed to go to sleep.
But some of the recruits keep on talking, and Jock tells them
to shut up. But they don't - in fact, they're talking even louder.
And Jock goes...
IN SCOTTISH ACCENT: "When I tell you to do something, you do it!"
And it goes completely silent.
And then one of the recruits says, "Get stuffed!"
And then all hell breaks loose - Jock grabs him
and punches him straight in the face, and knocks him out cold.
Welcome to the war, James.
But it wasn't only this mouthy private
who got a rude shock from Army life.
James and the new soldiers like him
were complete fishes out of water, weren't they?
They really were, cos they didn't have any prior military
training, maybe the only experience they had were the stories maybe
from their fathers. We know james's father
was a veteran of the Somme, for example.
Yeah. What would his training have been?
Well, James, when he first turned up, would have undertaken
8 weeks of basic military training.
It also would have consisted of anti-gas training.
The Army was very concerned about the gas threats.
Behind you, there is a pretty fearsome-looking instrument.
Presumably he would have been trained on that?
Yes, this is the Vickers machinegun,
which would have been the standard armament in a lot
of British light tanks at the start of the war.
James recounts when he first gets his chance to shoot on a
live range, he's so excited he just fires off all the rounds at once.
He's going, "Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam," forever and ever?
Well, no, because all he has, given the cuts to training allowances,
is 20 rounds to practise with.
Which, at about 500 rounds a minute,
meant that James would be out of ammo
in, ooh, about two seconds.
"Oh."
Perhaps because of his enthusiasm,
James was assigned to be a gunner on a tank.
Then in late May 1940, the call finally came.
James was going to fight in France.
He was given 48 hours leave and then, he was off.
He spent his last day in Britain with his girlfriend, Muriel,
and his father, before heading across the Channel.
When he landed, the German army was only a few miles away,
and his tank troop soon found itself under attack.
As we topped the rise, anti-tank guns hit us from the right flank.
Four of our tanks were ablaze before we had gone ten yards.
We were sitting ducks.
It was sheer murder.
I saw some men running amongst the trees,
with their clothes burning like torches.
Men were dragging their pals through the mud,
away from the burning tanks,
and the smell of burning flesh was catching my throat.
James crouched, and he could hear the ping of bullets,
and the clatter of shrapnel.
But his tank driver pressed on and on, through the hailstorm of fire,
and eventually he reached the other side of the valley.
Their first action had been a disaster, though.
Only 4 of the 25 lads in james's troop were still alive.
Soon, his regiment was desperately retracing the path
back to the coast as they Army retreated via Dunkirk.
They were off back to Blighty almost as soon as they'd left.
James returned to Manchester and proposed to Muriel.
She said yes.
But now James had a war to win.
He'd be in some of its most crucial battles before life would
return to anything like normal,
and he and his new fiance, Muriel, could finally tie the knot.
Coming up... The truck-driving grocer's daughter
who rubbed shoulders with royalty.
Little did she know, though,
what use her driving skills would be, once the war started.
And life under German occupiers in the Channel Islands.
They had fixed bayonets and they went through the toy basket,
under the bed - wicker toy basket -
and it went right through my panda bear's stomach.
For many ordinary Brits, taking on Hitler's fearsome war machine
demanded a brazen response.
And women especially suddenly found themselves doing
all sorts of things they'd never imagined doing.
Women like Eileen Heron.
In 1939, Eileen was 23, but she still lived at home
because she worked for her family's grocery business in Folkestone,
where she served behind the counter and drove the delivery van.
Eileen was a bit of a pioneer.
When she was only 20, she'd been among the first women to take
the newly introduced driving test.
Little did she know, though,
what use her driving skills would be, once the war started.
Just three months into it, 43,000 women volunteered for
the Auxiliary Territorial Service, or ATS - the women's infantry.
And Eileen decided to do her bit, and join them.
The Army welcomed her with an armful of jabs...
"Just a scratch! Agh!"
"from a needle already blunted by the other recruits.
She shared a freezing Nissen hut with around 20 other women,
but at least they could help each other take their medicine...
...before settling down on a lumpy mattress.
"Oh, night-night."
I wonder if Eileen regretted her decision
as she sat in her freezing-cold barracks.
There was 3 feet of snow on the ground
and, OK, the recruits were given a bucket of coal a day, but one bucket
was hardly going to make any impact at all in a tin building.
At the end of the first week, she trudged all the way to the nearest
town for a hot bath at the swimming pool and a nice cup of cocoa.
But getting used to un-sumptuous living conditions was the easy bit.
Eileen was in the Army now,
and there was a whole new world of pain to embrace.
For the new recruits, training was intense and relentless.
From the shrill sound of the bugle at 6am...
The whole day was a long list of drills...
...physical exercises, and skills training.
And all for a measly 11 shillings a week -
two-thirds of what a man of the same rank would have got.
But Eileen was special, she was a high-value recruit
because she had something the Army needed -
she could drive a truck.
So-called Tilly trucks were used as anything from ambulances
to carriers of vital military equipment.
And I'm having a go on one.
The clutch and the accelerator and the braking is great,
but the steering - phwoar.
Oh! It leaves lot to be desired compared with today's cars.
Every time I go round a corner, I feel it in my biceps.
But these were brilliant vehicles, they were so adaptable,
real dogsbodies vehicles.
But the downside was that they were very bumpy and uncomfortable.
I'm having a great time, but I'm only doing it for one morning.
Eileen had to do it month after month.
Poor old Eileen, she must have been knackered.
In fact, she called it her wretched Tilley.
That was a really good drive. It was nice and simple, you know, there's
only sort of four or five little things to push and pull on it.
But the vis is not very good at all,
it must have been very difficult at night.
Absolutely, and especially because of the blackouts.
Headlights would have been just a glimmer of light
coming from that, and obviously the threat of invasion
was at its height, so all of the signposts have all been taken down.
So you'd have to rely on map reading and knowing where they were going.
Juliette Pattinson is an historian of the ATS.
She knows all about everyday life for women like Eileen.
Well, they're in barracks,
so they're going to be having mass catering,
hearty, nutritious meals that could be feeding hundreds of people.
They actually got better rations than the ordinary civilian,
but... So I think she would have been well fed.
And the rest of the time when she wasn't working?
She worked long hours, but she would always have time off,
and they would go to the cinema, there would always be
dances on a Saturday, women were very much in demand at the
local Army barracks, so I think they played hard and worked hard.
There's lots of nice accounts, where women talk about wearing
a bit of lipstick, wearing non-regulation underwear, cos
nobody's going to notice they're not wearing their khaki pants.
Um, so there are opportunities for these women to individualise
the muddy green/grey dull uniform.
There was a slogan that beauty is a duty too.
So you have these manufacturers,
whether it's of toothpaste or breakfast cereal or shampoo,
and it would be very much, you know, the woman in the ATS, like Eileen,
who would be applying a particular kind of face cream, for example.
There was this expectation that women would pay attention
to their appearance,
because actually it would have a knock-on effect on male morale.
I bet if I said to you beauty is a duty too now,
you'd smack me in the nose!
I'm not going to answer that question!
Eileen might not have enjoyed driving her Tilly very much,
but she was obviously pretty good at it because soon, she was made a
driving instructor and was promoted to the rank of Lance Corporal.
This meant she now had 25 trainees under her,
and a lot more responsibility.
Under Eileen, hundreds of women learned to drive
and maintain motorbikes, ambulances and trucks,
helping the war effort to smash the Nazis.
But she was about to experience something even more exciting.
PHONE RINGS
One day, Eileen was ordered to go to her commandant's office,
and he told her a secret.
Apparently, a new subaltern, which was the equivalent of a second
lieutenant, was going to be working alongside her and her friends.
But this was no ordinary subaltern.
Her name was Princess Elizabeth.
Eileen and Princess Elizabeth were
soon mending the Tilly trucks together.
By day, Subaltern Elizabeth mucked in with the other girls,
but at night she turned back into a princess
and went to sleep in her castle.
OWL HOOTS
Eileen wrote at the time that the Princess was "quite striking.
"Pretty with lovely eyes and a charming smile."
But more celebrities were about to appear.
One day, King George VI and his wife turn up to have a
look at exactly what it is their daughter, Princess Elizabeth,
is doing, and it's, it's all pomp and circumstance.
Until suddenly, King George leans under the bonnet,
starts fiddling away with the engine, Lord knows what he's doing.
"One wonders what this bit does?"
Elizabeth's panicking, everyone else is laughing, then Elizabeth
gets HER hands out and says, "Look, Dad, they're all oily."
Everyone seems to have seen the funny side.
Eileen later wrote that,
"The Queen was very interested to see who these girls were,
"consorting with her elder daughter.
"And the King was absolutely charming."
The visit was filmed at length
and became a very effective piece of wartime propaganda.
For most ordinary people at that time, the King and Queen had become
powerful symbols of the kind of country that they were fighting for.
So, when their daughter, Princess Elizabeth was seen amongst them,
mucking in, getting her hands dirty,
it must've sent a really powerful message.
When the Nazis finally threw in the towel,
Victory in Europe was celebrated with a party to end all parties.
Eileen and the other women of the ATS let rip outside
Buckingham Palace.
And even Princess Elizabeth snuck out incognito
to gate-crash the party.
Four years before those joyful celebrations,
it had only been that bit of muddy water
we call the English Channel that held the Nazi foe at bay.
But some rather unlucky Brits didn't even have that.
It's easy to forget that over 60,000 British people lived under
Nazi control here in the Channel Islands...
"from June 1940 all the way through to 1945.
The German invaders were excited to have claimed a little
piece of Britain. I suppose that, for them,
compared to fighting, say, on the Russian front...
# Hello, sunshine, hello, sky... #
...it was almost a holiday.
But not so for the locals.
"Just keep walking."
There may not have been any fighting,
but the very feeling of being
British, and any connection with Britain was under attack.
Can you imagine what life would have
been like here during the German occupation?
Wouldn't have been a lot of happy, smiling faces, I can tell you that.
One ordinary Briton, Hubert Lanyon,
was the only baker on the small island of Sark, just off Guernsey.
He lived there with his wife and four kids,
including five-year-old Maisie.
I just remembered being told, oh, the Germans are coming,
the Germans are coming, and then when they arrived, they marched,
and they used to sing... beautiful songs, and it just echoed
all around the island. It was really lovely to hear them singing.
And of course, we were a bit apprehensive,
but once we got to know them, the ordinary soldier was quite friendly.
But, for Hubert, the new regime changed everything overnight.
He even had to share his baker's oven with the Germans.
They had half the week and he had half the week and, as war
went on, the provisions came from France. The flour was terrible
quality, it was full of bits of wood...
"stones, and rat droppings.
To make things worse, the departing British Army had taken
a lot of the Channel Islands' food supplies with it.
And there wasn't much left.
We could manage to grow vegetables which was, you know, a saving grace.
We didn't have meat, we didn't have much meat, just rabbit.
But, er, whatever animal was killed had to be shared
with the Germans, the Germans had their proportion,
and there was so much left for the islanders. Yeah.
So the local people started to think outside the box,
and go in search of new culinary experiences.
II
The beach was awash with seaweed, which they harvested
and boiled up to make jelly.
It wasn't too bad, if it was flavoured with blackberries
or frankly anything they could lay their hands on.
As time went by, the food shortages got worse and worse.
The fishermen were only allowed to go about a mile out to sea
because the Germans were frightened that they would run away.
Basic commodities like soap began to disappear off the shelves.
What little there was was reserved for newborn babies.
Moss replaced cotton wool in the hospitals.
Some people said they couldn't recognise their friends
and colleagues in the street cos they'd grown so thin.
Even the Germans were hungry.
When it came towards the end of the war,
they shot cats, they ate cats. The Germans?
Yes, we saw them go up the lane with our cat strung on their belt.
You're kidding. Our cat was on his belt, they'd...they'd shot it.
That must have been awful for a little girl to see that. It was terrible.
Maisie's father Hubert decided to make a stand.
In June 1942, the Germans had confiscated
the radios on the island and, now people couldn't even get the news.
So Hubert joined a secret organisation,
defiantly named GUNS -
the Guernsey
Underground
News Service.
Because it was all so secret, no-one knew very much about it.
But...
This building is now the Priaulx Library,
and it's here that I reckon I am going to find the evidence
I need about what Maisie's dad was doing in the war.
Historian Gilly Carr has found some of the news sheets that the
resistance group published.
Oh, look, there's V for Victory.
GUNS and V for Victory.
These are original copies, and as you can see, they're typed out
on tomato packing paper, which is really thin.
And if you were caught with one of these, you would have been arrested?
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Yes.
So what was it that Maisie's dad actually did on this newspaper?
He was the distributor of GUNS in Sark.
He had a little library at the back of the bakery, and
so he would take a newsletter and put it inside a book in the library
so people would come along and browse in the library and, you know.
But apparently there were even German soldiers who knew about it,
but stayed silent cos they also wanted to have the real news.
But not everyone could be trusted to keep a secret.
Some islanders were prepared to trade information for food,
even at the risk of having their houses daubed with the swastika.
One day, acting on a tip-off, the Germans came to the Lanyons'
house, searching for Hubert and his newsletters.
They had fixed bayonets and they went through the toy basket
under the bed - wicker toy basket -
and it went right through my panda bear's stomach.
That's outrageous!
THEY CHUCKLE
But it wasn't long before they found her dad.
They beat him up and knocked teeth out and, and he was...he was
unconscious for a while, and then they hauled him off, hands behind
his back and holding his hair and pulling...and he went past our door
with all the family standing on the doorstep, and he just looked at us
and I suppose he thought, "When will I ever see them again?"
Can you remember what YOU were thinking?
Well, I just thought they were being cruel to my daddy.
Was your mum able to explain to you what was going on?
She didn't know where he was for a month.
We thought he'd been taken to concentration camp and perhaps shot.
Then the family discovered Hubert was alive
and in prison on the island.
Maisie's mum pleaded for his release,
saying that the islanders were desperate for him to bake bread.
After four months in prison, he was released.
But five others involved in the free paper were deported to Germany,
where two of them died in prison.
I consider my father was lucky to come home to us. Sure.
And I do still feel very sorry for the people whose lives were lost.
Of course, there's no doubt that Hubert was a very brave man,
But it does make me wonder
what I would have done in a similar situation.
Would I have resisted, knowing that it could put my family
and my neighbours in jeopardy?
Or would I just have gone about my business
and kept my head down til the end of the war?
I really don't know.
Coming up... Over-sexed, overpaid, and over here.
Britain is invaded by swaggering American soldiers.
Can one young Englishwoman find lasting love in wartime?
In the Second World War, victory against the Nazis
depended on an event that happened far away, on the other side
of the world, on the peaceful Pacific islands of Hawaii.
In December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,
and forced the United States into the war.
BUGLE PLAYS
The cavalry had arrived.
And very quickly, our little island was swarming with Americans.
One and a half million of them were either stationed here or
stopped off here on their way to Germany.
This development had a decisive impact on the course of the war
and meant a heck of a lot to the Brits who worked with them, fought
with them or, as was often the case, fell in love with the American Gls.
Joy Beebe would be one of them.
But back in 1941, before the Gls arrived, she was just 16,
and a love affair was the last thing on her mind.
Joy soon became her family's only wage earner
and had to support her mother and two younger brothers.
She'd catch the train before half seven each day, when it was cheaper.
But instead of leaves or snow on the line,
there was the threat of blown-up bridges or unexploded shells.
She had a boring job at the Inland Revenue in the city,
typing letters to people who hadn't paid their tax.
Joy lived for her daily break.
CUCKOO
Best time of day was the lunch hour.
And I could walk in the gardens of the Tower of London.
At the end of each day, she'd catch the train home before night fell
and the bombing started once again.
Supper could be an omelette, made from powdered egg, or if there was
nothing else available, there was the sinister threat of whale meat.
In the evenings, they'd listen to jazz
or popular songs on the record player...
...or tune in to Winston Churchill, for a bit of courage.
We will mete out to the Germans more than the measure
they have meted out to us.
APPLAUSE
At weekends, Joy and her friends glammed up and hit the dance hall -
the Embassy Ballroom in Bexley.
Newly reopened after the worst of the Blitz.
It was really a nice place. It was a big dance hall.
And they had a nice band.
It was also a popular haunt for American Gls.
Of course, that drew a lot of girls that
wanted to come here and dance with the soldiers.
But these American boys were supposed to be
on their best behaviour. Just look at this.
This is the little book they all had to read -
Instructions For American Servicemen In Britain, 1942.
Issued by the US War Department.
"The purpose of this guide is to start getting you acquainted
"with the British, their country, and their ways."
It goes on to give lots of handy advice.
"The British are often more reserved in conduct than we.
"So, if Britons sit in trains or buses without striking up
"conversation with you, it doesn't mean
"they are being haughty and unfriendly.
"Probably they are paying more attention to you than you think.
"But they don't speak to you
"because they don't want to appear intrusive or rude."
And there's another one here, I really like this.
"Keep out of arguments.
"You can rub a Britisher the wrong way by telling him,
" 'we came over and won the last one.' "
I don't think they'd like that.
And most importantly,
"Don't be a show-off.
"The British 'Tommy' is apt to be specially
"touchy about the difference between his wages and yours.
"Keep this in mind."
Actually the British Tommy was MOST likely to be worried about
the thought of the GI running off with his wife or the girl next door.
And to be quite honest, he was probably right to be.
As one British comedian famously put it, the Yanks were "oversexed,
"overpaid and over here".
But the GI that Joy met in September 1944 wasn't like that at all.
How did you first meet Carl?
He was brought to the Embassy ballroom
by the other guys in the unit.
They said, "You should come and meet this girl."
His name was Carl Beebe.
He was not so laughing and joking
and all that kind of thing, like the others were.
You know, he didn't tell me that the streets of New York
were paved with gold.
Carl was stationed here, at the stately home, Hall Place,
two miles from Joy's house.
He worked for US Army Intelligence,
intercepting encoded messages from Nazi High Command.
Soon Carl asked Joy out, and they hit it off.
They'd go for walks in the park near where she lived.
He was always bringing me flowers or something.
For Easter, he picked a whole bunch of daffodils.
After 3 months of courting, Carl proposed.
But arranging a wedding in wartime required, let's say, special skills.
How did you get a dress this nice in the middle of the war?
You'd have to ask my brother.
How he got it through some friends of his or people he knows,
I don't know.
So, you're saying it was off the black market, really, aren't you?
I believe that it was the black market, yes.
Did you get married in a church? Yes, I did.
A very much damaged church.
The roof was out, and the rain and the snow was coming through.
They'd had little pots on the floor to catch the water
and you could hear the water dinging into the pots.
The Second World War had bought Joy and Carl together,
and they eventually made the journey to America together
with their young son.
The war created huge rifts between countries,
which took decades to heal,
so it's nice to hear some stories of romance coming out of all
that chaos. For joy, at least, and for others like her,
the war did have a silver lining.
The Second World War was the people's war,
and for many Britons,
its triumphant end remains one of our country's finest hours.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media