Researcher preserves memories of VE Day for 80th anniversary

True stories of how people marked VE Day, published to mark the 80th anniversary, have revealed that not everyone was joining street parties, or even celebrating, on 8 May 1945.

Drawing on diary extracts preserved through the Mass Observation Project, historian Professor Lucy Noakes has painted a vivid picture of what it was like to live through the end of the Second World War in her latest book.

The People’s Victory: VE Day Through the Eyes of Those Who Were There reveals that although many celebrated in the streets, many chose not to.

“The Mass Observation Project, which documented the everyday lives of people before, during and after the Second World War, shows us that many people spent the day at home, listening to celebrations on the radio,” said Professor Noakes.

“Others went out for picnics, bike rides and walks, whilst those who were bereaved, waiting for news of loved ones or not wanting to cause upset to friends and neighbours in that position, chose not to celebrate,” she added.

The book reconstructs VE Day and the weeks around it through the words of ordinary people collected through the Mass Observation Project. At its height, the Project had 1,000 writers – stretching from Penzance to Aberdeen and including miners, academics and housewives – and collected over 1 million individual diary entries between 1937 and 1960.

Professor Noakes, who is President of the Royal Historical Society, has been researching the experiences and memories of the Second World War for over two decades. Her previous research has often relied on the Mass Observation Project which she says “offers an unparalleled window into the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of British people in the mid-20th century.”

She hopes The People’s Victory will help preserve the full breadth of VE Day experiences for generations to come.

“VE Day is passing out of living memory. By the time we get to the centenary of the end of the war there will be very few people alive who remember it. As individual recollections become scarcer and the far right are once again on the rise and even coming to power, it's vital that we remember the defeat of Fascism in Europe.

“This 80th anniversary affords us an opportunity to remember VE Day, and the experience of war as a whole, in a more nuanced way. We sometimes forget, for example, that just after VE Day Britain went to the ballot box and chose Clement Attlee's reforming Labour government that brought in the welfare state and the NHS, whom they trusted to deliver this far more than the wartime leader Winston Churchill and his Conservative Party.”

The People’s Victory: VE Day Through the Eyes of Those Who Were There is published by Atlantic Books.

Header picture courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.