Working Class Life in the 1940’s

Working Class life in the 1940’s was a time of great change mostly brought about by the fact that war had been declared on September 3^rd 1939. The way most people got this news in September 1939 was via the radio more usually called the wireless. This is a short extract from the actual radio broadcast which most families in Britain would have listened to. For such an important broadcast if you didn’t have a radio of your own at home then you would have found somewhere like a friend’s or a neighbour’s or a Pub where you would have been able to hear this broadcast.

That pre war Britain was never to be seen again, things would never go back to being quite the same as they were before the outbreak of war. Things changed during this decade because of necessity not choice but no matter why previously locked doors were opened once opened they were going to prove difficult and in some cases impossible to close again.

The year 1940 is important to our family because that was the year than mum and dad got married. Getting married during the war years brought with it a whole load of previously unknown problems. Virtually everything to do with a wedding was on ration. If it was not actually on ration then it was rationed by price as the scarcer things became the more expensive they became and for the working class this meant that just about everything became expensive and very hard to get hold of.

My mum only had this one photo of her wedding day as in Britain photographic film and good quality photo paper was often very hard to find, because most of the film stock was being directly routed into the war effort for such things as aerial reconnaissance etc.

Although dad is not in uniform in this photo he was already serving in the armed forces as a soldier. I know that dad was in the Army during the war but he never spoke much about the war so I don’t have much information about his experiences during the war.

I know from the odd things that he said that he was in Egypt Italy and Germany at some point and that he had something to do with climbing up telegraph poles to connect wires because one time he showed me how he did this by climbing a telegraph pole when we were on holiday. I remember being very frightened at the time as the pole looked very high and dad went right up to the top very quickly I think I was about nine at the time maybe even younger.

I remember as a young child there was a cardboard box that contained photographs and medals which I use to be allowed to look at. In these photos dad was always in uniform sometimes there were the pyramids and camels in the background or palm trees and often tanks and other military type vehicles. What became of this box and its contents I have no idea but when we cleared the house after the death of my father there was no sign of it.

It is funny how the vantage point from which you view certain events change over time, when I was young I always identified with those who were on active service but as I grew older and had a family of my own then I found I more easily identified with the mothers.

Rationing came into being almost straight away with petrol being on ration from 1939 then on the 8^th of January 1940 such essentials as butter, sugar, eggs and bacon were put on ration but this list was soon added to. In March 1940 all meat became rationed by July Tea and margarine joined the list and still the list was growing. How the mothers of young families already living pretty near the poverty line before the war coped with all of this is remarkable, would we stand up under this sort of pressure today I wonder? I hope we never have to find out.  By March 1941 Jam joined the list and in May so did cheese followed in June by the rationing of all textiles and clothing and eggs. It seemed like everything useful or necessary was to join this list of rationing, in 1942 we see soap, coal, gas, electricity, sweets, chocolate (only 2ounces per person per week) and biscuits were also added to this list with sausages being added in the following year.  This following video deals with rationing and will give you  taste of what life in the early 1940s looked like, though I have to say that the lady referred to as an average housewife did not look like an average working class housewife she looked far too well off for that.

Of course not everyone played by the rules, people who had money found that they could supplement their rations by buying things without coupons on the black market. This following video deals with this problem, this short film would be seen in the local cinemas and would reach a wide audience. In this film the butcher who buys his meat from black market sources and the housewife who then buys more than her fair share (which is her rations) from him is likened to the common criminal and the dishonest fence. There was a very large propaganda machine at work during the war and they made information films and propaganda films on just about every subject conceivable.

One of the hardest things to deal with I think if you were a mother with young children living in one of the major cities which were deemed as likely targets for the German Luftwaffe was the Evacuation of the children and pregnant women. The evacuation of these vulnerable children from the large cities like London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Portsmouth were designed to send the children temporally to what was considered the much safer country side villages and small market towns out of harm’s way from the expected bombing and it was called Operation Pied Piper. 

There were three waves of Evacuation during the war the first one taking place two whole days before the declaration of the war on September 1^st 1939. The first few months of the war became known as the phoney war as many of the things that they thought would happen right away didn’t materialise and as a consequence of this 60% of the children from this first wave of evacuations had returned to their homes by January 1940.

In the following video is one teacher’s account of how she is coping with the changes in her school at Ashley Green. We see her tackling the changes that have been brought about by the lack of teachers and the influx of children who have been evacuated to this school from the more dangerous parts of Britain.

The teacher who is also the headmistress is the one who is narrating the film and you will see that she is responsible for three classes who she has to supervise and teach at the same time. The children are remarkably well behaved and seem to be very carefree and happy but like most of the propaganda films made throughout the war they give an idealised version of events in this case of both the evacuees and the hosts experience. In this short video the sun is shining and the children are playing happily and you would never guess that there is a war going on. However this video does give you some idea of how schools and teachers had to cope with the problems brought on by an influx of children who often came from very different backgrounds from the village children.

There was to be two more waves of evacuations the second wave took place in June and September 1940 the heavy bombing of the Blitz in September made conditions in the city centres very dangerous, the third wave began in June 1944. The follow video tells the story of the evacuations using propaganda posters and photographs of the children when some of the children returned after the war had ended they found that they no longer had homes or a family as a result of the bombings.

This Hub is proving to be much longer than I anticipated so I will continue from where I have left off in part two in my next hub. I hope that you have enjoyed this hub and that it is giving you some idea of what life was like in the 1940’s for working class people

If you enjoyed this hub I have put links to some of my other hubs that deal with similar material below.

All these Hubs have the common theme of coming from a Working Class perspective which differs quite a lot from that of the Middle Class and which has virtually nothing in common with the Upper Class perspective.

There is one period in modern times when all three classes had experiences in common and that was during the second world war.

I hope that enjoyed your foray into Working Class England if you did please leave a comment perhaps some feed back or if I didn't cover what you were looking for let me know and perhaps I can do another hub about that,

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