The Day We Went to War (50 page)

The first ENSA concerts in France were given at Douai and Arras on 15 November. Both shows starred Gracie Fields, the then ‘reigning queen of British show business’. She was only just recovering from a serious operation and appeared against her doctor’s orders. She told Dean before going on, ‘my knees wobble a bit. Hope I won’t disappoint you.’ Walking on to the stage, she was greeted with such a barrage of applause from the troops that even the hard-bitten Dean caught himself gulping back some tears. Overcome by this emotional display: ‘Gracie made a supreme effort to steady herself. Putting her fingers in her mouth and whistling shrilly, she shouted: “Now then, lads, no muckin’ about!” With this touch of Lancashire vernacular the emotional atmosphere dissolved into laughter.’

A few days after Gracie’s concert, the King and Queen paid an informal visit to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane to inspect ENSA headquarters and to see some of the some of the stars like James Mason, Willy Hay, Binnie Hale and Jack Hylton’s band rehearsing.

‘Our Gracie’: Gracie Fields performs at a concert for the men of the BEF ‘somewhere in France’. Of the concert Gracie said, ‘Most of the boys were like old friends. They’d seen me in the halls or heard me on the radio and I suppose I was part of the life they left behind. The songs I sang . . . were the ones they’d whistled on the way to work.’

‘Who pays for all of this?’ the King asked Dean.

‘NAAFI, sir,’ Dean replied.

‘Good,’ said the King, ‘stick to it, they’ve plenty of money.’

Cinemas, like all other places of entertainment, had been closed on Government orders at the outbreak of war. Only the Pier Cinema at the Welsh seaside resort of Aberystwyth, defied the order until specifically instructed to close by the Home Office on 7 September. Permission for all cinemas to reopen was announced on the BBC nine o’clock news on 15 September. The Granada Group gave orders that all its cinemas were now to fly the Union Jack instead of the house flag, and that there should be bright lights and jolly music in their foyers to offset the gloomy blackout outside. At the Granada, Welling on the first Sunday night reopening under blackout conditions: ‘The queues stampeded when the swing doors were thrown back; they made a blind rush towards the lights, sweeping the doorman aside, but in the foyer the habitual discipline of the ordinary citizen reasserted itself and they came to an orderly halt at the pay-box.’

As cinema audiences began to return, ‘conscientiously clutching their gas masks’, there was little except the newsreels and an occasional Government short information film to remind them that Britain was at war. Naturally enough, at first nearly all the films shown were peacetime productions. From British studios came
Goodbye Mr Chips
, starring Robert Donat and Greer Garson;
The Four Feathers
with Ralph Richardson and John Clements; and Hitchcock’s
Jamaica Inn
, featuring Charles Laughton. Only
Q Planes
, a spy thriller starring Laurence Olivier, had anything remotely topical in its plot. Hollywood productions in cinemas that autumn included: John Wayne in
Stagecoach
, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
, and Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in
Idiot’s Delight
.

At the outbreak of war, production in British film studios stopped abruptly. Alexander Korda was just finishing his spectacular
The Thief of Baghdad
, while Carol Reed was in the middle of directing the gritty mining drama
The Stars Look Down
. At the Gainsborough Studios in Islington, Arthur Askey was working on a film version of his hit radio show
Band Waggon
when production ceased. After three weeks, Askey was told that filming would re-start, but this time at the Lime Grove Studios at Shepherd’s Bush. As quite a few of the actors and crew had already been called up, Askey had to reshoot several scenes. He ruefully reflected that ‘after fifteen years’ struggle to get my name in lights, came the black-out!’

In November, the first British ‘war’ film was released. It was Korda’s
The Lion Has Wings
, starring Ralph Richardson and Merle Oberon, and it had as its centrepiece the Kiel Raid of 4 September. The Nazis got hold of a print and showed it to foreign correspondents in Berlin. William Shirer noted in his diary: ‘at the Propaganda Ministry we were shown the English propaganda film “The Lion Has Wings”. Even making allowances for the fact that it was turned out last fall, I thought it very bad. Supercilious. Silly.’

Gracie Fields’s
Shipyard Sally
, which featured her huge hit ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’, had come out the month before, and so had the First World War espionage drama
The Spy in Black
, starring the German émigré Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson. October also saw a less-than-successful film version of Lupino Lane’s smash stage hit
Me And My Girl
, that included ‘The Lambeth Walk’. But it still enjoyed huge audiences as did most other films that autumn and early winter.

Venturing out to ‘the pictures’ in the blackout was fraught with many hazards: ‘cinemas were swallowed up in the prevailing blackness, and even regular patrons, who had navigated unconsciously twice a week for years . . . found that going to the cinema was now something of an adventure’. But masses of cinemagoers in the first four months of the war still went, reflecting the craving for
‘entertainment for entertainment’s sake. People were jumpy; they sought emotional release and did not care whether they laughed or cried.’

For those not wishing to brave the blackout there was always the wireless. On 1 September, the BBC had merged the National Programme with its eight regional programmes to form the Home Service. The broadcasting day now began at 7.00am and continued right through until midnight. Before the war, and by agreement with the newspapers, the first news bulletin would not have been broadcast until 6.00pm. Now there were frequent news bulletins, but, in most British homes, it was the nine o’clock news that became the focal point of the broadcasting day. During the war’s first week, the BBC regarded itself as principally a news and information service, with bulletins every hour, on the hour. In between, it broadcast a succession of official Government announcements punctuated by gramophone records and ‘for some mysterious patriotic reason endless programmes of “Sandy Macpherson at the Organ”’. An irate listener-in wrote to the BBC: ‘I could be reconciled to an air raid, if in the course of it a bomb would fall on Sandy Macpherson and his ever-lasting organ, preferably while he was playing his signature tune.’

Apart from Chamberlain’s and the King’s broadcasts, the radio highlight on 3 September itself was the first instalment of J.B. Priestley’s
Let The People Sing
. Read by the author, it was the first novel to be written specifically for radio, and its title provided Evelyn ‘Boo’ Laye with a hit song that winter.

In expectation of massive air raids on London, the BBC had dispersed its various departments around the country to safe areas. The Drama Department was evacuated to Wood Norton Hall, near Evesham, while the Variety Department went to Bristol. Here, the Clifton Parish Hall became the BBC’s ‘Garrison Theatre’, broadcasts from which starred Jack ‘Mind-My-Bike’ Warner.

The BBC’s Television Service, which had been operating from the Alexandra Palace since November 1936, went off the air at midday on 1 September in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon being transmitted from Radiolympia. There were several reasons offered for the shutdown. The official one was that it freed skilled technicians to work on sound radio. It was also said that the cost of operating the service in relation to the number of television-set owners (20,000, and almost all in the London area) was too high to justify keeping the service going in wartime. And it was claimed that television’s short-range transmissions could help guide German bombers to their targets. The BBC was fairly unapologetic about closing the service down:

‘It has been pointed out to us that nobody said a word in the
Radio Times
about the passing of television. That is quite true, but so many things were passing, too, on that ominous week-end at the beginning of September, that television was at least not singled out for neglect. As a matter of fact we ourselves as viewers miss television as much as anyone could.’

This gave scant comfort to television owners, some of whom had paid as much as £40 for their twelve-inch screen sets. Nor to the sixteen firms manufacturing television sets, 15,000 of which now had to be scrapped. In Germany, the television service, transmitting programmes from studios under the Berlin Olympic Stadium, continued until 1944.

After two or three weeks, during which the expected German aerial onslaught failed to materialise, the BBC reverted to broadcasting entertainment programmes. One of the first to go back on the air at 8.15pm on Saturday, 16 September was
Band Waggon
starring Arthur ‘Big Hearted’ Askey and Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch. First broadcast in January 1938,
Band Waggon
, had been a huge success, turning Askey into a star almost overnight. The show’s catchphrases:

‘Hello playmates!’

‘You silly little man’

‘Ah, happy days’

‘It isn’t the people who make the most noise who do the most work’

‘Don’t be filthy’

‘Doesn’t it make you want to spit?’

‘What would you do, chums?’

and particularly Askey’s ‘Aythangyow’, were heard everywhere. But by the time
Band Waggon
’s third and final series finished on 25 November, its popularity was already being overtaken by a new comedy programme.

ITMA
had first gone out on the air on 12 July 1939. The show’s title,
It’s That Man Again
, had originally been a newspaper headline referring to Hitler. It now referred to Tommy Handley, a variety comedian, who, like Askey, came from Liverpool. The first series, which ran until 30 August, was not a great success, partly because its format was too much like
Band Waggon
. Nevertheless, a second series was sanctioned by the BBC Variety Department and the first programme went out on 19 September. In a swipe at wartime restrictions and the much-abused Ministry of Information, Handley was cast as the Minister of Aggravation and Mysteries at the Office of the Twerps:

‘Good evening, Great Britain. As Minister of Aggravation it is my duty tonight on the umpteenth day of the war against depression to explain to you that I have 700 further restrictions to impose on you. Here in the heart of the country I have been able to think out some of the most irritating regulations you’ve ever heard of.’

This poking fun at wartime bureaucracy and restrictions certainly touched a chord with the listening public, and very soon
ITMA
was attracting a huge audience. In the second programme, the German spy Funf appeared. Like all
ITMA
characters, he had his own catchphrase – ‘this is Funf speaking’. Funf was played by Jack
Train, who produced the spy’s voice by speaking sideways into a glass. He also played the civil servant Fusspot, whose catchphrase, ‘Most irregular!’, was almost as much imitated. ITMA’s second series ran for twenty weeks with a Boxing Day special, ‘Funf and Games for Everyone’.

But it was not just comedy programmes that attracted huge audiences that autumn and winter. An estimated one out of every three adults in Britain tuned into the fortnightly series on the history of the Nazi Party,
The Shadow of the Swastika
, ‘the biggest event of the winter’s broadcasting’. First broadcast on 9 November, the anniversary of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, the series featured actors Marius Goring as Hitler and Alan Wheatley as Dr Goebbels; Leo Genn was the narrator. The BBC assured its listeners ‘that every care has been taken to base the programmes on ascertained facts’, but it was noted, ‘some listeners, particularly older women, refuse to listen, saying that the programmes frighten them’.

In Germany itself it was forbidden to listen to the BBC or indeed any foreign broadcasts. Explaining the reason why, Dr Goebbels said in an interview, ‘We don’t let our people listen to foreign broadcasts; the English do. Why should we permit our people to be disturbed by foreign propaganda? Of course we broadcast in English, and the English people are legally permitted to listen in. I understand lots of them do.’

C
HAPTER
14

Lord Haw Haw

On 14 September 1939, Jonah Barrington, radio critic of the
Daily Express
, wrote in his column: ‘A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen (the German radio station beaming overseas broadcasts). He speaks English of the haw-haw damit-get-out-of-my-way variety, and his strong suit is gentlemanly indignation.’

Four days later, Barrington expanded on this: ‘Jonah Barrington listening at the “Daily Express” short wave station in Surrey to the war on radio, introduces “Lord Haw Haw” . . . from his accent and personality I imagine him with a receding chin, a questing nose, thin yellow hair brushed back, a vacant eye, a gardenia in his button hole. Rather like P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.’