The VE Day Hangover: What happened when the bunting came down and Britain became a grim, sour place – and divorce rates skyrocketed

After about six years of living in mortal fear, the people hardly dared to believe it. It was May 1945 and for weeks they had been promised that the war was about to end but…what if?

The news from Germany was promising – Allied forces storming across the Rhine, Berlin about to fall to the Russians, then Hitler dead, a self-administered bullet in his evil brain.

But what if the Nazis had one last malign trick up their sleeves, a suicide onslaught on London, more doodlebugs and V2 rockets, a blitz to rival any of the murderous air raids that had gone before?

Mollie Panter-Downes, brilliant chronicler of the Second World War in her series of Letters From London for The New Yorker, noted this reluctance on the faces of a weary population.

‘It is difficult for them to forget that they could be under some sort of fire right up to the last minute,’ she wrote.

Which was why, when the official order went out that dimmed lights could be turned up again and window blackouts taken down, the days of a crochety air raid warden shouting, ‘Put that light out!’ gone for ever, surprisingly few people complied, leaving London ‘as murky as ever’.

The end had been on the cards for a while but it was only at 7.40pm on Monday, May 7, that the BBC had interrupted a piano recital on the radio to officially announce that the war was over and that tomorrow – Tuesday May 8 – would be VE Day.

Even on the day that victory was to be declared, some had a last-minute frisson of fear.

An early morning thunderstorm rocked the capital, so loud and intense that Londoners woken from sleep instinctively reached out for the bedside torch and considered heading for the shelter before realising it was nature, not Nazis, disturbing their rest. They were safe, they really were. The party could begin.

Suddenly there were flags everywhere. Selfridges had been doing a roaring trade with its 25 shilling Union Jacks and streamers priced at 7 shillings; at Woolworths a special commemorative VE Day hair slide was a shilling. That’s if you could get your hands on one. 

Supplies were running out and queues –that wartime curse – forming. And not just for bunting but for bread, meat, fish, even alcohol to toast the victory. The war was over but rationing most certainly was not.

Housewives stood in line with their coupons, carrying their usual string shopping bag in one hand and a red, white and blue flag in the other. But, for one day at least, all that could go hang as throughout the country a relieved population sang and danced, revelling in the long-awaited peace.

In central London the streets filled with people determined to celebrate on what was a perfect English summer’s day of sunshine and blue skies, as if fulfilling Vera Lynn’s poignant – and now prophetic – wartime promise that: ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when/But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.’

In their hundreds of thousands, they waited for ‘Winnie’ to appear, waving his familiar homburg hat, and address them on ‘your victory, your hour’. Then they flooded down the Mall to Buckingham Palace to cheer ecstatically the King, the Queen, the two pretty princesses (Elizabeth in her army uniform) and the Prime Minister smiling happily from the balcony.

That day ‘a tremendous wave of pent-up feeling broke loose,’ remembered a then-schoolboy Michael Mason. ‘People waved flags, climbed lamp posts and blew whistles.’

Bells pealed from churches, ships’ sirens sounded from the docks, tugs on the Thames tooted out a du-di-duh-duh, morse code for ‘V’ for victory. There was no cannon fire, a deliberate decision by the authorities, who understandably judged, that Londoners had had enough of bangs. 

The streets rang with endless song – impromptu renditions of Roll Out The Barrel, Knees Up, Mother Brown and so on – and conga lines formed as, noted Panter-Downes, ‘each group danced its own dance, sang its own song and went its own way as the spirit moved it’.

She spotted babies with patriotic ribbons in their hair, old people in red, white and blue paper hats and dogs with Union Jack collars.

She was particularly taken by the number of ‘extraordinary pretty young girls. In their thin, bright dresses, they streamed out into the parks and streets like flocks of twittering gaily plumaged Cockney birds. 

They wore cornflowers and poppies in their freshly curled hair as they strolled with their uniformed boyfriends, arms candidly about each other.’

Some even dared openly to smoke cigarettes, convention thrown to the wind.

Rules were for breaking that day. The police turned a blind eye in Piccadilly Circus as a boy shimmied up the empty plinth where the statue of Eros had stood before being taken down and stored away for safety.  

At the top he stood on one leg, aiming an imaginary bow in imitation of the god of love. The crowd roared their approval and others hauled themselves up the monument until it was covered with young people.

Later that evening, the big lamps outside Buckingham Palace came on to, as Panter-Downes put it, ‘oohs of astonishment from children who had never seen anything of that kind in their short, blacked-out lives’. Floodlights lit up St Paul’s Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, to signify that the war, the darkness, really was over.

Similar partying was taking place across the country, with dancing in the streets to music from pianos and wind-up gramophones.

There were fireworks and bonfires, all forbidden under wartime regulations. In one town, folk pooled their resources and their talents to make effigies of Hitler and Goering, which they hung from a makeshift gallows before ceremonially burning them.

On trestle tables lined up in streets lay blancmanges, jellies and cakes, conjured up from somewhere for the children, who smiled at the Box Brownie cameras recording the festivities, the girls in party frocks, the boys smoothing down their hair with Brylcreem.

It was a time for treats. One lad, an orphan of the war, his family wiped out, was at his convent foster home when ‘a boy burst into the class shouting that the ice cream factory down the road was giving away free ice cream, one to each child to mark the end of the war.

We all rushed out, with the teacher shouting at us to come back at once. When we got there the queue seemed a mile long but we waited and got our ice cream in a paper wrapper.’

Food took on a special significance. One family celebrated by solemnly opening a tin of corned beef they’d been keeping since 1939 specially for the occasion.

The pleasure, though, was fleeting. Meat remained on ration for many years to come, an indication that if any reveller in 1945 thought VE Day was a passport to the promised land, then they couldn’t be more wrong. The fruits of victory proved meagre fare.

Yes, the killing had stopped in Europe (though not in the Far East, where there would be three more months of fighting and dying). But for all the exuberance of VE Day, post-war Britain turned out to be a grim, sour place.

Just a fortnight later was another bank holiday and, in contrast to the blue skies of VE Day, it poured with rain. Some said it was a sign.

Brits who headed off to the coast for the day found there were no glass windows left in the shelters on the promenade to keep out the howling wind. Beaches were out of bounds because of mines, but no matter because there were no buckets and spades for the kids to play with. None had been made in the war.

The Daily Mail reported: ‘Brighton tried to be its old self, but with most of the shops, cafes, amusements, pubs and hotels closed, it was impossible.’

Winston Churchill had hinted that the future was going to be far from a picnic in his address to the nation. Take a night off to celebrate, he’d urged, but ‘after that we must begin the task of rebuilding our hearth and homes’.

It was a tougher task than even he could have expected. The country was a mess, many of its cities wrecked by German bombers, the economy virtually bankrupted by the huge cost of fighting the war on borrowed money and dependent for its very survival on transatlantic loans made on crippling terms.

The US – the new world superpower, alongside the Soviet Union – could have been more generous. Its infrastructure at home was unravaged, unlike ours; its citizens were on the cusp of a new prosperity, unlike ours. It chose not to be.

Britain was broke – and it showed. The bacon ration was cut, the lard ration halved.

Floodlighting of public buildings that had so lit up VE Day was banned a week later because of a fuel shortage. The clothing ration was slashed at a time when men were coming home from war, understandably eager to swap their uniforms for civvies but finding little to wear.

After the initial euphoria, it was a dispiriting return. Was this what so many had fought and died for?

Many of those millions of men demobbed in dribs and drabs over the next year and a half, and returning from overseas assignments, from battlefronts, from prisoner-of-war camps, found themselves at a loss.

There had, naively, been an expectation that civilian life would begin again as if nothing had happened. As Vera Lynn had also sung: ‘The shepherd will tend his sheep/The valley will bloom again/And Jimmy will go to sleep/ In his own little room again.’

But normal service was not resumed. Society had changed. Wives had independence after years of making do without a man. Now he was back, if he thought he could just take over where he had left off, he had another think coming. Their children barely knew who they were. Many men felt unwanted, unappreciated, unmoored.

Actual homecomings were often deliriously happy, but just as often a let-down. Confused little Jimmies hid from the stranger who had just walked into their lives, bold as brass, as if he belonged there, as if this home was his! A sergeant who bent to stroke his own dog was bitten to the bone.

Divorce rocketed among unhappy families in which the experience of war took a heavy toll, a widespread phenomenon that went largely unrecognised in that stiff-upper-lip era.

Too many men were secretly scarred, particularly those who had seen action, watched friends die, perhaps been wounded themselves. Once-happy husbands and fathers were withdrawn, impatient, irascible, unkind.

‘My father and I never got on together,’ one daughter remembered. ‘He hit and punched me frequently for no good reason. He swore he would change but never did. His was a life wrecked by the war. As was my mother’s. And mine.’

Another woman recalled things never being the same after her father’s return. ‘In his head he still had an enemy to fight, while my mother had the constant struggle to keep the home fire burning. Within a couple of years, he had left, and all I had to hold on to were my precious memories of the four contented pre-war years when we were all together.’

It would be years before traumas such as these were recognised – let alone, if ever, confronted.

There were also, of course, the other wrecked lives, the many British homes where the fathers and sons had died for their country: close to 400,000 of them, plus the 70,000 civilians lost at home to the Blitz.

Here the day of victory was hollow, the grief and sense of loss hardly assuaged by seeing others dance in the streets. The end of the war had come – but not soon enough for them.

As we rightly celebrate VE Day, they should not be forgotten. But nor should the perhaps undeniable fact that the day of rejoicing turned out to be a brief flash of light in an otherwise benighted era. At astonishing speed, the euphoria of victory turned to cynicism and distrust, the hallmarks of a war-weary land all too plainly not fit for heroes.

It would be many years before the gloom came anywhere near lifting – probably not until a new, young, vibrant queen came to the throne, a new broom for a new age.

As people took to the streets again in 1953 and partied for her coronation – the service itself shown on that new household necessity, the television – only then could it fairly be said that Britain had at last weathered the post-war storm.