WWII in Colour

The Telegraph is doing a free DVD offer all this week of the extraordinarily good series 'The Second World War in Colour'. This was made in 1999 by Carlton Television. One of the diarists they drew on was my mother, so the Social Secretary and I got to represent her at the launch at BAFTA in Piccadilly. As simple country cousins we were rather excited about going, associating BAFTA with glitzy awards ceremonies. And as luck would have it, when we got to the front of the queue for taxis at Victoria, along came a head-turning reproduction vintage cab, all headlamps and mudguards and cream livery, so we felt appropriately important as we arrived at the doors.

Carlton followed this in 2000 with a second series, 'Britain at War in Colour', which also drew on her diaries. A small team travelled up to Skye and spent a long day interviewing and recording my mother at home, which she enjoyed, although she was far from well at the time.

The SS and I again went to the launch, this time in the main hall of the Imperial War Museum. While I chatted to a liveried Chelsea pensioner (who invited us to tea at his gaff at the Royal Hospital) and wolfed the delicious canapés and champagne being handed round by (it seemed) increasingly pretty girls, the SS got to meet Ian Lavender of 'Dad's Army' fame, who she said was charming. For the screening we sat behind Dame Vera Lynn (I would love to have told her that at school at the turn of the 1970s, as rock blared from out other studies, being too broke to buy a stereo it was her voice that crackled out from mine via old 78s and a wind-up gramophone). Next to us was a pleasant fellow named Bob Hanna, who very kindly gave me a copy of his father's memoir. Sam Hanna was a teacher from Burnley who spent his spare time recording local trades and tradesmen, making very early use of colour film.

Although the available wartime colour footage is limited, the immediacy it brings helps to shrink the years between and put us in closer contact with that world.

How I fired the last shot of WWII

Brother Tobias has done one or two silly things. Well, quite a number really.

One of them happened in 1996. It was a hot summer day and metal detectorists had been out in the field behind the house. Amongst the livery buttons, musket balls, milk bottle tops and smudgy roman coins they had discarded in a small pile at the end of the drive was a rusty cylinder with a pointy end that looked like an old weight from a grandfather clock.

Being the original recycling man with nothing better to do, I retrieved it and started cleaning off the rust with a hammer and a wire brush. After a while a fine brass line appeared around its middle, and a faint alarm bell sounded in my tiny, gin-befuddled mind.

Quite intelligently I reasoned, "This just might be unspent munition. Bashing it about might not be a good thing. Better make sure it's all right."

This was a clever, sensible thought.

Wiring it to a metal rod in the sunken garden and positioning a lighted gas torch to play on it probably wasn't.

After I'd walked away and made a cuppa, it dawned on me that it might be difficult to choose an appropriate moment to go back and turn the blow lamp off.

As I leant against the workshop supping tea and pondering the life-span of a gas cylinder, the pros and cons of waste against personal risk, and whether we had any chance in the current Test series, there was an almighty explosion.

I'm not talking 12 bore shotgun here. I'm talking Royal Tournament or a sizeable artillery piece on Salisbury Plain.

When the birds started singing again some time later I found myself in an involuntary crouch, with Earl Grey soaking into my trousers (I promise it was tea), and a schoolboy premonition that I was in trouble. I crouched on for a while, wondering if there was collateral damage, if anyone had been killed, whether they could see me if I could not see them, and how long I could stay huddled in a foetal position by the workshop in wet trousers pretending I wasn't there.

When I finally got up to inspect the damage, I found my blow torch was a mangled wreck. There were pockmarks in the limestone paving of the sunken garden, a bent metal rod, some shredded leaves and no sign whatsoever of the clock-weight.

After a prolonged search all I found, fifty feet away in the field, was a truncated, pointy thing that a friend later identified as the nose-cone of a WWII 50 mm anti-aircraft shell.

Moral: If you find a pointy thing, don't invite a town planner to sort it out.

One day. One family. Three worlds.

From a 12 year old Brother Tobias' diary (scary; I was writing angry letters even then):

"Sunday, 20 December 1964. Wrote an angry letter to Airfix about missing parts. Fairly sunny today. Christmas soon. Fairly windy, but not much."

From my 22 year old mother's diary (after driving an ambulance with the BEF in France, she was at home in Essex, driving her father who was Home Guard Zone Commander. Later she joined the WRENs.)

"Wednesday, 20 December 1940. This afternoon Mum and I went to Stortford and made half-hearted attempts to shop in a very crowded Stortford, full of troops and airmen on Christmas bound. I managed to get some vanishing cream but lipsticks are out for the present. I must go easy on the make-up in the home circle! A high easterly wind tonight but plenty of Boche over. The submarine war is rather grave. Today in Chelmsford there was a queue some fifty strong to buy oranges from the fruit cart. Invasion is in the air again, darn it - especially over Christmas. But those merchant seamen are brave men. Our wireless out of order - no news!"

And finally, from my 16 year old grandmother's diary:

"Tuesday, 20 December 1898. Cold again but nice and fine. Captain Clifton Brown and Mrs Calvert came to shoot. Harold went out with them in the morning and shot his first pheasant. I rode the cow in the morning and like him very much.In the afternoon we all went into Horsham to a dance which Miss Willis gave from 3 to 6 and enjoyed it very much."

Bruges, 1918

After the Armistice (see 11 November) my grandfather drove to Bruges (where he had been at school as a boy) with two of his staff officers. It turned out that they were the first British Officers the inhabitants had seen for five years.

In their honour the townspeople asked to play 'God Save the King' on the carillon in the belfry, so at 12 noon the three soldiers stood at attention in the centre of the Grand Place in front of a crowd of dignatories and townspeople, feeling 'stupid and conspicuous', while the bells pealed out the national anthem.

Armistice

My grandfather served in the Royal Horse Artillery, and fought on the western front for the entire duration of the Great War. This is taken from his account of the cease fire on 11 November 1918.

"At 6pm on that day, I got a message which read as follows:

CEASE FIRE AT 11AM TOMORROW NOVEMBER 11TH STOP AT THAT HOUR TROOPS WILL STAND FAST ON THEIR POSITIONS STOP ALL MILITARY PRECAUTIONS WILL BE TAKEN END

Next day I did a rather stupid thing. We had been fighting continuously for nearly four and a half years. I had been commanding troops in the front line for almost all that time, and we had all been living to a great extent on our nerves. I gave an order that every gun under my command on the 16th Division front was to be fired at 10.55 am.

There was a terrific din such as we had often heard before a battle. I doubt if many Germans were killed - they had nearly all retired to beyond gun range. Looking back after this lapse of years, I think perhaps it was rather a stupid order, but it was to some extent excusable and it made an impressive thunder.

Suddenly, dead silence came over the land. We had not experienced such a thing since the war began. We could hardly realize that the chance of being sent to eternity at any moment of the day or night was over."

Englnd xpx :)

Everyone knows of Admiral Nelson's signal before Trafalgar, 'England expects that every man will do his duty'. Less well known is the reaction of Admiral Collingwood, who was a more experienced sailor and would also prove to be a hero of the day. On seeing the signal, he remarked, 'I do wish Nelson would stop signalling. We all know perfectly well what is required of us.'

Sympathy for Collingwood increases when one learns that Nelson's signal required thirty-one flags in twelve three-flag hoists. To display it in one go, it would have had to be hoisted sequentially from the tops of the main, fore and mizzen masts and the gaff, and then down the starboard and port sides of each of the three masts.

In the event Nelson's signal was displayed in a rapid succession of eleven separate hoists to the mizzen masthead (in order to be most visible to the fleet astern). Each hoist had to be kept flying until all the ships had hoisted acknowledgements. Frigates were stationed along the line to windward to relay signals to ships further away, and then relay back their acknowledgements.

When one further learns that the the Fleet's code books had been revised just before the battle as it was believed the ciphers had been compromised, the potential for confusion was considerable. It is remarkable that the signal was read and acknowledged by the fleet within four minutes. I doubt it could be texted quicker.

Brevity makes Royal Naval signals something of an art form. Amongst my favourites is an exchange between the carriers HMS Formidable and HMS Indomitable. After being attacked by a Japanese kamikaze aircraft, Formidable signalled, 'Little yellow bastard'. Indomitable, carrying the flag of Admiral Vian, replied, 'Are you referring to me?'

Breaking out of the Box

As the daily news report notched more deaths in Iraq, I was reminded of that other, more morally confident conflict in the South Atlantic. I started worrying back then that TV wasn't bringing us closer to reality, but insulating us from it....that it was we who were inside the box, not the news. Feeling that - however peripherally - we should grasp some sense of having 'been there' at a moment in history, I dragged my long-suffering and reluctant girlfriend out at dawn one Sunday morning, and drove the 120 or so miles to Southampton to see the Canberra come home.

When we reached the town we parked and started walking towards Mayflower Park, picked out from a map in a tourist guide. A few people were walking quietly in the same direction, and as we grew closer trickles from other streets merged to become streams, until we were part of a flowing tide of humanity. "Why are all these people here?", my girlfriend asked.

And Mayflower Park was a good choice. It was already filling up. Vendors were selling Union Flags and souvenir supplements from the local paper. We sat on the stone-faced embankment above the water, and soon the crowd had swelled until the park was packed and people were clambering onto the roofs of shelters and clinging to lampposts.

There was morning mist over the water, hiding the approaches to Southampton Sound. But a palpable air of excitement animated the crowd, as helicopters buzzed to and fro overhead.

And then two great, sonorous blasts from the horn of a great ship sounded, deep and long, and you could feel the expectant crowd quicken. Out of the fog appeared two fire ships, their water cannon firing plumes into the air. And then huge and majestic, emerged the Great White Whale. Rust-streaked and hung with handmade banners, her decks lined with crew and soldiers. Overhead helicopters hovered; all around little boats swarmed and scurried. The last of the liners built for the passenger trade to Australia, sleek and graceful, back from her 18,000 mile round trip to the South Atlantic and from San Carlos Water's bomb alley. The crowd began to cheer, and the cheering spread along the shore towards the docks. In acknowledgement, three brisk cheers came echoing back from the ship. I glanced at my girlfriend and her eyes had filled with tears.

The Canberra was scrapped in 1997, and the Falklands War may already be an insignificant footnote to loss of empire, but I reckon I was right about the TV, because for once we were briefly outside it, and I can still hear the note of that foghorn echoing out of the mist....