Introduction
By Andrew Joynes
There is irony in
the fact that the planned EHS Exhibition which was to have been held
at Elham Village Hall to mark the 75th anniversary of the
end of the Second World War in Europe had to be cancelled because of
the Corona Virus pandemic.
Undaunted, however, the curators Derek Boughton and Bryan
Badham went ahead and prepared this excellent on-line exhibition.
In its richness of detail about the way the villagers of
wartime Elham faced up to uncertainty it might provide all of us
with a means of reflecting on the national predicament in which we
recently found ourselves.
During the
surreally beautiful ‘Corona Spring’ weather of 2020, we have been
concerned with the implications of another global crisis, albeit of
a very different nature from a world war. It is worth remembering
that, although the purpose of the May 8th anniversary was
to mark a finite event - the end of hostilities seventy five years
ago – throughout much of Elham’s wartime experience there was no
real sense of an ending. During the early years of the war, the
villagers of Elham, rather like ourselves in the midst of a
pandemic, lived through a state of continuous and debilitating
crisis without knowing what the precise outcome would be.
So it is very
reassuring, as one clicks on the e-door to enter the virtual
exhibition, to find that at the beginning of the war there were
pre-echoes of Elham’s impressive community response to the national
crisis that recently beset us. The Elham Wellbeing Group that was
set up in 2020 by the Parish Council and the Elham Residents’
Association would have been recognized and applauded by the Doctor
and the Policeman and the Vicar and the Parish Council Chairman and
Clerk of 1939 (see the EHS website section ‘Key People in the
Community’).
‘Be polite to
your Air Raid Warden and make a friend of him’ is wartime advice
that might have been given today with regard to the volunteers who
collect and deliver prescriptions to the elderly.
‘Don’t do it Mother – Leave
the children where they are!’ says a wartime poster in which a
spectral Hitler is trying to persuade a worried woman to return with
her young children (evacuees presumably) to the city. It could as
well have been addressed to ourselves in our state of lockdown: the
recent injunction to ‘Stay Home and Save Lives’ is very similar to
the Home Front order ‘Stay Where You Are!’
In the
Timeline section of the exhibition, the extracts from the
diaries of Mary Smith and Gordon Young show how valuable first-hand
accounts of momentous events can be.
They prove once again what many of us are realising eighty
years later: that grand-scale events governing the fate of nations
and familiar everyday occurrences exist alongside each other. As far
as the diarist is concerned, they are accorded equal weight
(‘June 14th:
capture of Paris by the Nazis.
Daddy put in celery…’). The Mary Smith diary gives a telling
documentary account of the summer months of 1940, when the skies
above the Elham Valley were the setting for a battle of global
significance. Isaac
Williams, Elham’s vicar, defines the mythical quality of the Battle
of Britain with his description of the victory roll of a British
fighter (‘as you might spin a tennis racket in your hand…’).
Encountering such vivid testimonies – a moment caught,
literally, on the wing - one realizes that the eye-witness account
is the essential component of history.
If the Mary Smith
diary had continued beyond 1940, it is likely that it would have
become much more routine, as the action of the war moved elsewhere,
and the eventual outcome continued to be uncertain.
The Parish Magazine and Isaac Williams’s Church Notes became
the journals of record of Elham’s war, recording the passage of the
seasons (‘There is to be no Elham flower show this year..’);
accounting for expenditure by the local National Savings Group
(‘Elham is to have the distinction of having its name painted on one
of the new tanks going into battle…’); praising homely fortitude in
the face of exceptional events (‘We congratulate Mrs Taylor on the
clean and neat appearance of the Church, after all the dirt caused
by the flying bomb…’).
But of course it
is the names of wartime service personnel, recorded in three
separate e-folders, which provides the essential – and in some cases
the most sombre - reading on this commemorative EHS website. From
the Elham Valley they went to the skies and deserts and jungles and
oceans of a global war.
Some of them were killed; some of them returned; and one of them,
Raymond Castle, died in a Japanese POW camp in
March 1945, to have the fact sorrowfully recorded in the
Elham Parish Magazine six months after the war in Europe ended.