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Tuesday, 19th February, 1946

This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.

Picture Post features a series of letters on the problems of the demobilized older ex-officer. "Excluding war service, I have 21 years normal business experience," writes one:

[Since I was demobbed] all I have achieved has been the offer of a minor clerical job at five pounds per week, less deductions. At that figure I began my business career some 26 years ago. I have written some 50-odd letters during the past ten weeks, in answer to advertisements, and have had but three replies.

So what? Go overseas? Migrate? Certainly - provided I can take my wife and son with me, and provided there is permanent employment there when I arrive, for at my apparently dead-beat age (a mere 42) any other sort of overseas employment is plainly futile. Rejoin the services? Yes - if a permanent commission was offered it would be worthwhile but the age-limit prevents that. Well - what about domestic service? Even that has been considered as in certain cases it offers a home of one's own, but neither my wife nor myself has references covering 'ability at domestic service.'

This, then, is one picture of many hundreds of the 'too old at forty' brigade, somewhat disgusted, and daily growing just a little more frustrated and bitter.

But another reader introduces a note of dissent:

In the Army an officer can very often get by on what his underlings know - not that the average officer is required to know a lot when you get down to brass tacks. No wonder, then, that many ex-officer are finding civilian life hard to face. May I suggest that these gentlemen swallow their pride and come down to earth a bit ... personally I am not the least perturbed at the prospect of my long-awaited release. I know that whatever happens I cannot sink any lower than I have these four years. I know that I shall have my self-respect and that no-one is going to look at me or speak to me in the way I have bene looked at and spoken to by innumerable officers in those four years, without getting a punch on the nose ...

Tuesday, 5th February, 1946

This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.

Chaos descended on Wigston Magna in Leicestershire yesterday afternoon, reports the Times, when an Avro Lancaster flying above the town exploded in mid-air, killing all six members of the crew, who were Polish. Eyewitnesses report that the aircraft was flying very low through a thunderstorm when a flash of lightning hit the plane and instantly destroyed it. Debris fell across Wigston Magna. In one house a family of seven were having lunch when the explosion caused part of their kitchen to collapse. A bus was also damaged, and wreckage from the aircraft littered the town's secondary school playground. A number of small fires broke out but were quickly extinguished.

In other news, the Times reveals that 458 British GI Brides and 175 babies arrived in New York harbour on the liner Argentina on Monday morning at dawn. The arrivals to the New World braved sub-zero temperatures as their ship was towed between ice floes to dock. Over fifty of their husbands were there to greet them. Eleven other ships carrying war brides are scheduled to arrive in New York this month alone.

Friday, 25th January, 1946

This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.

Picture Post this week examines the special problems of the demobbed officer. "How many of them are prepared for civilian life? The answers are disquieting. They point to the growth, as after the 1914-1918 war, of a class of ex-officers out of adjustment with civilian life and because they are dissatisfied and perhaps resentful, unable to make their full contribution to it and to get the best from it. They raise, too, the question whether ex-soldiers generally are getting the right reception and treatment from civilians.

Officers were generally drawn from the middle class, the professionals and young businessmen, so-called black-coated workers. They are now five or six years older than when they went into the Forces. Many of them have faced great dangers and hardships, and have carried the heaviest responsibility any man can carry, for the lives and well-being of other men. Under the stress of war, their minds have developed and their outlook changed. They demand much more from life now then they did before they went to war ...

James Lansdale Hodson writes in his diary: "R reports to me that the bulk of the young men she talks to who are being demobbed or shortly going to be say: 'Let's get to hell out of this country. We've had it! Austerity this and austerity that! What did we fight six years for?' Certainly a good many folk one meets are browned off."

A troubling portent of this disenchantment: the Times gives first reports of 'strike' action at RAF camps in Ceylon, Karachi, Cairo, and Palestine. This story will develop fast in the days to come.

Wednesday, 23rd January, 1946

This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.

"Thousands of people in Britain, from entire families to single, demobbed servicemen, are making plans to join an eager flood of emgrants to the Dominions," notes the News Chronicle. Every week, the paper reports, the Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and South African high commissions in London are receiving thousands of letters from would-be settlers; Australia House once received 600 in a day. A formal scheme for the passage-free (or at least cheap) immigration to Australia of up to 70,000 British settlers annually is due to be announced shortly. For now, however, the "doctors, domestic servants and potential rabbit-killers" who yearn for a life under southern skies are being told to wait. Other Dominions are as yet making no definite plans: Canada, for instance, still needs to repatriate 30,000 of its servicemen and their dependants before shipping space can be freed up for new settlers.

Sunday, 28th October, 1945

This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.

The News of the World offers some advice to ex-servicemen who might be thinking of a future overseas:

There is no future for me in this country, writes one young soldier; perhaps it is inevitable that, at the end of a long and wasting war, some men, whose lives have been torn out of their proper context, should feel like this ... it may be just the fear of settling back into the old routine. In five years the man has outgrown his old job and yet has no definite new job in view. Often things are wrong at home; there is no house, or another man has found favour with his wife. Naturally in these circumstances the thought of the man often turns to emigration ...

But it may not be the right answer. Emigration from a sense of unhappiness rarely is ... [the ex-serviceman] must make sure that he is not suffering from a general sense of depression ... waiting may be very tame, but it is well to remember that not all the emigration after the last war was anything like successful. There were many sordid little failures, because men were in a hurry ...

 

Friday, 26th October, 1945

 This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.

"Something must be done to speed up the organisation of compassionate leave from the Far East," bewails the Daily Mirror:

Many officers and men and their relatives at home are today forced to suffer avoidable anguish because the great military machine has become too cumbrous to speed men home.

I have just returned from Singapore. On the way to Rangoon I flew in company with a captain of the Royal Engineers who told me his story. THREE WEEKS before, he had applied for compassionate leave because his wife was dangerously ill in his home in Stafford. His brigadier rushed to his help. The application went to area command who passed it to corps, who sent it on to army. There for ten days it remained until the captain appealed again to his brigadier. Inquiries were made. It was found that the application had been lost. Four days later authority arrived to let him travel to England. A week elapsed before he was on the flight to Rangoon. But although he was armed with a ticket that gave him a priority for air travel he was told that his application to travel must be submitted to a board at each place of call ...

"I have no idea now what has happened to my wife," he said to me. "I've given up hope of seeing her alive ..."

Dissatisfaction at conditions back in Britain is mounting amongst returning servicemen, reports Union Jack. The Dominion travel offices are receiving over 1,000 inquiries daily from Britons wishing to quit the UK and emigrate abroad.

Saturday, 8th September, 1945

This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.

The Times reports that two workers at Woolwich Arsenal, recently demobilised, were killed yesterday in an explosion at the technical research department which shattered windows across Plumstead and shook houses two miles away.

Also in the Times: a detachment of the 5th Queen's Royal Regiment, veterans of El Alamein, took part in the four-power Allied victory parade along the Charlottenburger Chaussee in Berlin yesterday. Marshal Zhukov and General Patton were amongst those in attendance.

Sergeant Eve Dunlop of the ATS is asked about 'The World I Want (and the One I Expect) after her demobilisation in the Daily Mail. She is looking for a world "in which there will be no interference, no coupons, and shops plentifully stocked at reasonable prices ... she wants a decent, six-roomed house at a rent of about £150 a year ... she wants to be able to buy a new family car for £250 with real - not imitation - rubber tyres ... she wants to be able to buy 6lb. of tomatoes or a 6lb. joint when she needs it." But she expects "no house of her dreams within five years; no freedom from rationing for two years [she is seven years too optimistic]; no cheap, good stockings (let along nylon) for at least one year." So she is migrating to Malaya with her husband.

Thursday, 23rd August, 1945

This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.

“Men coming out of the Services are turning down indoor jobs," reports Union Jack. "The army has taught them the joys of outdoor life, and they want to carry it into civvy street … one tailor, who wanted a salesman with Leeds as his headquarters, received nearly 200 applications – all demobbed servicemen. ‘In nearly every case’, he said, ‘men prefer outside employment and refuse inside jobs.’”

"Do you want to emigrate?" asks former Major Ernest Watkins in the News Chronicle:

It is odd, but one of the first reactions after release from the Army is a desire to get away, and it's a very disconcerting one. The routine of civilian life seems petty. It stretches away indefinitely into the distance without any sign of a break. The people next door are strangers. The town is dull and the one thing that livens up an evening is the thought that you might meet someone else in the same boat and spend the time together talking over the good old days that have just finished.

Is it for you, you say, that I won the war? You will probably find yourself thinking loningly about emigration and a job in the Colonies ...

Watkins cautions his readers, however, that "the days when a Dominion or a colony was a useful dumping ground for the unemployed or the unemployables here (if they ever existed) are definitely dead ... no Dominion wants people will, so to speak, be mentally looking over their shoulder at England all the time. They want you to settle there, to become Australian or Canadian, or whatever it is. If you don't fancy that, then don't go."

Friday, 3rd August, 1945

This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.

In Canberra, reports the Times, Australia's newly appointed Minister for Immigration Arthur Calwell has announced to the House of Representatives that the Dominion and Great Britain have come to an agreement allowing, in principle, demobilized UK servicemen and -women free passage to resettle in the Antipodes. "Australia wants and will welcome new, healthy citizens determined to become good Australians by adoption," Mr. Calwell said.

The Times also reports that British aircraft sank a Japanese destroyer and three other enemy vessels in the Tokyo area on Monday. Three aircraft and their pilots were lost in the attack.