Victory in Europe (VE): Bond Street, 1944-46
Friday, 8th September 1944, four years and a day since the Blitz began: it started all over again. Facing waves of fighter planes, anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons across south eastern England, Hitler's war machine pivoted in June 1944 to rocket-delivered explosives. The V1 flying bomb dropped a ton of explosives. Its pulse-jet engine sounded like a droning insect, or 'doodlebug', which eerily cut out shortly before impact, bringing fear – often total panic – if also late warnings. The successor V2s arriving from 8th September flew at 3,400 mph: too fast for any such warning. Over the following months, 517 of these V2s hit London. This would be Hitler's vengeance weapon: How could London have defied him so entirely?
At 11pm on 6th December 1944, a V2 eviscerated the Red Lion pub (now the Duchess) on Duke Street, beside Selfridges, badly damaging the canteen in its Annex building, killing eight American servicemen and 10 civilians. It also led to flooding. Witnesses to these V2s landing recall blasts so powerful they brought violent inrushes of air. Short of disrupting or overrunning the launch sites, nothing could be done to defend against V2s. It took them just five minutes from launch on the Continent to impact. London life during the winter of 1944-45 became an intolerable lottery. Many remaining in the capital were terrified, homeless (or worse), cold and ill, and almost always tired. Nearly everything was now rationed or otherwise hard to obtain, from clothes and basic foodstuffs to rebuilding materials.
Yet cooperation with the Americans, facilitated by SIGSALY – the phone encryption terminal mercifully still working in Selfridges' basement – was making a crucial difference. Churchill and Roosevelt spoke via SIGSALY in April 1944, in the run-up to D-Day (6th June), which in turn let the Allies re-take northern France. Further east and south, Allied bombers battered the Nazi war machine, with no time to lose in light of intelligence about the Holocaust.
The Halifax aircraft formed the backbone of the RAF’s heavy bomber fleet, alongside the better known Lancaster. No Halifax bomber achieved such an impressive total number of operations as LV907, also known as 'Friday the 13th'. Down its side read, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” 'Friday' flew her 128th, final sortie on 25 April, 1945: a daylight bombing run over guns on the island of Wangerooge in the North Sea. Not two months later, she was on display at the John Lewis site in Oxford Street. Leading Aircraftman Jack Weeks recalled the plane there, shown off by a young RAF policeman who was "all of 19 years", doing a fine job of telling the crowd about Friday, "and seemed to be doing well in the way of tips." How exactly a heavy bomber had been transported to the middle of Oxford Street is a mystery.
Equally unknown is how Oxford Street celebrated VE Day itself, though photographs show joyous antics in the surrounding streets, and of course in Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square and all along the Mall to Buckingham Palace. For many, VE Day was a bittersweet moment. "The crowds in the West End yesterday were huge, everyone cheering, laughing, drinking, singing, dancing – Americans doing the conga and cockneys the Lambeth Walk – kissing, hugging, waving flags, bells ringing, some loonies lighting a bonfire," wrote Picot Schooling, who, before the war, had acted in movies and been a casting director for a theatrical agency. "We'll never forget VE Day," she went on. "I drove round after dinner to see the celebrations. But I felt nostalgic and thankful rather than gay and triumphant. The destruction is horrific."
Schooling worked for a Bond Street marriage bureau run by Heather Jenner, a Brigadier's daughter who'd co-founded The Marriage Bureau at 124 New Bond Street in 1939, aged 24. The book Marriages Are Made in Bond Street vividly tells its story. “It should be to the advantage of a bureau to get people married rather than to benefit by merely introducing men to women,” felt Jenner. In 1946, the bureau announced that it had made its 2,000th marriage – almost one a day.
Unsurprisingly, airmen were a popular pick among female clients, though not necessarily for the obvious reason: "These young men make wonderful husbands not because of their deeds of bravery, of which the average pilot's wife says she hears little or nothing, but because of their outlook," remarked Mary Oliver, the bureau's other co-founder. "You cannot fight air battles and have a mind for petty quarrels and disturbances."
Rather quixotically, the bureau even began offering a bonus of £50 (some £3,000 now) for each baby born to clients from all of the fighting forces, an announcement that promoted a Colonel to claim £100, his wife having just given birth to twins. The bureau had its insurance policy updated to cover for couples producing twins, triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets and so on. Undoubtedly, it played its part in the post-war baby boom. The parents of that boom are increasingly no longer with us, but the stories of their generation – The Greatest Generation – will forever live on.