The Diaries of Nella Last

by Patricia Malcolmson

  * Nella had views about male–female friendships. ‘I don’t believe in platonic friendships in the least. One always gets hurt sooner or later has been my experience since once as a girl I hurt someone very much without meaning to, and which was a severe lesson to me, so that I would never believe that a man and a woman could possibly be the same in friendship as two of the one sex’ (13 August 1941).

  * Dick, Kerr & Co. manufactured Hampden and Halifax bombers.

  * On 21 June British forces in Tobruk, Libya, surrendered to the Germans and Italians. The Axis powers took 30,000 prisoners and large quantities of matériel.

  * Of course, she was right; no Allied landing in France was possible until 1944, although southern Italy was taken in later 1943.

  * ‘He never realises,’ Nella had written of her husband the previous summer, ‘and never could, that the years when I had to sit quiet and always do everything he liked and never the things he did not were slavery years of mind and body … Recently I made my vow – to be a soldier till the war ended, to play the game and never grumble and never to ask anything else except that my boys could be guarded and live their life fully’ (28 August 1941).

  * They had presumably wired to wish her well on her fifty-third birthday, which was the following day.

  * A line made famous by the vastly popular radio programme It’s That Man Again.

  * The purpose of the Furness Association for Social and Moral Welfare, according to the Furness and District Yearbook for 1939 (p. 110), was ‘to protect the tempted and restore the fallen’. Its concern was primarily with extra-marital sex and pregnancy.

  * Substantial selections from the week just before and after VE Day are in Nella Last’s War, ed. Broad and Fleming (2006), pp. 265–75.

  * A woman in the American Red Cross, Elizabeth Richardson, was for a few weeks in late 1944/early 1945 posted in Barrow, because of the presence of US servicemen, and wrote a number of interesting letters and diary entries from there: James H. Madison, Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys: An American Woman in World War II (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 107–37.

  * Grizedale Hall, south of Hawkshead in the Lake District, was a POW camp for German officers. In mentioning a ‘V bomb’, Nella probably meant a V-2 rocket, invented by the Germans and first used to attack southern England in September 1944. There was no defence against it.

  * On several occasions this month Nella gushed enthusiastically about the sudden availability of goods that for long had been hard to obtain.

  * Charles Craven was Chairman of Vickers-Armstrongs Ltd from January 1936 until his death in November 1944. He had been responsible for getting a lot of business for the Barrow shipyard in the 1930s, thus protecting the town from severe unemployment.

  * Nella’s mother was born a Rawlinson; and the family ‘were known as the “proud Rawlinsons” – a name that has been associated with Hawkshead and Lake Windermere as long as there has been written records. Yeoman farmers, independent and free thinking people … The women were always the stronger-minded and more go-ahead, the men folk were content to dream and plan’ (DR, May 1946). Nella was an admirer of Hugh Walpole’s regional fiction the ‘Herries Chronicle’ (1930–33), which comprised four historical novels (one of them was Judith Paris: see below, 6 October), featuring narratives of violence and romance, and set in the Lake District in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  * Field Marshal Earl Roberts (1832–1914) had advocated a robust British rearmament to defend against (as he saw it) an understandably expansionist Germany. In a speech in Manchester in October 1912 – when Nella was young and recently married – he had declared that ‘there is one way in which Britain can have peace, not only with Germany, but with every other Power, national or imperial, and that is, to present such a battle-front by sea and land that no Power or probable combination of Powers shall dare to attack her without the certainty of disaster’ (Lord Roberts’ Message to the Nation [London, 1912], p. 9). A street in Barrow is named after him.

  * Cliff had proposed marriage to a young woman in the WAAF. She later turned him down (which was just as well since he was gay).

  * Harold Laski, a forceful and outspoken socialist, was Chairman of the Labour Party at this time – and much reviled by non-socialists (and not entirely popular in his own party). Clement Attlee had been Prime Minister since the end of July.

  * A few weeks later (2 February 1946) Nella again voiced her sense of the limitations of modern materialism: ‘When I feel the most blue, I feel Nature is beginning a war now, as if man’s stupidity has roused some destructive force – and there is always the atom bomb and its dire possibilities’ (DR, December 1945–January 1946).

  * Portraits of life in post-war Britain are presented in two highly informative books: David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2007), part 1, surveys the period admirably.

  * Earlier that evening they had listened to an episode of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga on the radio. Nella admired Galsworthy – and disliked Anthony Trollope: ‘I always feel Trollope portrays a period from which sprang “socialism” in its more rampant form’ (28 December 1947).

  * Nella’s mother’s first husband died shortly after their marriage. On 16 December 1947, when Aunt Sarah was speaking of her (she died at fifty-two) and ‘of her sadness and inability to take life as it came’, Nella ‘had a vision of the sadness and aloofness of my mother’s face – Dad always said she should have been a nun’.

  * ‘My father was absolute monarch and the house was run for him’, Nella had declared in her Directive Response for July 1939.

  * Jessie and George Holme, who were expecting their first child this month, lived in the house adjoining the Atkinsons’, two down from the Lasts.

  * The well-paid Magistrates’ Clerk for Barrow and Ulverston, a married man in his fifties, had recently left his wife in favour of a woman in her thirties, also married. The scandal was a major topic of conversation in Barrow, and his picture was reproduced on the front page of an issue of the Daily Mail.

  * This show was apparently a bit disappointing, for the next day Nella wrote that ‘there was a very good variety bill, but Sid Millward’s “Nit Wits” wearied me, the brass was so piercingly loud, and two good comedians who gave two turns – “The Finlay Brothers” – seemed to exhaust the humour of grotesque clowning’.

  * Often in the first half of 1948 Nella and Will took car trips on Saturdays, for he could usually find some business-related excuse for these journeys, which was not possible on Sundays. ‘I do long for the time petrol can be used’, she had written the previous day, after an outing to Ulverston. ‘Even to go and sit by Coniston Lake would be good for him, and now there is the wireless in the car, he would settle happily.’ Since the petrol ration was about to be restored, initially at a lower level, Sunday motoring would soon be resumed. Petrol rationing was not entirely eliminated until mid-1950.

  * George and Jessie Holme, who moved to Preston in 1953, both lived long lives: he to eighty-eight, she to ninety. According to their daughter Kathleen Emery, whom we met in March 2012, they were devoted to each other, their long marriage was harmonious and strong, and her own upbringing very happy.

  * She is referring to Edward VIII’s abdication of the throne in 1936 in order to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson. King Farouk (b. 1920, king from 1936) was notably corrupt and incompetent, and was overthrown in 1952.

  * On the evening of 12 January the patrol submarine Truculent, which had been built in Barrow and launched in 1942, collided with a Swedish ship in the Thames estuary and sank. Sixty-four men lost their lives. Building submarines was a specialty of Barrow’s shipyard.

  * J. B. Priestley’s ‘The Labour Plan Works’, one of a series of party political broadcasts, was publishe
d in The Listener, 19 January 1950, pp. 112–13. Priestley did, indeed, profess political humility and a common-sense outlook. His socialist thinking was not to Nella’s taste.

  * Maurice Webb was a political journalist and broadcaster, a Labour MP and Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He had spoken on the radio two nights before (published in The Listener, 2 February 1950, pp. 201–2), and Nella had described his speech as ‘a triumph of wishful thinking mixed with sincere conviction. If things could be as rosy and serene as some of the Labour speakers make out.’

  * Norman Raby, one of these boys, doubted in 2011 that the headmaster said or would have said this. A photo of the ‘Poker Club’, taken shortly after they were caught, appears as Plates, p. 6. Mr Raby recalled that ‘in some ways we were a little proud of our notoriety’.

  * Wilfred Pickles (b. 1904) was a celebrated entertainer and radio personality from Yorkshire. This edition of Have a Go had been first broadcast on the Light Programme on 1 February and repeated in the North Region on 3 February. According to Erin O’Neill of the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading, there is no surviving script, probably because the programme was originally broadcast live – from London Zoo, which accounts for the joke about elephants.

  * Later that week Mrs Higham was visiting, and she ‘was really shocked when he went on to tell her he had “never believed in any kind of insurance”, and she learned that I’d have nothing from any source if he died’ (23 February 1950).

  * Megan Lloyd George (1902–1966), daughter of David Lloyd George and a Liberal MP from 1929 to 1951 – she later joined the Labour Party – championed radical causes in her party, whereas other Liberals were moving, or had already moved, to support Conservative positions, a trend that Nella approved of.

  * In fact, women did not at that time have the vote, except in some local elections.

  * ‘This interest he has taken in the election has been a pleasure to both of us’, she wrote the next day. ‘I wish something else would come along.’

  ** She means that the somewhat meek and reticent committee members, who had been pushed around by the domineering Mrs Waite, retaliated by being active, assertive and effective.

  * Albert Modley (b. Liverpool, 1901) and Norman Evans (b. Rochdale, also 1901) were variety entertainers and comedians.

  * The Windmill Theatre in London was famous for its (more or less) nude performers. Two years later Nella made her views on nudity clear. ‘As for people who have little or no clothes on, well, they haven’t, and that’s that. I never could see anything shocking in nude or semi nude figures, always provided they weren’t gross untidy ones’ (12 June 1952). By the standards of her time, Nella did not hold particularly rigid views concerning sexual propriety. On 1 February 1951 she borrowed from the library a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock, although she did not report what she thought of it.

  * On Monday the 21st Nella was back in Rampside to view the wedding presents. There was no sign of austerity – ‘I never saw such a collection of “covetable” things. It looked as if the cream had been skimmed from every good shop in town’ – and she proceeded, admiringly, to list the gifts in copious detail.

  * The Prime Minister was in the American capital for talks with President Truman and senior American officials. Britain was striving to contain the increasingly dangerous conflict in Korea (China had actively intervened in November) and discourage the use of atomic weapons. The script for this speech, broadcast at 9.15 p.m. on the Home Service, is not held in the BBC Written Archives Centre, presumably because it was transmitted from abroad and no copy was deposited with the BBC. It was probably the speech that Attlee gave at the National Press Club in Washington that day (The Times, 7 December 1950, p. 4b).

  * The younger Lasts’ home was at 64 Blake Road, N11; the nearest tube station was and still is Bounds Green, on the Piccadilly line, about half a mile away.

  * Will was not always sensitive to the protocols for using the escalators in tube stations. ‘My husband has been unpopular a few times’, Nella wrote on 1 July. ‘In spite of my warnings – and given by Cliff – to keep always to the right, he will use the left, and has been bumped as well as told curtly “keep to the right”.’

  * ‘You carried flowers for Shan We as if he was a person’, Will had remarked (20 July).

  * A succinct account of these floods is presented in David Kynaston, Family Britain, 1951–57 (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), pp. 257–9. At Barrow’s WVS Club meeting on 2 February 1953 ‘quite a number wondered if “H and atom bomb trials could possibly be the cause of the high tides”’ that had inundated some coastal areas.

  * Will, for a man, was even slighter than Nella: he was 5 feet 3 inches in height and weighed 8 stone 8 pounds (8 June 1951).

  * Mass-Observation dropped the hyphen from its name in 2006, thus becoming Mass Observation. We have chosen in this appendix consistently to adopt the current usage, except when the hyphen is used in titles.