Mrs Miles's Diary

by S. V. Partington

  174 The NAAFI provided retail and recreational facilities – stores, bars, canteens, restaurants, etc. – to all branches of the British armed forces.

  175 HMS Wellesley, a 74-gun ship of the line first launched in 1815, was serving as the naval training ship TS Cornwall when she was bombed and sunk on 24 September 1940 at her moorings at Purfleet (not near the Tower of London as Connie records it). Her figurehead is now at Chatham Historic Dockyard.

  176 The battle known as the Channel Dash. On 11 February a German naval squadron successfully ran a British blockade in the English Channel en route from Brest in Brittany to their German bases. Beyond the Straits of Dover they were attacked by the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm, and defended by the Luftwaffe. Two German ships were damaged, but none was sunk. Accounts of the aircraft losses differ, but the Naval Situation Report delivered to the War Cabinet records 37 British planes destroyed and 17 German.

  177 Churchill called the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.

  178 It is apparent from the context of this letter, which later mentions being at the BBC, that the writer is May Sinclair.

  179 On 27 February in a battle lasting seven hours a combined Allied naval force had failed to prevent a Japanese invasion fleet from reaching Java. The Allied commander, the Dutch Rear-Admiral Karel Doorman, was killed and the USS Houston, the largest US warship in the Far East, was among those sunk.

  180 Katowice is the largest city in the industrial region of Silesia, in southern Poland. Following the German invasion in 1939 it became Kattowitz, and from 1941 to 1945 was capital of the German province of Upper Silesia. Around 40,000 Poles were expelled from Upper Silesia, and ethnic Germans were settled in their place.

  181 Following his flight to Scotland on 10 May 1941, ostensibly to broker a peace deal between Germany and Britain, Rudolf Hess was held until June 1942 at Camp Z, Mytchett Place, on the Surrey/Hampshire border.

  182 The Dig For Victory campaign encouraged everyone in Britain to grow their own food in allotments or turn their gardens over to food production, keeping chickens, goats or pigs if space allowed and digging up lawns and flower beds to grow vegetables.

  183 Bundles for Britain began as a New York knitting circle set up by Natalie Wales Latham in 1940. By mid-1941 it had 975 branches and more than a million contributors, and as well as clothing it also shipped medical supplies, up to and including ambulances. Mrs Latham was awarded an honorary CBE by the grateful British government after the war.

  184 Led by Commander R. E. D. (‘Red’) Ryder, the raid took place on 28 March and put the dry dock at St Nazaire out of action for the rest of the war, depriving German warships of any means of repair on the Atlantic coast. Among the 89 decorations awarded to the raiding party were five Victoria Crosses.

  185 A Ministry of Food initiative, British Restaurants served basic nutritious meals at minimum prices. By the end of 1943 more than 2,000 had been set up.

  186 Margery Perham, Oxford don and a renowned authority on Africa, was the sister of Connie’s near neighbour, Ethel Rayne. She was awarded a CBE in 1948 and in 1961 became the first woman to deliver the Reith Lectures on BBC Radio.

  187 Batavia was the Dutch colonial name for what is now Jakarta, capital city of Indonesia. Both the Hermes and her destroyer escort were sunk by Japanese bombers. Many survivors were rescued, but 302 were lost.

  188 Connie writes elsewhere that Robin met Mr Dodds in the village, who told him that Tony had walked in saying, ‘Daddy, I’ve only brought my body with me, I’ve lost everything else.’

  189Rostock and its port quarter of Warnemünde on the Baltic coast housed important aircraft factories, including the Heinkel works where the first jet plane was tested in 1939. The historic Hanseatic port city of Lübeck had been devastated by firestorms on 28 March, when 400 tons of bombs were dropped by RAF Bomber Command. Retaliatory raids by the Luftwaffe on the comparable historic cities of Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York and Canterbury were dubbed ‘the Baedeker raids’ after the well-known series of travellers’ guides.

  190 Anti-aircraft fire. ‘Ack-Ack’ comes from a First World War phonetic alphabet used in signalling.

  191 US Army General Joseph W. Stillwell, whose abrasive manner earned him the sobriquet ‘Vinegar Joe’ and whose command was characterised by difficult relations both with the Chinese leader Chiang Kai Shek and with the British Commander in the Far East, General Archibald Wavell, whom he considered overly cautious.

  192 ‘Black Saturday’ 13 June, was a decisive moment in the Battle of Gazala, which lasted from 26 May to 21 June. In a major push beginning on 11 June, Rommel forced the withdrawal of the Guards Brigade and destroyed or disabled more than 220 British tanks. Further withdrawals over the next few days laid Tobruk open to the German advance.

  193 Rommel took Tobruk in a surprise attack on 21 June. The Allies did not retake it again until 11 November.

  194 The Black Sea port of Sebastopol (now Sevastopol) in the Crimea had been under siege since the end of October 1941. The Russian forces surrendered on 4 July.

  195 Compulsory evacuation was considered for South Coast towns which would be in the front line of a cross-Channel invasion, but was never implemented.

  196 General (later Field Marshal) Claude Auchinleck, Commander in Chief in the Middle East from July 1941 to August 1942, when he was relieved of his command. He had greater success as CiC India, from January to May 1941 and again from June 1943 until 1947.

  197 Oliver Lyttelton, 1st Viscount Chandos, Minister of State for the Middle East in 1941–2 and Minister of Production 1942–5.

  198 Known as Tsaritsyn until 1925, and as Volgograd since 1961.

  199 Robin’s sister Sibyl was visitng them at the time.

  200 Rostov, on the River Don, had been taken by the Germans on 21 November 1941 and retaken by the Russians six days later. On 23 July Germany captured the city for the second time, and held it until 14 Feburary 1943.

  201 Probably Major Rayne.

  202 Stalin was pressing Churchill to open a second front by invading occupied France, thereby diverting German resources away from the Eastern Front. Roosevelt had promised Stalin that this would happen in 1942, although it would not in fact take place until June 1944.This meeting was the first time Churchill and Stalin had spoken face to face.

  203 Robin was wrong on both counts. He was a year and nine months out regarding the timing, and the D-Day landings would be in Normandy, not in Brittany or Bordeaux.

  204 In fact the raid was a failure. The likelihood is that Connie heard the BBC early morning news which announced it was taking place, but was unaware of what had actually happened. One unit, No. 4 Commando, achieved its objective and neutralised the gun battery at Varengeville; but elsewhere 3,367 Canadian landing troops and 257 British commandos were killed, wounded or captured, with further losses at sea and in the air.

  205 The Fuel Saving Scheme was introduced in July 1942 and encouraged people to use less coal by limiting heating and hot water use in the home. Most houses had coal-fired boilers and each household had a weekly target amount of fuel which it was supposed not to exceed.

  206 A trade name for phenobarbital, a barbiturate in common use as a sedative until the 1960s.

  207 Connie’s stepmother had come down from Scotland and was staying in London.

  208 Maurice was Connie’s brother. A psychiatrist and author, he was a leading authority on the esoteric thinkers Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

  209 Liberty Ships were cargo ships mass-produced in the United States. Their standardised simple design meant that they could be built as fast as the German U-boats could sink them. In November 1942 a Kaiser shipyard produced one as a publicity stunt in less than 5 days.

  210 What was to become, in 1948, the National Health Service.

  211 The Battle of Alam el Halfa, a major reversal for Rommel and the Afrika Korps, who were forced to withdraw.

  212 i.e. Connie herself.

>   213 Maurice Hankey had been a key member of the War Cabinet during the Great War and a member of Neville Chamberlain’s War Cabinet from September 1939 to May 1940.

  214 Mr Brook was the new downstairs tenant.

  215 Sark had been much in the news, owing to a commando raid on the island which led to a series of escalating recriminations with Germany over the treatment of prisoners. Connie and Robin both felt strongly that in shackling German prisoners in retaliation for Germany having done so to those captured in the raid, Britain was losing the moral high ground over the issue. Mrs Rayne had urged Connie to write to their MP in protest about it.

  216 This was the three-runway Holmsley South airfield from which USAAF B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers operated, along with RAF Wellingtons and Halifaxes. RAF Typhoons and Mustangs, Royal Canadian Air Force Spitfires and Mosquitos and USAAF B-26 fighters also flew from Holmlsey on missions over occupied France.

  217 Seven shillings and three pence: about £17.50 today.

  218 This was Montgomery’s famous victory of El Alamein, of which Churchill said: ‘. . . this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’

  219 The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, which took place over four days from 12–15 November.

  220 After three months’ tenacious defence of Stalingrad, on 19 November the Russians launched a counter-offensive which cut off the invading forces outside the city, giving the defenders the upper hand for the first time since the battle began at the end of August. For the next three months the now beleaguered German Army, unable to be supplied by land or air, slowly starved through the depths of the Russian winter.

  221 Despite the strength of Dutch anti-Nazi feeling, the number of active Dutch Nazi Party members was quite substantial.

  222 Naomi Lutyens was the daugher of Henry Devenish Harben, a noted philanthropist and supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. This corner of Surrey was home to several generations of the Lutyens family, the best known of whom was the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

  223 The economist and social policy reformer Sir William Beveridge chaired the Interdepartmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services. Their findings came to be known as the Beveridge Report, and formed the basis of the post-war Welfare State.

  224 Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim, Commander in Chief of the Finnish Defence Forces during the war, and President of Finland from 1944–6.

  225Presumably one of the garage hands in their boiler suits, whom Connie describes earlier as looking like Russians.

  226 The remnants of the Afrika Korps had retreated to the town El Agheila, from which they withdrew on 17 December.

  227 The line is from ‘Cargoes’ by John Masefield.

  228 Admiral Francois Darlan, Commander of the Vichy French Forces and deputy leader of the Vichy government from February 1941 until April 1942. On 24 December Darlan was assassinated by a member of the French Resistance in Algiers.

  229 The Merchant Navy kept Britain supplied at a heavy cost in ships and men. By the end of the war some 4,700 British-flagged merchant vessels had been sunk, and 30,000 merchant seamen lost their lives.

  230 The author of Peter Pan had been a friend of the Nicoll family during Connie’s childhood.

  231 Begun on 8 September 1941, in fact the siege was not finally ended until 27 January, 1944. Lasting 872 days, it was among the longest sieges in history. The news that Connie refers to was that the Russians succeeded in opening a land corridor on 18 January 1943, breaking the blockade for the first time and enabling some supplies to reach the city.

  232 Connie adds two handwritten notes, one explaining that the gremlin is ‘an RAF imp of mischief’; the other, written in 1947, saying that the film had not yet materialised.

  233 Thirty-eight pupils and six staff members were killed on 20 January when a Luftwaffe pilot released a bomb at close quarters on Sandford Road School, Catford.

  234 M&B 693 (Sulphapryidine) was an early sulphonamide antibiotic and the first effective treatment for pneumonia. Produced by May & Baker in 1938, it was also used extensively to prevent gangrene and septicaemia throughout the Second World War.

  235 Connie also missed recording the German defeat at Stalingrad, which, even more so than El Alamein, turned the tide of the war. On 2 February, the day before she fell ill, the Axis forces under General Paulus surrendered, in contravention of Hitler’s order that they should fight on to the last. The German 6th Army had been almost completely destroyed.

  236 On 3 March 173 people were crushed to death on the stairs leading down into Bethnal Green tube station when two people fell and the crowd packing in to the shelter fell over them. It was the worst single wartime civilian disaster in Britain.

  237 The battle for the Mareth Line, 20–27 March. The Mareth Line was a line of fortifications between the city of Gabés and the town of Medenine in Tunisia, originally built by the French before the war.

  238 It seems from Connie’s account that Lyons, previously known for their waitresses, or ‘Nippies’, had introduced the self-service restaurant, a concept which clearly nonplussed Robin.

  239 Danish author who also wrote under the name Isak Dinesen, best known for her memoir Out of Africa.

  240 Music While You Work was a radio programme broadcast for the first time in 1940 and devised specifically to make factory workers more productive in wartime by giving them light music to listen to. The show lasted until 1967, when the BBC Light Programme became BBC Radio 2.