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64 pages

English

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First published in 1990, Brighton Behind the Front was originally produced in collaboration with the now defunct Lewis Cohen Urban Studies Centre, in the same series as Backyard Brighton and Back Street Brighton. It brings together a collection of Brighton wartime reminiscences and documents how ordinary people were affected by the war. This was a challenging time in British history, giving rise to moving accounts of individual lives set against a society undergoing profound changes. Using personal recollections, contemporary photographs, letters, a logbook and diaries, Brighton Behind the Front vividly portrays what it was like to live in this south coast town during the Second World War.

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Publié par	Queen Spark Books
Date de parution	10 janvier 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780904733426
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	11 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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BRIGHTON BEHIND THE FRONT
Photographs & Memories of the Second World War
QueenSpark Book no 24 2nd edition
ABOUT THIS E-BOOK
This e-edition of Brighton behind the Front was created in August 2015. It is based on the second edition published in September 2008. This included unedited text from the 1990 book although some photographs were replaced with previously unpublished ones.
Whilst it stays truthful to the original printed book – including all forewords and introductions, and the information about QueenSpark Books and partner organisations at the time of publication - some aspects of that original have been optimised for better viewing on e-readers. For example, photographs that were side-on in the original book have been rotated, with their captions placed underneath; 'pull-out' text that ran outside the margin of the main original text has now been incorporated in that text, where appropriate.
In some cases, the quality of the photographs is not optimal. This is because the originals (often old and damaged to start with) could not be located and the photographs have been scanned from the printed book. A few original photographs are not included here, either because they disrupted the format of the e-edition, or because the scans were simply too poor.
Some interactivity only possible in an e-book has also been added to enhance the reading experience, for example, reverse links to footnotes and a chapter-by-chapter list of illustrations linked to the photographs, sketches etc.
E-book designed by Stella Cardus, Desktop Display © QueenSpark Books , 2015
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
AIR RAIDS
FOOD
EVACUEES
GAS
PREPARATIONS FOR INVASION
KEEPING UP MORALE
SAVING, RECYCLING AND MAKING DO
VISITORS TO BRIGHTON
RETURN TO PEACE
ILLUSTRATIONS
ABOUT THIS BOOK
ABOUT QUEENSPARK
QUEENSPARK BOOKS
ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
Constructing a water tank in front of St Peter’s Church.
AIR RAIDS
Upper Bedford Street : 14 September 1940.
People salvaging belongings after an air raid.
Bombed out recently-built Marine Gate flats.
Row of girls in school shelter.
A shelter warden distributing water to children in an air raid shelter.
Pork was an important source of food.
Sylvia Bellis, aged 22, driving a crane at Brighton railway station.
Soldiers helping APR in clearance and rescue work.
Testing air raid siren.
Gas mask drill 1939.
Schoolgirls approaching Moulsecoomb school air raid shelter.
St. Cuthman's Church, Whitehawk.
Inspecting the Kemptown Line after a bomb has struck.
A span of the Preston Road viaduct destroyed on 25 May 1943.
Policeman in gas mask in London Road.
YMCA mobile tea bar for armed forces 1940.
Nurses and their charges watch workmen building an air raid shelter.
Sandbagged ARP depot in 1939.
Firefighters outside Brighton Museum.
FOOD
Pigs outside the Royal Pavilion.
Local worthies sample food from a field kitchen.
EVACUEES
Education officials see off a party of overseas evacuees at Brighton Station, March 1941.
Young London evacuees arriving at Brighton Station, 1939.
Young evacuees in Brighton.
GAS
Decontamination procedure in the event of a Mustard Gas attack.
School class wearing gas masks, 1939.
PREPARATIONS FOR INVASION
Sandbagging the Aquarium and Prince’s Hall, 1939.
A boat hosing down the Palace Pier.
Workmen erecting anti-tank defences on the beach at Hove.
KEEPING UP MORALE
The mayor greeting members of the British War Relief Society.
Outdoor dancing in St Ann’s Well Gardens, Hove.
Clocktower advertising ‘Defence Bonds’.
Schoolgirls thinning crops on the South Downs.
SAVING, RECYCLING AND MAKING DO
Fuel economy week at the old electricity showroom in Castle Square.
Salvage collection - mostly aluminium for aircraft.
VISITORS TO BRIGHTON
Binder in action in a field north of Brighton.
RETURN TO PEACE
Victory parade along Kings Road.
Four landgirls seated around a brick structure.
Street party to celebrate the end of the war.
Empty shop used as an Air Raid Precaution enrolment station.
INTRODUCTION
‘Even now at the sound of the siren, that used to herald the approach of enemy aircraft, I get the strange feeling of sickness in the pit of my stomach'.
Ken Francis
People who lived through the Second World War often have vivid memories of a period in which their own lives, and British society, was profoundly changed. 'Brighton Behind the Front' gathers together memories, contemporary photographs, letters, a log book and diaries which depict what it was like to live in this south coast town during the war.
The two main sources for the book have very different origins and represent Brighton wartime life in different ways. The photographs were produced by the Borough of Brighton, and were primarily intended to serve as a record of wartime changes in the town (just as the photographs which we published in 'Backyard Brighton' and 'Backstreet Brighton', to which this book is a sequel, were created by the Borough to record the houses intended for demolition in so-called 'slum clearance areas'). As far as we know, the photographs were not used for propaganda or morale-boosting during the war. They do, however, highlight the particular wartime role and concerns of the Borough, focusing for example on the organisation of air raid precautions, saving and recycling campaigns and evacuation. The photographs usually portray aspects of public life which reflect civic pride, and sometimes the subjects are posed to present themselves and the war in a positive light. Yet they are still evocative, because they depict familiar Brighton landmarks in starkly altered circumstances, and because they reveal hints of what it was like to live through those changes and to cope with terrible uncertainties.
By contrast, the memories, wartime diaries, letters and a log-book which are reproduced in 'Brighton Behind the Front' highlight the varied, personal detail of lived experience. The memories were mainly drawn from interviews and written responses which followed publicity in a local newspaper. As in photographs, memories have their own selectivity and bias; difficult times are sometimes remembered in a more positive light, and are influenced by postwar change and nostalgia, and by other accounts of the war.
Yet personal experiences are often recalled in graphic and careful detail, and people's memories frequently cut across the simplistic public myths of the war. As Brian Dungate says, referring to the embarrassment of using a bucket as a toilet in front of other air raid shelter occupants, ‘These are the sorts of things you don't read in books.' Here there is co-operation, ingenuity and bravery, and the ever present 'cuppertea' and a sing-song. But interwoven with these positive memories there is fear, grief, exhaustion and boredom. While the photographs of evacuation show smiling faces, evacuees recall parents' tears and their own false expectations.
Stories about wartime life also show that there was no single, typical Brighton. Some people remember hunger, others recall that 'nobody was better off’, and that they were never hungry. Evacuees tell stories of both misery and delight. Some people remember the war as a last respite of neighbourliness before a postwar decline; others argue that it was the beginning of change for a new and better world. For Brighton people, and for British society in general, the nature and effects of the war were complex and even contradictory. In our selection of photographs and memories for this book we have tried to represent this variety of Brighton wartime experience.
For young Brightonians and visitors to the town there is much in 'Brighton Behind the Front' which will be strange and shocking. For an older generation who lived through the war the book will revive forgotten stories as well as well-rehearsed wartime anecdotes. It will provoke both negative and positive memories, and some sections may be upsetting. The book is also likely to be contentious, as readers remember different versions of the same events, or spot inaccuracies in the interviews or in our captions. We don't pretend that this is a comprehensive history of wartime Brighton. 'Brighton Behind the Front' is a starting point for new remembering and debate about the war and its effects upon people's lives. We hope that readers will become writers, and will send us their responses and corrections, as well as their own memories of the war.
Alistair Thomson
It was almost impossible for anyone living in Britain during the Second World War to avoid the war. It was a Total War for the British people, not as total as the war was for Jewish families living in Warsaw and Paris, or for the unlucky refugees caught in the fire-storm of Dresden, but the Second World War has rightly been called 'The People's War'.
Wars fought by the British in the nineteenth century in distant parts of the world tended to be spectator sports for the civilian population. More British soldiers were killed in the First World War that in the second, but this situation is reversed when it comes to civilian casualties. The German conquest of mainland Europe and the advent of bomber aircraft meant that civilians found themselves in the front-line and were no longer merely spectators.
The Second World War presented people with a variety of experiences very different from the tradition of men going off to war, with the women and children waiting at home. In 1940, during the Blitz on London, men conscripted into the army from the East End found themselves safe in military camps, while their families were being bombed. During this same period opinion polls showed that the public considered that the Air Raid Precautions, fire and ambulance services were all playing a more important and dangerous role than the army in the war effort. This is not to deny the traditional horrors of war endured by the bomber crews, infantrymen, mercha