How was VE Day Celebrated on the Home Front?

Author Lucy Noakes explain to us what the experience of VE Day itself was like for the general British population

The end of the war in Europe on 8 May 1945 didn’t necessarily come as any great surprise to the general population. There had been many weeks of anticipation for the event, ever since Adolf Hitler had taken his own life on 30 April 1945. As a result, many preparations had already been made when Winston Churchill announced a day of celebration for VE Day. So, how did people choose to mark the occasion?

“It depended on several things,” Lucy Noakes, author of The Peoples Victory explains. “Firstly – geography. If you were able to get into a big city, there would likely be some celebration. In Newcastle the mayor gives a speech, and people gather in the main square. Hull and other places have Illuminations. There’s been the blackout and then the gray out, so people are really struck by just how beautiful the coloured lights are. There’s a general feeling of a holiday.”

Many of the pictures we have from VE Day capture the sense of joy and freedom that was being shared on this momentous day. However, this was sadly not a universal experience, as Noakes explains further in our conversation for All About History 155’s Voices of VE Day cover feature.

“One of the saddest diaries I read in the Mass Observation Collection was from a farmer’s wife in mid Wales. She’s miserable. She states that they didn’t do anything, it rained all day, nothing was happening in her local town and even if it had been they didn’t have any petrol to get there. The other thing that affected how people experienced VE Day was personal circumstances. So if they had somebody who was either missing, or a prisoner of war you were far less likely to be celebrating. But then there’s also a lot of people who didn’t do anything because they were aware that people in their street had lost their sons, or someone’s husband was in a prisoner of war camp etc.”

You can read more of our interview with Lucy Noakes in All About History 155, available now.

^{Image Credit: Wiki/ Imperial War Museums – War Office Second World War Official Collection}