Save the Date

Lifestories 1946 Save the date The end of the Second World War saw a generation of Britons, heady with the relief of victory, play their part in rebuilding the nation by heading down the aisle in their droves. Anne Sebba reports 50 YOU.CO.UK 17 JANUARY 2016 The rush to marry was driven by nostalgia and a strong desire to return to an idealised life world. What most people wanted, as reflected in Labour’s landslide election victory of July 1945 and the marriage boom of the following years, was to make sense of the conflict, to prove that civilisation had, in the end, triumphed. What better way to demonstrate the power of love Clockwise from far left: GI than by getting married and raising a family? wives from Pontypool, ‘1946 was when ordinary people began to South Wales, protest to be allowed to travel to enjoy themselves again, to feel a better world join their husbands in the was in their sights,’ explains social historian US; Anne Sebba’s parents Claire Langhamer. ‘It was a year of pleasure on their wedding day six months after the end of and leisure, characterised by the football league the war, and Helen restarting, television broadcasting beginning Vlasto’s wedding in 1946 and a peak in cinema attendance.’ The surge in marriages, which began almost as soon as the war ended and continued through to 1949, n a cold winter’s day early he crossed the Channel on D-day plus one as part resulted in the baby-boomer generation – of which in 1946, Joan Hirshfield, of the Allied invasion that eventually liberated I am part – that has grown up with unprecedented feeling rather old at 26, Europe from the Nazis. security and prosperity, reaping the rewards of Ofinally married the man But, like many of the 385,000 couples who tied our parents’ sacrifices. who had proposed to her nine years the knot in Britain in 1946 – and who, if still alive, According to Virginia Nicholson, author of earlier, Major Eric Rubinstein, now 34. would be celebrating 70th anniversaries this year Millions Like Us, an account of women’s lives With austerity raging and rationing – my parents’ story had been complicated by during the Second World War, the rush to marry strictly enforced, Joan had used up all events. When my father first proposed to my as soon as war was over was driven by nostalgia the clothing coupons she could muster mother she was just 17 and her parents refused to and a strong desire, shared by both men and on her cream guipure lace wedding give them permission to marry. In 1939, once war women, to return to an idealised life, which they dress. For the maids of honour, the only was declared, my mother begged my father to believed had been wrecked, physically and fabric available some six months after marry her before he left with his regiment, but he emotionally. The Blitz, she maintains, having the Second World War had ended was a declined on the grounds that he might be killed struck not just London but the whole country, poor quality deep red velvet which, when and did not want to leave a fatherless baby should was a key factor in making the Second World War photographed, appeared transparent. In she become pregnant. They lost touch, and my different from the First, when the home front had the subsequent wedding pictures these mother eventually became engaged to someone been largely unaffected. ‘Women identified with women were seen unsuspectingly displaying the else, only to break it off when she discovered in home – often a home that had been destroyed – so baggy long johns they had all decided to wear 1945 that my father was alive after all. Believing postwar they urgently wanted to re-create the life underneath their dresses to keep warm in the all’s fair in love and war, she returned the other they believed their parents had created in the late unheated wedding venue. man’s jewellery, then married my father as soon 1930s,’ says Nicholson. Even educated women Joan and Eric Rubinstein were my parents, as possible after he was demobbed. who had tasted careers were complicit in this and the story of the transparent velvet was a 1946 dawned full of hope in Britain. Now that desire to return to domesticity. ‘They said, “I just regular source of laughter during my childhood. the victorious troops were returning home after want to go back to how things were to make a I realise now it was an easier story to relate when almost six years at war, there was a sense that home like my mother did and have babies.”’ talking about ‘the war’ than tales of the atrocities the country, having survived an existential battle Of course, women required a male partner to witnessed by my father (a tank commander) after against Nazi Germany, must create a better complete this idyll, which explains why there ➤ 17 JANUARY 2016 YOU.CO.UK 51 ➤ was no similar surge after the First World War. younger, had been a Then, with so few men available to marry, a fashion-conscious dress generation of women was left as spinsters, many designer before she was of whom decided that if they could not be a wife deported to Auschwitz, and mother they must construct a new identity, where most of her such as becoming a teacher. Not only was the family perished. death toll far higher in the First World War, but it ‘They were both was concentrated among young men of fighting unconventional people in age, whereas in the later war, the overall number conventional clothing,’ of casualties was lower and included many civilian explains their only son John, deaths from a wide age range. Baron Browne of Madingley Among those desperate to create a stable and former chief executive home was 31-year-old Denise Dufournier, a young of BP. Paula, 28 in 1945, French lawyer who had worked in the Resistance shaven-headed and severely escorting downed airmen to escape routes as well emaciated, was on the edge of as finding safe houses for fellow resisters. survival after a year spent as a Betrayed, she was sent to Ravensbrück, the slave labourer in a munitions infamous all-women concentration camp, where factory when she was liberated she witnessed barbarity and torture on an by the British and sent to a unimaginable scale. But she survived and, refugee camp in Germany. But immediately upon her release, thin and her fluency in several languages desperately ill, went to recuperate at a cousin’s (German, French, Russian, house in France where she wrote one of the first English and Hungarian) made her accounts of Ravensbrück, called The House of the extremely useful, and by 1946 she Dead. Having recorded for posterity the hell from had recovered sufficiently to be which she had emerged ‘before it had been given a job as a secretarial corrupted in her mind’, she married an assistant to Edmund. ‘It was a very Englishman whom she had romantic story,’ says met a few months before war John. They fell in love broke out. As soon as James almost immediately, McAdam Clark, a scientist but had to wait to get turned diplomat who had People wanted married until Paula had fought in Tunisia, learned to prove that papers – she owned that Denise was alive, he nothing, let alone any resumed contact and the civilisation had, documentation to prove couple were married in Paris in the end, who she was – while in April 1946. ‘My mother Edmund had to get RMS Queen Mary, was never going to marry a triumphed permission from his made repeated voyages throughout the conventional Frenchman commanding officer to marry. year, often carrying women who had never been from her own background,’ All potential marriages between to sea before and had no idea of the life that says her daughter, artist British servicemen and alien would await them in a new country. At the same Caroline McAdam Clark. ‘Yet the one women required approval, and permission was time, Rainbow Corner – the US servicemen’s club thing she longed for was normal family life. granted only ‘where the reasons for marriage on Shaftesbury Avenue in London, where many Having written the book, she wanted to rebuild are good and there was no security objection’. of the couples had met – closed its doors on her shattered life – even to the extent of The Brownes were finally able to marry in 8 January 1946, marking the end of an era. declining a request to testify in Hamburg about May 1947 in a Hamburg church. Many of the couples heading down the aisle in life in Ravensbrück.’ Meanwhile, in Britain, romance often 1946 did so after the briefest of courtships, but War acted as a social catalyst, bringing blossomed between the young women living with a robust belief in romantic love that had many couples together who would never near military camps and the allied servicemen often been nurtured in letters rather than reality. otherwise have met. In 1946 Major Edmund stationed there, whose numbers were in the Former debutante Helen Vlasto would not have Browne, a Norfolk-born tank commander who thousands. In January 1946, the first of almost met her husband, surgeon Lieutenant Aidan was in Germany overseeing the rebuilding of 100,000 British women and large numbers of Long, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, in Kiel port, met Paula Wesz, a Hungarian Jewish children set sail from Southampton, bound for Portsmouth had she not trained as a voluntary aid Auschwitz survivor.

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