London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good evening to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Wednesday, May 7th, 2025.
VE Day. The end of the Second World War in Europe.
Well, the 80th anniversary of VE Day.
What I have in mind is a grabbag, an assortment. I want to go off-piste. Come up with a few VE Day items that will arouse your interest and that you almost certainly won’t get anywhere else.
My catches – such as they are – have come from three ponds. Off-piste, fishing, yeah, I know, it’s a mulligatawny of metaphors. But who cares?
The catch from the first pond is something Chris Hedges published in the New York Times nearly a quarter a century ago. In a piece about war, Hedges made the point that recorded history goes back nearly 3,500 years. Over the course of those 3,500 years human beings have been entirely at peace for just 268 years. 268 years out of 3,500 years. That’s less than 8 percent of recorded history.
And we all know that this day – May 7th, 2025 – the anniversary of VE Day – the anniversary of the day the Second World War ended in Europe – right round the world there are any number of war hotspots. We all woke up this morning to the India-Pakistan news. And that’s only the latest outbreak of the curse, the scourge, the recrudescence, call it what you will.
The second pond I fished in was a couple of May 7th, 1945 newspapers. the Times and the Telegraph. I wanted to find out what was going on around the edges of the big story.
Wanted to find out what the ticker tape going through the minds of people who were alive on VE Day was telling them about that time and that place. And other places. What did the world look like to people on VE Day. So, by way of example, the lead story, the front page story for the Telegraph was exactly as you’d expect: the headline read: Germany’s Final Surrender is Imminent.
Some of the other front page Telegraph stories were: ‘Norway Capitulation Signed’ and Hitler Was Not Ill, Says His Doctor. In other, related news, 120,000 German soldiers in Holland were about to commence building their own barbed wire enclosures and the King and Queen last night returned to Buckingham Palace from Windsor Castle and while the Prime Minister’s preference was to announce victory in Europe in the first case in the House of Commons, he had decided that he would not keep the nation waiting should it be expedient to announce the news first in a radio broadcast. And Mrs Churchill, incidentally, was in Moscow. Yesterday, Sunday, May 6th, she’d attended a service for British Embassy Staff and the British Military Mission. Needless to say, the keynote was thanksgiving for the Allied victories.
Elsewhere, in Austria, American troops freed 15 well-known French men and women who’d been interned for nearly two years. Among the 15, General Charles De Gaulle’s sister, two former French prime ministers, a famous French tennis player, and the son of Clemenceau, the last war French leader. What else? Well, readers of the Times would have learned that yesterday evening Partisans in Milano had attempted to assassinate Crown Prince Umberto.
And news reached London on May 7th that three weeks earlier the former Chancellor of Austria, Kurt von Schuschnigg, had been hanged at the concentration camp where he’d been held.
Another telling headline read – this was a page 4 story – Mistakes of 1918 we shall avoid this time.
Turning to the Times, under the headline British Stamina Under Air Raid Terrors, it reported General Eisenhower’s message to the Prime Minister. Here’s what Ike said.
“I note a report to the effect that England has found it possible to abolish her defences against air raids. No event of this war gives me greater personal satisfaction, nor stands as a brighter symbol of Nazi defeat. One of the highlights of the history of this conflict will be the stamina, courage, and determination displayed by the British population in the performance of its indispensable duties under the constant threat of the most terrifying weapons the enemy could devise. I merely want you to know how truly happy this whole Force is for any part we have had in lifting this burden from the people of Great Britain.”
And then there was this. Under the headline Law of Defamation, the Times reported, “The committee appointed by the Lord Chancellor to consider the law of defamation is resuming its sittings, which were suspended at the outbreak of war in 1939.
And more good news. Turns out London had been afflicted with a tram and bus strike. And on VE Day normal services resumed. The strike was struck off.
Grim news that wasn’t war news. The Ministry of Fuel and Power reported that deaths in mines and quarries in Great Britain in 1944 totalled 674, as against 778 in 1943 and 946 in 1942. Sobering figures, aren’t they.
And on VE Day readers of the Times learned the American poet and fascist sympathiser Ezra Pound had been captured near Genoa on May 6th.. One of 8 Americans indicted for treason, Pound had broadcast from Rome under the Fascist regime.
Had I been in London on VE Day I probably would have gone along to the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. To hear Professor Major Greenwood lecture on Medical and Social Comparisons between the Conditions of England in the Wars against Bonaparte and Hitler.
And other cultural news, I would have definitely been looking forward to the Phoenix Theatre opening of Thornton Wilder’s comedy The Skin of Our Teeth. Produced by Laurence Olivier himself, the production had to be a can’t miss because of the lead role played by mr Olivier’s wife, the film star Vivien Leigh. In the words of Mr Olivier, Vivien plays the ‘eternal slut’ – a servant girl, a bathing beauty and a vivandiere. Yes, I had to look it up. A vivandiere was a female attendant who served in the French military in an auxiliary role.
And live and learn, on VE Day the Times published a letter from one Robert Eisler, late of Dachau and Buchenwald (yes, that’s right, they were notorious Nazi concentration camps). Mr Eisler had written in with what he described as two short footnotes to the Times’ obituary of the Fuhrer. Footnotes that shed light on the Fuhrer’s name. Mr Eisler said Hitler (from Hutte, Hitten, diminutive Hittel) means ‘small cottager’ or ‘little cotman’ and is originally an expression of contempt on the part of the bigger landowners in the neighbourhood.
Ok, let’s pick up the rod and reel. Move on to our third and final pond. See what we can hook.
I was thinking, VE. At long last the war in Europe is over. That particular production line finally shut down. A production line that produced death and destruction on an industrial scale. A killing – a death – every five seconds for six years.
Death to death assembly line. Now it was life’s turn.
Thinking of the elation, the joy, the relief… sure enough, I began to wonder. Can you guess? Yeah, you got it. I began to wonder if there was an upsurge in the birth rate nine months after VE Day. My hunch was, I’ll bet there was.
And my hunch was right. In 1945 there were 795,868 live births in England and Wales. In 1946 there were 955,266. 160,000 more births in 1946 than in 1945. That’s a twenty percent increase. And in 1947 there were 1,025,427 live births. That’s 70,000 more than there were in 1946. And stands to reason, all those soldiers, airmen and sailors coming home. But percentage-wise the biggest spike is the first three months of 1946. That’s nine months after VE-Day. So there was a lot going on on VE Day. It was the end of the war and the beginning of the baby boomers. This might be putting it a little bit brazenly, VE Day wasn’t just Winston Churchill holding forth and the King broadcasting and dancing in the streets. There was also a lot of daisy bumping. And why not.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com –
home of London Walks,
London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do
to attract and keep the best guides in London –
you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating:
the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative –
is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor
(and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)…
well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar
and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…
come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.