Photo: Harry Woolacott, my wife’s grandfather, and her aunt Tessa, c. 1942
As Helpful Digital, my team worked on the 75th anniversary of VE & VJ Day in 2020, which was sadly overshadowed by the pandemic. Which explains the significance, I think, of the 80th anniversary this year, recognising this may be one of the last times the generation with first-hand memories are still with us to remember the Second World War.
Still, when the project kicked off, it felt a bit abstract, and a bit rinse-and-repeat for me, if I’m honest. I’ve never been massively into war history – seen the big battle films and can reel off the great men, but otherwise… and certainly as we mark 80 years on from VJ Day today, Bridge over the River Kwai is about the limit of my knowledge of the War in Asia. I’d say it wasn’t really my thing.
Imperial War Museums and DCMS had a plan to get families to find and share letters written by their parents and grandparents during the Second World War. With the working title ‘Letters to Loved Ones’, the idea was that it would help engage younger generations with remembrance.
I wasn’t sure. Where’s the user need? Do people really have boxes of wartime correspondence in their lofts? Would younger generations be interested anyway? And – sigh – what a GDPR/accessibility/moderation headache.
Then the letters started to come in.
Quickly, we learned that – doh – we needed to find a way to let people send us more than a single snap of a letter. So people started to email in the other pages, the newspaper cuttings, the wedding photos, and the contemporary artwork.
My freelance colleagues and I have plenty of experience sorting out user-generated content but it soon became clear that this wasn’t a job about checking for rude comments or missing dates. These were bona fide historical artefacts, sometimes read for the very first time by the family members of the original senders and recipients, shared with pride and sometimes sadness. There were tales of encounters with leaders and Hollywood stars. Words of consolation to bereaved families. Incredible stories of survival. Some sad final letters.
With over 450 shared so far, the job for me over the last five months or so has turned into something more compelling than I ever expected. I’ve been trying to do my best to liaise with the contributors and publish them online so that they can be read and appreciated by a wider audience (now, and for posterity in the Government Web Archive). I’ve tried to make homemade scans as legible as possible, pulling out quotes, obscuring home addresses (just in case), labelling photos with names, and wrangling PDFs. It’s been a proper web-publishing job.
The lovely replies I’ve had from the contributors has made this one of the most heartwarming projects I’ve ever worked on, and a reminder that digital isn’t necessarily about services and transformation. It can be about recognition, connection and belonging too.
“I shared the link with my mum who is really pleased to see the Letters to Loved Ones project, and proud her father’s letters are given some attention.”
The letters have given me an electrifying, quite emotional connection to the wartime generation, and made me see it in a new light.
Maybe it’s being a parent of teenage boys, but reading matter-of-fact letters like Mrs Pitts’ to her son Clive brought it home to me how fragile life is, and how ordinary young people were suddenly transported to strange places to do things they never dreamed of. Not everyone was a cheery Dambuster.
“I ain’t fighting anyone no more – no more guns, mines or the other things which have scared the daylights out of me.”
The war separated families for so long, so arbitrarily, it’s hard for people of my generation to really comprehend. VE or VJ Days weren’t all about bunting and tea parties, as a lot of letters reflect, and those who survived the war didn’t necessarily make it home quickly or in some tragic cases, at all.
“I cannot go out to celebrate and don’t feel I want to without you, but at the same time I feel a little forlorn, and no doubt you can understand it
For some, being taken prisoner was a career setback. To some British communists, ‘victory’ raised questions. The French towns I drive past on the autoroute now were once liberated by chaps like Leonard, surprised to find themselves signing autographs like a celebrity.
Lots of the letters are pretty mundane, and the senders clearly didn’t have much to say. And yet some are gripping, like the account of a Navy crew accompanying a surrendered U-boat to Scapa Flow or quietly moving, like this poem by two regular sailors:
As I sit in the mess of an evening
My thoughts tender to wander and roam
And I think of those days back in peace time
Which I spent with my loved ones at homeThose days they seem very far distant
As along this new way which I thread
Meeting new friends as I visit
New places through this strange life that I treadSoon we get used to the strangeness
And the new friends take the place of the old
But still we keep happy and joyful
As the same story’s retoldYet deep in our hearts we remember
That when this war is over and won
We’ll go back to our folks by the fireside
And we’ll know that our job was well done.
It’s been a privilege to manage the inbox these last few months, checking to see which stories had come in each day. Thanks to the DCMS and Imperial War Museums teams for bringing this to life, and above all, to the contributors for sharing these slices of their families’ history.
I’ll genuinely miss it.
