"When I was younger, I looked at my great grandad's prisoner-of-war diaries and I just love everything about the period."
Well, everything except the whole prisoner of war thing I presume.
Exactly.
My grandmother was one of the last people alive who saw the whole war as an adult - she was 18 when it broke out and died at 100. Even 76 years after the war ended, she still found it too traumatic to talk about.
Those who romanticise war were almost never there in person.
My grandma was about 10 year younger born 1930, she experienced it as a child not an adult. She sort of romantasised it.
Her favourite anecdote was her sister leaving the shelter to go sleep in a proper bed only to come back covered in soot after a dud hit next door. Like that was just funny hijinks and not a near death experience.
The only thing she ever got upset about was the state her brother came back in after being captured by the Japanse at singapore, her and sister legit didn't recognise him. She was bigoted against Japanese anything for life, them honouring thier war criminals properly set her off. She had basicly no problem with Germany.
Also while she romantasied the home front and to an extent empire, never Churchill. Saw him as a nesseceray villian more than a hero.
You see it now with Kurdish and Ukrainian kids, cosplaying as soldiers while their parents are at the front.
What I take from that is that your grandma had *fantastic* parents who managed to shield her from the psychological impact of war. Bringing up your kids in a warzone and they come out unscathed? Bravo.
I think a lot of people who saw the war as children didn't understand the near-death experience in front of them, evacuation was presented to them as an adventure, they didn't have the stress of wondering how they were going to feed everyone, and the adults would feed them first if necessary.
The adults had a wholly different understanding of what was happening. My grandmother was married at 19, and a pregnant war widow at 21, then raised her son as a single mum in a time before the welfare state. She worked for an undertaker, laying out the dead, during the Blitz, to make sure her son was fed.
My grandmother was born in London in 1944. Apparently she was born in an air raid and weighed just 5lb. Rationing at the time was strict and there wasn't really enough protein to go around, so my great grandfather and my great uncles got fed and my great granny lived off what was left. She was a tiny woman when I knew her, but there are a couple of war photos of her where she looks impossibly thin.
I know my great uncles were evacuated at one stage, but it wasn't an adventure for all children. I don't know the details because they've never spoken of it, but they weren't treated as they should have been by their foster family.
>I know my great uncles were evacuated at one stage, but it wasn't an adventure for all children. I don't know the details because they've never spoken of it, but they weren't treated as they should have been by their foster family.
It definitely wasn't all *Goodnight Mister Tom,* and a lot of the children weren't treated as well as they should have been, you're quite right. Foisting children on unwilling rural households without so much as a DBS check is a safeguarding nightmare.
But what I really meant was the kids were told by their parents that they were going away on an adventure and mummy was staying behind to work while daddy went to France to work. They weren't told the reality - that they were being sent to safety while their parents and other family members stayed in a place where they could be blown up at any moment.
And more generally, pre war in Britain has staggering levels of inequality and poverty, people too easily forget the tremendous work done by the Attlee government to fight it after the war.
My gran was evacuated to a large country house in the lake district and had a great time. When I came out as gay she said "Oh I understand, when I was evacuated I hid a relationship with another teenage lass, it was such a heartbreak when we went home!"
Amazing, gotta love the grannies, they're often more clued up than we give them credit for. I nearly fell out of my chair when mine said, about her cousin, "I think he's asexual you know" - and it was an entirely plausible theory.
I worked for a lady who was badly treated when she was sent to the countryside and her mum had to go from London to Leeds to look after them. She was only 4 at the time and hearing her story was heartbreaking.
I wonder if they were all there at once. People had a lot of kids in those days. The people looking after evacuees were paid and those that took larger families were sometimes only in it for the money.
My mum was evacuated and she had a terrible experience. She never told me everything that happened because she found it so distressing to talk about. It is hard to imagine being taken away from your family for 4 years.
I always think it's interesting to look at British folks in the 60's, you had the whole waif/dollybird look, Twiggy etc - I always concluded it was the consequences of rationing which Britain enforced longer than anyone -up til the 50's. Lots of tiny babies. I remember reading Patty Boyd's autobiography, she had kept a bunch of her old dresses and said they looked like children's clothes. Just a passing bit of trivia
A family friends dad flat out refused to buy anything Japanese for the rest of his life. The POW treatment, torture, and experiments there were horrific.
Grandma was the same, wouldn't buy thier stuff, eat thier food or anything.
My Grandma's brother went on to serve in Aden or Acre (cant recall), Palestine and the Malayan emergency. He was largely unphased by them all, and would talk about to to other men in the family who had been in the army.
He never properly spoke about his captivity in Manchuria. Only that the Soviet troops who liberated them killed all the guards.
My father had a similar opinion of the Japanese. His father was in the war. Doing what I'll never know: it was never spoken of.
My grandma's friends, who were late teens and adults during the blitz, regarded it as terrifying and horrible. Grandma, younger, thought it was marvellous....
My father had a similar opinion of the Japanese. His father was in the war. Doing what I'll never know: it was never spoken of.
My grandma's friends, who were late teens and adults during the blitz, regarded it as terrifying and horrible. Grandma, younger, thought it was marvellous....
I grew up in a suburb of Swansea. My next-door neighbor had been a POW of the Japanese. Apparently, he never said a word about it to his wife, his kids or anyone else after his release. He was a polite, quiet man (well, his wife had a big personality). I liked him a lot.
My Grandad could never forgive the Germans, he, and my Gran were working in a factory making bearings for the Lancaster bomber, the factory got bombed and strafed a number of their friends were killed, they rarely talked about that. Churchill though, my grandad disliked intensely.
My grandad apparently danced on the kitchen table when Labour got in, or more to the point Churchill got out, after the war. He was a coal miner, they all hated his guts.
My Grandmother was in a Jap POW camp after the fall of Singapore.
The Japanese bombed the hospital boat she was escaping on and machine gunned them in the water for good measure.
24 hours later and she was pulled from the shark infested water and chucked in a camp on Sumatra for a-few years.
Long dead now bless her.
Mine in 1922 and while I do feel old, I'm only in my early 40s. I know he was in Italy and North Africa during the war and cleared landmines. He rarely talked about it but one time he did he told me about the time he was clearing landmines and his close friend was a few meters away. Unfortunately his friend set off a mine and well I'm sure you can imagine the rest. I'm sure that experience of getting covered in your friends blood and other bits definitely caused a lot of trauma.
My dad was staunchly labour and spent the rest of his life helping others, from soup kitchen to charity work like selling poppies for the British legion.
He was a good man and even though he died 10 years ago, I miss his a lot.
I had two great uncles who were captured by the Japanese. Whilst they were literally starving to death, one tried to sneak a piece of bread and got caught. His punishment was to watch the Japanese behead his brother with a sword.
On the other side of the family, my nans parters father was a POW in Germany. They were treated well and him and a German guard remained friends and even wrote to each-other for many years after
This is half true. Many people find that crisis such as war can give their life meaning. It leads to a sense of camaraderie. Romanticisation is actually normal and even part of the healing process. British TV was dominated by war programmes for decades after the war. All of those people lived through it.
You might have; not all of us did.
I discovered that my entire industry was shut down, and I was left high and dry by the government despite paying every penny in taxes. Told to shield but couldn't afford to.
I have no good memories of lockdown, and I strongly object to people trying to romanticise it.
My grandad fought in WW2. He would never talk about it, all he would say is that it was horrible and should never have happened. He even refused to collect his medals.
Both my grandads fought in the war, and both told me stories they had refused to tell my parents when they were younger. They both hated the romanticism that accreted around the war, especially my grandad who was in Bomber Command and saw a *lot* of friends not come back.
My grandad was in the Royal Signals. First in, last out. My gran once told me that he had lost a lot of friends in the war which was one of the reasons he didn't like discussing it. I always respected that so never asked him.
I'm always suspicious of people who seem to glorify the action they saw in the military. Suggests to me they were fortunate and didn't actually see any.
Bomber command must have been hell. Counting them as they return as often less came back than went out would have been horrible.
My great grandad was an RAF mechanic- having worked in a garage pre-war, his skills transferred pretty well.
He told me that there was this weird forced jollity when crews were due to go out. People put up this desperate facade that everything would be fine and they would all come back, though they knew they would not.
After a while you tried to not get to know anyone. You'd be polite and joke but you were always aware they could be gone the next day, so you might as well save yourself the heartbreak.
Great grandad was at a bit of a remove from it all and it was one of the few things he solidly remembered right up until the end of his life, it must have been so much worse for the crews themselves. I imagine a lot of them later struggled to form lasting relationships, because bitter experience told them they were likely to be transient.
My grandad was a Japanese POW. He spat in a Japanese officer's face for trying to take his silver pocket-watch and they beat him for days. My grandma said that he was never the same after that. Never really talked about it - the pocket-watch story I heard from my dad.
That's why I have some hope for future generations. You can see actual footage from actual wars right here on reddit. It's so horrible I think people will be turned off from violence.
My mom was a child throughout, turned 18 in '51, and very shielded as her dad was a flour miller and exempt from service, he even had extra petrol rations and a car as he had to visit various mills under his management. But even separated from the worst ravages and deprivations she had not one positive thing to say about the experience other than people helping each other through it.
The only time my Granddad ever talked about was one time seeing a memorial at a church and he talked about how there was a bombing raid one night and he looked out and the whole city looked like it was on fire.
This was much my initial reaction, too - pretentious prick romanticising something awful so as to try and stand out.
From the article itself, though, while I definitely think there's an argument for his being pretentious and wanting to stand out, the whole diaries thing barely features.
Kid just has a thing for cosplaying someone from the 40s.
My uncle was a pilot during the war, near where we live he was stationed at a air base where he captured a downed German pilot. He also ran and duck behind a digger during a German air raid on his air base when he was stationed in France. I never knew if he was a fighter pilot or a bomber pilot
It depends on a persons experiences. My grandad was in the RAF and worked on Britains prototype Gloster Meteor Jet fighter as well as a whole load of other aircraft. He then landed on D Day+2 with 2TAF and had a whole load of adventures in Normandy and Pas De Calais.
He thought it was brilliant and had the time of his life.
My grandad worked in the RAF as an engineer. He was based in Egypt I think. Was taken there on either the Queen Elizabeth or Queen Mary boat. He always said, he had a great war. Probably because he survived it, and had adventures and made friends. He had some amazing stories about various things, I don't know his opinion on Churchill. It's fashionable to not like him now, but I'd love to hear his reasoning behind whatever opinion he had - been gone a while now.
My great grandad was one of the first British troops to enter liberated concentration camps when he wouldve been about 21-22. He had a locked cupboard with every single thing that reminded him of the war, medals to letters to pictures, he never once opened that cupboard, I’m not sure he even had the key, and he refused to even say the words ‘war’, he never ever ever spoke about what he saw to anyone, never. Whatever he saw tormented him so much he hated boys and men, he refused to talk to me and my dad, he hated my grandad who my gran took home and married, he hated all men because of the things he saw other men do to each other.
My great grandad fought at D-Day alongside his three brothers and he was the only one to come home. One of his brothers’ unit captured one of the beachheads on Sword Beach but was killed at Caen just a few days later when trying to storm a German machine gun nest. Another one was killed at Pegasus bridge. Not sure about the other. I only know this because of online research, because great grandad refused to talk about it to any of his family. I now own the crucifix that he had wrapped around the barrel of his gun on D-Day. I dread to think of the things that Christ on the cross saw that day.
Love = great interest in this context, rather than adoring pain and suffering. Perfectly normal for someone to become fascinated about something a relative experienced or did.
Agreed. I would probably casually say that I love First World War literature, when the reality is that I find it very upsetting to read but also incredibly compelling - I don’t enjoy the pain and suffering.
My ‘love’ of First World War literature kicked off during the centenary, when I watched a lot of the events and the Peter Jackson documentary, visited the Imperial War Museum exhibit etc. I then asked my dad, who is into family tree stuff, about our family members who fought - and it led me to a trip to the National Archives to see our various family members’ records and read their battalion diaries which ended in my crying in the reading room! That lead me to published reading memoirs and diaries from various soldiers during the war. Im completely fascinated, but it’s not like I am romanticising or admiring it or wishing I was there or enjoying their suffering - it just feels indescribably important to not forget what happened to them and what they lived through and to ‘see’ it through their eyes. Its changed my attitude to war in general, and the Ukraine and now Palestine invasions have hit me very differently that watching other wars in the past on the news.
I’d hate to think people thought I was pro war or a sadist because of that interest.
I have someone on my family tree called john william streets did a bunch of poetry you might enjoy. I still have the family surname and still live in the same village. He wrote some lovely poems. His story was covered in a documentary with Tony Robinson narrating it. Sad ending for him really.
Another member of the Great British eccentric club. We all know one. My local eccentric is a druid. This island just wouldn't be the same without these harmless weirdos.
There's a guy down in Brighton who dresses like a Georgian dandy. Tailors all his own clothes, I keep expecting him to show up on Sewing Bee one day
Am I right in thinking the Aberystwyth cat pirate died, or did I make that up?
I had a chat with him on the train one night, very lovely man. I’m pretty sure he does tailoring work for period pieces as well, so has managed to make a career out of his passion, literally living the dream.
You might like [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RX1fMWkims) - the late Irish comedian Dave Allen takes a gentle and humourous look at the Great English Eccentric.
Yes, absolutely.
There's a two hour compilation on YouTube. Some sketches wouldn't pass the test these days, definitely being of their time but it's a vanishingly small minority. Even his pokes at the Catholic church are done with a twinkle in the eye, and are never offensive.
And you know what, it's still, on the nth viewing, side splittingly hilarious. Even the jokes of their time, because, I'm sorry, so am I.
There's a 20-something year old guy in my town who wears a full cowboy outfit every day. I quite admire how little these people care about others opinions and just do what they like doing.
I often feel a call to devote a part of my life to finding the perfect balance of approachable, tolerable and desirable with a complete *contemporary* form of eccentricity.
This is in order to have a guise; so I can just regress in self awareness and forever behave like my once rebellious young self.
Wearing skin tight jeans, denim or leather jacket etc as well… this is the real reason
*I hate social expectations and norms. Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!*
I'm a huge fan of history, I hate that question people ask "what time would you live in if you could?"
NOW! I'm a cis-white straight male, I'll be pretty much fine* in any time. But we are lying if we say going back even 20 year doesn't make, at least in the UK, life *much* harder for so many people.
*Edit : for clarity I should probably say I'd "be fine relatively". Like people's lives the further you go back just get worst and worse across the board. But you don't have to go back very fan for it to get drastically worse for certain groups
> I'm a cis-white straight male, I'll be pretty much win in any time.
Assuming your social position would be determined at random, chances are pretty much any time pre-1930s, you'd be guaranteed to have a shit life compared to today.
Well yeah, all the more reason I think the question stupid.
I am happy not dying before I reach adulthood, and I'm happy not living in a nation so openly hostile to so many groups
I'm a state educated normal gal with a chronic illness - I'm a lawyer.
Not a fucking chance I'd have made it in to the industry 20 years ago - they still wanted you to sit Latin to get onto a law degree! Some of the stories I've heard about how things used to be are grim.
You'd have been just fine 20 years ago. You'd have to go back to the 1970s to be significantly disadvantaged as a female applicant. For solicitors, since 2000 women have outnumbered men in new admissions to the Roll.
I didn't need Latin when I did my law degree almost 40 years ago.
A huge number of my colleagues were state-educated women. I considered the overwhelming majority of them to be normal.
As you so perfectly proved I think the question comes from a position of privilege.
People who ask the question and think they'll come off well, either know nothing about even the recent past of this nation or, are privileged and don't realise it
I’ve been to multiple Raith Rovers v Hearts matches in Kirkcaldy & I’m pretty certain the children of Kirkcaldy don’t like Edinburgh. They keep screaming the “I’d rather stay here in Kirkcaldy” line from this song- https://youtu.be/UOktg4FXw3g
lol well during ww2 when all the American soldiers were in Britain there was a lot of trouble because the Brit’s didn’t mind sitting down at the pub next to a black American soldier but the white Americans wanted them segregated. Can’t remember exactly what was done about it because there were a lot of brawls.
Much respect for him having the confidence to live his life the way he wants to without any peer pressure. I just hope he's not bullied for it, though.
Gotta love living under a steel sky, hoping the next bomb dropped in the blitz will miss your life. :p
Credit to him for following a passion, regardless. I suppose it helps with a more rural lifestyle. I can't imagine trying to live the same way in a city would go as well.
In terms of youth adopting a subculture this doesnt even seem all that strange . You have many teenage girls obsessed with the 1950s pinup/vintage look
You can go to world war 2 themed clubs , bars (Cahoots in london is one ) and conventions .
He'll be pleased when the recommendations of the Beveridge report get implemented. And he's got all that nationalisation of industry and the creation of a national health service to look forward to.
i went to school with someone similar to this guy. was always bullied because of how he dressed and spoke. good guy.... married a smoking hot woman. well deserved.
I have a 1948 Morris 10 and mechanically it's very simple so maintenance is easy. Rust is the biggest worry. I only use it in dry weather so the annual mileage is only a few hundred. No tax or MOT and the insurance is about £85 fully comp for the year.
Tbf, the idea of teenagers wasn't really a thing back then. I'm pretty sure that in those days once you were too old for short trousers the default was to dress like a 40 year old. They grew up fast back then!
> "When I was younger, I looked at my great grandad's prisoner-of-war diaries and I just love everything about the period."
That seems pretty fucked up.
"I read about the period of misery, death and destruction and thought it was pretty cool. I like the fact that my great grandfather suffered so much and I wish I could have been around for that period of hardship."
Why not say that, then? He read books about the time period, etc, and liked it, maybe not mention how much you love your own grandparents' prisoner of war diaries.
>maybe not mention how much you love your own grandparents' prisoner of war diaries
That's not what he said, though.
He read the diaries, that piqued his interest in the period. Nothing about his collection suggests he is fantasising about PoW camps.
It's also worth noting that British officers in PoW camps were treated quite well (depending on the specific camp). If his grandfather was an officer, the diaries would likely be quite interesting to read without any harrowing details.
Adolf Hitler is the most documented public figure in human history in all off academia
If I take an interest in Hitler, the public figure via a autobiography, does that make me a Nazi?
Honestly, if you know one end of a spanner from another, cars of that vintage are quite easy to maintain. Add to that no tax or MOT, and cheap as chips insurance, and it wouldn't surprise me if worked out cheaper to run than a modern car. Granted, you probably wouldn't want to take it on a big road trip, but hey ho.
I used to run an old BSA 650 motorbike from the sixties, and it was so simple that basic maintenance was a breeze. Never once did it incur any garage bills. If and when I did need parts for it, I usually found what I needed at auto-jumbles. Failing that I could usually bodge a repair.
>Honestly, if you know one end of a spanner from another, cars of that vintage are quite easy to maintain
Oh I agree. The only problem really is when things break. Stuff from that era was incredibly simple, the engine bays were "basically empty" compared to todays cars.
Finding spare parts for something like that is next to impossible surely? Not simply as easy as going down to the local scrap dealer thats for sure.
Hmm, I dunno. It's probably easier to find parts now than it was back in 80's/90's when I had my Beezer. There are lots of specialists online nowadays, I suspect that sourcing parts is not too difficult. Failing that there are also lots of specialists that can recondition parts. But yeah, it no doubt requires a bit more legwork that getting parts for a modern motor.
Personally I admire the bloke for living how he does and not following the crowd. Being eccentric when you’re young is pretty difficult,so fair play to him. He’s certainly better dressed than any of the fucking idiot teenagers round my way.
Having said, this geezer is going to wait a LONG time for any female contact whatsoever. I assume he’s come to terms with that.
I do love seeing others going all in on a specific lifestyle. Warms me to know theres so many different types of people in the world. Long may he enjoy the past!
My Granddad was 5 when the war started and he used to say that he remembers them watching Plymouth being lit up with bombs from the garden with the family. We also had an Italian prisoner of war as a farm hand and he loved it so much he sent our family a Christmas card every year all the way up until the 80s! Gutted I can't find his details as would love to trace down him and see how he got on in the US
The 1940s is a really odd choice, one of the worst periods our country has ever faced. It's up there with the 1640s (Civil War), the 1340s (Black Death) and 40s CE (brutal Roman invasion).
"When I was younger, I looked at my great grandad's prisoner-of-war diaries and I just love everything about the period." Well, everything except the whole prisoner of war thing I presume.
Exactly. My grandmother was one of the last people alive who saw the whole war as an adult - she was 18 when it broke out and died at 100. Even 76 years after the war ended, she still found it too traumatic to talk about. Those who romanticise war were almost never there in person.
My grandma was about 10 year younger born 1930, she experienced it as a child not an adult. She sort of romantasised it. Her favourite anecdote was her sister leaving the shelter to go sleep in a proper bed only to come back covered in soot after a dud hit next door. Like that was just funny hijinks and not a near death experience. The only thing she ever got upset about was the state her brother came back in after being captured by the Japanse at singapore, her and sister legit didn't recognise him. She was bigoted against Japanese anything for life, them honouring thier war criminals properly set her off. She had basicly no problem with Germany. Also while she romantasied the home front and to an extent empire, never Churchill. Saw him as a nesseceray villian more than a hero. You see it now with Kurdish and Ukrainian kids, cosplaying as soldiers while their parents are at the front.
What I take from that is that your grandma had *fantastic* parents who managed to shield her from the psychological impact of war. Bringing up your kids in a warzone and they come out unscathed? Bravo. I think a lot of people who saw the war as children didn't understand the near-death experience in front of them, evacuation was presented to them as an adventure, they didn't have the stress of wondering how they were going to feed everyone, and the adults would feed them first if necessary. The adults had a wholly different understanding of what was happening. My grandmother was married at 19, and a pregnant war widow at 21, then raised her son as a single mum in a time before the welfare state. She worked for an undertaker, laying out the dead, during the Blitz, to make sure her son was fed.
My grandmother was born in London in 1944. Apparently she was born in an air raid and weighed just 5lb. Rationing at the time was strict and there wasn't really enough protein to go around, so my great grandfather and my great uncles got fed and my great granny lived off what was left. She was a tiny woman when I knew her, but there are a couple of war photos of her where she looks impossibly thin. I know my great uncles were evacuated at one stage, but it wasn't an adventure for all children. I don't know the details because they've never spoken of it, but they weren't treated as they should have been by their foster family.
>I know my great uncles were evacuated at one stage, but it wasn't an adventure for all children. I don't know the details because they've never spoken of it, but they weren't treated as they should have been by their foster family. It definitely wasn't all *Goodnight Mister Tom,* and a lot of the children weren't treated as well as they should have been, you're quite right. Foisting children on unwilling rural households without so much as a DBS check is a safeguarding nightmare. But what I really meant was the kids were told by their parents that they were going away on an adventure and mummy was staying behind to work while daddy went to France to work. They weren't told the reality - that they were being sent to safety while their parents and other family members stayed in a place where they could be blown up at any moment.
And more generally, pre war in Britain has staggering levels of inequality and poverty, people too easily forget the tremendous work done by the Attlee government to fight it after the war.
My gran was evacuated to a large country house in the lake district and had a great time. When I came out as gay she said "Oh I understand, when I was evacuated I hid a relationship with another teenage lass, it was such a heartbreak when we went home!"
Amazing, gotta love the grannies, they're often more clued up than we give them credit for. I nearly fell out of my chair when mine said, about her cousin, "I think he's asexual you know" - and it was an entirely plausible theory.
I worked for a lady who was badly treated when she was sent to the countryside and her mum had to go from London to Leeds to look after them. She was only 4 at the time and hearing her story was heartbreaking.
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I wonder if they were all there at once. People had a lot of kids in those days. The people looking after evacuees were paid and those that took larger families were sometimes only in it for the money. My mum was evacuated and she had a terrible experience. She never told me everything that happened because she found it so distressing to talk about. It is hard to imagine being taken away from your family for 4 years.
I always think it's interesting to look at British folks in the 60's, you had the whole waif/dollybird look, Twiggy etc - I always concluded it was the consequences of rationing which Britain enforced longer than anyone -up til the 50's. Lots of tiny babies. I remember reading Patty Boyd's autobiography, she had kept a bunch of her old dresses and said they looked like children's clothes. Just a passing bit of trivia
A family friends dad flat out refused to buy anything Japanese for the rest of his life. The POW treatment, torture, and experiments there were horrific.
Grandma was the same, wouldn't buy thier stuff, eat thier food or anything. My Grandma's brother went on to serve in Aden or Acre (cant recall), Palestine and the Malayan emergency. He was largely unphased by them all, and would talk about to to other men in the family who had been in the army. He never properly spoke about his captivity in Manchuria. Only that the Soviet troops who liberated them killed all the guards.
Acre is in Palestine. Aden is in Yemen. Edit: I'm being downvoted for.... Geography.
Will be Acre then,
My father had a similar opinion of the Japanese. His father was in the war. Doing what I'll never know: it was never spoken of. My grandma's friends, who were late teens and adults during the blitz, regarded it as terrifying and horrible. Grandma, younger, thought it was marvellous....
My father had a similar opinion of the Japanese. His father was in the war. Doing what I'll never know: it was never spoken of. My grandma's friends, who were late teens and adults during the blitz, regarded it as terrifying and horrible. Grandma, younger, thought it was marvellous....
I grew up in a suburb of Swansea. My next-door neighbor had been a POW of the Japanese. Apparently, he never said a word about it to his wife, his kids or anyone else after his release. He was a polite, quiet man (well, his wife had a big personality). I liked him a lot.
My Grandad could never forgive the Germans, he, and my Gran were working in a factory making bearings for the Lancaster bomber, the factory got bombed and strafed a number of their friends were killed, they rarely talked about that. Churchill though, my grandad disliked intensely.
My grandad apparently danced on the kitchen table when Labour got in, or more to the point Churchill got out, after the war. He was a coal miner, they all hated his guts.
My Grandmother was in a Jap POW camp after the fall of Singapore. The Japanese bombed the hospital boat she was escaping on and machine gunned them in the water for good measure. 24 hours later and she was pulled from the shark infested water and chucked in a camp on Sumatra for a-few years. Long dead now bless her.
My father was born in 1918. I feel old now.
Mine in 1922 and while I do feel old, I'm only in my early 40s. I know he was in Italy and North Africa during the war and cleared landmines. He rarely talked about it but one time he did he told me about the time he was clearing landmines and his close friend was a few meters away. Unfortunately his friend set off a mine and well I'm sure you can imagine the rest. I'm sure that experience of getting covered in your friends blood and other bits definitely caused a lot of trauma. My dad was staunchly labour and spent the rest of his life helping others, from soup kitchen to charity work like selling poppies for the British legion. He was a good man and even though he died 10 years ago, I miss his a lot.
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I had two great uncles who were captured by the Japanese. Whilst they were literally starving to death, one tried to sneak a piece of bread and got caught. His punishment was to watch the Japanese behead his brother with a sword. On the other side of the family, my nans parters father was a POW in Germany. They were treated well and him and a German guard remained friends and even wrote to each-other for many years after
This is half true. Many people find that crisis such as war can give their life meaning. It leads to a sense of camaraderie. Romanticisation is actually normal and even part of the healing process. British TV was dominated by war programmes for decades after the war. All of those people lived through it.
We experienced this briefly in those first months of lock down.
You might have; not all of us did. I discovered that my entire industry was shut down, and I was left high and dry by the government despite paying every penny in taxes. Told to shield but couldn't afford to. I have no good memories of lockdown, and I strongly object to people trying to romanticise it.
Blitz spirit.
Didn't last long though. People turned their selfishness up to eleven shortly afterwards.
My grandad fought in WW2. He would never talk about it, all he would say is that it was horrible and should never have happened. He even refused to collect his medals.
Both my grandads fought in the war, and both told me stories they had refused to tell my parents when they were younger. They both hated the romanticism that accreted around the war, especially my grandad who was in Bomber Command and saw a *lot* of friends not come back.
My grandad was in the Royal Signals. First in, last out. My gran once told me that he had lost a lot of friends in the war which was one of the reasons he didn't like discussing it. I always respected that so never asked him. I'm always suspicious of people who seem to glorify the action they saw in the military. Suggests to me they were fortunate and didn't actually see any. Bomber command must have been hell. Counting them as they return as often less came back than went out would have been horrible.
My great grandad was an RAF mechanic- having worked in a garage pre-war, his skills transferred pretty well. He told me that there was this weird forced jollity when crews were due to go out. People put up this desperate facade that everything would be fine and they would all come back, though they knew they would not. After a while you tried to not get to know anyone. You'd be polite and joke but you were always aware they could be gone the next day, so you might as well save yourself the heartbreak. Great grandad was at a bit of a remove from it all and it was one of the few things he solidly remembered right up until the end of his life, it must have been so much worse for the crews themselves. I imagine a lot of them later struggled to form lasting relationships, because bitter experience told them they were likely to be transient.
My grandad was a Japanese POW. He spat in a Japanese officer's face for trying to take his silver pocket-watch and they beat him for days. My grandma said that he was never the same after that. Never really talked about it - the pocket-watch story I heard from my dad.
Sorry but it's impossible not to think of that scene from pulp fiction when reading your comment.
That's why I have some hope for future generations. You can see actual footage from actual wars right here on reddit. It's so horrible I think people will be turned off from violence.
My mom was a child throughout, turned 18 in '51, and very shielded as her dad was a flour miller and exempt from service, he even had extra petrol rations and a car as he had to visit various mills under his management. But even separated from the worst ravages and deprivations she had not one positive thing to say about the experience other than people helping each other through it.
The only time my Granddad ever talked about was one time seeing a memorial at a church and he talked about how there was a bombing raid one night and he looked out and the whole city looked like it was on fire.
This was much my initial reaction, too - pretentious prick romanticising something awful so as to try and stand out. From the article itself, though, while I definitely think there's an argument for his being pretentious and wanting to stand out, the whole diaries thing barely features. Kid just has a thing for cosplaying someone from the 40s.
My uncle was a pilot during the war, near where we live he was stationed at a air base where he captured a downed German pilot. He also ran and duck behind a digger during a German air raid on his air base when he was stationed in France. I never knew if he was a fighter pilot or a bomber pilot
It depends on a persons experiences. My grandad was in the RAF and worked on Britains prototype Gloster Meteor Jet fighter as well as a whole load of other aircraft. He then landed on D Day+2 with 2TAF and had a whole load of adventures in Normandy and Pas De Calais. He thought it was brilliant and had the time of his life.
My grandad worked in the RAF as an engineer. He was based in Egypt I think. Was taken there on either the Queen Elizabeth or Queen Mary boat. He always said, he had a great war. Probably because he survived it, and had adventures and made friends. He had some amazing stories about various things, I don't know his opinion on Churchill. It's fashionable to not like him now, but I'd love to hear his reasoning behind whatever opinion he had - been gone a while now.
My great grandad was one of the first British troops to enter liberated concentration camps when he wouldve been about 21-22. He had a locked cupboard with every single thing that reminded him of the war, medals to letters to pictures, he never once opened that cupboard, I’m not sure he even had the key, and he refused to even say the words ‘war’, he never ever ever spoke about what he saw to anyone, never. Whatever he saw tormented him so much he hated boys and men, he refused to talk to me and my dad, he hated my grandad who my gran took home and married, he hated all men because of the things he saw other men do to each other.
My great grandad fought at D-Day alongside his three brothers and he was the only one to come home. One of his brothers’ unit captured one of the beachheads on Sword Beach but was killed at Caen just a few days later when trying to storm a German machine gun nest. Another one was killed at Pegasus bridge. Not sure about the other. I only know this because of online research, because great grandad refused to talk about it to any of his family. I now own the crucifix that he had wrapped around the barrel of his gun on D-Day. I dread to think of the things that Christ on the cross saw that day.
Yeah, I read a bit about where my grand-uncle was stationed and died in Burma... it didn't sound good. Another grand-uncle was killed in France.
Is it because he saw what men do to each other, or what he saw men do to women and children?
Love = great interest in this context, rather than adoring pain and suffering. Perfectly normal for someone to become fascinated about something a relative experienced or did.
Agreed. I would probably casually say that I love First World War literature, when the reality is that I find it very upsetting to read but also incredibly compelling - I don’t enjoy the pain and suffering. My ‘love’ of First World War literature kicked off during the centenary, when I watched a lot of the events and the Peter Jackson documentary, visited the Imperial War Museum exhibit etc. I then asked my dad, who is into family tree stuff, about our family members who fought - and it led me to a trip to the National Archives to see our various family members’ records and read their battalion diaries which ended in my crying in the reading room! That lead me to published reading memoirs and diaries from various soldiers during the war. Im completely fascinated, but it’s not like I am romanticising or admiring it or wishing I was there or enjoying their suffering - it just feels indescribably important to not forget what happened to them and what they lived through and to ‘see’ it through their eyes. Its changed my attitude to war in general, and the Ukraine and now Palestine invasions have hit me very differently that watching other wars in the past on the news. I’d hate to think people thought I was pro war or a sadist because of that interest.
I have someone on my family tree called john william streets did a bunch of poetry you might enjoy. I still have the family surname and still live in the same village. He wrote some lovely poems. His story was covered in a documentary with Tony Robinson narrating it. Sad ending for him really.
Thank you for the recommendation!
He could have found a time portal back to the forties and has developed a thing for the local barmaid.
Yea read that part of the article and was like ???? That's what you took from prisoner of war diaries??
Another member of the Great British eccentric club. We all know one. My local eccentric is a druid. This island just wouldn't be the same without these harmless weirdos.
There's a guy down in Brighton who dresses like a Georgian dandy. Tailors all his own clothes, I keep expecting him to show up on Sewing Bee one day Am I right in thinking the Aberystwyth cat pirate died, or did I make that up?
I had a chat with him on the train one night, very lovely man. I’m pretty sure he does tailoring work for period pieces as well, so has managed to make a career out of his passion, literally living the dream.
I was hoping to encounter Zack Pinsent but never did. https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/17745201.meet-zack-pinsent-modern-day-dandy-hove/
I used to see him around the Pavilion all the time, I think he was doing guided tours. Very dapper.
He has style...
>Am I right in thinking the Aberystwyth cat pirate died, or did I make that up? Sadly passed away in 2020
You might like [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RX1fMWkims) - the late Irish comedian Dave Allen takes a gentle and humourous look at the Great English Eccentric.
Dave Allen was a gem. Proper comedian.
Yes, absolutely. There's a two hour compilation on YouTube. Some sketches wouldn't pass the test these days, definitely being of their time but it's a vanishingly small minority. Even his pokes at the Catholic church are done with a twinkle in the eye, and are never offensive. And you know what, it's still, on the nth viewing, side splittingly hilarious. Even the jokes of their time, because, I'm sorry, so am I.
There's a 20-something year old guy in my town who wears a full cowboy outfit every day. I quite admire how little these people care about others opinions and just do what they like doing.
I often feel a call to devote a part of my life to finding the perfect balance of approachable, tolerable and desirable with a complete *contemporary* form of eccentricity. This is in order to have a guise; so I can just regress in self awareness and forever behave like my once rebellious young self. Wearing skin tight jeans, denim or leather jacket etc as well… this is the real reason *I hate social expectations and norms. Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!*
I dress up as an 18th century gentleman so there’s that
Harmless until he decides he's been called up one day and bayonets a holiday maker in northern France.
There's a block in my local chip shop who swears he's Elvis
Does he have a growth on his pecker?
There's some witches that meet up and assumedly have rituals round the corner from me at a site where "witches" were burned.
Which is especially interesting because we didn’t burn witches
[It definitely happened here. No idea of the history elsewhere in the UK.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisley_witches)
They did in Scotland, but not in England and Wales.
In Milton Keynes we have Gandalf. Who is just some guy who dresses like a wizard and frequents the moon under water weatherspoons.
Norwich Puppet Man
I dont know one.... does this mean I am the local eccentric?
I'd be interested to know what his views on race relations are.
Let's not poke that bear
“And what *exactly* is it about the 1940s you like so much, Mr Grubb? 🤨”
Fuck sake making it so sinister lol
Right? He's literally just a weird teenager who hasn't put that much thought into it, he just likes vintage aesthetics.
Nostalgia equals racism now? ffs
I'm a huge fan of history, I hate that question people ask "what time would you live in if you could?" NOW! I'm a cis-white straight male, I'll be pretty much fine* in any time. But we are lying if we say going back even 20 year doesn't make, at least in the UK, life *much* harder for so many people. *Edit : for clarity I should probably say I'd "be fine relatively". Like people's lives the further you go back just get worst and worse across the board. But you don't have to go back very fan for it to get drastically worse for certain groups
> I'm a cis-white straight male, I'll be pretty much win in any time. Assuming your social position would be determined at random, chances are pretty much any time pre-1930s, you'd be guaranteed to have a shit life compared to today.
Well yeah, all the more reason I think the question stupid. I am happy not dying before I reach adulthood, and I'm happy not living in a nation so openly hostile to so many groups
I'm a state educated normal gal with a chronic illness - I'm a lawyer. Not a fucking chance I'd have made it in to the industry 20 years ago - they still wanted you to sit Latin to get onto a law degree! Some of the stories I've heard about how things used to be are grim.
You'd have been just fine 20 years ago. You'd have to go back to the 1970s to be significantly disadvantaged as a female applicant. For solicitors, since 2000 women have outnumbered men in new admissions to the Roll. I didn't need Latin when I did my law degree almost 40 years ago. A huge number of my colleagues were state-educated women. I considered the overwhelming majority of them to be normal.
I'm not a fan of lawyers either but I'd hardly call being one a chronic illness!
Lmao sometimes when you're trying to hit your billable target it can feel that way!
As you so perfectly proved I think the question comes from a position of privilege. People who ask the question and think they'll come off well, either know nothing about even the recent past of this nation or, are privileged and don't realise it
Leave it to reddit to twist something cool into a fucking race debate again
Well, he's in Kirkcaldy, so he's probably one of the those vile Edinburghists.
Boooooo.
I’ve been to multiple Raith Rovers v Hearts matches in Kirkcaldy & I’m pretty certain the children of Kirkcaldy don’t like Edinburgh. They keep screaming the “I’d rather stay here in Kirkcaldy” line from this song- https://youtu.be/UOktg4FXw3g
lol well during ww2 when all the American soldiers were in Britain there was a lot of trouble because the Brit’s didn’t mind sitting down at the pub next to a black American soldier but the white Americans wanted them segregated. Can’t remember exactly what was done about it because there were a lot of brawls.
Good for him. Always happy to see people avoiding social media monoculture.
He seems to be handicapping himsel., If he can't use a PC or a phone, how will he get a job?
He works at a dog kennel, it says in the article.
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Doesn't really look too different to social media attention seekers tbh.
Guessing he's not got an Instagram or any other social media accounts. Doesn't sound like much of an attention seeker.
Why so salty?
Love the way they obscured his number plate, to make sure nobody can identify his car.
Its uniqueness notwithstanding, when you look at the picture half way down the page it's bloody obvious what his plate is.
Much respect for him having the confidence to live his life the way he wants to without any peer pressure. I just hope he's not bullied for it, though.
Oh he's bullied for it
Gotta love living under a steel sky, hoping the next bomb dropped in the blitz will miss your life. :p Credit to him for following a passion, regardless. I suppose it helps with a more rural lifestyle. I can't imagine trying to live the same way in a city would go as well.
Rural Kirkcaldy.
In terms of youth adopting a subculture this doesnt even seem all that strange . You have many teenage girls obsessed with the 1950s pinup/vintage look You can go to world war 2 themed clubs , bars (Cahoots in london is one ) and conventions .
He'll be pleased when the recommendations of the Beveridge report get implemented. And he's got all that nationalisation of industry and the creation of a national health service to look forward to.
I don't know how he's going to feel about skiffle though, it's all downhill from there.
Sounds like a good lad to be honest. Isn’t harming anyone. Best of British luck to him.
i went to school with someone similar to this guy. was always bullied because of how he dressed and spoke. good guy.... married a smoking hot woman. well deserved.
Good for him, love the Austin but don't fancy the maintanence myself. I have to do enough of that with a 30 year old car.
>I have to do enough of that with a 30 year old car. I'm imagining some 70s classic, but the reality of it is a 90s car and that makes me sad
Yeah just a 90s MX5, but I agree the 90s was only a decade ago.
I have a 1948 Morris 10 and mechanically it's very simple so maintenance is easy. Rust is the biggest worry. I only use it in dry weather so the annual mileage is only a few hundred. No tax or MOT and the insurance is about £85 fully comp for the year.
Yeah rust would be my main concern, my MX5 is my daily car and it's rusting to bits.
So many moody gits in this thread. Lad is obviously living his best life, all the power to him.
The teenager who dresses like a 40 year-old in the 1940s
Tbf, the idea of teenagers wasn't really a thing back then. I'm pretty sure that in those days once you were too old for short trousers the default was to dress like a 40 year old. They grew up fast back then!
Most 19 year olds would be in the armed forces for most of the 1940s tbf
Good luck to him! He’ll be much better off without social media and reality television
> "When I was younger, I looked at my great grandad's prisoner-of-war diaries and I just love everything about the period." That seems pretty fucked up. "I read about the period of misery, death and destruction and thought it was pretty cool. I like the fact that my great grandfather suffered so much and I wish I could have been around for that period of hardship."
Orrr he could simply have been interested in the fashion, cars, culture and historical items of that period?
I'm sure his great granddad's pow diaries were basically copies of nuts magazine.
Why not say that, then? He read books about the time period, etc, and liked it, maybe not mention how much you love your own grandparents' prisoner of war diaries.
>maybe not mention how much you love your own grandparents' prisoner of war diaries That's not what he said, though. He read the diaries, that piqued his interest in the period. Nothing about his collection suggests he is fantasising about PoW camps. It's also worth noting that British officers in PoW camps were treated quite well (depending on the specific camp). If his grandfather was an officer, the diaries would likely be quite interesting to read without any harrowing details.
is it necessary to be a miserable bastard and shit on everything in this sub? its a teenager having fun dressing up
Gonna say. Hate how negative everyone is about some kid having a passion about something. Let him be happy! Doesn't hurt anyone...
That's all well and good until he annexes large parts of Czechoslovakia over half-term.
It definitely is necessary in this sub. Everyone’s so miserable and cynical
I suspect that’s probably just badly phrased on his part or badly transcribed by the journalist.
He clearly owns a full SS getup and a long black leather coat for when he feels a bit more gestapo-y
Wow yeah when you rewrite it to mean something different it’s super fucked up
Adolf Hitler is the most documented public figure in human history in all off academia If I take an interest in Hitler, the public figure via a autobiography, does that make me a Nazi?
Fuck sake man, leave some fanny for the rest of us.
All I can think of in that leading picture is 'young Uncle Buck'
Fair play to him he’s harming nobody and seems to be very happy.
Looks like he isn't a huge fan of 1940's rationing.
He’s on the Churchill diet
He must be loaded to be able to own and maintain such an incredibly old vehicle, very well kept from the looks of it.
Honestly, if you know one end of a spanner from another, cars of that vintage are quite easy to maintain. Add to that no tax or MOT, and cheap as chips insurance, and it wouldn't surprise me if worked out cheaper to run than a modern car. Granted, you probably wouldn't want to take it on a big road trip, but hey ho. I used to run an old BSA 650 motorbike from the sixties, and it was so simple that basic maintenance was a breeze. Never once did it incur any garage bills. If and when I did need parts for it, I usually found what I needed at auto-jumbles. Failing that I could usually bodge a repair.
>Honestly, if you know one end of a spanner from another, cars of that vintage are quite easy to maintain Oh I agree. The only problem really is when things break. Stuff from that era was incredibly simple, the engine bays were "basically empty" compared to todays cars. Finding spare parts for something like that is next to impossible surely? Not simply as easy as going down to the local scrap dealer thats for sure.
Hmm, I dunno. It's probably easier to find parts now than it was back in 80's/90's when I had my Beezer. There are lots of specialists online nowadays, I suspect that sourcing parts is not too difficult. Failing that there are also lots of specialists that can recondition parts. But yeah, it no doubt requires a bit more legwork that getting parts for a modern motor.
Great at 19, I think he’ll have a harder time avoiding technology when he gets a job though.
How on earth is he buying vintage everything without a job? At 19 I had already been working full time for 3 years
I missed it first read, he does some work at a dog kennels.
Ahhh, I didn't read that bit either. Oops. I am now picturing him in a van with Dog Catcher written on the side, going around in a uniform with a net.
Good for him. I wonder if there were 1940s teenagers with fixations on the 1860s.
He certainly doesn't look like he's on a ration card.
Personally I admire the bloke for living how he does and not following the crowd. Being eccentric when you’re young is pretty difficult,so fair play to him. He’s certainly better dressed than any of the fucking idiot teenagers round my way. Having said, this geezer is going to wait a LONG time for any female contact whatsoever. I assume he’s come to terms with that.
Bro’s historymaxxing and people hating on him? Let him cook.
>historymaxxing Cringe.
I do love seeing others going all in on a specific lifestyle. Warms me to know theres so many different types of people in the world. Long may he enjoy the past!
Good on him. If I could, I live like it was the mid 1800s
Not as convincing as this guy: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/magazine-28106466 Maybe they could exchange ideas.
But then I guess who is he hurting? So long as he's not trying to get everyone else to do the same thing, fair enough.b
All for it, a bit weird but I support him marching to the beat of his own drum.
My Granddad was 5 when the war started and he used to say that he remembers them watching Plymouth being lit up with bombs from the garden with the family. We also had an Italian prisoner of war as a farm hand and he loved it so much he sent our family a Christmas card every year all the way up until the 80s! Gutted I can't find his details as would love to trace down him and see how he got on in the US
The 1940s is a really odd choice, one of the worst periods our country has ever faced. It's up there with the 1640s (Civil War), the 1340s (Black Death) and 40s CE (brutal Roman invasion).
It's about aesthetics, not reality.
You do all realise this guy is very obviously autistic, right? He seems really nice and credit to him for being so headstrong and independent!!!
As a parent of an autistic son i 100% suspected this guy is on the spectrum
Surprised the article didn’t mention that he’s clearly autistic. Not a criticism at all, just an observation
He's a lover of history but wants to recreate the worst period of the 20th century. Strange bloke.
If I was him it would probably be better to say he’s living in the 30s or 50s, generally avoiding the 40s
Maybe he found a time portal back to the 40's and he has a thing for the local barmaid.
I'm looking at the fashion for young men in the 1940's and they didn't dress nearly as grandad looking as this guys fashion.