I know I have been given many wonderful opportunities in my life but this week I had probably one of the greatest honours of my life in my own community, lighting the Oystermouth Castle Beacon and Lamp of Peace to commemorate VE Day.
This week has seen a tremendous build up to the 80th Anniversary of VE day on Thursday. Throughout the week the media has done its very best to put this moment of remembrance at the centre of our minds with all sorts of regular programmes from the schedule that have focuses on the end of the war in Europe.
For so many of us, Sunday evening involves a sofa and the Antiques Roadshow. One of the best parts of the show is trying to work out how much a particular piece would make at auction. Sometimes people appear slightly disappointed that maybe their treasure is not worth a fortune, other times they are amazed that an odd family heirloom from the back of a cupboard could be worth a small fortune.
On Sunday’s programme nothing was given a monetary value because everything on the show really was priceless.
A series of hand drawn pictures from a father to his children keeping them close and trying to reassure them as the war took him away for precious years of their early lives.
One of the presenters took a trip to Bletchley Park to view an Enigma Machine, one of the machines the Germans used to encrypt their secret messages. With the machine offering millions of possible combinations of encryption the Germans were confident that their messages would remain secret but of course they hadn’t factored in Alan Turing and his team and the rudimentary computer they had built to break the code.
We were joined by Katie Fenton form ITV Wales
Every time I hear the name Bletchley Park I think of the lovely Gwen Watkins who sadly passed away earlier this year. Gwen’s grandchildren and my kids went to Oystermouth School and many an afternoon we would chat at the school gates waiting for the bell at the end of the day. Gwen was an extraordinary woman who had met her husband, the poet Vernon Watkins, during their time working together breaking codes at Bletchley Park. I was always impressed that she and Vernon had been great friends with Dylan Thomas but that paled by comparison when she once mentioned in passing that she and Vernon had been wartime codebreakers.
Other items on the show included a small pair of clogs given as a souvenir by a brave Dutch Couple who took in a British soldier who was lost during Operation Market Garden. A yellow star of David given to a Canadian Soldier who liberated Jews from a concentration camp and a watch worn throughout the war by a lady’s father. Every item told a story of heroism and love.
Photos courtesy Liam Matthews Photgraphy
The other programme I saw which had a VE Day special was the Repair Shop, possibly the loveliest programme on television. On any given day I find myself in tears by the end of the show but this week it surpassed itself. A clock that had taken a British Airman around the world but had also sat on his bedside table for 62 years of marriage, a nurse’s autograph book signed with messages from the soldiers she had nursed throughout the war, the cap of a West Indian Airman who had crossed the Atlantic to serve Britain in her hour of need. Television at its emotional and informative best.
If I’m honest I grew up in the shadow of the war whilst also feeling it was a lifetime ago. My mother would mention her time in London teaching during the blitz and my dad would talk about sailing on the wild seas of the Bay of Biscay but that was a time when the world was in black and white. The 60’s and 70’s really were a world away from the Second World War.
Photo Courtesy of Liam Matthews Photgraphy
Now looking back I realise that it wasn’t that far away at all. The older I get the more time seems to get concertinaed. For all my talk of celebrating 50 years in music, which now is moving towards 52 years, it still surprises me that I was in fact born only 15 years after VE Day, that’s the equivalent of 2010 to 2025!!
And now…how I wish I had asked more questions of my parents. One of my sons has just moved to Leyton in London. Over the past few weeks he has undertaken detective work to find out where in Leyton my mum lodged during the wartime years as a teacher. It was going through some old papers that we found a couple of envelopes addressed to my mum which pinpointed her London homes. He was delighted to find out that he now lives almost equidistant to those homes and that he now walks the streets she did 80 years ago
I remember asking her did she go to Buckingham Palace on VE Day and I’m pretty sure she celebrated locally in Leyton, although she and her friends from Swansea did travel into central London for VJ the following August.
Stan Pope – Royal Navy 1945
As for my dad I have no idea where he was on that momentous day and I’m kicking myself.
Of course the war continued in the Far East until August. The celebrations in May 1945 has often left those who continued fighting in the war against Japan feel like a ‘forgotten’ army.
This VE day will possibly be the last major commemoration with those who were there at the time. This is why it is so important that we mark these events and tell our children because as George Santayana wrote,
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
It’s even more poignant that those words were written in 1905, at the start of a century that saw not one but two world wars.
With all of these thoughts going around in my mind I was delighted by a phone call out of the blue. There was to be an evening of celebration and commemoration of VE at Oystermouth Castle. The night would feature music from the 1940’s followed by the lighting of the Castle Beacon and Lamp of Peace. I would have been pleased to pop along and do some songs but to be asked to actually light the Beacon itself….
It’s at times like these I think about my grandparents and parents and how honoured they would eb too. VE day and VJ Day marked the end of many years of fear, despair and hardship. In many ways the following years would prove be just as testing in different ways with rationing and undiagnosed post traumatic stress disorder in those who had seen into the depths of hell and now had to try to live a normal life again.
This week we honour those who gave their lives for our freedom and honour those who rose to the challenge to build a new world. It’s our job not to let them down.