Copyright

Justin Smith

Published On

2024-12-19

Page Range

pp. 309–496

Language

  • English

Print Length

188 pages

Media

Illustrations59

6. Occupational Therapy

(Germany, 1945–1946)

Chapter of: The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing: Remembering the D-Day Wrens(pp. 309–496)
With the end of the war in Europe, the principal task of ANCXF became the management of German naval disarmament, alongside its ongoing logistical oversight of the liberated ports whose repair and re-opening were vital to the supply lines of the Allied forces amassed in Europe. Their move from France into Germany, on 15 June 1945, marked the transition from liberation to occupation. It also changed the nature of the Wrens’ work somewhat, and their social and cultural lives considerably.

Minden, in Westphalia, became the site of Admiral Burrough’s (Ramsay’s replacement as ANCXF) headquarters in Germany. The reports of Joan Prior and her fellow Wrens on the bomb damage, hunger and destitution throughout Holland and Germany brought home for the first time the scale of the ravages of war and its bitter legacy. At first, their base compound was heavily guarded and strict orders were issued forbidding fraternisation with locals. Later there is more freedom and opportunity to explore, locally and regionally. Joan is as fascinated with the scenic route to attend a court martial in Plӧn as she is with the celebrated landscape of the Harz Mountains on a short break with her close companion Ginge. And having left behind the convenient pleasures of Paris, Brussels becomes the next best thing. If greater freedom to travel as ‘tourists’ was one development of this strange post-conflict occupation, another was the semi-official encouragement for Wrens to provide entertainment (at the very least as dance partners) for the locally-stationed allied troops - ‘something for the boys’ as Joan writes home. Although there was no let-up in the pressure of their work, from the typing pool to the camp swimming pool this was, by then, war work of a very different kind.

As VJ-Day gave occasion for the historic Naval order to ‘Splice the Mainbrace’, and war was finally over, Joan Prior’s attentions, like those of her fellow Wrens, turned to demobilisation and post-war careers. The book concludes with reflections on these Wrens’ contributions to narratives about women’s war work and play. It considers the legacy of the experiences of the ordinary women who became ‘Ramsay’s Wrens’, and thus contributed so much to the extraordinary events of the liberation of Europe, from conception to conclusion.

Contributors

Justin Smith

(author)
Professor of Cinema and Television History at De Montfort University
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4141-9150

Justin Smith is Professor of Cinema and Television History at De Montfort University Leicester, where he is Director of the Research and Innovation Institute in Arts, Design and Performance. Since 2010 he has been Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded projects Channel 4 and British Film Culture (2010-14), Fifty Years of British Music Video (2015-2018), Transforming Middlemarch (2022-3) and Adapting Jane Austen for Educational and Public Engagement (2024-5). He is the author of Withnail and Us: Cult Film and Film Cults in British Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2010), and co-author (with Sue Harper) of British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (EUP, 2012). With Karen Savage, he is the co-author of ‘Deference, Deferred: Rejourn as Practice in Familial War Commemoration’, in Pinchbeck, M. and Westerside, A. (eds) (2018), Staging Loss. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97970-0_3 . Smith’s interest in digital innovations in the archive is illustrated by https://middlemarch.dmu.ac.uk/ (2023) which is considered to be the first digital genetic edition of a screen adaptation of 19th Century literature. Smith is an archival historian with special interests in post-war British cinema, television and popular music, exploring issues of cultural identity, popular memory and family history. https://www.dmu.ac.uk/about-dmu/academic-staff/technology/justin-smith/justin-timothy-smith.aspx