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| Celebrating peace on Halstead Avenue, 1945 |
Even now that one line entry in a diary has a profound effect on me.
It was written in the late evening of May 8th 1945, at the end of the first day of peace in Europe.*
For some it had been a riotous night of fun, dancing and abandonment, for others a time of quiet reflection on the cost of six years of a hard war.
I don’t know what my parents and grandparents did on that night. Nana I expect spent some of it thinking of her son who was buried in a cemetery in Thailand and must also have wondered what her native Germany would be like.
She had been born in Cologne a city which like so many was now a desert of rubble, wrecked streets and shattered lives.
Granddad no doubt was in a pub while mum and dad would have been celebrating in their different ways.
It is of course an event fast fading from living memory and will soon join the experiences of those who lived through the Great War as a piece of history only now visited through the films, books, memorials and personal accounts of that earlier conflict.
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| Silver cup presented by recovering wounded soldiers 1917 |
We have the names of some who worked in the hospitals, letters written by the troops and this silver cup.
The inscription reads, Presented to the Wesleyan Church by the Wounded Soldiers of the Wesleyan School Hospital Xmas 1917.
Location; Chorlton
Pictures; Victory street party, Halstead Avenue, courtesy of Tom Turner from the Lloyd collection, and the silver cup from a picture in the collection of Philip Lloyd
*Of course it would be another four months before Japan surrendered and the fighting was truly over.
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