Phony peace on Earth

Spectator, The, Dec 14-21, 1996 by Hodgkin, E C, Gimson, Andrew

As for Christmas presents, what today sounds more alluring than a case of 12 bottles of Famous Grouse whisky at 7. lOs. or of Gordon's gin at 7. 4s.? A `flat fifty' of Gold Flake cigarettes `in an attractive Xmas greeting carton' (that shape had been made popular a year or two before by, I think, Kensitas) could be had for 2s. 5d. (12p). A classy pipe tobacco was `Three Nuns - the Vicar's Choice' at is. 21/2d an ounce. You could get `six Dainty Silk D'Oileys' from Marshall & Snelgrove for lOs. 6d. `For the bachelor or young man with his own flat are found some highly original American highball glasses decorated with prancing horses or coloured signal flags spelling out such amusing sentences as "I am in distress" or "Require immediate assistance",' price 4s. 6d each. At Smithfield market, English turkeys were `plentiful at 1s. 8d to 1s. 10d, Surrey capons at 1s. 6d to 1s. 10d, Scotch beef top rump at 1s. 4d and sirloin at 1s. 8d.

And, to crown it all, we had a white Christmas. December had started unusually mild; then on the 16th it became bitingly cold with gales in the Channel disrupting the ferries, followed by a brief thaw and hard frost again on the 23rd. On Christmas Day there were four inches of snow in Trafalgar Square and winter sporting on Hampstead Heath. But the best sight was the City, deserted, white and totally silent. I was reminded of this a year later when, as we used to say, `the balloon had gone up', and we had another hard winter. I found myself at two o'clock in the morning marching a detachment of 30 men from Cowley Barracks to Oxford station to entrain for embarkation. Snow was on the ground, the moon was nearly full, and from Folly Bridge and up the High there was no traffic moving, no cars parked. For once, I was able to see the heart of Oxford as it must have looked in the 19th or even 18th century.

That was in the middle of what was being called `the phony war'. Christmas 1938 was in the middle of what with good reason deserved to be called the phony peace.

Andrew Gimson writes:

Berlin

IN December 1938, Richard Wagner, a railway official in Berlin, and his wife Anna took a photograph of themselves with their presents and their Christmas tree, and sent it to their friends. They followed this custom every year from 1900 to the end of the second world war, with only minor variations.

They never had any children, and the photographs are almost the only evidence of their existence which survives, kept by accident by the descendants of one of their friends. In 1915, we see Herr Wagner standing proudly in front of a map of Europe on which the German fronts in the west and east are marked, and as late as 1921 the Wagners' wall carries a picture of the by then abdicated Kaiser.

In 1927 they go over to electric Christmas tree candles, but from 1933 onwards no sign or portrait indicates sympathy with Hitler. None of the newfangled Nazi decorations can be detected on the tree, and we may presume that the Wagners continued to follow many of the normal Christmas traditions. In 1938, for example, they probably bought a carp for Christmas Eve from the 15,000 hundredweight of the fish which, the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger claimed on 17 December 1938, were delivered to the city that Christmas, part of the 150,000 hundredweight delivered in the Greater German Reich (figures which look far too round to be true).