D-Day and Memory

Sometimes, I don’t mind admitting, it’s a struggle to know what to write for my monthly History Girls post. I shy away from the learned essays of some of my colleagues – not only do I not feel qualified, but often I simply don’t have the time to do the necessary research.

But today is the 75^thanniversary of the Normandy Landings, generally known as D-DAY, so I couldn’t really write about anything else. The Normandy Landings, on 6^thJune 1944, marked the start of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France. This was the largest naval, air and land operation in history, and laid the foundations for the Allied Victory in Europe.  D-Day is a general term for the start date of any military operation, often used when the exact date is either secret or not yet known, but this operation was so significant that nowadays, when you hear the term D-Day, it tends to refer to the events of  6^thJune 1944.

At the commemorations this week, there will be very few veterans left to remember their experiences and their fallen comrades. Anyone who participated in World War Two is very elderly now, just as, when I was a child, the veterans of World War One were very old. Listening to an American veteran describe his D-Day experience on BBC Radio 4 this week, I reflected on the first time I became aware of D-Day – indeed the first time I became aware of any commemoration. It was 1979, and I was ten. My P6 teacher, Mr Thompson, told us that it was 35 years since the D-Day landings. Few of us had heard of them, so he took the opportunity to give us a history lesson – one of those impromptu lessons so frequent then and so rare now. I remember him telling us that it didn’t seem so long ago to him, but we didn’t get that at all. 35 years! Three and a half times our lifetimes! Grown-ups were weird.

Since then, I have taken a group of school children to visit the Normandy landing beaches. We visited the Bayeux tapestry the same day. I wonder which felt more real to the children. The tapestry was ancient but it was tangible; we could see if not touch it, and buy miniatures for our walls.  The beaches, on the other hand, were empty, just sand and sea and a cold Channel wind. We had to people them with our imaginations. For the few veterans who travel there this week for the commemorations, I suppose they will people the beaches with their own memories of seventy-five years ago.

That impromptu history class of Mr Thompson’s was forty years ago. It doesn’t seem so long ago to me now.  

One fisherman, two saints, and three politicians… by Carolyn Hughes

I have really been enjoying finding out about the villages of Hampshire’s Meon Valley, in order to share something of their history, introduce a few of the people associated with them, and reveal some of the treasures held within their buildings. Even though I know the area very well, it has nonetheless been both an eye-opener and a delight to discover all the things I didn’t know.

Taken from a map of Hampshire by William J Blaeu, Amsterdam, 1645, 

showing the cluster of villages in the upper reaches of the River Meon

But, today, I’m going to look at Droxford, one of the cluster of villages in the upper reaches of the River Meon.

The name Droxford is probably derived from ford and an old word ‘drocen’ meaning dry place. The settlement of Drokeneford was first mentioned in writing in the 9th century, when it was granted by Ecgberht (Egbert), King of Wessex, to Herefrith, the bishop of Winchester, “for the sustenance of the monks of Winchester”.

 St Swithun of Winchester from the 10th century 

Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, 

illuminated manuscript in the British Library.

More than a hundred years later, St Swithun was adopted as patron of Winchester’s restored cathedral church. Swithun had been Bishop of Winchester from October 853 until he died sometime between 862 and 865. In 971, Swithun’s body was transferred from its original burial place to Bishop Æthelwold’s new church building and, according to contemporary writers, numerous miracles surrounded the move. We’ve seen images of these miracles before, in the church at Corhampton, where the painting at the top of the south wall is said to depict stories from his life. One of them is the miracle of the eggs, where Swithun is inspecting a bridge being built over the River Itchen and, in the crowd that has gathered, an old woman is jostled and her eggs fall from her basket. But the miracle-working Swithun simply puts the broken eggs back together.

In 939, the then king, Æthelstan, granted 17 hides of Droxford land to his half-sister Eadburh. (A hide, traditionally taken to be 120 acres or 49 hectares, was intended to represent the amount of land sufficient to support a household.) Eadburh may well have benefitted financially from her brother’s generosity but, of course, she might not have spent much, if any, time in Droxford. Nonetheless, her story is interesting.

It was said that Eadburh’s father, King Edward, the elder son of King Alfred, set his three-year-old daughter a test, to discover if she was destined to live in the world or in a house of religion. He asked his little girl to choose between a display of rings and bracelets, and another of a chalice and gospel book. Apparently, the toddler chose the religious items and, as a consequence, was given, at that tender age of three, to the Benedictine nunnery at St Mary’s Abbey, Winchester (called Nunnaminster), which had been founded by her grandmother, Ealhswith, Alfred’s wife. There Eadburh remained as a nun, dying probably before the age of forty. Quite why she became a saint I am not at all clear…

In the Domesday Book, Drocheneford was said to be “always in (the demesnes of) the Church”, and was still held by the bishop for the support of the Winchester monks. In 1284 the manor passed wholly to the bishop, the monks renouncing “all right and claim which they have or shall have in the said manor, for ever”.

Not an owner of Droxford, but one of its more famous (or, almost, infamous) sons, was John de Drokensford (1260s?-1329), said to have been the son of the local squire. An effigy of a lady in the south side of Droxford church has been supposed to be that of his mother. John was the Keeper of the Wardrobe to King Edward I, and accompanied the king on some of his Scottish campaigns.

Effigy of John de Drokensford in Wells Cathedral

John’s services to the king were rewarded with very many ecclesiastical preferments, including rector of Droxford. He appears to have had five residences in Surrey and Kent, as well as Hampshire. In 1309 John became bishop of Bath and Wells, at the instigation of King Edward II. And, as bishop, he made neither Bath nor Wells his headquarters, but moved about constantly, attended apparently by a large retinue, living at one or other of the sixteen or more episcopal manor houses. He was, like many of his fellow bishops, a worldly man, and not always as scrupulous as he might have been in his own dealings.

Droxford continued to be held by the bishop of Winchester until 1551, when the new bishop, John Poynet, surrendered the whole hundred of Waltham, including Droxford manor, to the crown, as part of an agreement to reduce the income of the Winchester see, to the benefit of the government. The demesne of Droxford passed to William Paulet, the 1st Marquess of Winchester (c. 1483/1485 – 1572). William started out as a Catholic, but was quickly “persuaded” to see things the way the king, Henry VIII, saw them. Following the dissolution of the monasteries, William found himself rewarded with former Church properties, such as those owned by the bishop of Winchester.

Paulet was a political manipulator who had a long and successful career, serving Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. He was involved in the audience with the Pope to discuss Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and he became a close associate of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and a friend of Thomas Cromwell.

William Paulet, 1st Marquess of Winchester, holding the white 

staff as a symbol of the office of Lord High Treasurer. 

1560s? National Portrait Gallery (London).

In 1535/36, he served as one of the judges at the trials of John Fisher, Sir Thomas More, and the alleged accomplices of Anne Boleyn. In 1547, he was an executor of the will of King Henry VIII. He was a political schemer and, in 1549, he supported the Earl of Warwick against the Duke of Somerset in their struggle for power in England during the minority of the child king, Edward VI. When Warwick succeeded, and became the new Lord President of the Council, he appointed William Paulet as Lord Treasurer. And when Warwick was created Duke of Northumberland in 1551, Paulet became the Marquess of Winchester and received Droxford, presumably as part of his reward!

It was said that Paulet and Northumberland “ruled the court” of the young king, as the two most prominent members of the Regency Council. William was still Lord Treasurer even after the death of Mary I in 1558, and continued in the service of Elizabeth I, although he must have been over seventy years of age. He retained his high positions, and was Speaker of the House of Lords in 1559 and 1566. Apparently, Queen Elizabeth once joked, “for, by my troth, if my lord treasurer were but a young man, I could find it in my heart to have him for a husband before any man in England.”

As already mentioned, William found himself able to shift his religious affiliation in order to win the favour of his monarch. Under Henry, he had already renounced his Catholicism and embraced Protestantism and, under Edward VI, he went so far as to persecute Roman Catholics. But, on the accession of the Catholic Mary, he “reconverted” and proceeded to persecute his former Protestant allies, while, on Elizabeth’s succession, he changed tack once again. All in all, he changed religious tack five times. Once, when asked how he managed to survive so many storms, not only unhurt, but rising all the while, Paulet answered: “By being a willow, not an oak.”

As for Droxford, William lost it again in 1558, when Queen Mary restored it to the bishopric, and the bishops then retained it until the Civil War. Then, the Long Parliament found a purchaser for Droxford in a Mr. Francis Allen, who gave £7,675 13s. 7d. for it. But, at the Restoration in 1660, the bishops recovered their possessions, and Droxford remained attached to the lands of the Winchester see for the next two hundred years.

But what of other famous associations with Droxford? I will mention two.

 Izaak Walton portrait by Jacob Huysmans,

c. 1672, National Portrait Gallery (London)

In the 17th century, the well-known fisherman and writer of The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton, came to Droxford to fish in the River Meon, declaring it the best river in England for trout. His daughter Anne married William Hawkins, prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, who was instituted rector of Droxford in 1664, and held the office till his death in 1691.

Walton passed the last years of his life with his daughter and her husband, and a passage in his will says: “I also give unto my daughter all my books at Winchester and Droxford, and whatever in these two places are, or I can call mine.”

And the other famous man who spent a little time in Droxford was Sir Winston Churchill…

In 1903, a railway came to serve Droxford with the building of the Meon Valley Railway. In fact, although the station was called Droxford, it was actually sited almost in Soberton, at a little settlement called Brockbridge.

On the morning of 2nd June 1944, orders were telephoned along the length of the Meon Valley Railway that it was to be kept free of trains so that a special train could use the route without interruption. Troops surrounded Droxford railway station and its sidings, and the local post office was ordered to let no mail other than official business leave the village.

The special train stopped and parked up at Droxford station. In it were the prime minister of Britain, Sir Winston Churchill, and the South African prime minister, General Jan Smuts. The next day Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, and Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, arrived by car. On 4th June, Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the United States, arrived from his nearby base at Southwick House, and they were joined by the prime ministers of Canada, New Zealand, and Rhodesia. They were there to discuss the D-Day invasion of France.

But, when the invasion was only days away, Charles de Gaulle, the Free French leader, had not yet been told of the Allies’ plans. The British cabinet was wary of communicating with the French government while they were in exile in Algeria, but also of a diplomatic incident if the invasion went ahead without French knowledge, so they decided to invite de Gaulle to come to England, to disclose the plans to him in person. When de Gaulle landed at RAF Northolt, he received a telegram from Churchill:

My dear General de Gaulle,
Welcome to these shores! Very great military events are about to take place. I should be glad if you could come to see me down here in my train, which is close to General Eisenhower’s Headquarters, bringing with you one or two of your party. General Eisenhower is looking forward to seeing you again and will explain to you the military position which is momentous and imminent. If you could be here by 1.30 p.m., I should be glad to give you déjeuner and we will then repair to General Eisenhower’s Headquarters. Let me have a telephone message early to know whether this is agreeable to you or not.

Although officially kept secret from local Droxford residents, it seems that Churchill had chosen the station as a secure base, because it was near the coast and to the Allied command centre at Southwick House. But there was some speculation that the site was also thought safe because it was overshadowed by beech trees, which obscured the view of the train, and because there was a deep cutting into which the train could be shunted if it came under attack.

Mackenzie King (PM Canada), Winston Churchill, Peter Fraser (PM New Zealand), Dwight Eisenhower,

Godfrey Huggins (PM Rhodesia) and Jan Smuts. Although this well-known photograph 

is generally credited as having been taken at Droxford, in fact, it seems unlikely. 

Anyway, at 6.58 pm on 5th June, Churchill’s train pulled out of Droxford station and returned to London. At 16 minutes past midnight the following morning, Allied troops attacked Pegasus Bridge and shortly thereafter the American airborne landings in Normandy began.

Of arms and the man I sing by Mary Hoffman

This week and month, we are bound to be thinking of the onset of the Great War a hundred years ago. At a time when hideous atrocities are being committed against civilians and combatants  in many parts of the world, the old question is being asked: have we learned anything about the nature of war and what alternatives there are to it in the last century?

The answer is too bleak to give here. 1914-18 was supposed to be "The War to end all war," and we can't now put ourselves back into the frame of mind that could possibly believe that to be the case. So fast forward thirty years.

A week ago I was in Normandy, as a guest of the airline Flybe and the Normandy Tourist board. Two months ago President Obama and Queen Elizabeth also landed at the tiny airport at Caen, to join other dignitaries arriving to celebrate the 70th anniversary of D-Day, or as it is known in France, "Jour-J."

Caen airport where President Obama and I both landed

I had flown from the equally tiny airport of London Southend, hopping over the channel in less than an hour. After a five minute wait at the single luggage carousel, we went straight to the spectacular Memorial Museum, which is currently hosting an exhibition of 100 Objects from the Battle of Normandy.

Those are "Compo boxes" in the background, which carried British soldiers' rations; in the foreground a Hispano cannon from a British Spitfire.

The museum was opened in 1988 and is built on top of the bunker where General Richter directed German operations. As you enter the permanent collection, the first thing you see is the statistic that 10 million people died in the First World War, with 21 million wounded or unaccounted for.

It takes you through the twenty-one years between one war ending and the next beginning, putting most of the blame firmly on the Treaty of Versailles.

I hadn't realised how long the "Battle of Normandy" lasted. All the books say 100 days and that takes you to almost mid-September if you reckon it from D-Day on 6th June 1944. But many commentators take it only to 25th August, when Paris was liberated by the Allies. I also hadn't realised how much destruction the bombing caused: 73% of Caen, for instance.

And the average age of the Allied combatants was only 24. Only 25% of the troops in Normandy on the German side were actually Germans by 1944, which clearly must have had some effect on morale.

The Allies pressed forward to take Caen as soon as they had landed on the Normandy beaches but were not completely successful until 19th July.

The first death in Operation Overlord was of Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, whose glider landed near the bridge over the Caen Canal at 6 minutes after midnight on 6th June. He led his Platoon over the bridge straight into German machine-gun fire and never recovered from his wounds.

He was twenty-eight years old and two weeks later, his wife gave birth to a daughter, Margaret. I'm recalling him here because I am lucky enough not to have lost any family member that I am aware of in either of the last century's World Wars.

But each death carried a story like Lieutenant Brotheridge's; each person had a family, a past and a future that was snatched away. Just as each person in Gaza, Israel, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, Sudan and every other country at war has a history without a future, unless we remember them.

These ceramic poppies are planted outside the Museum in Bayeux that houses a "tapestry" portraying a war even further off than the one we commemorate this year - nearly ten times further in the past (You can read about it in Adèle Geras' post on 7th August). They mirror the ones flooding the moat of the Tower of London at the moment.

Each tiny act of Remembrance, whether it is lighting a candle, wearing a poppy (white as well as red), looking at an old photograph or reading a diary or memoir is a small step away from war and towards peace. It is not enough - but it is a start.

(Mary Hoffman was the guest of Flybe and the Normandy Tourist Board).

The Personal and the Political, by H.M. Castor

Tucked away at the end of a platform at Bristol Temple Meads railways station, there are some photographs taken by Mark Perham (for a project called ‘Reverberations' ) of people who work, or have worked, at the station. When I spotted them the other day, as I waited for a train, they moved me; they made me think how many people have given day after day, year after year of their working lives to that station. They made me think how precious are individual lives – lived only once. And they made me reflect, too, on the fact that when each person retires – or dies – that deep accretion of experience, built up over all those days and years, leaves with them.

I thought of this same point when reading coverage of the D-Day commemorations last week in Normandy. I was shocked to realise that, all too soon, the whole of the generation that served in World War II will have gone.

Ellan Levitsky-Orkin, who served as a U.S. Army nurse in Normandy during World War II, is greeted by a U.S. Army paratrooper during a ceremony honoring the service of U.S. Army nurses during World War II, in Bolleville, France, June 4, 2014. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Sara Keller)
(Flickr: D-Day Commemoration) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

When I was growing up, it was the World War I generation that was elderly, whose numbers were dwindling; even so, I heard many desperately moving interviews with veterans on television and radio, and there were many men and women attending the yearly commemorations who had been there. The World War II generation, by contrast, seemed robust and all around me – energetic people in their 60s. My great-uncle told me stories of his war service in the Middle East and my grandfather (to my great delight) gave me the fascinating coins he’d collected while serving in North Africa – and his Army Ordnance Corps badges too. Although both wars were (of course) a very long way from my own experience, neither felt completely out of reach, since the thread connecting me to them was a living one. Knowing (or seeing) individuals who had been involved, and hearing them speak of their experiences, played a huge part in this sense of proximity and emotional connection. As my children learn now about the World Wars at school, I am aware how different it is for them: once a generation has gone, once the events they lived through have passed out of personal memory and into what we call ‘history’, that connection can never be quite the same.

These belonged to my grandfather

This brings me to another point about memory. Last week, with the D-Day anniversary in the news, there was a chilling juxtaposition. As the commemorations were beginning in France, black-shirted ‘Golden Dawn’ supporters were lining up in military formation outside the Athens parliament, singing a Greek version of the Nazi Horst Wessel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Wessel song, while inside the building their leader (currently charged with murder and assault) gave Nazi salutes and hurled abuse at MPs. Political commentator Pavlos Tzimas has been quoted as saying that Golden Dawn is “a true neo-Nazi force whose aim is to use democracy to destroy democracy.” Its support in Greece is growing.

These scenes, for me, underline the significance of the loss of first-hand memory and experience. The connection between financial crisis, economic austerity and the rise of nationalism and racism rings clear bells for anyone with some knowledge of the inter-war years of the 1920s and ’30s. (Is there any stronger argument than this for the importance of studying history?) Golden Dawn may be a very particular case – an organization that has grown out of the polarization of Greek politics since the civil war of 1946-9, and whose support-base has been boosted by the Greek government-debt crisis – but no one could deny that its rise is part of a wider trend. Right-wing xenophobic parties have scored successes over a wide area in the recent European elections. In Britain, the political party that has benefited from this trend is UKIP. While most UKIP supporters would no doubt be appalled to think of it as having anything whatsoever in common with an organization like Golden Dawn, still it is instructive to note that support for the far-right British National Party has collapsed as UKIP’s fortunes have risen; BNP support has transferred to UKIP.

Xenophobia, it’s safe to say, is on the rise. But what do people imagine that nationalism and xenophobia lead to? Even as we commemorate the D-Day landings in Normandy, are we at risk of forgetting the experiences of the World War II generation? Many in this country who hold xenophobic views might well say that they are admirers of Winston Churchill, yet few realize that Churchill was a strong supporter of the movement for a united Europe. Yes, it’s true that he saw Britain as a special case, having a unique role to play as the link between that united Europe and the USA, but nevertheless he was convinced of the vital need for closer ties and closer co-operation as the best bulwark against future outbreaks of bloody conflict. Whatever problems there are with the governance of Europe, nationalism and racism cannot be the road to improvement – as history clearly shows.

Among supporters of the far right, realistic thoughts of what these political trends might lead to in the long run – even among those extremists who would not be averse to starting a war – seem conspicuous by their absence. Instead, it is all about the expression of anger and distress. In interviews with Golden Dawn supporters quoted here  in The Guardian, the projection of each individual’s own rage and fear onto dark forces ‘out there’ is plain to see. This is how scapegoating operates, and it requires the dehumanisation of the target.

Which brings me back to the importance of the personal connection. When any group or institution (or, indeed, historical event) can be seen in terms of the personal and the specific, fellow-feeling and empathy are much more likely to be evoked. Seeing the individual D-Day veterans and hearing their reminiscences prompts us to think what it might have been like to walk in their shoes. More than this: as long as those with first-hand experience are alive, they have (we hope) the chance to speak up. When, on the other hand, the World War II generation has gone, that part of the electorate that experienced the Great Depression and the rise of fascism will have vanished. (And the reasons why the NHS and the welfare state were established – the reality of what happened to the most vulnerable in society when there was no safety net – will be in danger, it seems, of being forgotten too.), Individual memories, individual human voices will still be heard by historians reading the records but not, I fear, by the population at large – or, at least, not in a way that makes people think, urgently, of their own future and that of their children.

I looked at those pictures in Temple Meads station and I thought how valuable, how precious, is personal history, the lived experience. With each individual’s death, a whole world of experiences is lost. And in cases of the worst, most traumatic experiences, is the determination never to let them happen again lost too? I hope not. But I am worried.


This is my final post as a History Girl, since I am passing the baton to Tanya Landman – and am very much looking forward to reading her posts! It’s been an honour and a pleasure to be included in such a wonderful group for the past three years, and I would like to thank all the HGs, past and present, for their fellowship and support. Huge thanks, also, to everyone who has read and commented on my posts. I shall continue to be involved as a keen reader of the blog!
I am also delighted to mention that my aunt, Ruth Hayward, has recently published a book based on her research into the life and letters of (Jonathan) Wathen Phipps, eye-surgeon to George III, and a close confidant not only of the King, but of three of his sons too. Phippy is published by Brewin Books. 

Au revoir, Harriet! We've loved having you as a History Girl and wish you well for the future. Do stay in touch.