'There was a group of airmen who we talked to, and I got a kiss from each of them'
102–year–old former ATS member Marjorie Hanson was among those partying in Trafalgar Square on VE Day 1945
Richard Ansett
- Kate Battersby
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It’s a day familiar from black-and-white newsreel footage. After almost six years of war, crowds celebrated VE Day on the streets of London, stretching from outside Buckingham Place to Whitehall and Piccadilly Circus.
Marjorie Hanson, then aged 22, was in the women’s branch of the British Army and remembers joining the rejoicing throng in Trafalgar Square. “My mum said, ‘Let’s go up to London!’ So we took the train the few stops from Croydon to Victoria,” she recalls, her eyes shining brightly with the memory of 8 May 1945, the day after Germany’s unconditional surrender. “I had no idea it would be like it was. The streets were so full – people everywhere having a good time, everyone talking to everyone else.”
Revellers waded into the fountains, danced a conga and climbed onto the lion statues. Hanson, now 102, was wearing her Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) uniform. “It was so crowded with happy people. Mum and I were dancing and singing. There was a group of airmen who we talked to, and I got a kiss from each of them. It was late before we went home.”
Jubilant Londoners dancing in Piccadilly Circus on VE Day, 8th May 1945. Original Publication: Picture Post - 1991 - This Was VE Day In London - pub. 19th May 1945 (Photo by Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Hanson, then Marjorie Wright, was 19 when she joined the ATS in 1941. “I was in a reserved occupation [a job allowing military exemption, working in the offices of United Dairies], but I decided to join up anyway,” she says at home in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire.
After training, she was posted to work as a filing clerk at Didcot Central Ordnance Depot, which stored a huge range of military supplies, from equipment for mountain and snow warfare to bicycles, industrial gases and camouflage. “At first there were very few women but it grew and grew,” she says. “Everyone helped each other.”
The Oxfordshire depot was practically a town in itself, expanding to 7,410 personnel, including 850 ATS, by 1943. “Sometimes I’d do sentry duty from midnight until 2am, armed only with a pickaxe handle,” Hanson recalls. “I’m not quite sure what I could have done with that to stop the Germans if they’d arrived.”
Didcot COD played a vital role in D-Day, supplying vast amounts of military for the invasion and subsequent liberation of Europe. “I’m proud to have played a part. Our work was sending out stores and keeping track of it all. If the troops were doing well, we sent stores out. If they weren’t doing so well, the stores came back because they weren’t needed.”
She met her husband Tom, an articifer in the Fleet Air Arm, at a dance in the depot’s gymnasium, and they married in 1944 when she was 21. After the war he returned to his previous job as a sheet metal worker, and they had a daughter.
A widow since 1989, Hanson’s thoughts on VE Day will be with those who didn’t return. “Cousins, uncles, lots of boys I went to school with and people from my cycling club were killed – young men and women who died to save the country. It’s important we remember.”
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Three days before VE Day, on 5 May, she will be a guest at Liberation Day celebrations in the Netherlands, where citizens thank the British veterans who helped secure their freedom. She will be among wartime service representatives taking part in a parade in Wageningen, where crowds lining the streets are expected to exceed 100,000. “I’ll feel like the Queen,” she smiles at the prospect. “I’ll have to practise waving!”
Authors
Kate Battersby
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