How Essex celebrated Christmas during Second World War

For many families in Southend and across the area, the most difficult part of a wartime Christmas would be spending the festive season apart from loved ones.

Many men were fighting abroad in the armed forces or were being held as prisoners of war. Many children spent Christmas away from home as evacuees.

It wasn’t an easy time. Christmas luxuries were especially hard to come by at a time when even basic foods were scarce.

People were forced to find substitutes for key festive ingredients. Gifts were often homemade and practical, and children’s toys were often made from recycled materials.

Cards this year were smaller and printed on flimsy paper.

Women from Southend are pictured volunteering to help sort an influx of cards at Southend post office in 1940 (Image: Newsquest)

One Southend newspaper reporter wrote a piece about buying presents where she offered her top tips: “Silk stockings (hush) are still to be seen on shop counters though prices are high and you can only dream nowadays of a fully furnished hose,” she wrote.

“Cosmetics too are my idea of a sensible gift. In normal times nothing is more acceptable than a box of face powder or a bottle, however small, of extravagant perfume. Now lipstick and rouge, bath salts and toilet soap are more welcome than gold dust.”

In December of 1940 many toy bazaars were held around Southend where second hand toys could be picked up for children.

Toy cars, fairy cycles, rocking horses, snakes and ladder sets as well as wooden Brer rabbits on wheels, were among the most popular bargains.

When it came to buying gifts for mothers, presents like hair clips – of which there was a national shortage of – as well as a new ‘duster’ or ‘brush’ were hailed as great ideas.

Fathers, if they were at home, would be overjoyed with a box of cigarettes and a book of matches, Southenders were told.

An advert for Brightwells department store in Southend at Christmas time 1940 (Image: Newsquest)

Festive treats such as chocolates and dried fruits were hard to come by due to rationing.

One unfortunate woman from Leigh found herself in the dock simply because she wanted to make Christmas cakes for her friends.

Janet Brandreth, aged 70, of Olive Avenue, Leigh, wrote to friends in Ireland asking them to send her 1lb of butter so she could make her usual festive cakes for friends as presents.

A nice gesture you may think but this was against the strict ration rules that operated during the war.

The letter had been intercepted by a censor and passed onto the Ministry of Food. The pensioner was fined a hefty £15 and ordered to pay another £5 in costs for her transgression.

Another shortage at this time were onions. In fact onions were so in demand that prices had gone through the roof.

Patients at Southend Hospital still got Christmas Day dinner in 1940, despite the rationing. Here a hospital chef carves the turkey. (Image: Newsquest)

The government had to step in at one point to control the price.

Christmas pudding was largely out of the question due to lack of the basic ingredients so a ‘make do’ festive pudding recipe was issued by the Ministry of Food for housewives to whisk up at home.

It couldn’t have tasted all that nice. The recipe featured breadcrumbs, suet, raw carrots, raw potatoes, mixed dried fruit and, if you could find it some, mixed sweet spice.

Even little things that we take for granted every Christmas such as wrapping gifts and sending cards were virtually non existent when it came to the war years.

In 1941, to conserve paper, the Ministry of Supply decreed that ‘no retailer shall provide any paper for the packing or wrapping of goods excepting foodstuffs or articles which the shopkeeper has agreed to deliver’. This made it difficult to keep Christmas presents a surprise In wartime, finding adequate numbers of postal workers to deal with the influx of extra letters and parcels at Christmas time became more of a problem as many permanent staff members were in the armed services.

In Southend, as you can see in one of the photos in our gallery, local women volunteered to work in the post office to sort and even help deliver cards.

When it came to festive lights to brighten things up, they were of course a big no no as stringent black out rules were in place.

In Chelmsford for three weeks leading up to Christmas, 1940, hundreds of people were taken to court for flouting the blackout rules.

Defendants were prosecuted for everything from leaving a bathroom light on to making a fire in the garden to not dimming their car headlights.

At this time Essex was being pounded by air raids and so many school children were having to spend so much time in air raid shelters they were getting terrible colds and becoming ill.

Families has to be extra inventive when it came to wartime festive entertainment.

Many of the games people used to play are still around today, in some format.

‘Chin’s Down’ for example, we are more likely to call ‘pass the orange’ these days. Another game – ‘In the Abstract’ – could be seen as an early form of Pictionary while another big hit from this time, ‘Murder’, played with a pack of playing cards, was effectively Cluedo in a human format.

‘Coffee Pot’ was another wartime festive game which saw someone going out of the room and in their absence a word was chosen that had more than one meaning.

When the person returned he or she was allowed to ask any questions they liked but the answers had to contain the chosen word in at least one of its meanings.

It was a bit complicated but then again in those days people didn’t have the TV or smart phones to distract them from thinking or using their imaginations.