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People's Victory

Lucy Noakes
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A01=Lucy Noakes
anniversary
Author_Lucy Noakes
bonfires
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
Category=NHWR7
celebration
churchill
david kynaston
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
family britain
forthcoming
home front
housewife
juliet gardner
mass observation
nella last
nella last's war
northern wind
nostaliga
public history
rationing
social history
street parties
the blitz
ve day
welfare state
winds of change
world war ii

Product details

  • ISBN 9781838955151
  • Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 07 May 2026
  • Publisher: Atlantic Books
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

'The VE Day book' Amol Rajan, Today, Radio 4

IN 1937, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson created the social survey organisation Mass Observation to capture the thoughts, feelings and minutiae of individuals across the British Isles. At its height Mass Observation had 1,000 concurrent writers - stretching from Penzance to Aberdeen and including miners, academics and housewives - and collected over 1 million individual diary entries between 1937 and 1960.

In The People's Victory, historian Lucy Noakes mines the Mass Observation archive to present a groundbreaking history of how Britons at home celebrated and experienced the end of World War II. Alongside street celebrations and tea parties, we find bonfires and bell ringing, water fights and wagon rides, solitary and shared walks - and copious amounts of alcohol. However, as Noakes also reveals, not everyone felt like celebrating that May: many were still waiting for news of family members who had vanished in the fog of war, whilst thousands of British soldiers were still interned in the Far East.

By centring the voices, feelings and fears of the public at the heart of the People's War, Noakes also traces the hopes and changing attitudes of a nation in flux, revealing how the camaraderie and selflessness of wartime led to the birth of the welfare state.
About Lucy Noakes
Lucy Noakes is the Rab Butler Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex, a Trustee of the Mass Observation Archive and the current President of the Royal Historical Society. She is a historian of twentieth-century Britain and an expert on the social and cultural history of the Second World War. Her publications include three single authored books - War and the British: National Identity and the Second World War, Women and the British Army 1907-1948 and Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain - and three edited collections.

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