Surrey on film for VE Day

Screen Archive South East (SASE), our public sector film archive partners, produced a short compilation for Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) called ‘War & Peace’ to showcase films from around the south-east region, including Surrey, Kent and Sussex. The free-to-view films, some in vivid colour, commemorate Britain’s wartime Home Front as seen through the eyes of film makers from our region and culminates in all the exhilaration and exuberance of the celebrations that took place that May in 1945 for VE Day. You can watch the whole film ‘War & Peace’ on the SASE website but below are links to some of the fabulous Surrey highlights.

‘Crisis 1938’

Made by Eric Giles, who captures those ‘gathering storm’ days in London during the Munich Crisis before moving on to ‘Ottershaw 1939’ where we see members of his family, including the pet dog, trying out their civilian respirators as well as an air-raid shelter that can ‘walk’!

‘Leatherhead Newsreel’

These two remarkable films made by the Blackheath Film Unit, called ‘Leatherhead Newsreel’ and ‘Civilians in Uniform’, show the men and women of Surrey at A.R.P. posts, casualty stations, control rooms and marching through Leatherhead on special occasions like ‘War Savings Week’. ‘Leatherhead Newsreel’ also features one of the most colourful VE Day displays on regional film, where the local citizens put out even more flags and splattered their homes and streets with bunting of red, white and blue.

The Gowlland family - ‘Wartime 1939 – 1945’

In suburban Croydon, Geoffrey Gowlland and his family can be seen putting up the blackout blinds, getting out the ration cards and walking a little too close to an unexploded bomb. When VE Day arrives, they’re seen hoisting up the Union flag on their 1930s semi, removing the tiresome blackout blinds and dumping them in the garden and ceremonially unscrewing the blackout hoods from the headlamps of the family car.

‘Clandon Home Guard: Drills & Stand Down’

In glorious colour, Woking’s Home Guard are seen on exercise in the town’s streets and parks, with explosions, rope-walks across canals, street fighting and lots of climbing ladders and jumping over barbed wire. The ‘East & West Clandon Home Guard’ chart the organisation’s development from Local Defence Volunteers marching with broom handles to a fully armed, and now uniformed, Home Guard in action in the Surrey countryside, complete with bayonet charges, camouflaged soldiers, target practise and a few grenades thrown in for good measure.