Are 'WW2/1940s' events the only pull that heritage railways have to get bums on seats these days?

[adb968008]

2 hours ago, whart57 said:

 

An English Civil War re-enactment on a heritage railway might be a challenge  😁

Many a true thing said in jest.

 

The ELR tried this once with “The Battle of Summerseat” held in the field opposite the station.. The Sealed Knot society provided their volunteers, set up opposing camps in the field and brought a cannon and did a reenactment.

 

it wasnt overly popular though and wasnt repeated. Ive still got a ticket from this.

 

 

[Mallard60022]

Been thinking again about this.

Certainly the links between Historic Vehicles and Heritage railways is quite strong. Maybe a bit more emphasis on that and Costumes of the period? 

I suppose it also depends on the location of the Railway? If it's in a good Tourist area then it has to take advantage of that. 

I've been impressed by the number of people seen at Diesel Galas recently and there will be Grandparents of that era encouraging their Family to go to the Trains. 

As Andy York said somewhere else, along the lines of, "The 'normals' want decent Toilets and Ice Cream!"

One of the Pleasures of visiting the Bluebell was the Restaurant at Sheffield Park. Proper Catering Professionals did that. 

That's where the Railways have to ensure they get it right. Positive visitor experience is crucial. Adapting to modern requirements and values is so important.  

Those lines linked to the main line must also really push that. Visiting Specials can really create income.

Above all, intelligent, business-like and creative management is vital too.

Phil

[rockershovel]

WW2 is something special for a certain generation of British. It is now, for practical purposes just about the limits of living memory; a time when our country did sonething huge and important. 

 

It's easy to understand, unlike WW1 which is still a matter of debate to historians and incomprehensible to everyone else. 

 

See Evelyn Waugh's aphorism in Officers and Gentlemen; " ..he saw the modern age in clear view, huge and hateful..." 

 

 

[rodent279]

1 hour ago, Wheatley said:

I'd been misled for years by Paul Hardcastle that the average age of the WW2 combat soldier was 26

I thought it was nineteen....n n n n nineteen....

[rodent279]

1 hour ago, Michael Hodgson said:

War is invariably nasty, and I don't doubt that countless atrocities were committed by all sides during WW2, and often against innocent civilians.  I'm not offended by Nazi uniforms; indeed I think they looked somewhat smarter than those worn by the Allies.  But overweight middle-aged Brits pretending to be Nazi stormtroopers just look ridiculous, and "re-eactments" seem to me to be making a mockery of those who fought courageously and died or were handicapped for the rest of their lives in hostilities. These events strike me as being in very poor taste because war has never been a game where you play against the away team for a couple of hours and end the day supping ale with them in the beer tent afterwards. 

 

Having said that, I'm all in favour of preserved railways and stately homes making money by hiring out their facilities as a historical backscene to the film industry.  Crowds do pull in the revenue needed for fund restoration although I prefer to avoid these events, much as I do with Thomas the Tank weekend.  But if that sort of nonsense is what appeals to the punters, we have to accept that it's part of the price of seeing steam survive.

I agree. I don't see much to celebrate about a period of mass slaughter. My experience of talking to the generation that lived through it was that whilst there was a certain cameraderie, team spirit and pulling together, it was not a happy time, most people were just glad to see the back of it.

 

I get the impression that wartime weekends are not really a thing on mainland European heritage railways.

[RichardT]

5 minutes ago, rodent279 said:

1 hour ago, Wheatley said:

I'd been misled for years by Paul Hardcastle that the average age of the WW2 combat soldier was 26

I thought it was nineteen....n n n n nineteen....

If you listen to the lyrics that’s the point @Wheatley was making…

[whart57]

3 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

These events strike me as being in very poor taste because war has never been a game where you play against the away team for a couple of hours and end the day supping ale with them in the beer tent afterwards.

 

Actually it is. I recently watched the film biography of Bert Trautmann, the Manchester City goalkeeper in the late 1940s and 1950s. Despite having been brought to Britain as a POW he became a sporting hero in Manchester. His story is not unique. Other POWs, German and Italian, also settled in Britain after the war, married British girls and stayed. Part of the reason is that Brits had been given the propaganda image of Germans as evil hulking storm-troopers so that when real Germans turned up as POWs and were not really any different from their own young men that was a bit of a shock.

 

My family lived through the Occupation in the Netherlands and one thing one of my aunts said once is that you never knew where you were with a German soldier. The uniform was the same whether they were a hard core Nazi or just a young bloke doing a job he never asked to do. One reason the Resistance used young women as couriers is precisely because most German soldiers preferred flirting with the Dutch girls to doing the nasty stuff of checking for illegal stuff. Of course if you got a real Nazi, who might well have been Dutch anyway, then you were in trouble. Particularly if your papers were a bit dodgy.

 

The socialists used to say that "a bayonet is a weapon with a working class lad at each end". In the end wars are fought by men and women who don't really have any quarrel with those they are actually fighting. It's that that makes reconciliation possible.

[Wheatley]

2 hours ago, rodent279 said:

I thought it was nineteen....n n n n nineteen....

"In Vietnam he was 19"

 

I was s s s sixteen when it came out, the lyrics are therefore etched on my brain whether I like it or not :-)

[Michael Hodgson]

31 minutes ago, whart57 said:

 

My family lived through the Occupation in the Netherlands and one thing one of my aunts said once is that you never knew where you were with a German soldier. The uniform was the same whether they were a hard core Nazi or just a young bloke doing a job he never asked to do.

Exactly.  The very word uniform means "the same".  

Conscripts had no choice - you wore what you were told you had to wear, and at the end of the day it's still just clothing.   That's why it's petty-minded to ban Nazi uniforms.  The problems were entirely down to certain individuals who wore them.

 

Most German soldiers, like most of our lads were simple farm labourers, factory workers or whatever, with no beef against their opposite numbers in some place they'd never even been to.  But when you believe your country and way of life is going to be attacked, something has to be done about it, so you accept that you have to "do your bit". 

 

It can't be denied however that Adolf did get a pretty good turnout at his rallies in Nuremburg, just like certain Western politicians one can think of, and the crowds weren't cheering because they had to - they genuinely thought he was improving their conditions, and people are easily flattered into believing that they are the best in the world.  Not just the Germans - we had turned half the world pink on the map with the notion that we were making things better for those poor ignorant natives in our colonies.  Even today, calling ourselves democracies doesn't make us immune to rabble-rousers, and "the civilised world" has produced a lot more those in recent years.

 

[Phil Parker]

3 hours ago, rockershovel said:

WW2 is something special for a certain generation of British. It is now, for practical purposes just about the limits of living memory; a time when our country did sonething huge and important. 

 

I wonder if WW2 moving out of living memory is what makes these events so popular. Instead of visitors being people who saw the horrors of war, it's people whose only experience is highly sanitised war movies.

[Oldddudders]

ISTR the K&ESR, my 'local' heritage line when I lived in Kent, regularly holding WW2/Dad's Army recreations decades ago, complete with actor Bill Pertwee in uniform. There is every reason given that the county faced hostile Europe, and was the first landfall for most of the Luftwaffe raids. 

 

Our theatre society, TOADS at the Little Theatre, Torquay, has had considerable successes in recent years with performances of both 'Allo 'Allo' and Dad's Army, so despite these shows being very old, the public still relish the era and tv's take on its humour. Yes, I did wear a Nazi uniform as Leclerc in AA, but it implied nothing about my beliefs, or those of my character, a rather clever Resistance fighter. I do admit to a brief but exciting affair with a girl from Hamburg 59 years ago....

 

Where I now live was liberated in August 1944, and 80-year celebrations are being held right, left and centre next month. They will feature lots of military vehicles and other memorabilia of that ghastly occupation. The road into my nearest small town, Bonnetable, is named after a US soldier who lost his life in that liberation. 

 

Post-Covid every heritage line is running to stand still in financial terms. If their ideas are same-y, let's just cut them some slack and hope the cash rolls in.

[Boris]

"If you can't get people through the door with a 40s event you're doing something wrong"

 

That was from a museum director in York about 25 years ago and it is still true today, as long as it's generally the TV 1940s with people all being obscenely cheerful, "spontaneously" dancing in the streets etc people come in their droves in their Laura  Ashley dresses and their charity shop M&S suits and the public love to see it all.  As long as they don't have to see Axis soldiers or these days Russian soldiers its all jolly good fun and people unload their wallets and go home happy and fair play to any museum that taps into that market.  Same with model railway weekends etc. if a venue has the space to do this, good for them.  I think there is a blurred line between special events and "extra attractions" in some cases though, something like a steam gala or other theme weekend is usually a stand alone event to get more bums on seats, the SVR has something almost every weekend in the summer whether its food festivals, band concerts or whatever things like that are an additional attraction really to get people to stay on the railway and spend money rather than wander off and unload their wallets in the local shops.

 

I can tell you from personal experience organising preserved railway special events that the theme weekends take massive amounts of organising and is almost an additional full time role for a volunteer at times, and with changes to retirement age etc fewer people have that time  as we can see by decreasing volunteer numbers across the voluntary sector in general, and then of course there is outlay at a time of rapidly increasing operating costs for any railway (money, fuel, electric etc), the Pickering/NYMR 40s event (before the whole Price thing which I won't go in to) was well upwards of £65000 to organise and tied up 2 members of paid staff 1 day per week all year plus dozens of volunteers.

 

Then of course we come to the politics of the whole 1940s weekend where some eventually implode due to politics (Haworth) or for a multitude of other reason such as the Saltaire debacle of a couple of weeks ago, reenactor politics can be as bad as preserved railway politics.  Although a 40s event was held at Haworth recently where a number of shops in a street organised to have a 40s theme and do some minor street entertainment and the public and reenactors turned up and loved it - the council tried to stop it but as it was effectively a private event they had no power.

 

Booking a large reenactment group (let's say 20 plus reenactors on site) is going to start at £1000 generally and then increase hugely depending on what you want them to do/bring, bearing in mind again that these groups do need to run at a small profit each year and the cost of insurance has flown up in the past 3 years.  The group I am involved with paid around £400 a year in 2021, by 2024 that is £1100 for the same cover.  I'll tell you the cautionary tale of a council in the north of England that organised a large multi-period reenactment event for armed forces day and when they got prices turned to every single group and said "its a hobby so we expect you to do it for free" and then wondered why they were told to get knotted, some groups can go through £500 worth of powder/blanks in a weekends easily and they like to see those costs met.

 

Reenactment is a massively popular hobby these days and there are more groups and events than ever, but they won't be taken for mugs, maybe a lesson some preserved railways could learn about volunteer retention/recruitment after all volunteering on a preserved railway is basically reenactment.

 

But it all boils down to money and manpower, the NYMR used to do a load of small events that didn't by themselves make huge amounts of cash but increased secondary spend immensely (but needed willing people to organise) and have now gone to the other extreme with few large expensive events which do take less organising but need a higher cash input.  I would be interested to see where it goes in the future.

 

Just to respond to Phils comment, I agree people want the perceived jollity of the WW2 Home Front (Dads Army etc) without seeing the nasty side.  But at a none railway multi period event some of the most popular exhibits are the WW2 Germans, I think that depends on presentation, if you have the SS and concentration camp guards (yes this did happen at Levisham repeatedly) and swastikas emblazoned everywhere people are going to get uncomfortable (at least).  But the group I am thinking of whose name escapes me show what the average German soldier really wore and really had and really does show that most of them are normal guys doing a nasty job, often against their will and its well portrayed, interesting and educational.

Edited July 14 by Boris
Dreadful Spelling

[Michael Hodgson]

2 hours ago, rodent279 said:

 

I get the impression that wartime weekends are not really a thing on mainland European heritage railways.

 

For good reason - they had a much rougher time than we did.  Yes, a lot of our troops died in battle and civvies were killed in the Blitz and there was food rationing and all that.  But we remained free (albeit only by a very narrow squeak) while the rest of Europe was overrun and the natives treated savagely to discourage them from rebelling.  No "Dunkirk Spirit" camaraderie there.  And then while they were being liberated, they inevitably suffered from bombing and shelling by both sides as allied forces chased the retreating Germans back towards Berlin.   

 

Even the Axis countries suffered because our side eventually devastated them.  One can understand why they might want to string up Il Duce from the nearest lamp post.

[009 micro modeller]

5 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

I'm not offended by Nazi uniforms; indeed I think they looked somewhat smarter than those worn by the Allies.  But overweight middle-aged Brits pretending to be Nazi stormtroopers just look ridiculous

I think the problem some people had with them was that they were a bit suspicious about why some individuals liked to wear them so much, a bit like in this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq8RnAfCFwk

 

"You don't have anything from the Allied side?"

 

"No, no. That sort of thing wouldn't interest me at all."

 

 

They’re also not particularly historically relevant in the UK, especially if the people wearing them are just standing around not doing much.

 

However, if they’re done in a suitably sensitive and historically accurate way I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the educational potential of re-enactment (compare living history museums) or these sorts of events. I think it was the NYMR who used to do schools’ programming around their 1940s weekend, where the schoolchildren would come to the railway, learn about what it was like for children who were evacuated during the war and life on the Home Front etc., and ride on the train. This may have been lost now because of the changes they made to their event, although in theory it should be something that can be provided throughout the year in some form, independently of whether there is a 1940s weekend or not. But for the weekend the educational point still stands, if it’s done properly.

[Phil Parker]

9 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

For good reason - they had a much rougher time than we did.  Yes, a lot of our troops died in battle and civvies were killed in the Blitz and there was food rationing and all that.  But we remained free (albeit only by a very narrow squeak) while the rest of Europe was overrun and the natives treated savagely to discourage them from rebelling.  No "Dunkirk Spirit" camaraderie there.  And then while they were being liberated, they inevitably suffered from bombing and shelling by both sides as allied forces chased the retreating Germans back towards Berlin.   

 

Many year ago, we were invited to take Chris Mead's layout "Overlord" to Germany for an exhibition. As the organiser said, "It's part of our history. Not a good part, but it is part of our history."

 

The reaction was positive. None of the jingoistic stuff we get in this country, and a few misty eyes. Most people were really interested in the historical aspect of the layout, and no one felt offended it was there.

[Michael Hodgson]

22 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

Our theatre society, TOADS at the Little Theatre, Torquay, has had considerable successes in recent years with performances of both 'Allo 'Allo' and Dad's Army, so despite these shows being very old, the public still relish the era and tv's take on its humour.

 

I was surprised whilst working in Belgium at the popularity there of 'Allo 'Allo - I had expected the subtleties of the cod French accents would pass over their heads, but they clearly found it hilarious.  Pretty much every day somebody would say to me "I vill say zis only once".  The success of that series was down to the utterly farcical scenarios and its exaggeration of the national stereotypes as used in so many films of the period, whether the heel-clicking Germans, the gesturing Italian with a feathered hat, the RAF public school types or French onion-sellers, and of course to brilliant acting.

 

Dad's Army owed more to the implausibiity of the very idea that a well-equipped invading army could be repelled by a small group of ill-equipped but enthusiastic old men, boys, bank clerks, the butcher and the undertaker who still had to do their day jobs.  And again, the success was down to the acting, which was due in no small measure to the choce of cast and to the script-writing.

[60B]

12 hours ago, OnTheBranchline said:

I follow a number of heritage centres/heritage railways on social media and it feels like every other weekend, one of them puts on a "it's the 1940s!" event with staff dressing/railway dressed up appropriately for the occasion. Which is great and fun and everything but when they all do it, it seems a little uninspired I guess? I probably shouldn't say the 'only pull' but it seems to be a major point in the advertising.

To get to the central question: no. There are a lot of wartime/ 40s weekends but they aren't the only event that is making a lot of money for railways. Plenty of galas this year have been immensely successful within their own corner. But they don't leave their circle. Would the ordinary person have known how popular the SVR's diesel gala or Swanage's Bulleid gala was? Probably not actively. Whereas there is a pretty large group of people who effectively cosplay the past for whom the railway side of the event is secondary.

Buckle in cos I have some hot takes when you zoom out on the question.

As someone who is on the younger side of the forum's population and spent a lot of time as a teen at memorial events for fallen military personnel as an Air Cadet, I find these events intensely gauche. People love to celebrate the VE days and the cars and such but they aren't even close to a representation of how things were. Britain (and the US) in the post war rebuilding spent a lot of time creating a huge amount of soft propaganda about the wartime experience. Just have to look at Dambusters. In reality it was intensely dangerous and did very little to hold up Germany's wartime engineering in the areas they targeted. So all that for a few weeks of disruption and the deaths of a large number of Soviet POWs. You'd never know that from the movie though. This all gets filtered through the Baby Boomer generation who benefited from the post war reconstruction and social reforms but seem to have broadly convinced themselves they were driving tanks in Berlin in 1945 or working in factories back home to singlehandedly end the war. None ever seems to appear as French resistance, Soviet soldiers. 

As others have alluded to, theres something quite strange about the re-enactors and especially the ones who think they're owed an event. You'd have thought the SVR cancelling theirs in 2022 was tantamount to treason. The NYMR one getting cancelled proved to me that the people who go to these events are just completely focused on themselves. Nothing stopping them organising their own event of course. Overall, the events play fast and loose with what really went on as Britain, America and the Soviets surrounded Berlin and the Americans fought the Japanese on every Atoll they could capture. Theres no way every woman seems to be dressed up like they're about to be painted on the side of a plane (a more American behaviour) because it was happening. A quick perusal of even the most staged photos show a more drab outing for women's clothing. Then theres the egregious locomotives and rolling stock rolled out for the day. And the less said about the mock execution the ELR did, the better. There are ways to commemorate these events without turning them into ahistoric knees up but I dont think everyone going Memphis Belle and Lindyhopping to Vera Lynn is quite the way to do it. 

 

5 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

But overweight middle-aged Brits pretending to be Nazi stormtroopers just look ridiculous, and "re-eactments" seem to me to be making a mockery of those who fought courageously and died or were handicapped for the rest of their lives in hostilities.

 

Its all a bit Father Ted: "You don't have anything from the Allied side?" "No, no. That sort of thing wouldn't interest me at all." (Edit: Modeller got there first) In fact, Peep Show satirised the type pretty well: 

Theres also plenty of other wars and conflicts that don't seem to be on the radar for the war cosplayers. Korea? Kenya? The Troubles? Various countries declaring independence from Britain? No, none of them are as romantic as an Airfix kit painting on the box types. Could remove almost all the war time connotations with a 50s event. People love the cars and the music whilst burying generational trauma and rationing. Just make it Heartbeat without stepping on the toes of the NYMR. 

Edited July 14 by 60B

[Michael Hodgson]

18 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

 

The reaction was positive. None of the jingoistic stuff we get in this country, and a few misty eyes. Most people were really interested in the historical aspect of the layout, and no one felt offended it was there.

It has been very difficult for post-war Germans.  They know the previous generation were the bad guys, but their parents and all the Germans they know all seemed to be perfectly normal decent people.  So they are baffled - how come it happened?  I can understand why swastikas and nazi uniforms are banned in Germany - they are afraid that they must have some hidden genetic militaristic trait that might re-emerge and that history might repeat.

[009 micro modeller]

4 hours ago, adb968008 said:

Many a true thing said in jest.

 

The ELR tried this once with “The Battle of Summerseat” held in the field opposite the station.. The Sealed Knot society provided their volunteers, set up opposing camps in the field and brought a cannon and did a reenactment.

 

it wasnt overly popular though and wasnt repeated. Ive still got a ticket from this.

 

 

I mean, it doesn’t sound like there was anything particularly wrong with that event, just that there’s no real advantage to having a heritage railway at the venue used for it. Unsurprisingly, given that they didn’t really exist at the time, railways didn’t play as big a part in the English Civil War as they did in WW2. 😅
 

52 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

That's why it's petty-minded to ban Nazi uniforms.  The problems were entirely down to certain individuals who wore them.

I think the ELR banned people from dressing up as high-ranking Nazi generals and Gestapo and discouraged the excessive use of swastikas but allowed the normal army uniforms. But agree about the ‘certain individuals’. Again though, I don’t really see what is being recreated by somebody wearing an Axis uniform in a British setting.

 

45 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

 

I wonder if WW2 moving out of living memory is what makes these events so popular. Instead of visitors being people who saw the horrors of war, it's people whose only experience is highly sanitised war movies.

I suspect in many cases the ‘nostalgia’ of some people is for the popular culture depictions of the war, not the actual history (which they didn’t live through).

 

42 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

Our theatre society, TOADS at the Little Theatre, Torquay, has had considerable successes in recent years with performances of both 'Allo 'Allo' and Dad's Army, so despite these shows being very old, the public still relish the era and tv's take on its humour.

I’ve always found though that a lot of the humour in Dad’s Army isn’t necessarily directly about the war, but about the characters and the types of people within British society that they represent.

 

1 hour ago, Boris said:

Then of course we come to the politics of the whole 1940s weekend where some eventually implode due to politics (Haworth) or for a multitude of other reason such as the Saltaire debacle of a couple of weeks ago

I can’t remember exactly what happened with Haworth and didn’t know about Saltaire. You also mention Levisham but I thought some of the NYMR’s event was based elsewhere on the line?

[009 micro modeller]

25 minutes ago, 60B said:

In fact, Peep Show satirised the type pretty well: 

Theres also plenty of other wars and conflicts that don't seem to be on the radar for the war cosplayers. Korea? Kenya? The Troubles?

Unfortunately though you could have another issue there, as illustrated in this other sketch featuring Mitchell and Webb:

 

 

[rodent279]

1 hour ago, 009 micro modeller said:

I suspect in many cases the ‘nostalgia’ of some people is for the popular culture depictions of the war, not the actual history (which they didn’t live through).

Spot on.

We Brits are brought up on a diet of war films such as the Dambusters, in which Brits are depicted as dashing suave gents, a little bit understated and sometimes uncertain, but definitely the good guys, and all Germans as overarching dictatorial bully-boy types.

We can't really be surprised when we see news footage of drunken English yobs standing in fountains in German cities spreading their arms wide like an aircraft and singing the tune to the Dambusters.

I think most of mainland Europe wants to put it behind them, whilst honouring the sacrifices made, whilst to me we Brits don't so much remember WW2 as wallow in fake nostalgia. But then, as referred to above, Britain did not suffer in the same way that mainland Europe did. Sure Coventry got it bad, but it wasn't turned into a pile of smoking rubble like Hamburg, Dresden etc. We didn't have towns and villages rounded up, men and boys taken away and shot, women and girls sent to concentration camps or forced to work in brothels.

Our whole perception of it is different-sometimes it feels like the view is that it was just a jolly good wheeze.

Edited July 14 by rodent279

[rogerzilla]

Hardly anyone really remembers WW2 now.  You'd have to be born before 1943 to have even a hazy memory of sitting in a damp Anderson shelter at night, wondering if your house would be standing in the morning (my father did, born 1938).

 

I suppose it appeals to a certain breed of jingoistic types.  You can spot them by the flagpoles in their gardens - extra points for a regimental flag as well as a Union Flag.  There are three in my street!

[adb968008]

We only celebrate ww2 because we werent invaded.

 

Theres little positive to celebrate in Europe about an army turning up and killing families, looting, starvation and complete destruction of your surroundings.

 

If you need to think about it, just look at Ukraine today and ask do you in the future think they will look back at current events with nostalgia ?

 

 

[Michael Hodgson]

2 hours ago, rodent279 said:

 

We Brits are brought up on a diet of war films such as the Dambusters, in which Brits are depicted as dashing suave gents, a little bit understated and sometimes uncertain, but definitely the good guys, and all Germans as overarching dictatorial bully-boy types.

 

 

Almost.  Once the good guys had won, retrospective war films were mostly heroic Americans with the odd British sidekick or continental resistance fighters.  Mainland Europe got these same movies although they might have had to read sub-titles to follow the dialogue. 

 

As for those dreadful films produced as wartime propaganda, it's quite clear that they were mirrored by the German film industry.

[t-b-g]

There is a huge difference between celebrating conflict and war as if it is a jolly fun game that belongs in a theme park and having an event which pays tribute to the sacrifices of those who fought for the freedom we enjoy now.

 

Most of us have never had to put on a uniform and be ready to defend our country against an enemy like the Germans. If preserved railways hold events that keep the memories of those that did have to do such things alive, then I don't see a problem with that. Most re-enactors that I have spoken with do it as a tribute to those who were there, rather than because they wish they had been there themselves. It is their way of celebrating and remembering the "greatest generation". 

 

If they are financially beneficial to the railways and to other organisations that take part, then that is a big bonus.

 

If it is a case of the people who were directly involved not being around any more, so we should just forget about them and what they did, then that is a sad state of affairs in my view. I had a grandad who served on the Atlantic and Russian convoys and was also involved in the D Day landings and a cousin who was badly injured at Arnhem. My mum was bombed in the blitz and was lucky to survive.

 

They are not around now to tell us all how easy we had things!

 

1940s weekends are just another part of the heritage/preservation world. I don't see what harm they can do and I can see some good that they achieve in keeping the memories of what happened alive. If some people don't like them, the answer is easy. Don't go!