Historian Roger Bingham looks at how Westmorland saw out the last weeks of the Second World War:

UNLIKE the First World War, which ended with surprising suddenness, the closing European stages of the Second World War seemed to drag on endlessly throughout the cold and wet spring of 1945.

‘What is peacetime like?’ questioned a picture of a war baby in a Westmorland Gazette advertisement of ‘milk of magnesia - a cure for minor stomach troubles’.

But if peace had not arrived, some wartime features had already faded away. In December 1944, the Home Guard stood down and, amidst tears all round, the remaining evacuees returned to their original homes.

Yet, in the battle zones, nine months after their landings in France on D-Day, June 6, 1944, the western allies were still facing the furious final resistance of Hitler’s Third Reich. Yet, already, our own Winston Churchill with America’s President Franklin Roosevelt and the Soviet Union’s Marshal uncle Joseph Stalin had sealed the post-war fate of Europe at the Yalta Conference. Curiously, such was the far flung nature of the war, that the ‘big three’ were actually observed by a Westmorland woman, Dorothy Salmon, an army interpreter from Burneside.

As in 1918, the last weeks of this war saw a boost in casualties. Local ‘deaths in action’ included Sergeant J.J. Whitfield from Bowness, John Thompson from Troutbeck Bridge and Corporal Heap from Kendal.

Then, in May, as the bells were ringing for victory in Europe, there came a tragic reminder that the war against Japan was still on with the report of the death, in Burma, of a ‘thrice decorated Kendal officer, Flight Lieutenant Maurice Briggs D.Sl.O, D.F.C. D.F.M’. His brother Henry, a leading aircraftsman, had earlier been killed in a flying accident in Scotland.

Yet, despite continuing worries, some plans for post-war Westmorland were being made. The prospect of a national park was announced which, The Westmorland Gazette warily wondered, might become a scheme whereby Whitehall could run Lakeland.

Nevertheless, unlike after the last war, there would be homes fit for heroes. In Kendal, the Sandylands pre-war council estate was to be completed and 500 accommodation units were to be created on a new Hall Garth estate. Also, in the first instance, 50 council houses were planned for Milnthorpe and 12 for both Arnside and Holme.

Even so, some older domestic aspirations prevailed and the front page of The Westmorland Gazette’s victory edition included eight adverts for housemaids, six for parlour maids and one for ‘a girl for a farmhouse either now or at the Whitsuntide hirings’.

By April, many villages were already organising victory celebrations. Milnthorpe decided to buy the privately-owned public rooms for a memorial hall. Burton had started a committee for the same purpose four years earlier. Kendal’s corporation ordered an arena outside Abbot Hall for open-air victory dances, but stingily refused to open children’s playgrounds on Sundays. Tetchily, also, the town’s pubs were refused extended licences, as the date of victory could not be predicted.

Extensions were, however, granted to rural areas and so, on May 8, Victory in Europe (VE) Day, many village hostelries, like the Ship Inn at Bardsea and the Commercial Inn at Holme, were drunk dry.