This year 11 November sees the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that marked the end of the First World War. We know that our ancestors serving in the military will have ceased hostilities on this day and prepared to come home. But what about all the members of our families back in Blighty who had waited so long and so anxiously for them? Newspaper accounts from the time describe celebrations that were spontaneous and exuberant. The first hours and days after the war ended were not the time for formal thanksgiving celebrations or parades (though these would come later); rather, they were a time for wild rejoicing and a casting-off of some of the restrictions of the war years.

The celebrations
Probably the single most memorable aspect of Armistice day for our ancestors was that it presented an opportunity for time off work. The day itself, and, in some places, the following few days as well, were treated as holiday, with many bosses entering into the spirit of the moment by agreeing to pay their employees notwithstanding. The Northampton Mercury (18 November 1918) commented somewhat drily that ‘in practically the whole of the shoe factories of East Northants work ceased when the news became known… full payment will be made if work is resumed tomorrow morning’. Cessation of work affected all industries. The Birmingham Daily Post (12 November 1918) reported, for instance, that the sale of freehold properties in certain areas of the city would be postponed for a week ‘in consequence of the Armistice celebrations’. In Liverpool all the commercial exchanges – including the Produce Exchange, the Liverpool Exchange Company (merchants and shipowners), the Stock Exchange, Corn Exchange, Liverpool Cotton Market and the Fruit Trade Association – closed activity for the day. No trading was done and the Liverpool Post that day commented that the public ‘were not in the mood to buy anything, not even food’. One group of people, did, however, turn the Armistice to financial advantage. Under the side heading ‘Hawkers’ Harvest’, the Daily Mirror commented that London’s itinerant street sellers ‘did a great trade in ticklers, squirters and all the other paraphernalia of horseplay’.

‘Indescribable confusion’
Not in work that day, your ancestor would most probably have joined family, friends, colleagues and neighbours in the streets and parks of their locality. Legislation which, for four years, had forbidden people, for example, to loiter near bridges and tunnels, or to whistle for a London taxi (since the sound might be mistaken for an air-raid warning) went all at once unheeded. In small towns such as Nantwich, Cheshire, local dignitaries encouraged people to congregate in market squares at preappointed times in an effort to keep control. Flags were flown from all major buildings and bunting was thrown up across streets. In Liverpool, the Lord Mayor ordered the flags of all the Entente Countries (the Allies) to be displayed on the Town Hall Balcony. As each flag was placed in position, ‘enthusiastic cheering arose from a large crowd in Castle Street’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 12 November, 1918).

The mood in congested streets across the country was jubilant and – on the whole – peaceful, although the quarter of a million people celebrating in central London at what the Daily Mirror titillatingly described as the ‘Nelson Column Orgy’ made the streets impassable and ‘formed a surging mass as they wandered about indulging in all kinds of minor horseplay’ (14 November, 1918). Unfortunately these frolics led to two massive conflagrations in the area as people threw posters, poles, wheelbarrows, trestles and even wooden blocks into the road and set fire to them – vandalism deemed ‘inexcusable even given the circumstances now prevailing’.

With Guy Fawkes celebrations having been banned since the Defence of the Realm Act of August 1914, the Armistice was the first opportunity to publicly destroy effigies of hated individuals – especially the Kaiser. The Northampton Mercury revealed that at a local German internment camp, civilian prisoners ‘celebrated the abdication of the Kaiser and the signing of the Armistice by hanging his effigy’. Meanwhile in Newcastle, a similar effigy made by male and female munitions workers was carried from Scotswood and paraded through the principal parts of the city. At one road junction, the Kaiser was dropped and, due to his having been filled with squibs and doused with petrol (a scarce commodity at the time), burst into flames (Newcastle Journal, 12 November, 1918). A mock funeral procession for the Kaiser was also a feature of the Armistice celebrations in Dublin with a fake hearse ‘escorted through the streets by an excited crowd’ (Daily Mirror, 14 November, 1918).

‘The blessing of light’
Perhaps the most dramatic element of the Armistice celebrations was the restoral of electric light after so many years of blackout. As one working-class woman Adeline Hodges, from Seaham, County Durham, recalled, during the war, ‘no lights were allowed and the total darkness was terribly frightening. No vehicles carried lights and our homes were completely blacked out’ (see www.workinglives.org). On Armistice Day, workmen got busy taking the dark coat of paint off the street lamps. The Dundee Courier of 12 November commented that ‘one was almost blinded by the sight of an electric signboard in Murraygate blazing away with triumphant voltage and the glory of shop windows was again restored’. In Newcastle, electricians were busy all day long ‘with the result that with the coming of darkness huge signs outside theatres were illuminated and electric globes glowed from their points of vantage as of yore’ (Newcastle Journal, 12 November, 1918).

In addition to the newly illuminated street lamps and tramcars, there were bonfires, torch processions and fireworks, all of which led to ‘a brilliance in the night sky that people had almost forgotten’ (Aberdeen Press and Journal, 14 November, 1918).

‘A deafening din’
Accompanying the light displays were tremendous outbursts of noise. Bells rang out, people sang the National Anthem, boats on rivers and canals sounded their sirens, in harbours such as that at Ilfracombe, all the minesweepers and patrolboats simultaneously sounded their hooters (Western Times, 15 November 15, 1918). The Dundee Courier commented that ‘sweeter music has not been heard in Dundee for many a day than the bells of peace which yesterday clanged in joyous message into a clear and sunlit sky’, and went on to report that the Armistice had inspired a wonderful variety of impromptu bands; pipers, ‘melodeon’ [small accordion] players, the Lilybank ragtime and the like (12 November, 1918).

In Leicester, the streets were well filled even three nights after the Armistice with young people ‘singing and generally “making a cheerful noise”“’. In London, soldiers, munition girls and frenzied youths pushed their way through the crows making ‘making weird noises on still weirder instruments. Bells were rung, trumpets and bugles blown, and there was much banging of tins’ (Daily Mirror, 14 November, 1918). And it was not only in the towns and cities that the volume had been turned up, The Newcastle Journal reported that there was singing in the fields around the city, ‘an occurrence hardly heard for four years’.

‘Mingled feelings of gladness and of sorrow’
For many of our ancestors, however, the mood of the Armistice was, of course, mixed. For many, the war, as the Newcastle Journal put it, ‘has left gaps in their home life that can never be filled’. Thanksgiving Services were held in many parish churches on Sunday 17 November, but vicars in some parts of the country commented on low turnouts. Many men had been killed in the war, thousands were missing presumed dead, others were incapacitated by injury, and still more members of the congregation were unable to attend because they were suffering from the sinister outbreak of Spanish Flu which was to kill 228,000 Britons over the next few months. And the last word must surely go to the ordinary bereaved mother who, when asked by a journalist from the Northampton Mercury how she was feeling, pronounced most movingly: ‘I feel dazed… But I shall have to be happy for the sake of the others.’