Richard Dimbleby Archives - The Skittish Library

Inspired by my mum handing me an envelope recently which contained a lock of hair from my very first haircut in about 1975 (a family hairloom, I suppose you could call it), I’ve been thinking about the little bits of history that surround me day to day. I didn’t know this lock of hair existed until a few weeks ago so to suddenly be presented with my hair (pale, gingery brown and wavy, entirely unlike my hair now) from 40 years ago was a slightly strange experience. Especially as I now have a one-year-old daughter myself and her hair is redder but much the same.

I can never quite understand those Cash in the Attic type programmes that zoom round someone’s house, gathering up armfuls of family heirlooms to sell at auction so they can put £400 towards going on a holiday that they were probably going on anyway. Firstly, the surprise that people emit from being presented with their own possessions, as if they knew nothing about them beforehand. I can only imagine most of these things were inherited by a largely disinterested family who shoved the house-clearanced bits in a cupboard and feel utterly unattached to them. Because, secondly, they are pretty happy to just get rid of this stuff for £10 a pop at an auction house.

Me, if I owned those antiquey odds and ends, I would know about it and I certainly wouldn’t flog them for buttons just so I could stand next to Angela Rippon (delightful as I’m sure she is) and get on daytime telly.

The programme of that ilk that I still think about, and which continues to annoy me, concerned some parents who wanted to sell their heirlooms in order to buy a new heirloom for their children. Which is a pretty strange thing to do in the first place, but hey ho. What was incomprehensible though, was that the heirlooms they sold were a large set of family silver cutlery pieces, with an incredible history. They came from some Jewish ancestors who had escaped Fascist Italy during World War Two with only these bits of silver, stashed all over their body. They were lovely old pieces, and I especially loved some long spoons used for ice cream floats, with a straw incorporated in the handle. Now, the family had three children, and you’d think this would be an ideal heirloom to share around fairly, what with there being lots of separate pieces. But no, they sold them to buy one (ONE) modern art painting that the parents obviously just wanted to buy anyway. I’m not a mega fan of a lot of modern art (unless it makes me laugh) so disregard my opinion…….but it was complete rubbish. Good luck kids, sharing that.

My heirlooms don’t need a team of people to uncover. I have my Grandad’s ephemera and Richard Dimbleby ring, as I wrote about here – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/remembrance-week-grandad-richard-dimbleby-and-an-unknown-german-soldier/.

I also have what is probably the most common 100-year-old-thing generally owned now – a brass Princess Mary tin given to the troops as a Christmas present in 1914. My Grandad carried it in World War Two to keep his tobacco and spare uniform patches in, so he probably got it from his step-dad, who’d been in the First World War. Household tip – some brown sauce polishes old brass up a treat.

Princess Mary's brass tin — Princess Mary’s brass tin

Some various wartime ephemera – a handkerchief sent to my Grandma, uniform patches and badges:

While I am in France, my heart is with you

This made me realise that there must have been a brand new industry in wartime France – manufacturing souvenirs and tokens for the soldiers stationed there to send home. Although possibly only for a short time during the phony war period, I presume.

Oh, and what appears to be a live bullet Grandad brought back with him at the end of the war. Not too sure what to do with that. Or if I’m even allowed to own it.

What’s great is finding things in your house, though. Not in a Cash in the Attic way, I mean things actually as part of your house. Like when we found a newspaper from 1986 lining the shower base when we redid the bathroom. Or the general oddness of discovering a still-unexplained small bone in the plaster of the bedroom wall. And best of all, taking off some wallpaper to discover the previous, previous owners the Doyle family had written their family tree on the wall, and scribbled “The Doyles are the best!” in big letters before covering it up like a living room time capsule. This was especially great as I was captivated by a similar thing in Hancock’s Half Hour when I first saw it as a kid, when he “finds” poems by Lord Byron on his walls in East Cheam:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eAhd1Xs0kb0

What’s fascinating is that there’s so much stuff hidden away, things that may be of great importance, just unknown, in people’s houses. What do you have passed from the past?

This is the post I’ve been wanting to put up since I started this blog. It’s my treasure trove – my Grandad’s archive of his wartime activities, stuffed inside a book that both fascinates me and creeps me out in equal measure.

Firstly, a note – my scans are often a bit wonky on this blog, I’m afraid. This is usually due to the delicate nature of my old books, which means that they don’t take kindly to being pressed open (and, admittedly, sometimes it’s just because I’m still trying to improve at the scanning and photo editing involved). But this post is full of some of the most delicate things I have, and some of them have almost disintegrated. So wonkiness is rather unavoidable.

My Grandad was Allan Pickup, a lovely man from Rossendale, in Lancashire (and apparently one of his much younger cousins was Ronald Pickup, the actor). He’d been a bus driver before the Second World War, and after signing up he landed quite a brilliant job – he served with the Motor Transport Corps and became one of the official drivers for the brilliant Richard Dimbleby, the BBC’s first and most prominent war correspondent.

This was pretty exciting stuff, at least at this point – to start with he was in France with the British Expeditionary Force, on the Maginot Line. This was during the so-called “phoney war” period, before things really kicked off properly. I do imagine him on the Maginot Line, as the George Formby song goes. Being a big Formby fan, I just have to include the clip below, where he’s singing his song to the soldiers on the Maginot Line itself. I really love this footage – it gives me such a sense of a moment just hanging in time.

Grandad’s proximity to the press meant he was in sight of many luminaries of the period – which I know because he kept his clippings from the Rossendale Free Press in this book. It sounded like he was a slight celebrity to his local newspaper because of his job – the clippings show he handed Gracie Fields a bouquet, met the actor Sir Seymour Hicks, and was “in reaching distance” of King George VI when he visited the front. He was on the BBC giving his impressions from The Maginot Line, and also on a BBC spelling bee quiz for soldiers and their relatives – he and my Grandma, Bessie, being on opposing teams. As far as anyone was having a good time in the war at this point, it sounds like he was finding it all pretty thrilling, and I don’t blame him. He says,

“I myself have been on the air, on the screen (on the news reels) and also been mentioned in The Daily Mail, so that is not a bad show for just a common bus driver.”

(I’ve looked for the newsreels and although the British Pathe archives are incredible, and one of my favourite places on the internet, I sadly can’t find anything.)

He told my mum that Richard Dimbleby was a lovely man – in fact, once they were in Arras, in northern France, when Dimbleby wanted to stop at a jeweller to buy his wife a present. Grandad was looking at the rings, but couldn’t afford to buy one. So Dimbleby bought one for him, to give to Grandma. We still have it, in its box, on the bottom of which Grandad wrote “To Bessie, with love from France” (and then, possibly as an afterthought, thinking “France” was too vague, he wrote “Allan” up the side).

And when Richard Dimbleby was on the cover of The Radio Times in January 1940, there was Grandad, in his driver’s cap, standing next to the car. Thanks to the brilliant and recently launched BBC Genome project, I see the reason Dimbleby was on the cover that week was because his programme “Despatch from the Front”, was launching in a new weekly format. Grandad saved the cover and back pages, and they’re wonderful. I did post up my favourite advert of all time earlier this week, but here it is again (any excuse):

Here are the other things Grandad kept in the book:

An authorisation chit for a press visit to a site in France –

A photo of a friend of his –

A tourist guide to the First World War trenches of Vimy –

A newspaper page showing a bombed site, with a cross drawn on it. Not sure what this is, but presumably one of them is Grandad or one of his friends.

A morale-boosting piece about a soldier missing his home and family –

Which was obviously especially poignant as his daughter, my mum, was born in 1942. He posted a happy birthday message in the paper for her in 1945 and kept the clipping here –

I posted this earlier this week too – the fabulously British certificate he was given at the end of the war:

This is what really chokes me up, though. It’s a couple of pages torn from The Journal of the Royal Army Service Corps, and an article by Major C. R. Thompson called “The Horror of Belsen”. I don’t know what date this journal was from, but the letters mention a previous edition of March 1945, and as Belsen was liberated by the British Army in April 1945, this must have been one of the very first impressions of the concentration camps. Perhaps Grandad had been there – Richard Dimbleby famously filed the first report from Belsen, breaking down as he described what he’d seen. The BBC didn’t believe that what he was saying could be true and decided not to run the report. Dimbleby threatened to resign if it wasn’t broadcast, and so four days later it was. At this point the world began to find out about what had really been happening in those camps.

Grandad had torn the pages out in order to post them to Grandma, and he wrote at the top, “Read this darling, and think what may have happened in England x”

Journal of the Royal Army Service Corps, 1945

But this is all only half the story. The thing is, before my Grandad kept his clippings and reminders of home in this book, someone else did too. And they’re still there. Because this book belonged to a German soldier first; it’s called Fahrten und Flüge gegen England (“Trips and Flights from England” is the translation, I think) published in 1941 by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces.

What it is, is a book celebrating the victorious strikes by both the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine against England in 1941, entirely written in headache-inducing gothic font. Here’s some pages detailing the attacks on Coventry, Manchester and Liverpool. Google Translate tells me these chapters are called “The attack on Coventry”, “Twice the big attack on Manchester” and “The Port of Liverpool, a single Inferno”:

I have no idea where or how Grandad got this book. But inside it were similar mementoes of the German soldier it once belonged to, which Grandad kept along with his own.

This might have been him:

Photo of unknown German soldier and woman

There’s a postcard of soldiers –

Plus some postcards apparently dated 1915 and addressed to somewhere in Holland. Perhaps a family heirloom from the First World War?

And I don’t know if Grandad even knew about this. All the other memorabilia was mixed together with Grandad’s own, but I found this thin letter from 1944, unobtrusively slipped between two different pages. It’s written to “lieber Heini” so presumably this soldier was called Heinrich. I’d love to translate this as far as possible one day –

The book is incredible and quite sobering. At this point in 1941, things were looking pretty good for Germany. I get the sense this book is a very confident expression of the expectation of ultimate victory. There are a lot of pictures – here are some of them. They show bombs over London, Maidstone, Swansea, ships exploding, mines erupting, attacks at Scapa Flow, Tower Bridge as seen from a bomber plane, shark-painted Messerschmitts, and the Nazi High Command meeting the troops. Strange to think it was someone’s job to take these action shots as they happened –

In the end, at this distance, it’s hard to know what to feel, exactly. I have a great sense of melancholy for “Heini”, who I presume didn’t live to see the end of the war. I have a huge admiration for Grandad, who saw quite some sights and then quietly went back to his life in Lancashire. And I’d love to have one last conversation with him now, about all this.