We have all seen images of the joyful street parties and triumphant newspaper headlines that greeted the end of war in Europe on 8th May 1945. As the UK prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day in 2025, we explore the British Library's newspaper collections to see how VE Day has been covered by the British press on its significant anniversaries across the decades.

The early anniversaries of VE Day were subdued affairs as the country grappled with the aftermath of the war, and this is reflected in the newspaper coverage. On the first anniversary in 1946, the continuing struggles of rationing and the fragile nature of newly-established peace in Europe were cited by the Dundee Evening Telegraph as reasons for a lack of celebratory atmosphere around VE Day. Food rationing only officially ended in 1954, so wartime hardships were still fresh in the minds of Britons on the tenth anniversary in 1955. The Scotsman described the 1955 anniversary as a moment of remembrance and reflection rather than of celebration.

The Scotsman, 9 May 1955, p. 6

International relations played a role in newspaper coverage of VE Day in 1975 and 1985. The 1975 anniversary occurred a few weeks before the UK's EEC membership referendum, a time of great debate in the media. VE Day and the ensuing years of peace in Europe were evoked in adverts and articles promoting a “Yes” vote, such as this pro-EEC article which was reprinted in several regional newspapers. In January 1985, a reluctance to offend West Germany prompted the government to consider cancelling VE Day celebrations for that year. The Daily Express reacted furiously to this prospect, asking “Why should we surrender Britain’s proudest moment?”

Daily Express, 15 January 1985, p. 8

Public outcry prompted Margaret Thatcher to change course and announce that celebrations would go ahead after all. Newspapers of this period also featured some of the wartime nostalgia that would become prevalent in 1995 and beyond, such as this advertisement for a VE Day dinner dance from the Ripon Gazette.

The fiftieth anniversary of VE Day in 1995 was marked by street parties, parades, and 1940s nostalgia. Many newspapers featured multi-page spreads with photographs from the various parades and events that took place across the UK, such as the Skegness Standard below.

Skegness Standard, 12 May 1995, pp. 18-19

Food was a key element of newspaper coverage in the run-up to VE Day 1995. Newspapers often displayed a sentimental attitude towards the days of rationing; they offered readers simple, old-fashioned recipes to hearken back to the wartime period, as can be seen in the below article from the Burton Mail.

[The Weekender], Burton Mail, 29 April 1995, p. 1

The Cambridge Evening News offered special VE Day coupons for a local department store in the style of a “Ministry of Bargains” ration book, further demonstrating the trend towards wartime nostalgia during this time. This shift from remembrance to nostalgia may reflect the fact that by 1995, many of those celebrating had not lived through the war themselves.

Fast forward to VE Day 2020: the UK was in Covid-19 lockdown on the seventy-fifth anniversary, thereby curtailing any mass celebrations like those seen in 1995. VE Day street parties were held at a social distance and many commemorative events were held online. The Hinckley Times below shows how neighbours and communities found new ways to mark the anniversary.

Hinckley Times, 13 May 2020, pp. 42-43

The Daily Mirror provided a two-page spread with advice on how to mark the occasion at home, from dressing up in 1940s-style garb, to baking “Winston Churchill’s fruitcake”. Like many other newspapers, the Mirror drew parallels between wartime sacrifices and the “very different war” being fought against Covid-19.

Daily Mirror, 7 May 2020, pp. 28-29

Finally, a common feature seen in newspapers throughout the decades were contributions from readers sharing their memories of VE Day 1945. In 1965, the Peterborough Evening Telegraph ran a two-page feature on readers’ memories of the day, encompassing a variety of viewpoints from across the community. In 1970, the Sunday Express awarded a reader a £100 prize for her letter in which she recalled her five-year old son asking her whether he would now be able to sleep upstairs in a bed, having slept in a shelter all his life. In 1995, the Hayes and Harlington Gazette interviewed a woman with the noteworthy name of Violet Edith Day about her memories of the 1945 occasion.

Sunday Express, 3 May 1970, p. 7

Most of the articles mentioned above are available to view online via the British Newspaper Archive, which is now free to access on your own device in British Library Reading Rooms. You can also use the British Newspaper Archive in many public libraries around the country for free. Visit LibraryOn’s website to find your nearest library with access.

 

Claire O’Halloran, Curator Newspaper Collections

2022 marks a special anniversary for the Newspaper Collection at the British Library. 200 years ago, in April 1822, the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books began systematically collecting newspapers. From that foundation the Library’s newspaper collections has continued to grow, and now comprises more than 36,000 titles from the UK and overseas, or 60 million individual newspaper issues. 

The Old Newspaper Reading Room in the British Museum, Bloomsbury. Sell's Dictionary of the World's Press 1893

Like many of the British Library’s collections, newspapers were originally part of the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books. However, from the Museum’s founding in 1753, until the 1820s, news publications were not seen as a distinct collection in their own right, and weren’t part of any concerted collecting effort. The impetus for changing this came in 1818, when a large collection of early newspapers, compiled by Dr Charles Burney (1757-1817), was purchased by the Museum. The Burney Collection of newspapers 1603-1818, when added to the Thomason Tracts (a collection of newspapers and news-books from the English Civil War period, which had been purchased for the museum by George III in 1762), formed a significant collection of early newspapers; enough for the museum to start considering the form in its own right.

In April 1822, after negotiations by Henry Baber (1775-1869), Keeper of the Printed Books, the British Museum began to collect newspapers in a systematic fashion. This was achieved via an arrangement with the Stamp Office, who at the time collected all newspapers published in Britain for purposes of registration and taxation. They kept the newspapers for two years, in case they were needed for legal cases, but agreed to pass them on to the British Museum after this period had elapsed. The first newspapers to arrive at the library were London papers for the years 1818 and 1819, and the first consignment contained sixty complete sets for these years, and twenty-one imperfect sets. Provincial newspapers were added to those deposited by the Stamp Office in 1832, and Scottish and Irish newspapers were sent from 1848. 

British Museum Trustees Standing Committee: Minutes of Ordinary Business, 13 April 1822.

There are very few surviving records of this early arrangement between the Stamp Office and the British Museum. The image above, showing a short notice of thanks to the Stamp Office after the first consignment of newspapers arrived, which was recorded in the minutes of the Trustees Standing Committee. This is the only know record held at the British Museum/British Library, and there is no list of which newspapers arrived in that first delivery. Records for this period from the Stamp Office do not survive. Therefore, we have no certainty about which newspapers were the first actively collected by the British Library, but we can make some educated guesses. Below is an image of the front page of The World, which began publication in January 1818. This newspaper has annotations, including the publishers name and address, which were made by clerks at the Stamp Office. This indicates that it was originally the Stamp Office copy, and it was published in one of the first years deposited at the British Museum, so it is likely that this is one of the titles handed over during the first year of the arrangement.

The World, Vol. 1, No. 1, 4th January 1818.

Newspapers arrived at the British Museum from the Stamp Office via this arrangement until 1869, when Legal Deposit laws were introduced. From that date onwards a copy of each newspapers produced in the country legally had to be deposited at the library by the publishers. The British Museum was now entirely responsible for its own newspaper collecting, and began building up a sizeable and (mostly) comprehensive collection of British newspapers.

The rate of newspapers publication from the late nineteenth century quickly led to storage problems for the British Museum, and from 1905 many newspapers were stored offsite at Colindale in north London. In the early 1930s this offsite newspaper storage depot was expanded, and a reading room was added, with the new Newspaper Library at Colindale opening to readers in August 1932.

In 1973 the British Library was established, and while newspapers, along with the other collections of the Department of Printed Books, were transferred to the new institution, they continued to be housed at Colindale until 2013. Newspapers then travelled up to Boston Spa, a site that had been used by the British Museum and then the British Library since 1962. A dedicated newspaper reading room was open at St Pancras in 2014, and the state of the art National Newspaper building designed especially for storing newspapers was opened in 2015.

Newspaper continue to be an important part of the British Library’s collections, with around 1,000 newspapers added to the collection each week. Alongside this, the Library now collects radio, broadcast, and internet news, creating the national news collection. Curators also continue to work to preserve and make accessible the newspapers from the Museum’s earliest days of collecting. Many of the first newspapers to arrive in 1822 have been recently digitised as part of the Heritage Made Digital project, and are now freely available to view via the British Newspaper Archive.

Sources:

Esdaile, Arundell. The British Museum Library. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1946.

Harris, P. R. A History of the British Museum Library, 1753-1973. London: The British Library, 1998.
                        The Library of the British Museum: Retrospective Essays on the Department of Printed Books. London: The British Library, 1993.

Gaskell, Beth and McKernan, Luke. ‘British Library News Collection’. In Breaking the News: 500 Years of News in Britain. London: British Library, 2022.

 

Beth Gaskell, Newspaper Curator

Following on from our recent announcement of a complete title-level downloadable listing of all newspapers catalogued by the British Library, we now have a downloadable listing of all our television news programmes, available from today on our Research Repository.

British Library's Broadcast News Service with programmes for 30 August 2022

The British Library Television News Programme-Level List provides a programme-level record of all television news and current affairs programmes recorded by the British Library’s Broadcast News service between March 2010 and May 2022. All of the channels featured were receivable free-to-air in the UK and licensed by Ofcom. All of the programmes listed can be accessed in the British Library’s reading rooms via the Broadcast News service.

There are 114,380 programmes listed, each with record number, programme title, series title, description, publisher/broadcaster, production date and duration. It should be noted that for many of the programmes we only have a generic description (e.g. "The latest national and international news"), though there are plenty of programmes with meaningful descriptions, including some tagged under themes such as Coronavirus, Donald Trump and Ukraine Conflict. The subtitles that we capture with when we record television news programmes are not included in the list.

The channels features, with their dates of recordings held, are:

Channel	Recording dates
Al Jazeera English	06/05/2010– ongoing
Arirang TV HD	16/03/2022- ongoing
BBC One London	06/05/2010– ongoing
BBC News	06/05/2010– ongoing
BBC Parliament	01/06 2010– ongoing
BBC Two	06/05/2010– ongoing
BBC Four	04/06/2010– ongoing
BBC Scotland	05/03/2019- ongoing
Bloomberg TV	01/06/2010– 30/06/2016
CGTN	31/12/2016 – 04/02/2021
Channel 4	06/05/2010– ongoing
Channel 5	29/03/2010-17/06/2010, 16/04/2018-07/01/2020
Channels 24	02/11/2015– ongoing
CNN	06/05/2010– ongoing
CCTV News	22/02/2012– 30/12/2016
Euronews	07/05/2010–21/03/2011, 05/06/2017 - ongoing
France 24 English	29/05/2010– ongoing
ITV1 London	06/05/2010– ongoing
GB News	13/06/2021- ongoing
NHK World	21/06/2010– 30/09/2011
NHK World HD	06/10/2011– ongoing
RT (Russia Today)	01/06/2010– 02/03/2022
Sky News	02/06/2010– ongoing
TalkTV HD	25/04/2022- ongoing
TRT World	08/01/2020- ongoing

The listing is available in Excel spreadsheet down and can be downloaded under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain licence. The DOI is https://doi.org/10.23636/jcbr-7v17.

This is part of our growing collection of freely-available news datasets, all available under the News Datasets section of the Research Repository. Until now, we have added on newspaper and press directory data to the Repository.In adding television, we are demonstrating the multi-media approach to our collecting of the nation's news. Radio and Web news must follow.

We hope that researchers will find interesting uses for the Television News Programme-Level List and welcome any feedback.