Today is the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944.  Have you ever considered the role that NAAFI played in D-Day?  NAAFI placed advertisements in newspapers all over Britain in the summer of 1944 describing its work during the invasion campaign and appealing for new recruits to its canteens.

Map of defences Franceville-Plage May 1944 Online Gallery 

NAAFI (Navy, Army, & Air Force Institutes) was established in 1921 to run recreational establishments for the Armed Forces, and to sell goods to servicemen and their families.  In the weeks before the Normandy landings, thousands of young women working for NAAFI volunteered to be ‘imprisoned’ in the sealed invasion camps to provide a canteen service for the troops.  The units which left Britain on D-Day took a NAAFI invasion pack with essential supplies and comforts: cigarettes, matches, razor blades, boot laces, letter cards, shaving cream, toothpaste and soap.

From an advertisement in Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer 4 August 1944 British Newspaper Archive

On 23 June 1944 a NAAFI reconnaissance party landed in France to look for suitable premises for warehouses, stores, canteens and billets. The first main supplies of canteen goods were landed on 25 June.  These were followed the next day by sports packs containing books and indoor and outdoor games, a free gift to the troops from NAAFI.  On 10 July, NAAFI started to serve outlying units using five mobile canteens.  By 15 July, in addition to the emergency packs, NAAFI had landed 670 million cigarettes, nearly 3.3 million bottles of beer, and over 9,500 tons of tobacco, chocolate, razor blades, matches, writing materials, handkerchiefs and toiletries. 

 
Rosemary Harris in her NAAFI uniform. She worked in the canteen at RAF West Raynham, Norfolk. (Family photograph)

More than 800 NAAFI men were at work in France by the end of July 1944. Hundreds of NAAFI women volunteers were ‘also standing by, eager for the adventure of service in Europe’.  Their places at home needed to be filled and so NAAFI sent out an urgent call in the press for manageresses, cooks and counter assistants to join its canteens.

Margaret Makepeace
India Office Records

Further reading:

Advertisements placed in local newspapers throughout Britain, for example Dover Express 7 July 1944 and Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer 4 August 1944 British Newspaper Archive

 

While putting together the Comics Unmasked exhibition, it became clear that the 1880s were something of a high point in British comics history. The popular magazine Fun was just one of several that were regularly carrying single-page comics at this time. It’s ‘British Workman’ stories, written and drawn by James Francis Sullivan (c. 1852-1936), are particularly enjoyable because they show that the Victorians were as interested in discussing class differences as we are. The jokes are often still funny for us today, as in the case of the clock-watching painter who barely gets any work done at all.

Fun, 18 Jan 1888. [BL shelfmark: P.P.5273.c.] 

Less well known to comics historians are the stories that appeared in the Christmas issues of papers such as the Illustrated London News and The Graphic. My co-curator Paul Gravett had heard about these through the grapevine, but hadn’t had the opportunity to examine any of them. It appears that some libraries in the 19th century didn’t retain the Christmas specials, maybe because they contained stories for family reading rather than the usual news and current affairs. Fortunately, we do have them at the British Library.

The Christmas 1884 number of the Illustrated London News, for example, contains a wonderful colour comic entitled ‘Rouge et noir … from Miss Pettifer’s Diary’, (writer/artist not known) in which we follow the social life of a high-society lady as she attends balls and shooting parties.

 

Illustrated London News, Christmas Number 1889. [BL shelfmark: HS.74/1099] 

Similarly, The Graphic Christmas 1889 issue contains the ‘The girl with thirty-nine lovers’. This focuses on the experiences of a correspondent (a Miss E.H. Townsend?) who reports that she was pursued by 39 gentlemen while on a sea voyage: an adventure that she turns into a poem with sketches, and which William Ralston (1848-1911), a staff artist at The Graphic, then makes into a comic.

Together, these Victorian comics provide an interesting insight into the lives, values and aspirations of people in Britain in the 1880s. They also show that humour can sometimes work across the decades.

Book now for Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK, at the British Library until 19 August 2014.

Adrian Edwards
Co-curator, Comics Unmasked