VE Day latest: King hosts veterans for tea at Buckingham Palace after royals watch flypast
Today was the start of four days of celebrations to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day on Thursday. Here's how the rest of the week is shaping up:
Tuesday
Tomorrow an installation of 30,000 ceramic poppies returns to the Tower of London.
The ornaments, which will be viewed by the Queen when they go on display, were made in 2014 as part of the Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation, which marked 100 years since Britain's involvement in the First World War.
The latest installation, overseen by designer Tom Piper, features tens of thousands of the original ceramic poppies on loan from the Imperial War Museum, as a way to "mark and reflect on the sacrifices made by so many during the Second World War".
A small part of the poppy installation will be visible to the public for free, with the main installation located inside the grounds of the Tower. It will remain in place until 11 November to mark Armistice Day.
Historic landmarks across the UK will also be lit up in the evening, which you can watch on Sky News with live helicopter shots capturing the scenes.
Wednesday
In the evening, an anniversary concert takes place in Westminster Hall at the Palace of Westminster.
It will mark 80 years since a newsflash told the nation that the next day would be known as Victory Day.
The Parliament Choir will perform pieces of classic music from across Europe and America, with the addition of special guests.
Thursday
Events planned to mark VE Day itself kick off with a service in Westminster Abbey, with 1,800 people invited to attend including the King and Queen, veterans, politicians and charities.
At midday, a two-minute silence will be held across all UK government buildings and departments, with other organisations invited to follow suit.
In the afternoon, the Royal British Legion, a UK-based charity that supports veterans, will host a private tea party for Second World War veterans and their families.
It will take place at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire and aims to include veterans who live in the North of England and cannot travel to events in London.
The tea party is expected to attract a large crowd, if not the largest group of Second World War veterans at a VE Day event, and you can watch live coverage of it on Sky News.
In County Fermanagh, there will be a parade of 80 pipers and drummers along Church Street in Enniskillen.
Pubs will also be allowed to stay open for an extra two hours on 8 May, meaning people will be able to raise a glass until 1am to mark the end of the four-day celebration.
Concerts and film premiere
The government's VE Day programme of events concludes with a concert at Horse Guards Parade between 8pm and 10pm on 8 May.
The concert will feature "stars of the stage and screen" as well as performances from military musicians, readings and poignant moments that will tell the story of VE Day and the nation's reaction to the end of the Second World War.
More than 12,500 people are expected to attend the event, including the King and Queen, as well as 2,500 young people made up of Duke of Edinburgh ambassadors, Commonwealth scholars and representatives from youth groups.
Meanwhile, from 7.30pm at the Royal Albert Hall, the Armed Forces charity SSAFA will host VE Day 80: The Party.
This will feature The RAF Squadronaires, part of the central band of the Royal Air Force, who will perform 1940s songs, and the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, which will perform the nation's best-loved classical anthems.
A new short film by the National Theatre will also be released on 8 May.
The Next Morning, written by stage and screenwriter James Graham, will feature award-winning actors Julian Glover, Sian Phillips, and Joseph Mydell and will take viewers through a series of stories exploring intergenerational perspectives on the end of the war.
Bringing the day to an end, 2,500 beacons will be lit across the UK. The fires will be ignited around 9pm, including on the River Thames at London's Tower Bridge, in Folkstone, Kent, Bridport in Dorset, Fairhaven Lake and Gardens in Lancashire and Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
Friday to Sunday
Community events around the country continue into the weekend, though these have not been officially organised by the government.
On Friday night, there will be a 1940s style dance in Wouldham, Rochester, with a hog roast, a 1940s wartime band and authentic Second World War jeep.
On 10 May in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, there will be a community concert by the band, bugles, pipes and drums of The Royal Irish Regiment at St Macartin's Cathedral.
In Glasgow on 10 May, there will be a church service at the Veterans Memorial Garden on Baldwin Avenue, followed by a veterans parade. This will finish at the Lincoln Inn where there will be a buffet, music and raffle.
In the Yorkshire village of Catton, there will be a vintage-themed day featuring Second World War memorabilia and vehicles. A similar event is also set to take place in Keelby village hall, in Lincolnshire.
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Daily Mirror
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Like most people, Jak didn't know much about Hester when he agreed to the role in 2019, but is now a huge fan, even writing the foreword to a new book I co-authored about her, Finding Hester. In it, he admitted that he agreed to the role because he knew she was just a secretary who didn't play a big part in the plot, so playing her 'would likely give me more opportunity to play additional supporting roles.' But that all changed a few years later when a group of fans of the musical dug up new information, putting Hester at the centre of the daring operation. 'It's an incredible story that I still have trouble believing myself,' Jak said. 'A group of individuals who pull off the unthinkable - a moment in history that truly deserves to shine.' It was in 1943 that the Germans thought they'd got their hands on a briefcase full of British military secrets concerning the impending Allied invasion of Sicily. But it was all a ruse. 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The research into Hester had set the record straight when it came to her age, but it hadn't been able to entirely disprove the idea of her as the embittered spinster who never knew love. It was certain that she never married or had children, and archival records aren't typically the place to find more private details of someone's life, but this box was a direct insight into her personal life. Hester herself had left irrefutable evidence that she had been the perfect person at MI5 to write love letters to a soldier, because she'd written hundreds of them herself, and this recipient had been real. The object of Hester's affections was Valdemar Bertie Caroe, known to her as Val. Based on the date of their anniversary as noted in Hester's diary, their relationship began on November 25, 1939. She wrote frequently to him when he was posted in Northern Ireland as an army liaison to MI5, and when he was later stationed in France. 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Daily Mirror
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New Statesman
16 hours ago
- New Statesman
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Photo byEveryone has cracks; we hear that's how the light gets in. Adeline Virginia Stephen wanted a life flooded with light. Marrying her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1912, she said she wanted 'everything – love, children, adventure, intimacy, work'. In her masterpiece Mrs Dalloway, published a century ago, she wanted 'all inner feelings to be lit up'. But so much light meant so many cracks. Virginia Woolf is now such a large figure in global literary culture that she has at least 15 full-length biographies. But Mark Hussey's new Mrs Dalloway is a biography of a novel by Woolf, relaying its conception, execution and propagation. Hussey is Professor of English at New York's Pace University, and we believe him when he tells us Woolf is 'my favourite writer': he has published several books on her, and includes a charmingly domestic photo of his personal Dalloway stash, piled 20 editions high, which he started over 50 years ago. By scholarship's best guess, Dalloway's scene – 'life; London; this moment of June' – is 11 June 1923. For the last eight years, with Woolf's reputation higher than ever, a 'Dalloway Day' has been celebrated, with tours of Woolf's London led by the Virginia Woolf Society. The festivities will be particularly exuberant this year, the centenary of Dalloway's publication. Walkers will see Bloomsbury and Westminster in all the 'absorbing, mysterious… infinite richness' Woolf imbued them with, 'as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would have been impious'. The amusements may sound little more than a short walk around central London. But so, really, might the book's plot. In the story, a politician's fashionable wife, Clarissa Dalloway, gives a fancy party, and a traumatised young veteran of the First World War, Septimus Warren Smith, kills himself after his doctors neglect him. Hussey is correct that, asked what the book is about, one might answer 'not much.' But, of course, for Woolf it was all about what was happening inside her characters. In that way she was of her modernist cohort, trying to find her artistic bearings after the moment 'on or about December 1910', as she put it, when 'human character changed'. To Woolf, to Joyce, to Proust, there had been what Hussey calls 'a fundamental shift in relations' between subject, object, and the nature of reality. What Woolf called Edwardian writing was futile just as describing a house's exterior was futile to convey the soul who slept inside. If art was to answer the 'astonishing disorder' of modernity, it had to directly penetrate conscious experience. It was an ambitious project, but Woolf felt confident. She had brought off two fairly conventional novels, and her more daring third, Jacob's Room, had attained wide praise. She felt she could write freely, and that she at last knew 'how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice'. Or, putting it another way, that she was 'beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain'. Her voice was her mental mechanism, however flawed that mechanism. Woolf had had to stay in a private nursing home after a severe breakdown that came a year after the marriage from which she wanted everything. A few months later, chance alone her saved her from death, after she took a deliberate overdose of Veronal (a sleeping aid). And two years after that she had suffered another severe breakdown. But with her confidence and reputation waxing, she felt 'madness is terrific… in its lava I find most of the things I write about'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Readers liked in her what she liked in those she read: what she called 'queer individuality'. So the project was to inspect her self as it shattered and reconstituted. No humans were 'as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes'. Instead they were 'splinters & mosaics', and art should show them as such. A plane broken to pieces and put together again became a mosaic, and thereby turned particular, beautiful, and more interestingly refractive. At one point in the novel, Clarissa Dalloway is seen mending her dress. To do full justice to her 'queer individuality', she devised for Mrs Dalloway a 'queer & masterful' design. For it, she had 'almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity.' So she devised Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, who would show 'the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side' and who, as in a long-held idea for a play, would only ever 'almost meet – only a door between – you see how they just miss – and go off at a tangent, and never come anywhere near again'. But they did come near again. The problem we all know, visible in the book and its author's life, is that the separation did not hold. Sanity went into insanity, life went into death. In 1941, Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse. Clarissa does not commit suicide, but was originally intended to, and it may be telling that one early reader mistakenly believed she had after finishing the book. Septimus, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, who fought to defend Shakespeare's England, does kill himself, and gives lie to the vision of art as individualisation. If the war launched Woolf's project, it also undermined it. Compare Woolf's artistic vision of splinters and mosaics, of lively Clarissa mending her dress, with her thoughts when visiting a relative, wounded during the First World War, in his hospital ward. She felt 'the uselessness of it all, breaking these people & mending them again'. It is hard to say what differentiates life-giving art from death-giving war. In one letter, Woolf described the War in artistic terms, as 'the preposterous masculine fiction'. Septimus is a traumatised veteran, but if any character has 'queer individuality' it is he. And he grows 'stranger and stranger', more and more alone, by allowing himself to think too much. The modernists thought leaving 'description' for 'insight' would help them ascertain truth; in fact it destroyed it. They were not writing, as they thought, after Einstein and Freud, but after their closer contemporary, Werner Heisenberg, the quantum physicist who found that electrons refused to be fixed under observation. So did the modern self, inspection only creating uncertainty. Woolf was closer than she knew on writing in her essay 'Modern Novels' that consciousness is an 'incessant shower of innumerable atoms'. The self-attention they hoped would achieve stability in fact wrecks it. The more you look, the less you know. Woolf's own metaphor was a 'tunnelling process', which allowed her to 'tunnel behind the façade of objective appearance' and reveal consciousness. But efforts to light up anything can only ever illuminate a new, deeper darkness. There is nothing at the back to reach. Clarissa feels 'the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone'. The best option might be to turn back while you still can. The generic life Woolf feared, inert and inartistic, 'mute & mitigated, in the suburbs,' may be preferable. Septimus loathes his boorish physician Dr Holmes, and Woolf loathed the psychiatrists she based him on. But it is hard to dismiss his insistence that introspection offers no delivery from itself, and his prescription that what Septimus really needs is to stop thinking about himself and become occupied by external things. To do so would certainly be to neglect his individuality, but the depths of his individuality killed him. Perhaps he should have joined the dull masses. The bores were right. In a preliminary, more frivolous appearance, the character of Clarissa Dalloway exclaimed, 'How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!' How much? Mrs Dalloway contains the birth and the doom of the modern self. We are all Virginia Woolf's children. She wanted light and was determined that it could be found somewhere at the back of the 'dark region of psychology'. She never found it, but we have continued her search. Her 'queer individuality' is a public deity. That the unexamined life is not worth living is a truth inviolable; indeed we examine relentlessly. It is almost axiomatic that inward tunnelling breaks through to rewarding clarity. But Mrs Dalloway is a warning as much as guide. Perhaps, for once, we need not go deeper. [See also: Who's offended by Virginia Woolf?] Related
