The wild night Britain celebrated VE Day: Late drinking, fireworks and 'sex outside Buckingham Palace' as exhausted, battered but jubilant nation toasted Hitler's downfall after six long years of war

Daily Mail​

08-05-2025

Getting wildly drunk, having sex in public and setting off fireworks.
It sounds like a description of saucy party animals today.
But these were some of the scenes in Britain 80 years ago, after it was announced that Germany had surrendered and the fight against Nazi tyranny was over.
The Second World War in Europe had come to a halt on May 7, 1945, after nearly six years of toil, sacrifice, tragedy and loss.
And so that night and on the subsequent evening of May 8 - which was named as the official Victory in Europe Day - Britons more than let their hair down, they partied well into the small hours.
Photos show the raucous celebrations in London and elsewhere, with couples dancing and kissing in the streets and revellers enjoying pints in pubs.
The then Princess Elizabeth and her sister Margaret famously joined in the celebrations by mingling with crowds on the night of May 8, an experience the late Queen would later describe as 'one of the most memorable' of her life.
But what the pictures and memories of Her Late Majesty do not get across are the much naughtier goings on that were described in written form.
Londoner Diana Carnegie told in a letter to her husband how she spotted couples having sex in the dark near Buckingham Palace in the small hours of May 8.
She wrote: 'We had quite a good dinner and then stumbled across f******g couples in the dark to the Palace where the King and Queen had just been out.'
In the letter, which came up for auction in 2014, she went on to describe further raucous scenes, saying: 'We decided to go to Whitehall in the hopes of seeing Churchill.
'The crowds were terrific but we managed to make our way behind a string of sailors.
'Parliament Square was a seething mass. We actually all got on to a jeep but thank heaven - it got so bad we couldn't move, as otherwise I should have been killed.'
She went on to describe how her friends nearly got into a fight with a man who called Churchill a 'drunk who didn't give a damn.'
Also celebrating was Joan Harrison, who was serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service as an ambulance driver.
Now 107, she recalled in MailOnline this week how a serviceman came rushing towards the 22-year-old to tell her of the momentous good news.
'Everything was still. Then, all of a sudden, he came running down the concrete path to the ambulance and said, 'Brownie! The war is over!,' she said.
'I said he must be kidding. And he said, 'No, the war's over!'
'I jumped out - I don't think I even locked it, which was a crime , and ran with him to the NAAFI [Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes] where everyone was gathering.
'Hats were flying in the air. It was all men. It got a bit boisterous, and some officers came down and called 'order'.
'The men calmed down. The officers were saying, you're still in the Army, you know, get to your beds. But they couldn't do much about the sheer joy of the moment.'
Reporting the jubilant scenes on the night of May 7, after news of Germany's surrender had come, the Mail recounted: 'Bonfires blazed from Piccadilly to Wapping.
'The sky once lit by the glare of the Blitz shone red with the Victory Glow.
'The last trains departed from the West End unregarded. The pent-up spirits of the throng, the polyglot throng that is London in war-time, burst out, and by 11 o'clock the capital was ablaze with enthusiasm'.
It went on: 'Rockets - found no-one knows where, set-off by no-one knows whom - streaked into the sky, exploding not in death but a burst of scarlet fire.
'A pile of straw filled with thunder-flashes salvaged from some military dump spurted and exploded near Leicester-square.'
'Every car that challenged the milling, moiling throng was submerged in humanity. They climbed on the running-boards, on the bonnet, on the roof.
'They hammered on the panels. They shouted and sang. Against the drumming on metal came the clash of cymbals, improvised out of dustbin lids.
'The dustbin itself was a football for an impromptu Rugger scrum.
'Bubbling, exploding with gaiety, the people 'mafficked'. Headlights silhouetted couples kissing, couples cheering, couples waving flags.'
The party atmosphere was smoothed by the extension of licensing hours for bars and pubs, whilst dance halls stayed open until midnight.
Soldier Alec Borrie, who was a trusted member of the elite Special Air Service (SAS) unit, happened to be in England recovering from injuries he suffered when his Jeep was blown up by a mine in Germany just weeks earlier.
He later recalled how the VE Day celebrations could be summed up in two words: 'Getting drunk!'
Further jubilant accounts of the celebrations were gathered by Mass Observation, the social survey set up in 1937.
Recounting them in her book The People's Victory, historian Lucy Noakes tells how, in Trafalgar Square, hundreds danced and sang The Marseillaise and pub song Knees up Mother Brown.
One woman, a clerk in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) who had been given permission to go out on the evening of May 7, noted: 'We rush back for our hats and jump on a bus to Hyde Park Corner.'
She went on: 'Most of the men are in uniform. All services and nationalities.
'The Canadians are noisy, the sailors are merry, the airmen are drunk (or pretend to be), the Americans have a girl apiece . . . All the way to Knightsbridge, happy groups pass, and people still hope to get buses home.
'This is midnight, Victory Eve – and, oh, my poor feet!'
Scottish novelist Naomi Mitchison recounted the scenes in London on May 8. She wrote that, in Piccadilly, there were 'a lot more drunks and broken bottles than earlier, and a few people crying or having hysterics or collapsing, and a lot of ambulances'.
Having caught the Tube home to Hammersmith, she described how people were dancing near the station, so she stopped to 'dance a reel' with a 'nice drunk Glasgow Sergeant' and then 'joined in one or two "snake dances"'.
Another woman, writing to her soldier husband, detailed the raucous scenes and her own plans.
'Tomorrow night I shall be going out with Win I expect probably pub-crawling,' she wrote.
'There is not much drink about and probably most of it was drunk last night. We could hear singing all round Cowley and see flares from bonfires.'
Her letter, written on VE Day itself, was digitised as part of Oxford University's Their Finest Hour project, which is now home to more than 25,000 memories and artefacts from the Second World War.
In Green Park, deckchairs and park benches were thrown onto a huge bonfire.
Winston Churchill's speech from the balcony of the Ministry of Health on the afternoon of May 8 was watched by thousands of people massed in the streets.
'This is your victory,' the prime minister declared. 'It is not the victory of a party or of any class or large section. It is the victory of the great British nation as a whole'.
Just before speaking, he had led the masses in a rendition of 'Land of Hope and Glory'.
Even Churchill's wife Clementine - who was away on a trip to Russia when Germany surrendered - got in on the action by arranging a party to coincide with her husband's speech.
When the prime minister finished paying tribute to the nation, Clementine climbed onto a chair to shout: 'We will drink to victory!'.
Having appeared with their parents the King and Queen and Churchill on the Buckingham Palace balcony, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret then famously mingled with crowd in the evening.
The late Queen would go on to describe the experience on May 8 as 'one of the most memorable nights of my life'.
The princesses did the hokey cokey and the Lambeth Walk and also danced the conga through the Ritz Hotel in Piccaddilly.
Speaking in 1985, the Queen said: 'My sister and I realised we couldn't see what the crowds were enjoying… so we asked my parents if we could got out and see for ourselves…'
She added: 'I remember lines of unknown people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, and all of us were swept along by tides of happiness and relief.'
Her Majesty also described how she and Margaret joined in chants of 'We want the King', before she saw her father and mother make another appearance on the Palace balcony.
She admitted that they had 'cheated slightly because we sent a message into the house to say we were waiting outside.'