‘Make 1939 the year you visit Germany’

A chance discovery lead to a quest on sensible bicycles, and lessons from history.

The journey begins in northern England. My Dad’s house. He lives on a cul-de-sac on a suburban housing estate. It was a newbuild in the Nineties, and before that, a field where we used to play hide and seek. I would always lose, because I was the littlest, and shorter than the long grass. The rest of the family would just run away. Now it’s tidy suburbia, where residents keep their grass short, and park sensible family cars on long paved driveways.

My Dad lives on his own, and the house is getting too big for him now, so he’s thinking about moving. I’ve been clearing the loft and tidying out the garage which, even in the summer, has a slight chill to it, and an air of gothic neglect which contrasts with the rest of the houses on the street.

Little light gets in, because ivy has covered the small window, and the space where you would expect to find a car has been used to store other things. Some of these you’d normally find in a garage, like a lawnmower, and others not, like a filing cabinet full of sealed crepe bandages and row of empty ballot boxes from a borough council that no longer exists.

There’s a stash of supply parachutes from the Second World War, and a 1978 Dalek annual. Tufty Cluband Keep Britain Tidybadges. A rusty ‘John Bull’ puncture repair kit, which was made in Evington Valley Mills, Leicester. It features a portly man in a Union Jack waistcoat on the front of the tin. It’s the kind of branding a far-right political party might use these days. You could easily get distracted by all this stuff.

My old homework diary, covered in complex and intricate biro doodles, on which I spent more time on than the homework itself. I hold it in my hands. It does not spark joy.

There’s a cache of family photographs from the 1970s and 80s. My parents and my two big brothers all have the same spectacular bowl cut as I do. This was the pre selfie era, when it was perfectly normal to bring your family to a studio for the yearly family photograph. An expertly lit moment of awkwardness and shiny, shiny hair that would last for ever. I find a lock of my hair from when I was one, according to the label, sealed in a small polythene bag.

When my Mam died my Dad didn’t have the heart to sort through her things properly, and more than a decade later, he still doesn’t. Things were just placed out of sight. I spend a lot of time looking through her carefully filed ring binders. There are dozens of short letters between colleagues where we would now send emails. It’s strange to see her handwriting again. She was thorough and courteous in her correspondence, although I discover no secrets.

It is obviously not an upbeat task, but it makes me happy to think of her in this role, active and at work, rather than wearing a hospital wristband, too big for her wrists, surrounded by the machinery which monitored her decline. But there is no reason to keep any of it, and I put all of her letters onto the recycling pile, ripping up the ring binders with a satisfying tear. I separate them into their component parts for recycling or disposal: plastic, metal, card.

I’m trying to hold it together, to be honest. A long relationship has just ended, and everything feels miserable, and falsely nostalgic, like the only good things are in the past. Whereas the future is uncertain and unimaginable. I spot my brother’s stuffed kangaroo, from the days when people still made their own soft toys, as opposed to outsourcing the task to a more efficient producer in China. My Mam’s Husqvarna ‘Viking’ sewing machine, which she got for her twenty-first birthday, solidly built in steel. It was retired to the loft when she fell ill, but not quite thrown out. It would still be going strong, if there were anyone to use it, and it was probably involved in the making of the kangaroo. But people don’t really want old sewing machines these days.

Everything unlocks a memory, but there’s no time for emotion. There’s too much stuff, and limited time to get through it all. Bin, keep, charity shop. It’s dusty in the garage, there are long strands of spider’s web, thick like Halloween spray. Assorted insect carcasses have attached themselves to it, and when I accidentally touch some, I’m glad nobody is there to witness my pathetic flinch.

So much stuff. Like the trash compactor scene in Star Wars, the walls feel like they are closing in with all this tat. From the era before decluttering, when lofts were for keeping things in rather than knocking through and when you held on to old blankets just in case.

There’s nothing particularly valuable, so far as I can tell, amongst the furniture, pottery, war medals, commemorative mugs, and a picture of my Auntie Elsie before she was old.

There is just enough ambient moisture to give off a dank mustiness, but nothing is damaged, including several piles of the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette, and dozens of copies of Lilliput, ‘the pocket magazine for everyone,’ which date from the 1930s and 1940s. It’s a really good magazine, and with more time I’d rifle through a few copies.

A brown A4 envelope catches my eye. It is addressed to me. In my Granddad’s handwriting. He has been dead for more than a decade, so naturally I am curious. There is no postal address, just my name in slightly wobbly capital letters. I know that I should leave it, to look at properly later, because the first and only rule of house clearance is to not get too distracted by items of interest. But everybody ignores this rule, and I open the envelope.

It contains two items. The first is a tourist guide to Japan. I flick through its pages and am transported. It’s expensively produced, on thick paper, and a beautiful object. There are several illustrations: intricate prints of mountains and seascapes, and trees in blossom, and photographs of jewellery and stylish looking hotels. There are flashes of art deco styling and brilliant colours, which have been preserved in some pages with tracing paper.

It’s fascinating treasure, belonging to a different era. There are longer articles too, which I don’t have time to read, but the writing is a mix of Japanese and English. There is a date: 1937.

The second item is a pair of bicycle clips. These are the C-shaped metal things that people used to wear around their ankles to stop their trouser legs getting oily, or stuck in the chain. There is no accompanying letter to explain the significance of these items, nor whether they are linked in some way.

I put them back in the envelope, and put the envelope on the ‘keep’ pile, trying not get too distracted. Why bicycle clips? What’s the Japan connection? Why me?

For the first time in a while, I find myself smiling. I begin to formulate a plan. Naturally, I will try to solve the mystery of the envelope. I will document the journey. More than this, I will allow myself to be guided by the discovery, which I take to be a sign. I don’t believe in fate, homeopathy or trickle-down economics, but surely there must be some significance to my grandfather’s bequest. Where will it take me?

[…several chapters later…]

As well as Fred, Germany attracted holidaymakers from all over Europe, a good number of them from Britain and Ireland. It was a way of bringing in much-needed foreign currency; but it was also a PR exercise to show the world that Germany was a clean, organised and healthy place where singing and long outdoor marches — I mean walks — were the order of the day. And definitely nothing for anyone to worry about, according to the Ministry Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

They produced brochures in English, too, and issued ‘Travel Marks’ as a currency for tourists. Those coming from Britain arrived on the train ferries put on by the London North East Railways company, whose posters of the period are stunning, art deco-influenced masterpieces. As well as famously telling us that ‘Skegness is SO bracing’, they produced a brochure advising readers to ‘make 1939 the year you visit Germany’.

These guides feature mostly practical advice, but it’s also clear that there is an element of idealism in the author’s mission to get Brits abroad. ‘Never in history was friendly feeling between our two peoples so important as it is today,’ it explains. I think it reflected the views of many ordinary people at this time, who felt that a world war could be best combatted through individual acts of international friendship and cultural exchange. If ordinary people mixed and spent time with one another, they wouldn’t be so comfortable killing each other.

Because of what we would now call cultural baggage from subsequent years, it’s hard to imagine Anglo-German relations in May 1938. We are so hard-wired into seeing Germany as our enemies, people with whom we were at that point gearing up for war. Not people who we might visit on holiday. And it was clear from press reports that Jewish people, trades unionists, communists, and others were being persecuted in Germany and fleeing in large numbers; but Kristallnacht, the worst horrors of the concentration camps, and the Final Solution were yet to happen. Sure, there was a strong leader who wanted to make Germany great again, who held rallies, and didn’t like foreigners.

It has become a cliché to bring up the Daily Mail in connection with their support for Nazi Germany, and they weren’t the only media house to embrace Nazism. But they were amongst the most vociferous supporters. In 1934, when the Mail famously triumphed ‘Hurrah for the blackshirts’, plenty of people agreed. Its owner Lord Rothermere predicted that ‘the minor misdeeds of individual Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany’. Some Daily Mail staff started wearing black shirts to work.

The paper had stopped openly supporting the Nazi regime by 1938, but it was still railing against Jewish immigration to Britain. When magistrate Herbert Metcalfe commented on the ‘outrage’ of ‘stateless Jews’ who were ‘pouring in’, the paper agreed that it was ‘a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed,’ in its editorial.

Other papers — like the Mirror and the Express- took the threat of war much more seriously than the issue of refugees. This was the year of Kindertransport, and the Central British Fund for German Jewry had been around since 1933, so some people knew that bad things were happening and were doing something about it. But when Germany annexed Austria, the British government introduced tighter visa requirements for Austrians, making it harder for people to escape. For many more, life carried on as normal.

When war finally broke out, there was strong anti-German feeling in Britain. As with the First World War, there was a certain amount of rebranding. Heinz’s became Haynes’s, Schwartzes became Blacks, and so on. The Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’s became the Windsors, of course. The history of Germans in Britain was rewritten, as it had been in 1914, when there were more than 30,000 Germans living in Britain. At the start of that particular conflict, but by the time war came around again, many had left because of angry mobs attacking anyone with a foreign-sounding name. The violence was widespread, and one pathetic and awful photograph shows a damaged shop with the words ‘We are Russian’ scrawled on it. In East London, they attacked so many German bakers that there was a shortage of bread in some neighbourhoods. A pub in Leytonstone was damaged, because the surname Strachan was understood to be German, rather than Scottish.

Angry mobs don’t get any more pedantic as time goes by; in the run-up to a Euro 96 football match between Germany and England, the Sunran with ‘Let’s Blitz Fritz’ as their front page; the Mirror’swas ‘Achtung’, and then editor Piers Morgan gleefully planned to drop copies from a Spitfire on the German team’s hotel. England lost, and in the anti-German violence which followed there were more than 200 arrests. BMWs were attacked and a Russian teenager was stabbed five times in the neck ‘because they thought he was German’.

In recent years the Spitfire has been used as a symbol by the anti-immigration far right. Both the National Front and Britain First have used photographs of them in their campaigns. In both cases they were flown by Polish pilots, who formed the most successful squadron to fly in the Battle of Britain. Bloody immigrants, coming over here, defending our country.

Was my Granddad visiting friends in Germany? Could he have picked up the Japan brochure there? There were a few Japanese who made it to Germany in the 1930s. On the one hand Nazis viewed Asians as inherently inferior, and stoked up fear about the ‘Yellow Peril’. But Hitler told Japan that it was a target for the international Jewry, and declared the Japanese ‘honorary Aryans’. It was an alliance of convenience. Nazi Germany needed the illusion of racial superiority in order to take over neighbouring countries, just as much as Japan did.

The close ties between the English aristocracy and the Nazis is better documented than that of ordinary people. I wished that I’d asked for more information about his visit, cursing myself at having wasted the opportunity for more in-depth information from this primary source.

Would he have met ordinary Germans?

This has been an extract from the Bicycle Clip Diaries, first edition paperback and more details on my website, currently free to key workers and unwaged; and as an Amazon eBook elsewhere in the world.

Words and pictures © Nick Raistrick, cover art by Ric Marry.