For the fifth year running my nearest village in Northamptonshire has just hosted a weekend of celebration called ‘Stoke Bruerne: Village at War’. A busy two-day programme of events, including a Spitfire fly-past, a bread-and-dripping and spam-sandwich tuck-in, and classes in how to dance the Lambeth Walk, started on Saturday morning with a formal opening ceremony by Winston Churchill and Field Marshal Montgomery lookalikes and ended on Sunday afternoon with an air raid ‘all clear’.
Stoke Bruerne lies on the Grand Union Canal about halfway between London and Birmingham; and Village at War was organised by Friends of the Canal Museum there to raise money for that worthy institution. It was a great success. The village was festooned with Union Jacks and crowded with hundreds of people (men often in old uniforms or siren suits, and women in sensible coats and skirts, wedge shoes and hats) buying items of second world war nostalgia and ‘black market’ food products from stalls beside the canal, watching noisy military demonstrations by ‘living history’ re-enactment societies, and listening to a very plausible George Formby impersonator.
Stoke Bruerne may not have played a particularly prominent part in the struggle against Hitler, but enthusiasm for that era is strong in this part of south Northamptonshire.
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