How the great news was received

The maroons that in the bad nights of the past beat like blows on the drum of fate gave the news to London at eleven o’clock this morning and sounded the overture of rejoicing.

The idea of using the maroons came right out of the humorous mind of London, and the once-terrible sound was like a huge Cockney chuckle of delight. The guns boomed over the heavy grey sky, and everybody knew that the last guns had been fired in the home front.

Before the sound had died away innumerable people everywhere rushed into the streets from house, factory, and workshop, and children helter-skelter from the schools crying “The war is over!” In a few minutes all over London the little boys in red with the bugles, who used to send us to bed when the Gothas had gone, were starting out blowing the cheer ‘All clear’ for the war.

Manchester Guardian, 12 November 1918.

Editorial: the end of the war

The war is over, and in a million households fathers and mothers, wives and sisters, will breathe freely, relieved at length of all dread of that curt message which has shattered the hope and joy of so many. The war is over. The drama is played out.

The old order in Europe has perished. The new is hardly born, and no one knows what its lineaments will be. Tomorrow we shall be brought up against the hard immediate problems of re-establishment. Before we grapple with these, let us give a moment to the review of the position gained and try our best to sum up the result of four tremendous years as it may be measured by the historian.

Read the full editorial.

Crowds celebrating the signing of the armistice, 11 November 1918. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

How the news came to Manchester: a day of rejoicing – munitions workers in the streets

For once in a while it was a fine morning. A yellow autumn sunshine was coining the wet streets into gold, and at ten o’clock in the morning, Manchester was making some attempt to get going in the routine of the week. Then the news came out, finding its way like water through the chinks in the boards where the newspapers are published, gathering volume, and in a few minutes flooding the whole floor of the town. Shortly after ten o’clock the all-night vigil at the newspaper offices was broken by an intimation that the news was coming and the wires were cleared. It arrived between 10 15 and 10 30, and at 10 25 the flags were out over the office of the Manchester Guardian and the Manchester Evening News, and newspaper carts, already flying colours, were carrying the tidings far and wide. The sirens of which Manchester has such a full chorus spread it farther still, from Northenden on the south to Prestwich on the north.

The first impulse of Manchester seemed to be to throw open the windows. It was as though people had heard the news and wanted to breathe it. It seemed just what occurs after a long and heavy thunderstorm, when people may be seen opening their windows as though some welcome release had come. Meanwhile the news was spreading from hand to hand; newspapers were common property, and all over the city the flags began to break out, and float icily over the streets, for it was a still morning and the colours drooped.

About eleven 0’clock, when the war was just ending, the crowd in Albert Square, with a kind of momentary stillness, watched the two flags go up slow and sure at the Town Hall. It was the very dawn of peace over the town; its small hours still unsullied by the noise and gesticulation which broke out later on, just, as the dawn of day is untarnished before man wakes up. And it was impossible not to notice how many people were taking the news solemnly, and how frequently between, say, Victoria Station and Albert Square one saw eyelids which were not without a suspicion of tears. But the dawn did not last long. The full day of jubilation was coming up fast. The frequency of blue linen overalls in the streets announced that the munitions works had broken loose, and by one o’clock the streets had formalised themselves into processions, which gathered numbers as a snowball gathers hulk. Those first thoughts which lay so near to tears were swept away in a rush of tramping feet and the choruses of songs.

Celebrating the signing of the armistice in Albert Square, Manchester, 12 November 1918.

The City let loose

As the afternoon wore on the stream in the streets thickened. Along all the main roads into the city, along Ashton Old Road, along Stockport Road and Hyde Road, workgirls poured in hundreds, gathering as they went flags and the other patriotic symbols which had been so suddenly rushed out from the obscurity of the hawker’s warehouse. They clambered on town-going lorries. In Market Street one saw a cart, drawn by the tiniest of donkeys, with seven or eight sturdy girls in overalls, cheering and flag-waving. But it was a crowd that had its discipline – four years of war have not gone for nothing. It formed its orderly platoons and battalions. Anyone with a big enough flag, and the courage frankly to display it, could lead a shouting army. There marched into Albert Square a procession of 300 girls headed by a small man, solemnly holding a flag, and with the bearing of a triumphantly entering conqueror. The girls – for the first crowds were mainly girls – flocked in their workclothes, shawls over heads, or in the light trousered overalls of the munition works. They shouted and cheered, breaking up now and then to do a few steps of a wild fox-trot.

Albert Square was the artery from which the people circulated. In the early afternoon it vibrated with the chimes of the Town Hall bells. It was here one saw at their best the eccentricities of the day – the bravo spirits who bore gorgeous paper umbrella or trimmed their hats with red and blue, the American soldiers who had little of the shamefacedness behind which most men sheltered their feelings, and the Belgians who came down to display their boldly coloured national costume.

Crowd gathered outside the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England in London after the announcement of the armistice, 11 November 1918. Photograph: PA

The infectious gaiety spread from the streets into shops. By early afternoon very many had shut their doors. Work had ceased, too, in the Town Hall and in the offices and warehouses, and a holiday was declared at the Grammar School. The military tribunals and the recruiting offices, dread symbol of what we have passed through, closed. The tram service gradually slackened. Women guards and trolley girls left their posts, and cars had to be run back to the depots. By early evening the Manchester tramway system was practically at a standstill, though Salford kept a service running.

Lights up

When darkness fell Manchester found itself, after so long an age, with unobscured lights, though there had not been time for street lamps to be freed from their “mufflers.” The feverish energy of the crowd showed no slackening. It was given point and direction by bugle bands and drums. In almost every main street at any time during the evening one could see such a band, with its flag-waving leader and its long straggling tail of men and girls linking arms across the street. They marched quickly and unimpeded through the crowded streets, for there were no tramcars to break their ranks. It was, indeed, a wonderful contrast with the days that are just behind us – streets with lights but no traffic, crowds that moved about as if they had no care and no thought beyond the burning joy of the moment.

The noise and shouting, the bugle bands and the processions went on in the main streets until far into the night; long pent-up reserves of nervous energy and high spirits took long to work themselves out.

People celebrate the end of the first world war in London. via YouTube.

Editorial: The Great Day

This is the great day – the great day of Peace, hoped for, longed for, at times appearing remote, almost unattainable, yet never despaired of, resolutely pursued, at last conquered. Now it is ours, and not ours only: it is the world’s, it is for our enemies no less than for ourselves. It is like the rain from Heaven, it is a gift to all. In name it is not peace but only the cessation of arms, but the arms, once laid down, will not be taken up again; the fighting is over, the slaughter is over; the armies may still stand on guard, and some of them must continue so to stand till the peace itself is signed, but their work is done. Recruiting has stopped. The vast machine of military munitioning may continue to work for a little, as it were by force of habit, but with fast-diminishing energy and with no serious purpose before it except that of bringing itself, as soon as possible and with as little injury as possible to the interests of the millions of men and women it has absorbed, to a complete standstill.

Events within the last few days have moved with breathless rapidity, and the whole condition of the problem as regards the central powers are changed. We have no longer to deal with the two great and highly organised military autocracies, but with a whole series of states not merely democratic in form but in which the democratic forces have definitely assumed the upper hand.

This is an edited extract. Read the full article.