George Cedric Beardmore
1908 to 1979
George Beardmore was a successful writer for more than four decades. His published work was extensive and eclectic: a dozen novels, a popular series of children’s books, and long-running comic strips in both Girl and Eagle.
Most of George’s novels and children’s books are out-of print now but can often be found on Amazon or Abe books. Just search there for the title that interests you.
Civilians at War and The Long Wedding Reception can be ordered from this website.
Civilians at War
by George Beardmore
£20
Barred from the Army by his asthma, George Beardmore started the War working as a cost clerk in the BBC. At the end of 1940 he was moved to Droitwich to help erect an emergency transmitter. In 1942 he returned to London and after a short spell writing for Picture Post, he became first a billeting officer and then an information officer at the sites of VI and V2 bombings in North London.
Based on George’s vivid and insightful journals, Civilians at War offers a unique record of life on the home front between 1838 and 1946.
The Long Wedding Reception
by George Beardmore
£20
George was married to Jinny for thirty-eight years. She died suddenly when he was just 65. The Long Wedding Reception is an intimate and previously unpublished memoir of their life together and George’s struggle to live without her.
Civilians at War
4 September 1938
About time I started a Journal again as events crowd upon us. Today we spent 25/- on sugar, rice, flour, corned beef, and Marmite which we have stored in the sideboard against the day when these things will be difficult or even impossible to obtain by reason of War. This morning the Prime Minister returned from his Godesburg conversations with Hitler and although the outcome has yet to be discussed in the Cabinet before being made public, I am far from unique in thus preparing for the worst. The issue is that if Herr Hitler marches into Czecho Slovakia to aid his so-called subjects, France declares war on him, we join France, Russia joins us, and together we overwhelm Germany. That’s the theory. My chief concern follows a recollection of the 1917 bread queues, but for myself, I can’t worry about events over which I have no control.
After a brief talk with Corky (the family doctor), it appears that Jean has filled a true bill and may safely be called aprospective mother. At last! The event should take place about 20 May next.
I should be happier if 1 knew that I had a job to go to after 31 October next, which is my last day in Regent Street. Four prospects present themselves: the BBC, Odham’s, sale of a book, and the possibility of my successor proving a failure.
24 September
We were all waiting for Hitler’s speech at the Berlin Sports Palace last night to show some conciliatory spirit but instead it demanded evacuation of the Sudeten region, intact, by 1 October. Otherwise he threatened to march. Today therefore has seen Jean collecting our gas-masks, and loudspeaker vans patrolling the London streets recommending Westminster residents to be fitted with masks, but after working-hours asWhitehall was already packed with some 14,000 applicants. Harrow is placarded with red bills asking for nurses and ordering John Citizen to call at the nearest school for his mask. Outside Westminster City Hall this lunch-hour I saw eight big cleaning vans being loaded with big square tins, presumably holding masks. One always assumes that Whitehall knows best but all its efforts seem to be devoted to making and distributing gas-masks. Poison-gas? But surely it was proved to be a two-edged sword in 1917 by blowing back into the Huns’ faces. Perhaps hereafter we shall have our south-west gales to bless as well as the Channel.
Also saw a load of sand outside a Pall Mall club and sandbags lining the walls of another. Holland says that Clapham Common is being dug into trenches by the light of flares. Five central Underground stations are to close down, those centering on Charing Cross. This is said to be so that fire-proof and flood-proof doors can be installed. The Thames isn’t far off, after all. Yet apart from the tension inside oneself and the inevitable turn of conversation London runs along as usual, the streams of traffic, the old lady selling chrysanths on an Oxford Circus corner, the fountains blowing in Trafalgar Square.
Jean has made up her mind to go to Horsham (i.e. Love’s Farm, where we spent part of our honeymoon) but only if the threat is carried out so drastically that life cannot be borne. After all, she says, Harrow is fifteen miles from Marble Arch. I didn’t care to remind her that a plane would do it in under five minutes. Her face is very sad and I play patience with her and make tea, much as I dislike both these diversions in the evening. As Corky tells her, she is now responsible for another life.
My next-door neighbour, Amos, has agreed with me to begin work tomorrow on an air-raid trench in his garden to take eight sitting, with an adit at right-angles: his idea. He’s more farsighted than me. He says: ‘No need to make it a home because we shan’t need to be in it more than half an hour at a time’, which is the opposite of what the official bills, posters etc. tell us.
‘Tonight the PM has given a long and moving broadcast. He sounded tired to death and despondent, but with a wonderful naturalness touched with anger when he spoke of the ‘fantastic’ notion of our going to war for a people (the Sudetens) of whom we. know nothing, and bitterness when he mentioned Hitler’s unreasonableness. The sincerity of his inflection moved me very much. At this moment it’s pouring – I hear the gutters bubbling houses away – so work on the trench tomorrow seems improbable.
The Long Wedding Reception
Here I am, six months short of seventy, putting my newly acquired cottage to rights as in the past I have put to rights – how many ? – five homes, with plaster, screws, paint, cup and picture-hooks, towel rail and whatever else, as though for the two of us – as though the rest of our lives were to be spent here. The impulse is still present to walk into the next room and announce: “Listen, that rotten job, polishing the kitchen’s new copper pipes, washing and drying them, coating them with polyurethane varnish – well, it’s finished.”
Still, I don’t want to write about copper pipes and housekeeping so much as about our marriage. A stream flows through me of ideas and recollections I want to share with you. I must write or, as Corky suggested, l shall go mad. It’s all right for you because you can communicate with me but I can’t reach you by turning myself into a symbol in your dreams. These letters must be pushed out in hope, like messages in a bottle flung into the sea. At least the messages will be formulated, and not ruin my nights like so many oysters. ‘
Do you know, I never bothered to ask what you remember of our first meeting. Sometime during the summer of 1932 I watched you jump off the wooden steps of the tennis pavilion at Parkfield and turn to look up at the rest of us as, shading our eyes against the sun, we crowded the doors and windows trying to sort out fours. I was so moved that I couldn’t bear to follow what you did next but turned away saying “Oh, God!” and someone, Margery Rendell perhaps, told me : “It’s no use George. She’s tied up with a boy in Beckenham.”
So your recollection won’t be the same as mine.
I knew that that moment was a turning-point. I told myself: “That’s it,” and set about the six month business of convincing you that it was it, too. All autumn and winter you held out, and it wasn’t until July of the following year that I was placing the engagement ring on your finger in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
One result of that first meeting was that this morning, over forty-five years later, I woke dreaming that you were in my arms again. Or do you know?