Morning everyone, recently I’ve been thinking a lot about competitions as together with a bunch (or should that be collective?) of other wonderful saga writers we’ve launched a competition where you can win a bumper bundle of our signed books! Not bad eh, if you’d like to enter you can do so here.
But with all this competitive spirit flying around, I started wondering about competitions during WW2. Surely there would have been a fair few of those flying about to boost morale? Actually, the shock answer to this is NO! Incredibly, many competitions, most notably the Football League were forgotten as everyone threw themselves into the war effort with many stadiums becoming military bases. Thankfully the football league was replaced by the Wartime League, which in essence was a much smaller version, with far fewer teams, but it did give something people to latch onto during hard times.
So what else did people do to keep their spirits up? Well the good news is, there were a few other competitions still knocking about but the drive behind it was more to do with helping the war effort.
For example, many towns had competitions to see who could save the most money towards the war effort. In fact, Savings Weeks, where each town was given a target towards helping fund a spitfire or warship, became a regular thing.
Children were often the target of war effort competitions, as they were asked to draw a picture and write a short story about savings weeks with winning entries often displayed in town halls – the ultimate prize.
Then of course there was scrap. Appeals for leftover metal to help build tanks, planes and weapons were so large that BBC Children’s Hour ran a scrap-collecting competition. The winners collected nine tons of scrap, and the prize was a National Savings certificate. However, my very favourite competition from World War Two comes from a newspaper.
In January 1942 many people claimed The Daily Telegraph newspaper’s crossword wasn’t hard enough. In fact there were so many complaints the chairman of the Eccentric Club offered a prize of £100 to be donated to charity to anyone that could solve the puzzle in under 12 minutes. Four people beat the deadline, but unbeknown to Mr Gavin, the War Office was also watching and wrote to those that had won, inviting them for an interview at Bletchley. Incredibly those four people went onto help break German military codes.
A good friend of mine always says, you never know how far reaching something you think, say or do will affect the lives of millions tomorrow. This was certainly true for those contestants taking part in a newspaper contest and it could be true for you, What will you go out and do today that could change your life or someone else’s? You could start small by entering our competition today.
As ever I love to hear your thoughts so feel free to leave your comments below. What were your favourite competitions from the forties? Do you remember the Savings Weeks or know of those that did? Did you collect scrap metal or did you enter The Telgraph’s esteemed crossword puzzle?
Until next time,
Fiona x
Fiona Ford Writer 