VE Day was the fourth day of the Summer Term on 8 May 1945. Michael Fisher (MH 1944) was in the nets the previous afternoon when another boy came up with a radio on which he had picked up the news of Germany’s surrender. VE Day itself was proclaimed as a school holiday and it was a fine sunny morning. In the Thanksgiving Service in Chapel Now Thank We All Our God was sung as loudly as any hymn has ever been sung and that afternoon many listened to Churchill’s broadcast on a radio in Big School. All the timber was taken out of the anti-tank ditch on the Upper Hundred and burned in a huge bonfire round which boys danced and threw in bent and battered ‘barges’. A three-day holiday was decreed and Peter Mieville (PH 1945), a Tonbridge boy for just four days, was taken by his mother to London to share in the national rejoicing. He was at Buckingham Palace when the Royal Family and Churchill appeared on the balcony and that night searchlights lit up the sky and huge crowds danced and sang in a spontaneous outburst of national relief and rejoicing. VJ Day was not celebrated in the same way as it came in the middle of the summer holidays.

The relief for those at school during the war was enormous because for nearly six years no-one could know when the war would end. Their future was on hold and the prospect of military service and possible death had always been very close. Boys craning their heads upwards to watch the Battle of Britain in 1940 had seen men dying in burning planes. Many also had fathers or brothers in the forces, adding to their sense of family anxiety. 

The war had however given the School a stronger sense of community. This was not the jealously guarded self-contained community of the 1930s but one which looked out more to the needs of the local area and the wider nation, shown in the service given in the Home Guard, the farming work done in holidays, the use of school buildings for local organisations, the sense of all being in it together.  

OTs of that era when asked to recall the war at Tonbridge had many varied and lasting memories:
                                                           
The half-holiday for Nicolson’s VC; lessons in winter dressed in overcoats, hat and gloves, as fuel for heating was rationed; nights spent in air raid shelters; collecting spent bullets; sweet coupons needed for the Grubber; the taste and texture of that universal meat called ‘Spam’; taking exams in Big School as the radiators started to vibrate with the approach of a doodlebug; the galaxy of private cars on Skinners’ Day 1945 as petrol became obtainable again. 

David Walsh, author of A Duty to Serve, Tonbridge School and the 1939-45 War
(CR 1972-2009)

WWII Memorial, Chapel of St Augustine, Tonbridge School