The following stories were collected during the 1940s day held at Bantock House Museum, Wolverhampton, on 4 September 2004. The event, which commemorated Bantock House's wartime role as Home Guard HQ, was extremely popular and drew over 1000 visitors from the surrounding area.
Visitors were greeted by museum staff and WW2 re-enactors dressed in 1940s costumes. During the course of the day, they were invited to attend a wartime wedding; listened to live performances of popular songs of the day; attended a 1940s fashion show; and were addressed by Winston Churchill himself.
Everyone kept a sharp lookout for black marketeers, and when a spiv was spotted setting up shop in a corner of the museum, the special wartime policeman was quickly summoned!
The day brought back a lot of memories for older visitors of Wolverhampton in wartime. Many who had been children during the war remembered the generosity of the US troops stationed on Penn Common. Two nonagenarian members of the Wolverhampton Home Guard shared their experiences and recalled the games of one-upmanship that took place between their own units and the regular army.
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