CHEEKFUL CHRISTMAS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 December 1940, Page 6

CHEEKFUL CHRISTMAS

SPENT BY LONDONERS RESPITE FROM RAIDS FINE SPIRIT SHOWN IN ARMS FACTORIES. WORKERS CARRY ON WITHOUT ROOF OVER THEM. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 12.30 p.m.) RUGBY. December 26. After a day of intimate gatherings and irrepressible good cheer, and a Christmas night of unbroken peace—a peace the R.A.F. also accorded to all Germany and Ger-man-occupied lands — Londoners awoke refreshed and ready. The blackout and the silence of Christmas bells were the sole reminders of the tasks and perils still to be faced and throughout the capital families gathered round firesides and drank toasts of “The King” and “Absent Ones.” While many parents took a welcome opportunity to visit their evacuated children, availing themselves of an unexpectedly generous allowance of trains, the greater part of the citizens made it a “stay at home” Christmas. Though arms workers were officially on holiday on Christmas Day, key men in some factories worked long hours to do vital repair and maintenance work. • In the Royal Ordnance factories, states a Ministry of Supply bulletin, everything had been planned in advance to ensure that work could begin again early in the morning of Boxing Day. Here is a Christmas postscript from a Ministry of Supply arms factory which Hitler says he bombed to bits: One bomb blew every pane of ..glass from the roof of a workshop where men and women had been working alongside of one another producing arms. They swept up the glass and went on working without a roof over their heads. Before the boarding in of the roof was completed, it started to rain. They still went on working. The women' workers would not stop. They just tied umbrellas above their machines and kept at it.

ALMOST LIKE PEACE ABSENCE OF AIR RAID SIRENS. (Received This Day, 1.0 p.m.)' RUGBY, December 26. Up to a late hour on Thursday evening, Londoners had not heard air raid warning sirens since Monday night. “Almost like peace time,” one Cockney said, unconscious of the gas mask and tin hat on his back and that he was walk- • ing past a gap made by the destruction of a famous store by a bomb in a busy London shopping centre. London’s streets themselves showed a contrast to a peace time Boxing Day in the absence of large holiday crowds, owing to the fact that there was no official Bank Holiday this year. The air still, however, seemed to be pervaded by a spirit of quiet enjoyment, mingled with We profound conviction that Britain will see through to the end any big job she has on hand which has been a characteristic feature of the present Christmastide.