Calling Blighty - A Message Home
World War II footage of British soldiers in Burma sending messages to their families back home. The first man up, winning bottles of beer in a game of darts, is my grandfather, Joseph Critchley, from St Helens, north west England. The family are still here, going strong. My grandmother died only in 2010. I inherited her Vera Lynn records, whom my granddad, of course, loved.
Calling Blighty is a series of short films made in 1944-46 of individual servicemen and women in the Far East sending personal messages home to their family and friends. Only 64 of these films are known to survive.
Follow the links for details, recovered connections, new stories
‘With the focus on the war against Hitler in Europe, the soldiers in Burma were largely overlooked, becoming known as the “Forgotten Army”. For these troops, fighting a savage battle against the Japanese in Burma and India, home leave wasn’t possible, post was slow, and sometimes letters didn’t get home at all. Some of the men left behind pregnant wives or young children who would barely recognise them by the time they came home. Others would bid farewell to sweethearts never knowing whether they would see each other again… Many would become heroes but never spoke of their experiences once they returned to Blighty. In addition to fighting a seemingly invincible foe, the British soldiers were at risk from other enemies hiding in the jungle. The worst was disease. 40% of the 14th Army suffered from malaria. Typhus and dysentery were also rife. Out of every thousand troops, 700 fell victim to disease of one kind or another.’
You can read about the history in other places. I’d just like to put a little personal biography to the film, to make it clear that these are real flesh and blood people like you and I, people with histories, stories, relations to others.
In the film, my grandfather says hello to his children, Joan, Kevin and Brian, my auntie, my uncle and my dad. My dad celebrated his 80th birthday 22 November 2017. What a sad, funny feeling that we are now all older than my granddad was here. Yet he still looms large. War histories talk about heroes. To me, he was my granddad, and that’s hero enough. He could be bold and abrasive. Cut to the sing-a-long at the end, you’ll see him again in the middle of the group, the one the others look up to and follow. That’s how I remember him. He believed in facing the world, head up, chest out. Once you start running in life, you never stop. Confront your fears, stand up to bullies. But he wasn’t a soldier. He was a bricklayer, one of a number of builders in the family. I don’t remember him saying much at all about the war. I do remember he would threaten to eat the assorted toads, frogs, newts that would gather in the back garden, to be returned to the local brook. He said he used to eat them in the jungle. Whenever he came round, I’d be prepared to fight him off. But I guess he was pulling my leg after all. And he did enjoy looking after the family budgies, without ever eating one of them.
He seemed such a big man when I was little. I see him now as he really was, just a simple, ‘ordinary’ man like all the others, caught up in extraordinary events and processes much bigger than they were. I remember seeing him working outdoors in the rain, on a building site in town, smiling and joking and shouting over the road to us, with that same cheery face-the-world-whatever-it-throws-at-you optimism. But he looked very old and frail, and the work looked tough. I thought he was indestructible, even when we visited him in the hospital. He would have been 60. He died in October 1976, aged 63. Which seemed impossible at the time. I inherited his rocking chair, which I had always loved, and would always try to claim from him, by the open fire, when we visited (I always have a rocker to this day). And when, years later, my grandmother found out that I was a keen dart player, she gave me his darts in their wooden case (I’m badly out of practice these days, the darts are battered now, but the case is still in good shape). I won the darts competition in America! I played with a real Cherokee too! My granddad would be proud indeed. He encouraged us to go into the world and give it all a good go.