Yule meet again

From increasing food rations and singing carols to playing Royal Christmas broadcasts, citizens and soldiers did their best to spread festive cheer during the Second World War...

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Shortly after Christmas, he fell sick with dysentery and died, in Ben Wheeler's words, of “enteritis and malnutrition oedema”, before the end of January.

There's something stirringly sentimental about wartime stories like this. One of the reasons the Second World War remains so significant in our collective memory is the enduring example of solidarity and sacrifice it continues to provide, especially as people in the most desperate situations tried to keep treasured family memories and traditions alive.

Royal Christmas broadcasts were at the heart of this, particularly during the Blitz of 1940, as tens of thousands of Londoners spent Christmas Eve away from their homes - many separated from children evacuated to the countryside - and sleeping in a shelter or the platform of a Tube station.

Some listening to the King will have remembered how his eldest daughter, a 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth, had made her first ever radio address just weeks before, speaking especially to those who had been sent from their homes to safety.

The children of wartime Britain were - in her words - “full of cheerfulness and courage” and “bearing their share of the war's danger and sadness”, full of hope for better times, and better Christmases to come.

That same Christmas Eve, a volunteer ambulance driver called Alice Remington was taking a group of wounded men to hospital when they suddenly started singing carols - a moment of hope and fellow-feeling she never forgot - lifting her spirits as she picked her way through the smoke and rubble of a city under nightly bombardment.

A year later, Christmas came just after the shock of Pearl Harbor and the start of the Japanese army's dramatic sweep through South East Asia.

The dreadful news of the fall of Hong Kong reached London on Christmas Eve, but PM Winston Churchill wasn't there to receive it.