On Saturday, Helen and I dressed ourselves (and the boys) up and drove over to Pickering for their excellent 1940s weekend. As Helen remarked while we were getting ready, ‘Some people have to buy new clothes for a day out like this.’ Not us. My wardrobe once clothed three men for such an outing (with plenty to spare) and every year, the comments under my photos say something along the lines of ‘You could at least have gone in costume…’
Leading with the most important information, I wore a Bates Poet wide-brim fedora in brown – one of my all-time favourites, though the heavy antelope felt makes it strictly a cold-season hat. Tweed jacket and trenchcoat were both vintage St Michael, wide-leg trousers were Thomas Farthing, brogues were Solovair burgundy rub-offs, spearpoint collar shirt was Darcy Clothing and my tank top was an old Gant one. Normally I always wear a moustache to this sort of thing, but I’ve gone clean-shaven in the hopes of looking a bit younger for an important event later this month. I do indeed look younger, but having not seen my top lip in at least a year and a half, I also feel rather naked.
I know, I know, having waxed lyrical about berets earlier this year, I really ought to have worn one, but in the event I couldn’t resist the Goodnight Sweetheart look. Fortunately, Helen kept the side up by sporting my blue Laulhére one with a union jack silk scarf from A Piece of Chic (which I think I last wore for the Coronation).
The 40s weekend – or the Wartime Weekend as it was known until recently – has a slightly chequered history. As ‘The Railway in Wartime’, it used to be run by the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, but according to their magazine, it cost them so much to run that they never made a profit on it. It also came with significant headaches for the heritage steam railway, especially around the wearing of Axis uniforms (see more thoughts on that below). Covid and the War in Ukraine provided what I suspect was a welcome hiatus, and after a few years the NYMR management quietly binned it off.
The event languished in limbo until the local community in Pickering resuscitated it last year. Bringing it back was no mean thing to attempt, and I think they’ve done an impressive job. While it’s not as big as it was (though it soon will be, if this year’s showing is anything to go by), they’ve made some shrewd updates to the format. To start with, they’ve rebranded it ‘Pickering 1940s Weekend’, broadening the focus from the previous ‘wartime’ theme. I suppose organising a fun family event around a major 20th century conflict was always a slighty odd thing even in a time of peace and prosperity, but over the past decade or so, the world has moved into a much more unstable phase. ‘Wartime’ weekends had already started to feel a bit off by the time the Ukraine war came along in 2022 – and the influx of refugees prompted most such events to cancel for the year and do a bit of re-evaluation.
The big tension with the Pickering weekend – and perhaps all such events – is that it caters to a very mixed bag of punters. There are the casual time-travellers and vintage enthusiasts looking for a fun, accessible event where they can swank about in red lippy and good hats, and then there are the dedicated re-enactors participating in a living history event, in many cases with incredible attention to detail. Mostly you can please both camps, but there are some points of friction.
Weapons are one. A lot of people attend in military uniforms, and feel that they should be allowed to carry appropriate replica weaponry including guns, bayonets and ceremonial swords or daggers. Risk assessments say otherwise, and the Pickering weekend has taken the decision to ban them. It’s unfortunate, but in an era of lone-wolf terrorism, it simply isn’t worth the risk. I think most people understand that, but you do get the odd chap kicking off because he can’t wander around a crowded town centre brandishing a machine gun.
The other sticking point has always been uniforms – specifically German and Russian ones. Personally, I’m all for personal freedoms, but I’m also always slightly uncomfortable with grown men who want to dress up as soldiers of the Third Reich. Yes, they were part of history and we shouldn’t pretend they weren’t. Yes, they had the coolest uniforms. Yes, many of them were conscripts rather than out-and-out Nazis. Yes, history is written by the victors and there were atrocities committed on all sides. However, the horror and moral repugnance of Nazism is something quite unique in modern history (perhaps all history), and those uniforms have some deeply sinister associations.
Re-enactors who dress as WW2 German soldiers will tell you that Holocaust survivors are almost all dead now – and so will not see them – but their children and grandchildren aren’t, and trauma on that scale endures for generations. I went to school in Leeds with a lot of Jewish boys, and I can’t imagine trying to justify to even the most open-minded among them why I might want to dress up as a Wermacht soldier.
Be all that as it may, some people like to attend in German uniform, and when the railway organised it, they came up with an inspired solution. German uniforms were only allowed at the tiny woodland station of Levisham – re-branded as the occupied French hamlet of Le Visham. It worked really well, and if we’re talking about living history, it was genuinely quite an interesting and slightly intimidating experience getting off the train onto a platform full of uniformed fascists with clipboards and hammy accents demanding your papers.
As is so often the case in life, what cocked it up for everyone was the Daily Mail. They sent a photojournalist to cover the weekend – which one should remember was spread along an 18-mile stretch of railway, including four stations and a market town. He apparently spent the whole time on the platform at Levisham, papping creepy Yorkshiremen cosplaying Nazis. The article went online with the headline ‘World War Two re-enactors dress up as SS stormtroopers to recreate 1940s life on historic railway’, which I imagine wasn’t exactly the publicity the NYMR were hoping for. Their response was to ban German uniforms the following year – leading to a fall-out with some re-enactors and an excellent weekend of whack-a-mole Nazi hunts as defiant stormtroopers popped up on platforms up and down the line.
The modern incarnation walks the various tightropes pretty well, I think. The event is split between Pickering town centre – which has a more civilian focus – and the open-air WW2 museum at Eden Camp, a 10-minute drive away. The uniformed groups of re-enactors tend to gravitate to Eden Camp, and German uniforms are permitted there (but not in the town centre), so everyone has somewhere they can enjoy the kind of event they want. From my point of view, I’ve always preferred to go in civilian clothes, so the vibe in the town centre is more my cup of tea, but it’s great to have both.
We had a lovely time admiring the vintage vehicles, browsing the stalls in the indoor market, watching the musicians and dancers, singing along to the Dad’s Army theme tune and generally enjoying the atmosphere. Aside from the usual smattering of Rab jackets and cagoules common to any tourist town, most people were dressed up, and there was that same sense of stepping back in time (or at least to a cosy Sunday-night costume drama approximation of a time) that first drew me to the event years ago.
It’s also the first time we’ve taken the boys to an event like this one, and I think they had a good day out – helped by burgers at the Black Swan and the fact that they both looked super in their finery. We’ll make temponauts of them yet.
Here’s to the next one…
