My thanks to Prof. David Edgerton (Kings) who alerted me on social media on the 75th anniversary of VE Day in 2020 to a post from a fellow Kings historian Dr Kit Kowol.
Kowol, who I don’t know has done research on the recent history of letter writing (amongst other things)
Kowol reports that the Second World War was the golden age of letter writing- perhaps the last one- as people sought to keep in touch in fractured times. This was before of course most people would have had a (fixed line) telephone and social media was a thing of the distant future, although the telegraph existed.
Within this he suggests that VE Day saw a peak of letter writing- to Churchill-with people keen to engage with the wartime leader. Another peak came a few months later when Churchill lost the General Election to Attlee and people wrote to commiserate with Churchill.
One presumes certainly in the latter case that the writers were mostly Tory voters, but we can’t really be sure, any more than it can be known if Churchill read any of the letters or responded to them.
Were Churchill around today we can imagine what his twitter timeline would look like but the process of letter writing perhaps suggested more measured thoughts.
A corrective to the above is that 1945 was certainly not the golden age of letter writing for publication. That came many decades later. Papers in 1945 had few pages compared to now and carried very few (often lengthy) letters.
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