News Article

Borders War

08/11/2009

BORDERS AT WAR DVD
To mark the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, Northern Heritage and Deerpark Films are proud to release the DVD of Borders at War. First broadcast on ITV in 2005, the six part series tells the story of the Home Front, how those Borderers left at home coped during the long years of the greatest conflict the world has yet seen. Their memories and testimony are unique and precious for the story of the war and how it affected ordinary Borderers will soon outrun living memory.
Gas masks, the blackout, rationing, the Land Girls, prisoners of war, the Home Guard and the sheer undaunted determination to survive are all recalled by a group of almost fifty Borderers who saw it for themselves. It is the best sort of history, immediate, human and utterly absorbing. When the series had its only broadcast in 2005, it gained an astonishing 42% of the total TV audience in the Borders, a record-breaking rating.
Madge Elliot of Hawick remembers the early panics and uncertainties of the war, the blackout, wearing badges which glowed in the dark, but she adds that if Hitler had invaded in 1940, his armies would have overrun a near-defenceless Britain. Rationing had its effects in Selkirk; former rugby internationalist, Jim Ingles, led a successful strike of tattie-howkers in protest at no sugar in the tea supplied by farmers. John Ogilvy of Kelso remembers the Home Guard being ambushed by a small platoon of regular soldiers hiding in Tucky Lynch’s tattie shaws. “If they were Germans,” shouted Tucky from an upstairs window, “ you’d aa be deid!” Anne Melrose of St Boswells smiled at the early name given to Dad’s Army. The LDV, or Look, Duck and Vanish, was how people teased them. But she and others agreed that as the war went on, they became much more formidable. Jack Purvis of Walkerburn admired the determination of the old First World War veterans who joined the Home Guard, “they would have fought to the end”, but Bill Pattison of Kelso recalled one old soldier who insisted on marching to war in his slippers.
Remarkable stories, real nuggets of history, emerged in the series. Mark Entwistle of The Southern Reporter told how two Newstead schoolboys found themselves on opposing sides in the war in the air above Scotland. In the first sortie over the Forth, Albert Barton flew a Spitfire and Friedrich Hanson was in a Messerschmidt. Walter Elliot of Selkirk remembered how his father left for a few months and came home to work as an insurance agent. Allegedly. In fact he was recruiting the Borders section of an underground resistance force known as the Stay-Behind Army.
Borders at War ranges across the whole spectrum of memory, from Jenny Corbett of Selkirk laughing at the stirrup pumps supplied to put out fires, “Mercy, it widnae pit oot a candle!”, and Madge Elliot saying that “the Hawick lassies had a ball” because there were thousands of soldiers at Stobs and Wilton camps. But then there were those who never came back, the appalling treatment of the Italians who lived in the Borders, and those who saw the newsreels of British soldiers entering the death camp at Belsen and never forgot it.
Borders at War paints a vivid picture of world-changing events seen through the eyes of Borderers, people who experienced history and helped make it.

See more: Borders at War DVD £12.99

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