The number of people who can remember the Second World War is very much decreasing.

Happily though, the Romsey Advertiser kept going throughout both wars, and is a magnificent record of local life, despite censorship.

Recently I have completed a project to extract all the local news for the years from 1939 to 1945. It has taken me several years, but I now have an absolute treasure trove of information about this part of Hampshire during World War 2.

My work was made possible by the British Library who filmed all the Romsey Advertisers from 1896 to 1951 and crucially by Charles Burnett who copied each image as a jpg file that, with some tweaking, I could turn into editable text.

One of the most striking features has been how the war fell into three phases.

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The first phase lasted from the outbreak of war in September 1939 until May 1940. The war was largely at sea but the government started to put in place a number of measures designed to provide for the civilian population and re-organised production onto a war footing.

Rationing was introduced. Since much of our food was imported, the need for this was obvious and generally accepted.

Vulnerable members of the population of towns likely to be under attack were evacuated, although many had gone home again by Christmas 1939.

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Blackout was introduced, resulting in a big increase in traffic accidents in the dark. Churches faced a near impossible task of blacking out their windows, so moved their evening services to the afternoons. Conscription of men was introduced.

Then after Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain in 1940, there was a very real danger of invasion. The Home Guard and other civil defence arrangements became very important and took up much of people’s spare time.

Late in 1940, Southampton took a huge battering and teams from all round Hampshire went into the city to give assistance. Industry, particularly the aircraft industry, was decentralised and parts of Spitfire production were re-located to this area.

In October 1942, after the second Battle of El Alamein and the allied invasion of Italy, it became apparent that it was only a matter of time before the Axis powers were defeated.

It took nearly three years, and brought many casualties amongst our military personnel, but on May 8 1945, the war in Europe finally ended, and people turned their attention to re-constructing Britain.