Celebrate and Remember-VE day dance on May 1st at the CourtHouse, Warwick

We’ll be dancing like it’s 1945 on May Day this year!

Tickets are now on sale in the Visitor Information Centre for the Unlocking Warwick VE-Day Dance and presentation of memories to commemorate the 70^th anniversary of the end of WW2 in Europe, to be held in the Ballroom on May 1^st.

Plans are well advanced. The tickets are in the form of ration cards which dancers can cash-in for their fish-and-chip supper (or vegetarian alternative) from our NAAFI canteen. On the night, the volunteers will be busy distributing the food and serving drinks at the bar, and Edwina has created an austerity cook-book with Warwickshire recipes made from non-rationed country fare. It might give the guests a few ideas for healthy local food dishes 70 years on.

Thanks to a collaboration with the Leamington and Warwick Courier, who have featured our VE-Day celebration and appealed for photos and anecdotes from 70 years ago, Edwina, Ann, Kate and Fran are preparing a display for guests to look at as they arrive for the dance. Volunteers will be reading-out some of the memories of wartime Warwick in a short presentation to begin the evening.

We are pleased to have DJ Woody to provide the music for the dance. He has a huge collection of 1930s and ’40s recordings, and is much in demand for revivalist events.

Please promote the event using flyers which can be picked up from our desk in the Visitor Centre. Or just tell your friends to dress up and join the VE-Day Dance.

Here’s a poster for the event to download and print…

VE Day Flyer – Poster (PDF)

One of our favourite historic sources is the Warwick Advertiser which was published in Warwick from 1806 to some time in the 1970’s ! The County Records Office in Priory Park holds the archive and we’ve taken some photos of various relevant articles and adverts from some of the May 1945 editions…..