6th July 1941

State Service to launch War Weapons Week [in Colchester this week] – Mayor, Corporation, etc. Poulter went, and told me tonight that Arthur Greenwood, the Cabinet Minister was there, and made a speech in the Mayor’s Parlour afterwards. He said that, regarding air-raids, the damage done by the Germans here was as nothing compared with the damage done in Germany by the RAF. He is quite notorious for these fantastic statements.

He has a “country cottage” at East Mersea.

War Weapons Weeks were held to raise funds locally for the war effort. Michael Ford's painting 'War Weapons Week in a Country Town' (1941) conveys the sense of civic pride in these occasions that would have been evident in Colchester.

Arthur Greenwood (1880-1954) was a Labour MP who had been appointed Minister without Portfolio in Churchill's War Cabinet. CP

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