Join the Wrens! Nearly everyone was called to some kind of action during WWII., and many women decided to join the Wrens.

Britain calling...

Short pattern German dress fire axe.  Date is uncertain - but high-quality dress fireman's axes were produced for dress use from the German Empire period up to 1939 at least.  One of the difficulty in dating fire axes is that, more often than not, they do not carry particularly prominent marks or insignia indicating their date.  

Some who spend time In Here may recall that one of our US friends, some time back, posted a long-handled pattern, axe and hammer-headed fire axe of very high quality.  This is a short handled type with ornamental axe head combined with a claw.  There were, of course, numerous variations.  Note the two rings, allowing the axe to be attached directly to a belt by way of leather thongs or fabric straps, much like dress daggers or bayonets.  Some arrangement like this was common for dress axes, although they would not have been very practical for the more basic versions of these objects used by ordinary firemen.

The fire services of Germany were, historically, organized as part of the police services.  In Nazi Germany, the Fire Protection Police were a specialist division of the national "Ordnungspolizei", the main divisions of which were the Schutzpolizei (urban police) and the Gendarmerie (rural police).  The precise provenance of this fine axe is unclear; it was offered recently for sale somewhere in Internetland.  Best regards, JR.

Dress fire axe - short pattern.

Jan. 8, 1942, Philip Zec’s cartoon in London’s The Daily Mirror . The caption.... “The price of petrol has been increased by one penny " ... It caused a bit of a stir . Winston Churchill believed that the cartoon, which he interpreted as saying that the merchant marines’ lives were being put at risk to increase the profits of the oil barons, would undermine the morale of the merchant marines, and ordered an investigation to discover who owned The Daily Mirror. It led to “one of the stormiest debates in the wartime parliament,” when in fact all that Zec had meant to say was that gasoline shortages would put lives at risk.
taken from fb(James Mardlin)