HUNDREDS of people joined in the festivities to mark VE Day in Oxford. “The atmosphere was electric,” the Oxford Mail reported.

Buses, cars, bicycles and prams were gaily decorated, and many historic buildings in the city were floodlit for the first time since 1939.

In public houses and hotels, sailors, soldiers and airmen toasted the Allied victory to which they had so bravely contributed.

The noise was deafening, with the Carfax bells struggling to be heard above bagpipes, a guitar, fire crackers, drums, bugles and voices singing and cheering.

‘No beer’ signs soon appeared in pubs. Cars and vans were stopped and rocked from side to side by revellers.

A baker’s van was halted, the door pulled open and loaves spilled on to the street. Many were used to bombard buses inching their way through the high-spirited crowds.

Bonfires were lit in many parts of the city, with big ones at Carfax, outside St John’s College in St Giles, near Queen’s College in High Street and in Broad Walk. Crowds danced around many of the fires.

Bonfires appeared in many side streets, generously fed by residents.

Children in St Clement’s, accompanied by a bugle band, paraded through the streets with an effigy of Hitler, which was finally put on a bonfire.Two bonfires - at the junctions of Bailey Road and Knolles Road, Cowley, and Ridgefield Road and Drove Acre Road, East Oxford - were so fierce they burned huge craters in the road.

Two days later, the city was still celebrating - a big crowd joined a torchlight procession along High Street, through Turl Street and Broad Street to St Giles, where another effigy of Hitler was burned.

Jean Mundy submitted this photograph of VE Day celebrations in Cowley Oxfordshire.

She was 14 years old at the time of VE Day and remembers being at school and remembers the head mistress telling the school children that the war was going to end the next day and sending them home. When she went home she told her parents the news, but they didn’t believe her until they heard on the radio. Afterwards there were street parties.