TODAY'S VE Day celebrations will, of course, be much more muted than they were 75 years ago.

The sheer relief that six years of war in Europe had finally come to end would never be replicated in the anniversaries that followed.

Nevertheless, the people of Herefordshire have continued to mark the milestone as the years have passed. There have been church services, civic commemorations, the occasional party, and red-white-and-blue bunting hung across windows.

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We recognise, perhaps even more clearly as time goes by, the debt we own our grandparents and great-grandparents' generation, and the enormity of the sacrifices they made.

The coming of this anniversary was significant, not only because it neatly denotes three-quarters of a century since the German surrender, but because the remaining few who served in that war are slipping away from us. When their living testament is gone, all we will have are written words and photographs.

So we had resolved to muster an extra effort in Herefordshire and around the country to mark the occasion.

Sadly, coronavirus put paid to almost all the celebrations.

But what we do have now is more time to reflect, and to enjoy these extraordinary pictures of ordinary people in Hereford who came together in their neighbourhoods to mark VE Day on May 8, 1945.

They were taken by Tony Williams, of Hereford, who was an engineer and amateur photographer.

He toured the city on VE Day, and on subsequent days, capturing street parties and parades. We reproduce his pictures courtesy of his daughter, Dr Maureen Beauchamp, and of the Derek Foxton Archive.

Almost all the streets Tony visited still stand, though they are much changed. Cars are now parked bumper-to-bumper at the kerbsides where trestle tables once stood laden with sandwiches and cakes made with precious rations.

But there is also a familiarity in the scenes beyond the familiar buildings we recognise.

In the seas of faces we see families like ours: jocular uncles, cocky schoolboys, devoted mothers, and aged grannies placed tenderly in seats where they can see all that is going on.

In many ways we have changed so very much; in others none at all.