Yesterday the leviathan stirred, shrugged off Thursday’s terrorist attacks and turned out to honour the millions of women who contributed to the allied victory in the second world war.

Young and old put fears aside to watch the Queen unveil a bronze memorial in Whitehall in honour of the women veterans who faced down a far more destructive adversary.

Many echoed the spirit of resistance voiced by the Queen the previous day. “They want us to stay at home and cower, but people won’t,” said Gayle Peters, who had travelled with her husband from Maidenhead.

Barbara Davison, who served as a wartime Wren at Devonport and St Merryn, Cornwall, made the journey from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, to attend. “A little thing like that isn’t going to stop us,” she said.

This was just the start of a weekend of nationwide events marking the 60th anniversary of the war’s end. Today is national commemoration day with a parade in the Mall.

There will be a service in Westminster Abbey and at 5pm five groups of wartime aircraft will fly over Buckingham Palace dropping 1m poppies.

Yesterday the mood of defiance was clear. If the terrorist attacks were supposed to destroy the capital’s morale, the bombers were mistaken: they had chosen the moment when the spirit of the blitz was about to be evoked at full throttle.

At the centre of it was the sculptor John Mills’s memorial to Britain’s wartime women heroes near the Cenotaph.

Measuring 22ft high, 16ft long and 6ft wide, the plinth depicted 17 sets of women’s clothing symbolic of the hundreds of roles they performed from 1939-45 and their return home when the job was done.

“They quietly took them off at the end of the day, hung them up and let the men take the credit,” said Baroness Boothroyd, former Speaker of the House of Commons who presided over the ceremony. She helped to raise £350,000 towards the memorial trust with nearly £1m coming from the lottery.

This belated recognition of women’s wartime contribution lagged behind those of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and America.

Boothroyd did not mince her words yesterday: “It has taken us 60 years to honour the women of the second world war.” No other country had demanded so much of women, she said.

“Never before did so many women show themselves so capable in so many unexpected ways, from flying fighter aircraft between fields to driving petrol tankers around London’s docks in the blitz.”

Nine out of 10 young single females worked on essential war production in factories or on the land, mobilising 7m women. More than 600,000 were conscripted into the forces.

So much time has elapsed that of the 40 women who won George medals, only seven were able to make it to yesterday’s ceremony. Their testimony revealed their bravery.

Rose Taylor was 17 when she crawled into a Sussex farmhouse crushed by a German bomb to haul out three orphaned children. The children’s mother had been killed by the bomb and Taylor cared for them for the next two years until she was called up by the Women’s Air Force.

Then there was Betty Popkiss, from Coventry, who dug with her bare hands to rescue seven people from a collapsed air raid shelter. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time,” she said.

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