About a time when nearly three million British people, mostly
children, were made to leave their homes and live with total strangers
They called it The Evacuation. It seemed a compassionate, well-intentioned
concept, yet it turned out in many ways to be one of the most chaotic and
tragic operations on Britain’s home front during World War II.
In the early stages of the war, the British government moved
three million people, mostly children, from the cities most likely to be prime
targets of Nazi bombers, and found them homes with volunteer foster families
deep in the countryside.
By 1939 the Nazis were already geared
for battle, yet Britain’s forces were still at peacetime strength, and
rearmament began only in the spring of that year, when the declaration of war
with Germany was only six months away. A year earlier Hitler had snatched the
German-speaking sector of Czechoslovakia. Now, in March, his army was sweeping
into Prague itself, and was about to annex a part of Lithuania.
While rushing, almost too late to
recruit, build tanks, planes and ships, the British found time to make a hasty
plan of action for the evacuation of children between the ages of three and
fourteen. Within three days of the declaration of war, on Sunday, September
1939, the first phase of the plan had been carried out. By then, one and a half
million children had already been taken from their homes and sent, mostly by
train and bus, miles away to live in the homes of total strangers. Four
thousand special trains were commandeered, and London’s red buses alone took
nearly a quarter of a million children to the railroad stations, or direct to
their new lodgings. A number of the trains had canteens, but many of them and
all the buses had no toilets, so the children arrived at their destinations
hungry, soiled, fearful and bewildered.
Author Alan Sillitoe, an evacuee
himself, remembers “I was vomiting out the window as the convoy wove its way
through Sherwood Forest, my sister keeping an arm round me. Brian, who was the
youngest at five years of age, normally a terror and tearabout, sat quietly,
saying nothing.”
No
one told the evacuees their destination or the names of their temporary foster
parents. Some very young children traveled with their mothers, but most -- like
the Sillitoes and those whose parents were in the forces, doing essential war
work at home, or working to pay the bills -- went with their brothers and
sisters, or alone.
The children had baggage labels tied to
their clothes with their names and addresses, and carried only a toothbrush,
towel, a change of underwear, a gas mask, and a doll or teddy bear. Six hundred
thousand of them came from London, and another nine hundred thousand from
industrial cities and seaports all over England, and three vulnerable areas of
Scotland and Wales. The children
came mostly from poor working class families, and few had ever seen the
countryside before. It was their poverty that caused some of the biggest
problems when they arrived, both for themselves and their host families, who
described them as dirty, shabby and unkempt, infested with lice and mites, and
infected with skin diseases. In the slums of the big cities, but especially in
London’s East End, few houses had bathrooms, and the privy was a dark, damp
outhouse in a cramped back yard. Instead of bathing at home, the children were
used to being marched once a week to the local bathhouse, where they had to
call to an attendant with a bucket for more hot or cold water.
For the middle-class foster families,
who had looked forward excitedly to the children’s arrival, the reality came as
a shock. They may have expected grubby faces and hands, but they weren’t ready
for downright filth, bad behavior, foul language and a complete lack of
manners. At the family table they ate like ravenous animals, and ‘please’ and
‘thank-you’ didn’t exist in their vocabulary.
Children
from better homes and some from the poorest families soon adapted to their new
way of life. They learned the importance of cleanliness, settled well in local
schools and learned new skills, especially those billeted on farms.
But
in many households there were frequent arguments and scenes. Some host families had not expected the cost
of feeding, clothing and maintaining their young guests would be so high, and
complained that the government's support was inadequate. When their appeals
were turned down, they demanded supplementary allowances from the children’s
families. Some forced the evacuees (they called them ‘Vacs’) to stay out of the
house all day, so they became little more than non-paying bed and breakfast
guests. Some stores refused to serve the
Vacs, and put up signs announcing that their goods were only for 'registered
customers.'
Partly because so many children were
made to feel unwelcome in strange surroundings, and also because the expected
heavy bombing never came in the first year of the war, nearly half of the
evacuees had returned to their homes by the late summer of 1940. But within
weeks they were packed off yet again at the beginning of the Battle of Britain
that September. Having learned painful lessons from the year before, this time
the government arranged for as many children as possible to be checked and
treated for nits, vermin or scabies before they left. Also the weekly allowance to host families
for an unaccompanied child was increased from nine shillings (75c at the
present rate of exchange) to fourteen shillings and ten pence ($1.10). This would probably be worth about $10 to $12
today, and was expected to cover food, accommodation and laundry. A modest
allowance for medical care was available from a separate fund.
Of course, there must have been
thousands of heart-warming stories about evacuees who found welcoming, loving
foster parents, and who became a part of the family, and even lifetime friends.
Some certainly stayed on and took jobs when they left school, and married into
their adopted community but, tragically, there are many more cases in the
archives that tell of intolerance, rejection, physical and sexual abuse, severe
neglect and deep unhappiness.
So
it's not a happy story, but at least some good came of it. Many of the problems
that surfaced during the Evacuation played an important part in drawing public
attention to the plight and neglect of the British working class, and helped
demonstrate to post-war governments the pressing need for reforms in housing,
education, health, and nutrition.
As a result, after all Britons had
endured and won the war side by side, much of the traditional snobbery in the
workplace and in everyday life at last began to break down, heralding the
evolution of a more equal and less class-ridden society.
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