Working Class Life in the 1940's - The Evacuation of the Children

The first hub that I wrote about the 1940’s listed the three waves of evacuations, which took place in the last part of 1939, and into the 1940’s during World War two. The mass evacuation of those thought to be especially vulnerable, children, pregnant women and the disabled was an enormous task to be undertaken. The impact on people of being either evacuated or a relative of someone who was evacuated is still being played out today sixty five to nearly seventy years later.

This year there was a memorial service for the evacuees held in St Paul’s Cathedral this link will take you to a small video where some of these evacuees are being interviewed the clip is under two minutes long and you can see how vivid these memories still are for those who went through this experience.

One you man Ben has made a video in which he interviews his granddad about his recollections of being evacuated during the war, it is easy to forget that these elderly people were those very young children that are pictured in the photographs and videos that follow later in this hub.

It is easy to read the statistics of how many were evacuated in each wave and where they were evacuated to, but statistics alone do not tell us much about what this process meant to the people involved. In this hub with the use of photos and video clips from Youtube I want to try to put some faces to the term evacuee so that we can see a little more clearly the human side of these traumatic events.

Just look at the brown paper parcels tied up with string that most of the children are carrying in the photograph above, these parcel contain their meagre possessions that are meant to be sufficient for the period of their evacuation. Some children were too remain in the place they were evacuated to for the entire war which from start to finish was a period of six years in total. It is quite clear to see that the children being evacuated in this photograph are working class children from their clothing and belongings.

It was not unusual for very young children to be evacuated with out their mother and as can clearly be seen from the above photograph this was a very stressful situation for the children and for those adults accompanying them. When you look at the face of the conductor he is smiling for the photograph but it is clear from the face of the driver that they are not finding this any easier than the children.

I was speaking only last week to a man who was evacuated in the third wave, which took place in June 1944. He was just three years old when he was sent away on his own to a huge country house which was being used like a boarding school. He was not taken in by a family instead he lived in the big house in a dormitory along with other evacuees. His father had been killed earlier in the war and his mother was a serving Wren and he lived in an area that was near to Naval Dockyards. Those dockyards were a prime target for the Luftwaffe and as the war was coming to its close the bombing of such sites increased, as did the danger to those living in the area.

Lives were forever changed by these evacuations, not just of the evacuees, but of the host families, teachers, communities, relatives of both host and evacuee families. Some of the evacuees never returned home, as they had no home or parents to return home because of the war. While the vast majority of parents wanted the return of their children some did not and disappeared into the woodwork never to be located. It is easy to see that each story of the people whose lives have been touched by these events although they will share some common ground will in essence be different and personal to each one of them.

There are many personal accounts on the inter-net written by evacuees, which give us some insight into what it was like to be an evacuee. One of the best pages that I have found is Meet some of the evacuees which contains seven short accounts by former evacuees and one account of a child (Enid) that was part of the host family. Click on the blue link above to go to this page the personal accounts are fascinating if you only have time for one then I can recommend Nina’s story. Nina was one of the lucky ones as she was to remain for four years in the care of the same people and her memories of this time are vivid and very positive.

One of the ladies in the above video talks about how the host families were paid by the government for taking in evacuees, seventeen shillings for one child and twenty one shillings if you had two children.

I think that it is difficult for the younger generation to understand how life-changing evacuation was especially for the working class children involved. It was not unusual for working class children in the 1940’s especially young children not to have been more than few miles from where they lived. For an inner city working class child the evacuation was for many of them the first time that they had traveled outside of the area in which they lived. Most working class families did not own a car or even a motor bike the only form of transport that was common to the working classes at that time was the bicycle. In the main working class people relied on public transport to get around.

This journey taken by the evacuees was often their first experience of travel away from home by bus or train and for many of them it was the first time they had been outside of the city they were born in. For many of the children the view they had of the countryside as they journeyed to the area they were being evacuated to was to be their first. In a lot of the evacuee’s personal accounts that I have read one comment was made over and over again by city children and that was ‘looking through the train/bus window as we went through the countryside was the first time I had seen a cow or a sheep.’ It seems strange now when travel and transport are everyday experiences for most children that had these children not been evacuated they may never have seen these animals in the flesh until well into adulthood if at all.

For most children the evacuation started from their school with each child being taken to school usually by their mother the children carrying with them their gas masks and the belongings that they were to take with them. You can see from the photographs and videos that they didn’t take much with them. The Children had a paper label pinned on their clothing with their name and address written on it along with some other details like the name of their school and school teacher. The children were then taken by their teachers from the school to either the train or bus station to begin their journey.

I found it amazing that for the most part the parents, children and the accompanying adults had no idea of where the children were being evacuated.  The government gave guidelines as to what an evacuee should take with them when being evacuated. Here is that list and just reading this list makes you realise just how different times were then from now. As you read this list keep in mind this was not for a two-week holiday, this was for a stay of undetermined length. I think most of us would feel that it was not enough to take on even a short holiday today.

BOYS:

2 vests

2 pairs of pants

Pair of trousers

2 pairs of socks

6 handkerchiefs

Pullover or jersey

In addition they were also advised to pack in their suitcases plus their gas mask.

Overcoat or mackintosh

Comb

1 pair of Wellington boots

Towel

Soap

Facecloth

Toothbrush

Boots or shoes

Plimsolls

Sandwiches for the journey

It is easy to see from the photographs and the videos that not many of the children actually had suitcases many of them had their meagre possession brown paper parcel tied up with string fashioned into makeshift rut sacks which they carried over their shoulders or on their backs or in old pillowcases.

From the size of the bundles that the children are carrying it is clear to see that there was not enough being taken to last for an extended stay in fact hardly enough for a short visit, certainly by today’s standards.

In most cases the children were not taken or accompanied individually by their parents nor were their parents allowed to see them off. It was thought that it would be less stressful for the parents and children alike if their goodbyes were said at home or at the school gates. It was feared by the government that many mothers would have a change of heart if they took their children to the train or the bus themselves, and that the children would be much more resistant to boarding a train or a bus without their mum if she were there.

So for most evacuees the journey started from school and they were evacuated as a school unit. The children would turn up at school on the morning of the evacuation with their makeshift cases packed with the suggested items and their little gas mask and as you look at the photographs they made a very pathetic sight. Most had a bewildered lost look on their small faces that would tear your heart out, no wonder the government were afraid the mums would change their minds.

When the children arrived at their destination often they would be taken to somewhere central like the village hall or the church hall where host families would be waiting to pick which children they wanted to take home with them. Of course those children who looked well cared for and best dressed would be the first to go. It was not uncommon for those children from the poorest backgrounds to be the last chosen. In many of the evacuees’ accounts this particular part of the process was the most upsetting.

I remember one lady saying it was degrading it was like being in a cattle auction with people saying I’ll have that one, or I don’t want that one all in the hearing of the children and not at all mindful of the effect that  the words were having on the children that were being spoken about. Very often where there was more than one child from the same family it was hard to find a host family that was willing to take all the siblings so brothers and sisters were often split up and taken in by different families.

The children arrived at these church halls very often tired, hungry, upset, dirty and sometimes wet arriving in this state did not make a very desirable impression on the host families. Children had often travelled for many hours in trains which back then predominantly had carriages that had no corridors. This of course meant that very young children once on the train would have no access to a toilet and so more than one child would end up soaked in their own urine by the time they got to a village hall. All in all this initial part of the process was felt to be one of the most distressing.

For some children once chosen life with their host families was a pleasant experience and many evacuees have very positive memories of the time and the people. However not every evacuee was this lucky, many ended up with people who just wanted the government’s money and the extra rations that came with looking after the children. Some children fared even worse, and ended up in homes where they were neglected and abused by their hosts. The physical, emotional and psychological scars cause by such disgraceful treatment had long lasting effects which some are still experiencing right up to the present day.

It is very hard to do justice to this event in such a short article but I hope that you have enjoyed this hub and that it has given you a better understanding and some insight into this extraordinary event from a working class perspective. Hopefully it has given you a taste for looking deeper into this event through the many personal accounts that are on the Inter-net.

• Working Class Life in the 1930's The 1930s in England was a time when the Government rode roughshod over the already impoverished working class.

• Working Class life in the 1950’s – Train Sets and Train Spotting Trains featured in our childhood not just as a means of transport for taking us on holiday but also in our playtimes too.
  

• Working Class life in the 1940’s and 1950´s Britain ~ Train Travel ...When I was growing up in the late forties early fifties one of the things that stand out in my memory is the old steam trains, of course they weren’t the old steam trains back then they were just trains. Like most working class people back then we didn’t own a car and the only means of transport my father ever owned was a bicycle, which he would use to cycle to work.

• Working Class Life in the 1940s & 50s When I look back on my childhood the late 1940s and into the 1950s it seems almost like it happened in another world. In a way it did because so many things have changed since then that if I were magically plucked up from that time and brought here to 2009 it would be easy to imagine that I had been transported by aliens to another planet rather than just another time.
• Working Class Life in the 1940’s Working Class life in the 1940’s was a time of great change mostly brought about by the fact that war had been declared on September 3rd 1939. The way most people got this news in September 1939 was via the radio more usually called the wireless.
• A Victorian Woman of Substance ...she was born Annie Shingla in 1895 while Queen Victoria was still on the throne and she married my granddad William Johnson some where before 1919 when my mum was born.
• Stay at Home Mom or Working Mom? The choice of a Working Class Mum I was a stay at home mum in the seventies, before the birth of my first child I had suffered three miscarriages. Although I don’t think that was a particular factor in my decision to be a stay at home mum it certainly made me even more aware of how precious the life of my child was.
• Stay at Home Mom or Working Mom? The choice of a Working Class Mum part Two ..The seventies, was the time into which my children were born, it was a time when women were being bombarded with all sorts of new ideas that challenged the traditional role of women in the home and workplace.
• Stay at Home Mom or Working Mom? The choice of a Working Class Mum part three ... I think that this final hub has given me the most joy and it is the one that I haven’t had to write. I wrote an email to my daughter telling her about TamCor’s three questions and I asked her if she would answer the final question for me so that I could write this final hub.
• A 1950's Working Class Mum's Answer to Children Biting ..My mum Jeanie was one in a million she was born in 1919 the eldest of ten children, and you could tell right away she was used to being obeyed. In many ways Jeanie was no different from many of the mothers of that time but is some areas she had some novel ideas.

• Working Class Girl in Singapore in the late 1960's ...In March1967 I got married to my husband Malcolm who was a Petty Officer in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. Just three and a half months later Malcolm got a married accompanied posting to Singapore. I had heard of Singapore but I hadn’t a clue where it was, so Malcolm had to show me where it was on a map.

• Bonfire Night in a Working Class area in the 1950’s ...Each November the fifth in England we remember the foiled plot of Guy Fawkes who plotted to blow up Parliament and the King. Fortunately this plot was discovered and Guy Fawkes was arrested before he could put a match to the gunpowder that he had secreted below the Houses of Parliament.