When the Children Came Home: Stories of Wartime Evacuees

WHEN

THE CHILDREN

CAME HOME

ALSO BY JULIE SUMMERS

Henry Moore and the Sea

The Caros: A Creative Partnership

Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine

The Colonel of Tamarkan: Philip Toosey

and the Bridge on the River Kwai

Remembered: A History of the Commonwealth

War Graves Commission

Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men

returning from the Second World War

Remembering Fromelles

British and Commonwealth War Cemeteries

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011

A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © 2011 by Julie Summers

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

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of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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Quotation from ‘Evacuees’ by Norman Nicholson, from Collected Poems, published by Faber and Faber © Trustees of the Estate of Norman Nicholson. Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

1 Run to the Hills

2 Relative Strangers

3 The Anguish of Elders

4 Hostels to Fortune

5 Over the Seas and Far Away

6 Beyond Harm’s Reach

7 Children of the City of Benares

8 Orphans of Empire

9 Reading by a Dark Lamp

10 Forgotten Voices

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Picture Credits

Index

I look back on my period of evacuation as one of great significance to me. The experience broadened my character immensely; taught me that there was much more to my country than the suburbs of London and showed me the essential goodness of people. These things have never left me.

Robert Miller OBE

INTRODUCTION

When I am asked what it is about the Second World War that fascinates me so much I reply that it is not war but people who excite my interest: how individuals cope in a time of emergency and how such events impact upon their later lives. So when I was challenged a few years ago by a grandfather from Swindon to consider the situation that faced children returning from evacuation after the Second World War my interest was piqued. Patrick Fitzgerald, whose story features in this book, unwittingly set in train one of the most rewarding journeys I have undertaken and revealed to me a vast collection of experiences and reminiscences, both positive and negative.

It is estimated that over 3 million¹ British children were affected by evacuation at one stage or another during the Second World War. They were sent on a mixture of private and government-sponsored schemes to coastal towns, to the country-side, to Canada, the USA, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Some children spent six years living away from home. These children were in the minority. Most of the others spent anything from a matter of weeks or months to several years in foster homes, with extended family or living with strangers abroad. They returned, not en masse in May 1945, but randomly at stages throughout the war.

Essentially there were three waves of evacuation in Britain and one in the Far East. The first was in September 1939 when 1.5 million women and children were moved from the major cities to the countryside in the space of three days. The second came in 1940 in response to the threat of invasion after the fall of France when over 200,000 people were moved out of danger areas, such as the coastal towns, and some 20,000 were sent to live abroad. The third wave, affecting around 1 million people came in the March of 1944 when flying bombs threatened London and south-east England. An almost forgotten evacuation took place in late 1941 and early 1942 in the Far East when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. This book looks at the effect of evacuation on children and examines how it affected them on their return.

I was born long after the end of the war but evacuation did affect my parents’ generation. Although my mother was brought up near Liverpool her mother refused, under family pressure, to have her children shipped out to America. They remained resolutely at home near Willaston and my grandmother was overheard on several occasions to say that if Hitler was going to kill her then she would prefer to die in her own bed. My father was evacuated. He was sent with his school from the Wirral to the Lake District and his experience seems to have been wholly positive. Certainly every time we return to Glenridding, at the south end of beautiful Ullswater, he takes great pride in reminding us that he and Bill Glazebrook shared a room above the post office. The rest of the boys lived in the Glenridding Hotel on the opposite side of the road. Classes were taken in the village hall and all the boys trooped off to Patterdale Church every Sunday. Evacuation features as a short, happy chapter in his war years that ended with a different but fascinating experience of national service in Vienna.

My father was lucky. He was sent away as one of a group to a structured and familiar way of life – a boys’ prep school. He did not fit the bill of the typical evacuee I had built up in my mind as he faced none of the uncertainties of the 820,000 unaccompanied schoolchildren who in September 1939 were billeted with foster families in villages, often long distances away from their city homes. As I began to research the effect of wartime evacuation on a generation I became increasingly aware of the extraordinary complexity of the six years of movement of children. My father’s story, contrary to my expectation, fitted in to the overall picture perfectly well. It was simply one variation on the theme. There was no ‘typical’ evacuee, neither was there a typical experience. I also became aware that the view of evacuation amongst the general population and, to some extent, amongst the evacuated children, has been shaped not by fact but by fiction.

Authors and novelists in the post-war era found evacuation to be a rich area for inspiration. C. S. Lewis used it in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a conceit to remove the four Pevensie children from their house in London and send them to live with Professor Digory Kirke in the English countryside. Written in 1950 but set in 1940, it was based, Lewis explained, on four schoolgirls who were evacuated from London to Lewis’s home outside Oxford in 1939. Four years later William Golding published The Lord of the Flies, which started with a planeload of evacuated children being shot down over a tropical island. Although not set in the war it again uses evacuation as a method for isolating a group of children without adults. Dramatist Jack Rosenthal also drew on his own experiences of evacuation from Manchester to Blackpool during the war when he wrote The Evacuees, first screened on television in 1975. It focuses on the humour as well as the sadness of the situation of two Jewish boys billeted with a foster family who have no comprehension of the cultural background of the children. Instead of producing a happy ending, he underlines the sadness and sense of loss felt by the mother as her sons return, older and changed, after fifteen months of living away from her.

In 1981 Michelle Magorian published her first novel. It was about a boy, badly abused by his mother, who was evacuated from London to the country during the war. His name was William Beech and his foster father was Tom Oakley, a curmudgeonly but caring old widower, who took the boy under his wing; both grew to love one another over the course of the novel. Goodnight Mister Tom is a story of trust, friendship and triumph over personal adversity. It is also one of the most enchanting children’s stories and it achieved both critical acclaim and immediate and enduring popularity. In 2010 it was voted one of the most popular children’s books of all time.

The upshot of this success was that the story of the wartime evacuation reached a whole new generation of children, whose parents had grown up reading Carrie’s War, Nina Bawden’s novel about a little girl and her brother evacuated to South Wales. Also fiction, though drawing on Bawden’s own experiences as a wartime evacuee, Carrie’s War centres on the children’s relationships with the eccentric characters that they are billeted with. The focus of the book is not evacuation, unlike Goodnight Mister Tom, but the children’s adventures.

In 1971 social historian Norman Longmate published How We Lived Then, his outstanding survey of life in Britain during the Second World War. He devoted a short section to evacuation, concentrating on the government’s attempts to convince evacuees and foster families not to give up and so require the children to return to the cities that were still in danger of being bombed.

It was not, however, until almost fifty years after the end of the war that a flood of memoirs and stories of individual experiences of evacuation began to appear.

More recent books such as I’ll Take That One by Martin Parsons, Out of Harm’s Way by Jessica Mann and The Absurd and the Brave by Michael Fethney deal with bad experiences, unhappy billets, bullying and worse, as well as with what comes across as a small number of successful cases. This had the effect of making many former evacuees feel that their own, happy evacuation experiences, like that of my father, were the exception rather than the rule and had no place in the social history of the war. ‘I’m afraid my story will be of no interest to you,’ one inter viewee explained to me as we sat down to talk about her five years living in Devon. ‘You see, I had a wonderful time and loved every minute of my evacuation.’ She was not the only person who prefaced her own story with that caution. Their stories are, of course, of great interest and they belong to the history every bit as much as those that have a less happy theme.

In the end I became concerned about the insistent apologies and by going back over every interview I carried out personally or read in archives I was able to establish that the majority, over 85 per cent, of the evacuees claimed to have judged the experience to have had a positive effect on their subsequent lives even if, at the time, they were homesick or lonely, or were later troubled by their return.

Michael Henderson, who was evacuated to America as a boy with his brother, Gerald, in 1940, explained recently that the first draft of his book about his and others’ experiences of their American sojourn had been too positive. For him those years had been overwhelmingly happy and both he and Gerald had benefited immeasurably from their time away but then he remembered that returning to Britain had not been entirely straightforward. He wrote:

‘Returning home, it was hard for us to step into the lives of parents who had survived the bombing, and more recently the V1 and V2 rockets, and would jump at any loud noise. Our parents’ admonishments were met with, We don’t do that in America. Soon America became known in our family as We-land.’²

For many children, even those who enjoyed their evacuation like Michael and his brother, there was not necessarily a happy ending to their story. Many found coming home as difficult, or in some cases more difficult, than they had done leaving in the first place. But this is not what their families wanted to hear and it took years for most of them to admit to others or even to themselves that this was the case. Time after time during interviews, reading memoirs and letters I came across stories of men and women who had met up with others at reunions who had been through similar experiences, and for the first time in their lives felt able to talk about how it had been for them when they came home. In general these gatherings came on the fiftieth anniversary of the evacuation. Time enough for the past to have become history and yet still recent enough to be a part of living memory. After one such reunion in 1989, Pat Crouch explained:

I’d never really thought about my evacuation in any sort of context. I mean, I’d told my own children about it and I’d looked at them when they were six and thought ‘Would I have had the courage to send them away?’ but that was personal. Suddenly meeting all these others who had been away, like I had, for four years, well, it released some emotions in me which must have been lying dormant. I found myself crying with one woman as we remembered how hard it was leaving our foster homes and coming back to London. As we talked we realised we had much in common. We had felt guilty about finding fault with our families, with the food that seemed so poor in comparison to what we had been used to in Cornwall but most of all we realised that it was a shared thing, not something unique and although it was painful at first to dredge up all those memories it was good to think that I was not alone. There were so many of us and we all have so much in common.

From today’s perspective it is almost inconceivable to imagine a situation where upwards of a million families would agree to send their children away from home, to strangers in the countryside, or even abroad, for an unknown period. In order to understand the impact of returning home after weeks, months or years away, it is necessary to understand the reasons why the children had to go away in the first place. Children in all major British cities that were considered targets for the Luftwaffe were involved. And that was just the evacuation of September 1939. There are three other evacuations, including one overseas, to consider.

The first two chapters of this book examine the reasons behind the government’s evacuation scheme and the reception that the children received when they first left the cities and arrived in the country at the outbreak of the war. The later chapters look in detail at the effect of evacuation on the children in the immediate aftermath and in their later lives. Finally the book looks at the foster families who took the children in for anything up to six years and then had to hand them back to their natural parents as the war drew to a close.

James Roffey, Founder of the Evacuees Reunion Association (ERA), which was formed in response to the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, wrote to me in 2009:

The subject of the return home of evacuees is one that has never been given the attention it deserves. Most people believe that when they finally went home and all the feelings of homesickness were over, everything returned to normal, just as it was before the evacuation started. I know from my own experience that that was far from true. During my four years as an evacuee all I had wanted to do was to go home. I used to smuggle letters to my parents pleading to be allowed home. They had to be smuggled out because our foster parents were told to censor our letters and destroy them if we had not said that we were happy. Eventually the day came when I could go home but, to my own amazement, instead of being elated I was quite sad at leaving the village where I had lived for over four years.

The return home was a major disappointment. To be really honest I found that I no longer had any affinity with my parents. I hated London and took every opportunity to return to Sussex. As soon as possible after leaving school I got a job back in my evacuation village. I have never lived permanently in London since. However, as the years have passed I have realised just how hard it must have been for my parents, especially my mother. The little eight-year-old boy that she saw leaving in 1939 never did return home, instead she found herself trying to understand a very mature, self-reliant, twelve-year-old who made no secret of the fact that he did not like being at his real home.

The stories in this book come from a variety of sources: from first-hand interviews conducted over the space of two years; from the archives of the Museum of English Rural Life which holds an outstanding collection of interviews put together under the auspices of Dr Martin Parsons of the University of Reading to whom I am indebted; from papers, memoirs and diaries held in the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum; from published and unpublished books on evacuation and from the People’s War section of the BBC’s excellent website devoted to the Second World War. Predominantly I have focused on the human story and the individual experience of returning from evacuation.

I have made every effort to contact people and check they are happy with what is published. Some people have asked me to change their names and others have wished to remain anonymous. Views expressed by the former evacuees are their own but I take responsibility for any errors that might appear in the narrative.

Julie Summers

Oxford

October 2010

1

RUN TO THE HILLS

From the first day of September 1939 evacuation ceased to be a problem of administrative planning. It became instead a multitude of problems in human relationships.

Richard Titmuss

Of the three major evacuation movements in Britain during the war the first, codenamed Operation Pied Piper, is the most well known. It took place over four days at the beginning of September 1939 in response to the threat that the government most feared, which was the aerial bombardment of Britain’s cities. From the mid-1920s attention had been focused on aerial warfare as the newest and most uncertain factor in any future war. As early as 1924 the Committee of Imperial Defence was set up to assess the potential risk to civilians and how to deal with a major attack on London. It was tasked with calculating the likely casualty figures and the probable damage to the capital’s infrastructure. Richard Titmuss, in his seminal book Problems of Social Policy: History of the Second World War, explained how the committee worked out its figures: ‘In the background was the experience gained from the eighteen German air raids on London during 1917–18, when a total of about 128 aeroplanes reached the metropolitan area. During the whole war, about 300 tons of bombs were dropped by the Germans on the British Isles. These raids caused 4,820 casualties including 1,413 killed. The casualty ratio for the whole country thus worked out at sixteen per ton of bombs.’³

Taking into account the density of London’s population at the time, the committee increased its estimate of the likely number of casualties per ton of bombs to fifty of which, they estimated, one third would be killed outright and two thirds wounded. This figure of fifty casualties per ton of bombs remained for the next sixteen years. In 1922 Lord Balfour wrote that even four years on from the First World War he expected that a continental enemy could ‘drop on London a continuous torrent of high explosives at a rate of seventy-five tons a day for an indefinite period’.⁴ Whilst not everyone in government agreed with Lord Balfour’s warning, there was sufficient concern so that the Committee of Imperial Defence continued to calculate the capacity of the German air force to increase its tonnage of bombs year on year. Thus, a decade later, in June 1934, a new estimate was submitted by the Chief of the Air Staff and was based on an analysis of the air expansion programme in Hitler’s Germany. The committee calculated that the Germans could be ready to launch a large attack by April 1939. They also considered it possible that they would start with a Kolossal or massive bombardment, launching 3,500 tons in the first twenty-four-hour period, which could cause up to 175,000 casualties. To put this into perspective, the estimated death rate would match the overall casualty rate of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. But this time it would be civilians who would bear the brunt.

Individual politicians did not seek to delude the public. Stanley Baldwin had told the House of Commons in 1932: ‘. . . the bomber will always get through . . . I think it is as well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed.’⁵

It was not just a question of the prospective tonnage of bombs but the type of bombs that would be dropped. The Home Office was convinced that a major threat from a gas attack was to be expected and by December 1937 over 19 million containers for gas masks had been produced. The public understood the horrors of gas in the First World War trenches. Gas warfare and air raids were vividly linked in their minds and gas was the indeterminate factor in a war against civilians. However, not everyone was convinced that the most serious threat came from a gas attack. Churchill had warned, prophetically as it happened, in the House of Commons in November 1934: ‘The most dangerous form of air attack is the attack by incendiary bomb.’

The great unknown for the government during the 1930s was how civilians would cope with an aerial bombardment. The horrific effects of the bombing of Spanish cities during the Civil War were well documented in the press. An eyewitness account filed by a correspondent for The Times the day after Guernica was all but destroyed by German Heinkel and Junkers bombers gave a graphic description:

Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent raiders. The whole town of 7000 inhabitants, plus 3000 refugees, was slowly and systematically pounded to pieces. At 2am to-day when I visited the town the whole of it was a horrible sight flaming from end to end. The reflection of the flames could be seen in the clouds of smoke above the mountains from ten miles away . . . The town lay far behind the lines. The object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralisation of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.’⁶

Between 200 and 400 civilians were killed in this single carefully planned and executed raid and it proved, if proof were needed, that aerial warfare would be used as a weapon against non-military targets.

Evacuation of Britain’s major cities became a question to be addressed at the highest level of government. In a House of Commons debate Churchill had warned:

We must expect that, under the pressure of continuous air attack upon London, at least 3,000,000 or 4,000,000 people would be driven out into the open country around the metropolis. This vast mass of human beings, numerically far larger than any armies which have been fed and moved in war, without shelter and without food, without sanitation and without special provision for the maintenance of order, would confront the Government of the day with an administrative problem of the first magnitude, and would certainly absorb the energies of our small Army and our Territorial Force. Problems of this kind have never been faced before, and although there is no need to exaggerate them, neither, on the other hand, is there any need to shrink from facing the immense, unprecedented difficulties which they involve.⁷

London and its environs was thought to be the most vulnerable area with one fifth of the British population or 9 million people concentrated into 750 square miles. But other areas were also considered at risk: those lying south of a line drawn from the Humber to the Bristol Channel. The Air Raid Precautions Department, using information and advice from the Air Ministry, classified provincial cities and towns in Britain in order of vulnerability. The health departments responsible for civilian evacuation divided the country into evacuation, neutral and reception areas. But overwhelming all else was the problem of London, which was expected to be the target of the Luftwaffe in the first instance. The government’s concern over how the public would react under a major air attack was based on the reaction to the German bombing of London in the First World War when over 300,000 people took shelter in the Underground stations. Titmuss wrote: ‘A war of armies and navies was understood; discipline and behaviour were under control, the individual took from the group a recognised and accepted standard of conduct, and behaviour was within certain limits predictable. But how would civilians behave? They could not be put into uniform, neither given the same group loyalties nor controlled and led in the same way as was an army.’⁸ By the time of the air strikes on Guernica, therefore, the question of evacuation from cities was settled in the mind of the British government.

In 1938 a committee was formed under Sir John Anderson to review the question of mass movements of people away from areas deemed to be at high risk from air raids. The Anderson Committee’s report of July 1938 was presented to Parliament by the Home Secretary, who announced that the government accepted its main principles and laid particular stress on five points:

1. Evacuation should not be compulsory unless for military or other special reasons people be requested to leave a certain area.

2. Production in large industrial towns should continue for the war effort but non-essential personnel could be evacuated.

3. Accommodation should be provided in private houses ‘under powers of compulsory billeting’.

4. The initial costs of evacuation would be borne by the government but those who could afford to contribute towards their maintenance should do so.

5. In order to meet the need for parents who could not afford to evacuate their children, school groups in [the] charge of their teachers would be sent to reception areas.

This last was an important point because it paved the way for hundreds of thousands of children to be evacuated from the towns and cities without their parents.

In the summer of 1939 the population of Britain was estimated to be in the region of 45 million. Of these, some 13 million were living in areas that would need to be evacuated, 14 million were living in neutral areas and 18 million were living in the districts classified by the government as reception areas. The next question that had to be settled was who should be evacuated. The Ministry of Health came up with a list of four categories: pregnant women, mothers with children under five years of age, schoolchildren between the ages of five and fourteen, and the blind and the handicapped ‘whose removal was feasible’. Chillingly, those considered so severely disabled that they would not be able easily to be moved or rehoused in the country fell outside the scheme.

Although handicapped children were from the outset to be moved to camps, hostels or institutions the majority of the accommodation for the rest of the evacuees would have to be provided in private homes. To this end the Anderson Committee decided to carry out a survey of accommodation in all the reception areas. It was commissioned on 5 January 1939 and had to be completed by the end of February. The objective was not only to establish a comprehensive picture of the housing situation in reception areas but also to ascertain the number of households who would be prepared to take in children and mothers.

Choosing private accommodation for the majority of mothers and children rather than hostels was expedient for several reasons. First and foremost, the accommodation already existed and the government considered it too short notice to provide a network of hostels and camps for up to 3.5 million people throughout the country. Secondly, it was deemed more suitable for mothers and young children to go to housing judged by the committee to be ‘of a standard’, that is to say, adequate for family living. This was open to question, as the survey of homes carried out in January 1939 would show. And thirdly, the expense of creating accommodation for such a large number of people for what the committee believed could be a long stretch was impossible.

The government recognised that billeting was the only solution but it also acknowledged that it would be unpopular. After the Munich crisis many MPs of rural constituencies began to make their voices heard. One MP even wrote to say that ‘compulsory billeting would be far worse than war’. Nevertheless, despite protests from MPs, church groups, local authorities and individuals it remained the main option with the government making the very small concession that it would construct one hundred camps, each capable of holding about 300 people. Eventually fifty camps were constructed for use as temporary housing for ‘difficult’ billeting cases and homeless refugees. These were built to have the future potential as peacetime holiday camps. During 1940 the camps were called into use for more permanent accommodation, particularly for disabled children who had been sent in the first instance to buildings with unsatisfactory facilities. Thus the camps were eventually requisitioned for the evacuation scheme proper.

Surplus accommodation was measured on the basis of one person per habitable room (including kitchens and bathrooms). As housing was in such short supply in Scotland, the calculation had to be based on one person of fourteen and over per habitable room and two under-fourteens. Those conducting the survey also had to make value judgements based on such things as the age of the householders, i.e. those elderly or infirm could not be expected to receive unaccompanied children, or whether the householder would be out all day in which case that could prove difficult in terms of providing care for school-aged children.

What resulted was an unprecedented snapshot of rural Britain: 100,000 visitors investigated over 5 million homes in the course of six weeks, covering 18 million people. The figure for England and Wales, after deductions for rooms needed for other purposes such as service departments, private rental or those deemed to be too close to strategic points such as aerodromes or military establishments or, on the other hand, having problems such as inadequate water supply, was 3.7 million habitable rooms. This, fortunately, was half a million more than the government believed it would need to house the probable number of evacuees.

What the survey also threw up was the state of rural housing in 1939 which, when encountered by people coming from the towns and cities, produced howls of horror: earth closets in outside huts, poor services, often with no running water or electricity, lighting by gas or oil lamps and infrequent bus services. The survey revealed that half of all rural homes in 1939 did indeed have an outside lavatory and 10 per cent had no running water with the village standpipe being the sole water source.

One of the most far-reaching results of the Anderson Committee’s report was the decision not to make evacuation compulsory. The initial impact was that no one knew until the moment came how many families would decide to send their children away. The difference between those that registered an interest and those who actually took advantage when the moment came was great. Less than half the schoolchildren eligible for evacuation in England (47 per cent), and just over a third (38 per cent) in Scotland left home in the first wave. This made it difficult for the authorities to work out how many people would require billeting in any one area but it also had an impact on the problem of providing schooling for the children left behind.

By the summer of 1939 the government had decided evacuation should be carried out quickly, efficiently and immediately before the war began. Too long beforehand and the population would not accept it. Once war had begun the bombing of Britain’s cities could start within hours. With almost all schools about to start the new academic year it was decided that Operation Pied Piper should be launched on 1 September 1939. The order to commence was issued at 11.07 a.m. on Thursday 31 August with the blunt message: ‘Evacuate forthwith’.

In the purely statistical sense, Operation Pied Piper was a success. The largest single movement of civilians in the history of Britain ran relatively smoothly. Hundreds of thousands of women, children and disabled were trained, bussed, paddle-steamed or driven out of Britain’s major cities to the countryside. Over a period of four days 1,473,391 people left the cities for billets in rural areas of Britain under the government scheme. In addition to the unaccompanied schoolchildren on the official scheme there were a very large number of privately evacuated people, including a large proportion of children who did not form part of the