Millions of British parents obviously now had a huge decision to make. Should they register their children for possible evacuation with their schools? Some evacuees remember the agonies their parents went through. James Roffey recalls:
Increasingly I heard the word ‘evacuation’ being said at school, by my parents and on the wireless, but I didn’t fully understand exactly what it meant. Then one day at school we were given letters to take home. Each letter was in a brown envelope with the words ‘From His Majesty’s Government. Urgent’ printed on the front. ‘Take this letter home and give it immediately to your parents! Don’t lose it or get it dirty. It is very important!’ said the teachers – all looking very serious and worried. I did as I was told and so did my sister Jean and our brothers John and Ernest.
Our mother put them all unopened beside the clock on the high mantelpiece for when our father arrived home from work. As he opened them he became very angry, ‘It’s all starting again!’ he shouted. ‘They told us we were fighting the war to end all wars!’ He had been a soldier in the First World War and had been gassed and injured. ‘They will have to go,’ he added. I didn’t know what he meant, but our mother rushed out to the kitchen and we could hear saucepans and plates being banged about, which was a sure sign that she was very upset and probably crying.1
The letter taken home by James was probably similar to the one that was given to pupils at one Grammar School in West Bromwich:
Dear Sir/Madam, In the event of an emergency it has been decided to evacuate all pupils attending Higher Education Schools in the Borough of West Bromwich. I hope that one parent from each family that has (or will have in September) boys or girls at this School, will kindly attend a meeting at the School on MONDAY EVENING at 7.30 p.m. I am enclosing a circular letter from the Director of Education, and I shall be much obliged if you will fill in and return the Form of Registration attached to it at your earliest convenience, or bring it with you on Monday evening.2
John Hawkins vividly remembers the day that his mother first mentioned the possibility of evacuation:
Mom had bought a haversack for one of us and said that she would let the other have a case for when they practised ‘sending us away’. The moment she said it, she obviously regretted having done so. The immediate flicker of alarm that crossed both of our faces at that moment reduced her to embarrassed silence.
She slipped a comforting arm around our shoulders and said quietly, ‘I don’t know whether to let you go or not or to send you to your Auntie Flo in Canada, like she wrote and asked me to.’ I had visions of every Western film I had seen and pleaded ‘Oh yes Mom send us to Canada, they have Mounties, and cowboys and Indians there!’ Grim-faced, she shook her head, ‘Well, I don’t know. Just think, if you went all the way over there across the sea, I wouldn’t be able to visit you, not ever. I think if you’ve got to go anywhere you’d best go to the country. It’s lovely, honest, and I promise to come and visit you every week if I can.’
One morning, laden with haversacks, gas masks, suitcases and top coats, we were all once more paraded in the school playground and counted. But instead of being returned to our classrooms, Rose and I were each given a letter and sent straight home. The letter was apparently to inform her of our quite probable evacuation and asked that she attend the school that same evening, both to sign her final consent and to receive all the necessary details. The last sentence was heavily underlined and said quite simply, ‘Evacuation is to take place immediately’.
We looked on in wide-eyed astonishment at Mom’s sudden flood of anguished tears as she read it.3
In August 1939, Mr A.D. Wilshere was one of many across the country tasked with helping prepare for the evacuation of children.
He subsequently made the following entries in his diary:
Friday, August 25
Evacuation duty in Ilford has fallen to Mr Dinmore, Mr Bryce and me. We attended the meeting this afternoon to receive preliminary instructions. My party, which will consist of children under five with their mothers, together with expectant mothers, will be known as a non-school party. It will number at least 650 and will go from Southpark School.
Thursday, August 31
We learnt that the government has ordered the evacuation to take place tomorrow Saturday and Sunday. We attended a meeting this afternoon to receive our final instructions. I am going on Sunday – I know not where to. My party totals 800.4
Jean Burton’s mother was reluctant to send her daughters away:
We lived in Dunfermline in 1939 and Mum became an Assistant Riveter at Rosyth dockyard, working on the ships and submarines. Rosyth and the Forth Bridge were considered prime German targets, so the government ordered that the local children should be evacuated.
At first, Mum refused to send my sister Margaret and I away. However, when bombings occurred around Rosyth, Mum decided to send us to relatives in Wolverhampton, believing it would be less of a target.5
Anthony Pakenhem was in church when his parents suddenly decided to send him away:
My parents had made plans for me to get out of London as soon as possible – assuming that London’s fate would be similar to that of Warsaw. After lunch my case was packed, and about 2pm my parents and I travelled up to King’s Cross to catch a train to Letchworth in Hertfordshire which was about forty miles from Central London.
When we arrived at Letchworth, everywhere was deserted, but we managed to get a taxi to my new ‘home’, namely St. Francis College, quite a large boarding school.
In a bit of a daze, I was shown around – which in every way was a complete mystery to me. After an hour or so, I had to say my goodbyes to my parents and just could not hold back the tears any further. I was completely on my own with not a friend in the world. Eventually I was shown my bed and locker, where the staff were trying to put blackouts up at all the windows. All was quiet and I cried myself to sleep.6
Like so many, Jean Noble’s mother, having come to terms with the prospect of evacuation, did not want to send her children away to live with strangers:
For some time we had been practising for the evacuation of our London school. From one day to the next we did not know if we would be returning home that afternoon and it must have been very distressing for my mother. She would see us off to school in the morning, not knowing if we would be coming home that afternoon.
One day, I arrived home for lunch to find we had a visitor. It was my grandmother’s brother, Frank, who lived with his daughter and her husband in Reading. To prevent us being evacuated with the school and billeted with strangers they were offering to take us in. Two days later mum took us to the railway station. My grandmother hugged and kissed us tearfully and stood at the corner of the road, waving to us until we disappeared from sight.7
Having taken on board all the evidence presented to her, John Payne’s mother decided that her son would remain in Notting Hill in September 1939. However, she later changed her mind:
I was seven at the time with a five-year-old brother and a three-year-old sister. Mother was seven months pregnant and I think this is why she didn’t want us to move away from London.
We soon noticed that evacuees were returning to London but the quietness was not to last. Bombs began to fall at night and you didn’t know where they were going to land. I give thanks that I wasn’t a parent in those dark days, not knowing what to do. What a nightmare for her and thousands upon thousands like her, having to make life or death decisions like that.
One night there was a horrendous air raid, so close that dust and stuff was falling on us. Our mother had second thoughts about the basement being the safest place for us so took us all into the shelter on the street. On that very night the house that we were living in caught the blast and some of it tumbled down. We were now homeless and had to stay with our Aunt. One morning our mother gathered us all together and we were evacuated, not knowing on earth where we were going to.8
From May 1940, further waves of evacuation were announced when Germany invaded Belgium, Holland and France. In Parliament it was said that, ‘In the weeks that lie ahead, none of us knows whether he may not be evacuated from some place which at the moment appears to be quite safe’.9
The newspapers discussed the risk of an invasion of Britain, with one paper reporting that, ‘the whole German press this morning announced that a campaign of annihilation against England was about to be unleashed. In all cafes and places of amusement, crowds sing repeatedly the German war song – we are sailing for England!’10
On 27 May 1940, parents in Folkestone received this notice:
The Government have decided that parents of school children living in this town are to have an opportunity of sending their children away to a safer district. The evacuation of school children will begin on Sunday next the 2nd June. Whether it will be possible for all the children to go on the one day will depend upon how many there are to go. If there are too many for them all to go on Sunday, the rest will go on Monday, and if necessary, on Tuesday, and following days. In order that trains may be ready to take the children whose parents wish them to go, the Council must know at once how many parents intend to send their children away. If you wish your child to go, please fill in the form sent with this notice, and get your child to bring it to school as soon as you possibly can, and in any case not later than 9 a.m. on Wednesday, the 29th May.
The children will go to places in the Midlands and Wales that the Government consider are safer than this town. You are free to decide for yourself whether your child should be sent away to a safer area or not. It is hoped that parents will not decide to keep their children in this town without thinking very seriously whether such a decision is in the best interests of the children themselves.11
Living in Folkestone at that time, Peter Campbell was one of the youngsters who may have been affected by this notice. He recalled the following:
Our Headmistress said we would be going to a town in South Wales called Merthyr Tydfil but I had no idea where Wales was or how far away. I thought it would be very nice to go away on holiday and it sounded like fun. What I did not realise at that moment was that my Mum and Dad and my little brothers, too young for school, would not be coming with us and we would have to stay there until the war was over. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my Mum and Dad but they already knew and were very sad, they did not want us to go to a strange place on our own. However, they knew our teachers were coming with us and the whole school would be together.12
The fate of pupils at Earl Hall School in Southend was decided on Sunday, 20 May 1940, when the BBC announced that East Anglian coastal towns were to be evacuated by 2 June, for fear of invasion. During a bewildering week, parents had to decide whether to have their children evacuated or not. The destination would be Chinley in Derbyshire, which was later amended to the nearby village of Whaley Bridge.13
Derrick McGarry lived in Oldham, Lancashire, in the dark days of the summer of 1940. On one occasion he overheard his parents discussing his potential evacuation:
My parents considered sending me to live with an uncle and aunt in the United States. I heard them discussing it while I was in bed. But a few weeks later a ship with several hundred evacuees on board, bound for North America, was torpedoed in the North Atlantic and my parents changed their minds about shipping me out.14
Philip Doran remembers his mother’s preparations for his evacuation by ship from Liverpool:
In the weeks that followed, we had it drilled into us, what evacuation really meant; it was to be no holiday. Each child was given a list of clothes that they would be expected to take away with them, I regret to say, the list bore no resemblance to what was in my clothes cupboard at home. Needless to say, my ever-loving Mam miraculously managed to get hold of most things. At the time it didn’t occur to me that she probably had to go without in order to provide everything on the list.15
The problem of mothers being unable to provide the required list of ‘evacuation clothing’ was discussed in the House of Commons:
In any future evacuation it is not sufficient to say that each should have a change of underclothing, a pair of house shoes, an overcoat and so on. They should be provided for those who cannot provide them. The parents of a family of four are told to provide four new pairs of boots. It simply cannot be done. They have not the income.16
The Channel Islands of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark lie within thirty miles of France. In June 1940, as German forces approached the French coast, concern arose in the islands. Would Hitler decide to invade?
On Guernsey, Ebenezer Le Page had no doubt about the outcome of the German Blitkzkrieg:
Well, when we saw the clouds of smoke in the sky from the Germans blowing up things across the water in France, and boatloads of French came over with horrible stories of what the Germans was doing to them, I reckon we all knew our turn was coming.17
Now it was the turn of Channel Island parents to decide whether to send their children away – with the destination almost certainly being the mainland. Ursula Malet de Carteret described the anxiety she suffered in Jersey:
On 16th June I saw many troops marching along the main road towards the bay. The Germans were occupying Cherbourg and gun fire could be heard. I telephoned my husband, Guy, who was working in Malvern at the time. I told him how things were, telling him not to come to Jersey unless I phoned again.
On Monday 17th more gun fire could be heard, everyone was wondering whether Jersey was going to be defended, and what was the right thing to do. On the 19th Jersey was declared an open town and would not be defended if German forces arrived. A register was immediately set up in the Town Hall in St Helier for the names of those who wished to leave the island for England.
I telephoned Dr John Evans for advice, his answer was swift, you have three small children and should leave. I went into town to join the queue at the Town Hall. I can’t remember how long I waited to obtain our permit, but it was some hours. I had Jill, my golden Cocker Spaniel with me and went straight to the Animal shelter. She was one of the first animals put to sleep in a humane way!18
On 18 June, Guernsey’s headteachers attended an emergency meeting where it was announced that the evacuation of schoolchildren was a real possibility. On 19 June the Guernsey Star announced that the evacuation would commence the following day. Ron Blicq’s headmaster made this announcement:
Within a few days Guernsey almost certainly will be occupied by German troops. Consequently, starting tomorrow, the government plans to bring a fleet of boats to the island to evacuate everyone who wishes to leave before the enemy arrives. I must make it clear that no one has to go. Your parents will tell you whether you are to stay or leave. And they will tell you their own plans. The college has to be ready to leave at any time after 9 o’clock tomorrow.19
Rachel Rabey heard her mother and aunt whispering throughout the night. ‘Then at breakfast I was told that the school was going on holiday and I could go too.’20
Therese Riochet found her mother in the kitchen with evacuation instructions in her hand and two labels. She told Therese that she was going to be evacuated with the school:
I asked her why and she said, ‘You heard those guns last night didn’t you? Well they were at Cherbourg on the coast of France. The Germans are there and people say they are coming to Guernsey.’ Mother had made her decision that I was to go.21
Hazel Duquemin recalls her parents’ anguish:
I remember how desperate my immediate family, grandparents, aunts and uncles felt when the States of Guernsey announced that everyone who wanted to would be evacuated to England until the danger passed. My father decided that our family would go and he never wavered from that decision, but a lot of islanders were undecided including my maternal grandparents (who spoke no English) and eight of my mother’s siblings who stayed on the island. The evacuation eventually got underway, personally for me, after two false starts. Twice my father took me to school as instructed and both times I was brought home as there was no ship available to accommodate our school. The third time was successful.22
Rex Carre also recalls his parents’ discussions over whether to send him to England:
I was sitting in the Wayfarer bus on the way home when someone gave all the passengers leaflets saying that the island was to be evacuated as the German armies had already reached Normandy. (We were soon to hear the guns.) There were details in the leaflet about the schools being evacuated and naturally my family fairly panicked when they read all this. We were eventually told to meet at school where our parents were faced with the choice of my going to England under the care of most of the school staff, who, bless them, must have agreed to this incredible responsibility, or the alternative of staying under an inevitable German occupation which could come at any moment.
My parents dithered – could they come after me? Could they leave their parents, especially my frail French-speaking grandfather who had made a disastrous second marriage? This was especially difficult as my mother’s sister and brother and their families had already left, so my mother felt very responsible. As for me, in the great excitement of the moment, I wanted to go with my friends. So it was settled I would go.23
In July 1940, it was the turn of parents in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar to decide whether or not to send their children to an unknown destination.
In May 1940, 13,000 civilians had been evacuated to North Africa, mainly French Morocco, on orders from London. However, when France fell to Germany, the Royal Navy and RAF attacked elements of the French navy in order to stop part of its fleets falling into German hands. As a result, the Gibraltar evacuees were often treated badly by the people of French Morocco. Lourdes Galliano recalls:
Life had become a nightmare for us. My mother had tried to spend what money she had but none of the shops would sell us anything. To them we were ‘Anglais’; the most despicable beings on earth.24
The evacuees were told they had just twenty-four hours to get out of Africa and were forced onto ships and returned to Gibraltar. Lourdes Galliano’s family therefore made the decision to leave Gibraltar. Though they did not know it at this stage, their destination would be Swansea, then London:
Gibraltar suffered various air raids from Italian aircraft and from the Vichy French force based in Morocco. Spain was not willing to take us, so we were advised to pack our belongings and to be ready for our move to an unknown destination.
In the early hours of Thursday 18 July two enemy aircraft dropped fifteen heavy bombs on the southern half of the Rock, bringing the first casualties of the war. On Tuesday 30 July, twentyfour ships sailed out of Gibraltar Bay for England and our whole family travelled together. My father, a volunteer in the Special Constabulary, had been designated the charge of looking after the five hundred evacuees on our ship.25
As the war progressed, further waves of evacuation occurred as British towns and cities were targeted by German bombers. Gerry Mullan’s family decided to leave their home in Northern Ireland:
In 1941 we lived about eight miles outside Belfast, up in the Belfast hills. Because of our proximity to Cave Hill, quite a lot of bombs fell near us, together with shells from the anti-aircraft guns. Many did not explode so were scattered around where we lived, which was very dangerous. We had a close call during one air raid when my father was sitting on the windowsill inside the house with my brother, Peter, on his knee. A shell exploded about one hundred yards behind the house. It blew my father and Peter across the room and as a result of that shock, Peter didn’t speak properly until he was almost five years old. It was a very frightening time, so my father sent my mother, my brothers and I to Fintona, County Tyrone, where we had lived three or four years earlier. He remained in Belfast.26
Dan Muir remembers his mother’s decision to leave Clydebank with her children:
My sisters Betty, aged nine, and Helen, aged five, and our mother and I were evacuated on Friday 14th March 1941, after a night of German bombing. We had spent the night of the 13th in a cinema where we had gone to see a Shirley Temple film. We came out at 6 am to devastation and the news that two of our uncles had been killed. Our house was not habitable, so we had to leave town. Our father had not been at the cinema with us and we did not know his whereabouts.
We travelled upriver to Glasgow in the back of a lorry then we got a bus which took us on to Helensburgh and eventually ended up in a big house in Millig Street. The family who took us in were called Snodgrass and our mother became their housekeeper. Our father eventually found us after a two day search, but soon after he was called for service in the RAF. We lived in Helensburgh for two years and I have two years of mainly happy memories. The only sad ones were watching our mother who kept looking around, hoping to see our two uncles, whose bodies were never found.27
During the war, there was one more major decision to be made by parents of those children who had been ecavuated. Should they leave their children in the ‘safe’ areas for the duration of the war, or should they bring them home before then? In some cases, a lack of enemy bombing resulted in the gradual drift home of evacuees. John Partridge, for example, remembers that, ‘after five months living in Cheshire, Mum decided to bring me and my sister back home to Manchester so we could be with Dad’28
For his part, Ben Howard recalled that by March 1940 over half of the boys from Catford Central School had returned home.29 This drift home led to some criticism. One newspaper in Northumberland reported:
In a bus going to Morpeth the other day was sitting a woman who was talking to friends, on their way to see their evacuated children. The woman was going to fetch a little boy home, saying, ‘One place is as safe as another, he’s not happy there, he says he is always getting into trouble. His father says he might as well be home.’ Presumably this fond mother came from a vulnerable area. She preferred her son to live with her in danger of being killed than that he should live with someone else in danger of getting into trouble.30
The Manchester Evening News expressed similar concerns in a report published in its edition of 20 August 1941:
Manchester’s evacuated school children are returning to their homes at the rate of 40 a day. The summer raid lull has converted the trickle into a stream. Nearly 2,500 have drifted back from the country during June and July. There were 11,387 scholars from Manchester schools in safe areas at the end of May. Two months later, the figure had dropped to 9,125. So now 72,358 children are going to Manchester schools again. Education Committee officials told the Evening News today, ‘We have done everything possible to persuade the parents to leave their children in the evacuation areas.’
However, a report issued by the Manchester Child Guidance Clinic argued that, for many families, the impact of evacuation was just as loathsome as the impact of aerial bombing:
There are cases in which the parents wished to take the child home. The commonest reason was just that the parents wanted the children home, despite the risk of air raids on Manchester. Some of these cases are worth quoting. One child was evacuated in September and brought home in November. The mother reports, ‘I was afraid something might happen to her. I thought she wasn’t happy.’ A boy aged 17 whose father committed suicide; the boy was brought home because the mother was lonely. Another boy, aged 12, is a difficult, very anxious boy whose mother was in a state of chronic ill-health. He was taken home suddenly by his father because the foster parents complained that he was difficult to manage. Another boy, aged 11, ran away from his billet taking another boy with him and they started to walk back home, a distance of some 50 miles. They eventually stopped at a police station and were returned home. The general conclusion to be drawn would seem to be that the immediate effect of evacuation, which is separation from parents and a known and accepted environment, is worse than the fear of air raiding.31
In some cases, those evacuees who returned home before peace was declared were going to face many issues and risks. May Hill was living in Lincolnshire at the time and mentioned the return home of London evacuees in her diary:
13 September 1944: Evacuees are streaming back to London in spite of contrary advice. Gerry may still have something up his sleeve and apart from that, practically half the houses in London are down or damaged, so accommodation will be a problem for some time, tho’ I can quite understand the people wanting to be home if it is reasonably safe.32
On 20 September 1944, The Times reported the following tragic story:
Children who had only just returned from evacuation were among those killed by flying bombs which were sent over the southern counties, including the London area yesterday. Two months ago when flying bomb attacks showed no sign of slackening a little girl named Margaret aged five, and her two sisters were evacuated from their home in southern England to Birmingham. Then a few days ago the menace seemed to be ending and the parents, who now had also a baby boy, decided to bring the children home. On Friday there was a family reunion. Now only Margaret is alive. The others were all killed while they slept. When the house was demolished early yesterday, rescue workers dug for two hours. They could hear Margaret crying for help and found her with the mother’s arm around her.
Such were the dangers faced by those who had decided to return home before the end of the fighting in Europe.