The arrival of large numbers of evacuees in towns and villages unsurprisingly created quite an impact. In some cases the population of a village could double overnight. In Lancashire, on 15 September 1939, the Bury Times remarked upon ‘the large number of child evacuees walking around our streets with their smiling faces, greeting everyone with a cheery Hello’.
Many evacuees retain strong first impressions of their new homes and of the people who cared for them. The environment was often unfamiliar and they encountered differences in housing, dress, food, language, dialect and religion. Many remember the immediate kindness of their foster families.
Audrey Patterson, for her part, found herself in a house in Bideford, where,
My sister Gwen and I were very lucky to be placed with Mr & Mrs Shute, a lovely couple who were very kind to us and where we were both very happy. I remember she used to make junket, a white sloppy substance sprinkled with nutmeg which I hated, perhaps that’s why I remember it well. My most vivid memory is of their canaries which were always singing in their cages in the little garden room leading from the sitting room and of an old eccentric cousin, who lived a few doors away, had bright red hair, red lipstick, yellow fingers and who always seemed to have a cigarette dangling from her mouth.1
With his mother dead, 3-year-old John Glasgow’s father, who was serving in the Army, had knocked randomly on a door, asking if the family could care for his son. Luckily, Frederick and Winifred Grant, said ‘Yes’ and John remained with them for the duration of the war:
When my father had left me there before returning to the Army, he said ‘this is your new mummy now.’ As I already had my father, my foster father was known as Uncle Fred and foster mother as Mum or later Ma. They also had a live-in lodger, a Scot from Dumfries, Robert Monks. He became like an adopted uncle to me, known as Uncle Bert. These were my surrogate family now. I was three and a half years old and had been embraced into wonderful loving care, all by chance.
Could it happen today? Some years later when I was old enough to understand, my foster mother told me that my father had told her that some of my mother’s last words to him were ‘Look after John for me.’ A mother thinking of her child to the last. He did look after me.2
Dagenham evacuee, Derek Trayler, was billeted with the Keeler family in Yarmouth:
Mr and Mrs Keeler took us back to their house and it was only later we realised the problem. My brother had insisted that we were not to be split as he had promised our mother to look after me. Mr and Mrs Keeler had a 6 year old daughter and had to give up their own bedroom to take us in. Nowadays parents would be even more reluctant to foster two unknown boys as my brother was nearly 13 at the time. They treated us very well with the same loving care that my parents would have done for their children if the roles had been reversed.3
Rita Roberts, aged six, was evacuated with St Thomas’s school, Birmingham, to Bromsgrove:
I thought I was many miles away from home and at that time Bromsgrove was all countryside, trees and fields with lovely big farm houses. I was one of the lucky ones chosen by a family who seemed quite wealthy. Mr King was a departmental head at the Austin Motor Company. Their house was called Blackmore Lodge, a large black and white country house with a plentiful garden.
The Kings were very good to me; they bought me new clothes and nice books to read. I was allowed to go to the farms to help with milking cows, feeding chickens, collecting the eggs, making butter and cheese, having a ride on a horse, but the best was seeing a lamb born. Another exciting time was being taken to Aberystwyth in Wales to see the sea, which I had never done before. All I could say was ‘Ooh, look at all that water.’ To my surprise, Mr and Mrs King had bought me a brand new swimming costume which I immediately changed into and ran splashing along the sea front.4
Ron Gould, from Guernsey, was billeted with the Yearsley family in Hale, Cheshire:
I remember waking up on the first morning, we were in a lovely sunny bedroom and went down to breakfast. It was all rather strange, we were told which seats to sit on at the table and we used the same ones every day. We did not want for anything as Miss Yearsley was very kind and showed a lot of interest in us and our families. Soon after our arrival a photo was taken of us and it was clear that we were busting out of our jackets and trousers. Anyone knows that as 12 year olds, you are growing by the day. Miss Yearsley took us both into a big department store in Manchester and fitted us both up with a new grey suit each. I am sure they paid for this themselves.5
There is a common misconception that most evacuees were sent from poor urban housing to the countryside where the facilities were far superior. As former evacuee, James Roffey points out, ‘To this day many people still assume that all evacuees came from inner city slums, were dirty, had head lice and were not “house trained”’.6
However, this was not always the case, as Jessie Hetherington recalls the poorer facilities that she encountered in Bishop Auckland:
We were welcomed warmly by our prospective hosts and, after distribution to our new homes, a long day ended. Mine was to a village comprised of long rows of pit houses with outside ‘netties’ (toilets) and very few bathrooms. Saturday was spent seeing that the children were settling in. They had all come from a new housing estate where every house had an indoor toilet and bathroom and most were housed in homes without either – as I was. The kindness of most of the hosts made up for the lack of amenities.7
Philip Doran was surprised by the toilet facilities in his Caernarfon billet:
The seven of us travelled with Mrs Robert to our home through the lovely countryside in a beautiful pony and trap. We travelled through places that not only had we not heard of, we couldn’t even pronounce. Cwm-y-Glo, Brynrefail, it was pure heaven!
Eventually we turned off the main road and crossed over the bridge of the beautiful Lake Paddern. Just over the other side we entered a small farm; on the gate it said Penlynn Farm. We stopped outside and Mrs Roberts said, ‘Come on my loves, we’re here’. Once inside, we met Mrs Roberts’s children, Bobbie who was fifteen and Grace who was nine. We also met Tom – Tommy Roberts, the Dad! Tom didn’t look too happy, he wanted an explanation as to how his wife had left to collect just two evacuees and come back with seven!
Mrs Roberts obviously had a way of handling Tom, and eventually he calmed down. Tom’s first job was to show us where the ‘lavvy’ was. I didn’t want to go but Teddy was desperate. He came back and said quietly to the rest of us, ‘Yer wanna see da lav, it’s just a bit o’ wood wid a hole in it, yer do it into a bucket and it stinks’. It was Tommy’s job to empty the bucket – a job that he did once a week. Now with seven new inhabitants it would have to be done on a more regular basis; maybe this was what he was upset about and who could blame him. I recall that first evening with great pleasure; we had a lovely tea and Mrs Roberts asked us all sorts of different questions, ‘How many are in your family? What do your dads do, and what religion are you?’ She seemed to really want to get to know us.8
Bob Cooper also remembers the subject of toilet facilities and his experiences in Cornwall:
Billy Shipman and I were both chosen by Mr and Mrs Old, a couple who lived in a tiny hamlet called Ladynance. Mr and Mrs Old had no gas, electricity or running water, we collected water from a well, and used a bucket for a toilet. It was normal to them but very strange to me!They looked after us well and I called them Auntie and Uncle. On our first day there, Billy and I went out for a wander and as we were passing some trees we heard a noise overhead and looked up - it was the local children looking down on us as if we were from outer space.9
Mavis Robinson immediately noticed the lack of facilities in Wales:
In Caerleon I had found a lovely surrogate family even if the surroundings were rather different. Baths were taken in front of the fire in a tin tub. There was no bathroom and the lavatory was across the yard in a little pantiled building. It had a scrubbed wooden seat and was flushed by emptying a bucket of water down the hole.10
When Liverpool evacuee Richard Singleton asked his foster mother where the toilet was, ‘she took me into a shed and pointed to the ground. I asked her for some paper to wipe our bums. She walked away and came back a few seconds later with a bunch of leaves.’11
June Somekh was evacuated from Manchester to Winster, Derbyshire. Not only were the facilities at their destination less than satisfactory, but she and her brother quickly noticed the strange behaviour of one of the women in the house:
My brother and I had left a large house in Manchester with facilities and were taken to a much smaller one with no electricity or running water. Miss Smith was somewhat older than my grandmother, but she was very kind and I grew to love her. However, the problem was a much larger lady who used to shout, ‘You licker newt, you kipper ’addock!’ at us.
With hindsight I think she had Tourette’s Syndrome, but we were terrified and thought we were staying with two witches! We decided that one of us should stay awake at all times. Needless to say, we soon dropped off.12
As June goes on to recount, there was often little consideration given by the host to the religion or ethnicity of an evacuee:
I came from an Orthodox Jewish home and my brother was billeted with the local pork butcher! I could go into more detail such as my attendance at Sunday School and my brother’s singing in the pub run by his hostess’s daughter. I am quite sure that my mother had never seen the inside of a pub. Had my parents known any of this I don’t think we would have been allowed to last the course.13
Brenda Harley also shared her first impressions of the home of the Davies family in Aberdare in South Wales:
This was a miner’s household with no bathroom, an outside toilet and a tin bath in front of the kitchen fire (a culture shock). They were a kindly, welcoming family but endured much hardship.
I remember the girls had a plate of broad beans on their own for dinner. The bread was made at home and cooked across the road in the baker’s shop oven. Their house had four bedrooms and three downstairs rooms. There were lodgers in the front room. The wife was a dress maker and the husband was ill in hospital, returning home to die of septicaemia (I declined the invitation to look at the body laid out, having been advised to do so by my teacher). In time I learned to read and pronounce Welsh by singing hymns in Gadlys Chapel.14
John Martin, aged just seven, was evacuated from Dagenham to Lancashire in 1943:
I had a very nice place to live with Mr and Mrs Bromley at 5 Lawn Street, Colne, near Burnley. It was a nice clean house with a small back yard. There wasn’t a bathroom and the toilet was outside. It was next to a coal mine and from my bedroom window I could see the miners going into the lift cage which took them underground. They did not have any children of their own so I was looked after very well.
After six months Mrs Bromley became ill so I had to go to another family. This time it wasn’t so good. The house was shoddy and not clean, they had no idea how to look after children. My room was the junk room in the attic, full of old stuff which they had no use for. The bed was never made and the room was never cleaned the whole time I was there.15
Peter Staples, aged eight, arrived in Norfolk where the facilities were less than modern:
I was allocated, with another boy, Donald Self, to live with Mr and Mrs Scarff in Brumstead, near Stalham. He was a cowman at a local farm and the couple had two sons, Patrick and Derek. They had no gas or electricity, drew water from a well and cooked on a primus stove and range, which shocked my Mum when she came to visit us from London. Despite this basic existence, they were a delightful family, and it was great fun for us boys!16
The different dialects and languages required some adjustment. John Honeybone attended school in Portland, Dorset where, ‘the local children were unfriendly. Our accents stood out and we were called “incomers”.’17
In his account, Liverpool evacuee Richard Singleton remembers hearing the Welsh language in Bronant, near Aberystwyth:
My brother Ron and I were chosen by Elizabeth (Liz) Morgan and travelled with her in the dark to her farm. Inside was a slate floor, a room with a table in the middle and sitting on the couch was a man who looked old, wearing a greasy trilby hat. There was a lovely fire burning, stoked with peat. Aunty put a pan of milk on the fire, cut a couple of rounds of bread and two lumps of cheese, she poured the milk into cups. The last time we had eaten anything was a sandwich and a cup of tea when we had changed trains at Shrewsbury.
When we finished, Aunty told us to say ‘Goodnight’ to Uncle Moses, who replied ‘Nos Da’ (He spoke Welsh and no English.). She then took us to a room in the hallway. There was a double bed and a chair, on the chair a candle in a saucer. We put our pyjamas on and climbed into bed. Aunty told us to get out of bed then told us to kneel down and put our hands together. She said ‘Now say the Lord’s Prayer and ask God to keep your Mother and Father safe’.
We grew very close to Aunty Liz because she looked after us, and if she went anywhere, we would be right behind her. If one of us got hurt she would give us a hug and say ‘Come here my love’ (in Welsh). Our mother would never have said that, it would be ‘Don’t be a cry a baby’.18
Clifford Broughton was another of the many evacuees who were sent to new homes in Wales:
My sister and brother had already been billeted with Blodwen Thomas, a miner’s widow, at her house ‘Glanpedol’ in Twyn, a mining village. In December the London ‘Blitz’ intensified, so I went to join Mavis and John. It was a sea-change in culture, moving into a rural Welsh-speaking mining community but we were safe, save for the nights when Swansea was bombed in February 1941! We could hear the explosions even though we were 20 miles distant. Auntie Blod was very generous to accept all three of us and for that we were eternally grateful because it lessened the blow of leaving our parents.
The village was at the confluence of two rivers at the head of the Amman Valley. One of the rivers was known as the ‘black river’ because it was literally black from colliery workings upstream. Auntie Blod’s neighbours gave us a demonstration of how to kill chickens, and what with a pig slaughterhouse just down the road we were certainly indoctrinated into country life.
Although I only had a few Welsh friends – I think the evacuees tended to keep to their own – I learned a little Welsh. I remember going around households on one New Year’s Day, probably 1945, singing a little traditional verse ‘Blwyddwyn newydd dda’ and collecting a few coins.19
Jean Burton was privately evacuated to relatives, whom she did not know, in Wolverhampton:
I was three years old when I arrived there from Scotland. My Aunts, Marjory, Barbara and Jean, worked shifts at the Boulton Paul aircraft factory. I spent most of the time with Barbara which led some of her neighbours to assume that I was her own child! Wolverhampton was very different to Dunfermline, and I had to get used to the different accent. There were actually more bombing raids in Wolverhampton than at home! German maps found at the end of war show that the aircraft factory was a major target. It survived because of a dummy factory built two miles to the north which was bombed three times by the Germans!20
Ken Chamberlain found it difficult to adjust to his new environment in Eccleston in Cheshire:
There were no buses, no trams, no cinemas like we had in Liverpool and we had to walk everywhere. It was a four mile round trip to school. At the school, everyone had a totally different accent to mine so there was a certain amount of bullying by some of the other children. This went on until another Liverpool boy came to live in the village and took my side.21
The experience of encountering different accents and dialects is one that Eric Scott remembers from his time as an evacuee in Kettering:
We arrived at the Henry Gotch School from where a car drove me to 12 Hillcrest Avenue. Having knocked on the door a lady answered and said ‘He’ll do’ and I thought ‘Oh this will be alright’ although I was surprised by her quite broad Midland accent. I met her husband Charlie on his return from work and as he was a quiet, gentle man, I had no concern for my safety because Hilda and Charlie Petit were very kind to me.22
When over 25,000 Channel Island evacuees arrived in Britain, local people often assumed that they were foreigners. Ruth Alexandre wrote in her diary that, ‘I told the girls at the Co-op that I was from Guernsey and was surprised to hear them say, Fancy and you speak perfect English too!’23
Olive Quin will never forget her arrival at an evacuee reception centre in Burnley:
The ladies from the WVS made ‘signs’ for us to start eating. We thought this rather odd and would have had a jolly good laugh at their miming had we not been so tired. Suddenly the penny dropped, as they say. They thought we were all French and as they could not speak French they had performed this sign language. They were very relieved when they learned we could all speak English!24
Agnes Camp was pregnant when she left Guernsey with her four-yearold son:
We arrived in Yorkshire where kind people had prepared a nice buffet for us and lots of cups of tea. Dennis wasn’t very well and I was quite worried. We spent the night on camp beds with an army blanket to cover us. The Northern people knew very little about the Channel Islands and thought we were all going to be black people; they were also amazed that we could speak English.
I phoned my husband in Guernsey and told him that we were safe, gave him our number and asked him to phone me the next day. That call never came because the Germans invaded Guernsey and all communications were cut. Then Dennis came down with pneumonia and nearly died.25
Rex Carre remembers hearing his wartime foster parents’ Oldham dialect:
In contrast to my Guernsey family of growers, my new family were nearly all teachers which scared me a lot at first but not for long. The Oldham dialect took a lot of getting used to, e.g. ‘If thou does out for nowt, do it for the sen!’
My foster father, Sam Morgan, was a junior school headmaster at Watershedding, near Oldham Rugby football ground. He was the finest real gentlemen I have known. My foster mother was his second wife. She was a jolly happy person with a great sense of humour. Things were difficult at first, getting to know these new people and trying to fit in. Auntie tried her best on the first day by taking us to Alexandra Park – including a boat trip on the lake – about the last thing I wanted after a traumatic Channel crossing!26
Just before the Channel Islanders arrived in the UK, at least one newspaper published an article which told readers to beware of strangers and people speaking foreign languages who might be spies. ‘If Strangers ask you, don’t tell!, it advised.27
When Guernsey evacuee, Adolphus Ogier, arrived in Stockport, he changed his name to Bill because of the hatred of the name Adolf. As well as speaking English, some of the adult Guernsey evacuees spoke a ‘Guernsey patois’ which was based on Norman French. Margaret Duquemin’s mother occasionally spoke patois to other evacuees. ‘Passers-by would give her odd looks, I was scared that they would think that we were German, and although only 7 years old, I would walk behind her, ready to run for help if needed, or escape.’28
Derek Dunn’s Guernsey family experienced similar difficulties, this time in Wales:
The whole family, my grandparents, their four children and we four or five grandchildren lived in one house, a family to a room. It was a difficult time for the adults as they had nothing! Just a totally empty house to furnish and equip. I think they must have been very resourceful when faced with the problems. But it all seemed very difficult as there was no meeting of minds between exceedingly insular Welsh who had no idea who we all were and where we were from and I believe that we were regarded with considerable suspicion.
As I believe happened elsewhere, my grandparents were reported to the police so many times as German spies because they were speaking patois to each other in public that they called and asked my grandmother in particular to stop! But my grandfather was instrumental in catching a German sympathiser/spy who was allegedly signalling to planes from a tree. Maybe the guy was a nutcase but taken away. After the war my grandfather would not talk about it as he said that the man had probably been shot.29
However, it was often the Channel Islanders who felt they needed a translator when they first heard the unfamiliar British dialects. During Raymond Carre’s first evening in Manchester, an air raid took place and he found himself ‘in a shelter, with over a hundred people, young and old, all talking a broad Lancashire dialect that we could not understand’.
When evacuees arrived in the reception areas, they encountered very different environments to those they had left behind. Children from urban areas discovered the open spaces of the countryside. Coastal children settled into urban towns and rural villages, whilst thousands of Channel Islanders were sent to noisy, industrial towns and cities. John Honeybone was evacuated with his mother and sisters from Barnet to Portland, Dorset:
We went to stay with Mum’s brother who lived on a council estate right next to Portland dockyard. The tunnels next to the dockyard were used as ammunition dumps, so if a bomb had hit them that would have been the end of Portland!
My parents were constantly worrying about this. They were a very down to earth family and kind to us. Aunt Ada used to walk round with an uncut loaf of bread under her arm and ask, ‘Are you hungry duck?’ and if we said ‘Yes’ she would cut us a slice of bread and spread it with butter.
I really wanted to see the big ships in the dockyard, so one day I walked to the gates, there was no one on guard duty so I walked in. Suddenly blue lights were flashing and I was arrested! It was even mentioned in the local newspaper!30
Marion Wraight left Margate to discover farm life in Staffordshire:
Mr and Mrs White (later Auntie Millie and Uncle Dick) came to pick us up, and took us to Sunnyside Farm. It was the first time I had seen a cow or an egg, as we lived mainly on bread and margarine in Margate and plum jam. Auntie Millie ran the farm and there were 2 farmhands – Freddie Adamson and Bill Crisp. They had pigs, cows, sheep, geese, chickens; I got some pigs for my birthday!
I was very happy there, it was much better than where I had left. I milked the cows every day, 6am before school, fed the pigs, helped in the house, cooking etc. Auntie Millie was kind but didn’t show love. I liked Uncle Dick as he liked horses and I was given a pony called Taffy and learned to ride. I would never have had a horse if I hadn’t been evacuated.31
When David Forbes arrived in Dunning, Scotland, with his mother, brothers and sisters, he was amazed by the huge open spaces:
It was exciting, coming from tenements to a country place. We stayed at first in Baadhead Cottage on the farm up behind Keltie Castle. It probably took me a year to get used to it, to the big open spaces. There were two cottages, I think they were servants’ quarters for the Castle. Another evacuee family called the MacNabs stayed there too. We’d come from a big housing scheme in Glasgow and when you went out to play there were twenty or thirty kids to play with. In Scotland, at Baadhead, you felt at first lost and lonesome, just your family.32
Terence Frisby recalls the moment when he and his brother Jack saw their new home in Cornwall:
We swept past a farm with a huddle of outbuildings, which grimly showed their backs to the weather and the outside world. We topped the brow of a hill, a lone oak tree growing from the hedge, all the branches blown one way. We would soon learn to know those south westerly winds that blew across Cornwall. The man, Mr Phillips, spoke. ‘There we are. See? That’s where we live. We’re the end one. There.’
We stared across a field at a terrace of Victorian cottages – more slate and granite. They looked tiny and grim. Seven of them, as it turned out. How could seven families live in so little space? ‘That’s Doublebois,’ he said, ‘Doublebois is French. It means two woods.’ The taxi stopped and we went to the house at the far end of the terrace which had a wooden wash-house beyond it and some hens in a wire-enclosed run on the right.
Neighbours looked out of doors at us. A woman said ‘Thought you was only getting one.’ ‘They was on special offer,’ said our man. ‘They looked too good to leave behind,’ said his wife.
We entered and stared in wonder at a black shining range with a cat curled beside it, at a canary in a cage, at a green velvet tablecloth and oil lamps – no electricity here; at two First World War shells in their cases, over six inches tall, standing on either side of the clock on the mantelpiece. But the glory came last. Outside tucked down in a cutting and breathtakingly revealed was the main London to Penzance railway line with Doublebois station practically below us.
In the short time before we went to bed, the rural silence was occasionally shattered as an express train roared by a few yards below, steam and smoke belching over the cottages. Our Dad worked on the railways, so we two railway children couldn’t have invented, couldn’t have dreamed of arriving at such a place. Our satisfying new address was 7 Railway Cottages.33
Alan Boast was sent from a children’s home in coastal Lowestoft to the village of Clowne, in rural Derbyshire:
We eventually arrived at number 9 Oxcroft Crescent which was to be my home for the next 21 months. Mr Townsend was a miner and worked at Oxcroft no. 2 pit, at the back of the house, down a hill. It was a cosy little semi-detached with two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom downstairs and a big front room which served as a dining room and lounge etc. In this dining room was what was known as a Yorkshire Range. It was a warm cosy home, and I liked it.
Well, Sunday it was, so Mrs Townsend cooked a Sunday dinner. We sat down at the table, and she served it up. A Yorkshire pudding was put on our plates and then covered with gravy which was very nice. Peter Harvey and I looked at each other, and didn’t know what to say! So I opened my big mouth again! ‘Is this all we are going to get?’ said I. ‘Eat your Yorkshire,’ said Mrs Townsend.
Nobody had told us that in the north of England you ate your Yorkshire pudding and gravy first, then had your meat and vegetables afterwards. We, of course, were used to having it all on the plate at the same time! This was just one of the many differences in the lifestyle ‘up north’.34
In many cases, Channel Island evacuees had left behind a quiet, rural island way of life to be plunged into noisy, industrial towns and cities in England and Scotland. Muriel Parsons, for example, wrote in her diary that, ‘There were rivers and canals, viaducts, trains and noisy railway stations. There were cotton mills belching black smoke into the air and coating everything with a dark grey dust.’35
When he arrived in Oldham, Bob Gill saw, ‘Tripe in a butcher’s window. The people were very friendly but the accents, clogs, shawls and mills were very unfamiliar and different.’36 Lawson Allez, for his part, recalled that: ‘People were very friendly but everywhere seemed so noisy after living on a quiet island.’37
When Ron Gould arrived in Eccles, Manchester, he thought he was imagining things when, ‘A large cargo ship, many times larger than our Guernsey mail boats, went steaming by, forty miles from any sea! I soon found out it was the Manchester Ship Canal.’38
Ted Hamel was asked by locals what he thought of Bradford and he wrote later the following: ‘Well, I just couldn’t tell these kind folk that I thought I’d been dropped in the Black Hole of Calcutta could I? So I compromised. I said I was not thrilled at living in a city but the wonderful welcome we had received in Bradford made up for being so far from home.’39
Evacuees who lived in the countryside had never seen ‘smog’ before, the mixture of fog and coal smoke which poured into the air from the chimneys of urban houses and factories. Len Robilliard described trying to get home on his bicycle in Stockport: ‘I could hardly see my hand in front of my face and walked past my street three times.40
In Leeds, Joan Wilson also encountered smog for the very first time. ‘It was pitch black,’ she noted. ‘I wondered what on earth had happened, it was only 3 o’clock in the afternoon. A bus suddenly appeared out of the darkness across the main road and nearly hit me!’41
Mrs Evelyn Brouard was shocked when she arrived in Manchester:
We lived at 34 Marshall Road in Levenshulme. I had my own room but we shared the rest of the house. It was dirty, all smoke and soot. So many houses, you couldn’t touch anything, your washing got black when you put it out. The houses were all back to back; there was an alley at the back and then another big row of houses, all the same. Very different to Guernsey.
Air raids too, a bit close. We had an air raid shelter in the garden but we always went under the stairs, in the cellar. We had a bomb that fell two rows of houses behind us. We heard the bomb, we went to have a look and there was a car on the second floor of a house. It had been blown up there by the bomb.42
For some evacuees, their first encounter with their wartime carers was not a happy one. Some households simply refused to take in evacuees, whilst others grudgingly accepted them. James Roffey describes the day when he and his sister arrived at a cottage in Pulborough, West Sussex:
The young man who had brought us there knocked loudly on the door. No one appeared and the door remained tightly closed, so he knocked again, much louder this time. Suddenly the door opened and a very cross-looking woman appeared. ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ she shouted.
The young man, who was obviously taken aback, replied, ‘I have been sent by the Billeting Officer to bring these two evacuees’. She immediately answered, ‘Well you can take them away again. I won’t have any bloody evacuees!’ and slammed the door shut.
He knocked on the door again and the woman immediately opened it and again started shouting at him, but this time he put his foot in the doorway to stop her shutting it. Then he pushed us inside, saying, ‘You’ve got to take them by law; if you don’t I’ll call the police.’43
Philip Doran was grudgingly taken into the home of Mrs Burgess:
She certainly seemed to resent the fact that I would be interrupting her cosy lifestyle. She made it clear to me on the way home that I would have to do as I was told. She had a child of her own called Kenneth, he was about my age; like his mother, he too made it clear that I was not welcome. It was only a few hours before, that I’d left my own dear Mam, in tears, waving to me at Lime Street Station.
Here I was in a strange town, with strange people, unwelcome and certainly unloved. To be fair, Mr Burgess was a really nice man, he seemed to see the difficult situation that I was in. I got a real sense of genuine sympathy from him, although he never showed it in front of his wife. Like me, Mr Burgess also seemed somewhat downtrodden.44
Jessie Hetherington, a teacher from Gateshead, remembers the unfriendly and somewhat icy atmosphere that existed in her billet:
The long dark evenings were the most depressing. My elderly hostess, Mrs Smith, and I had nothing in common and conversation at any depth was nil. She would retire to bed early and I was expected to do so as well.
I tried, frequently, to ‘sit her out’ and on those occasions the fire would have gone out before the cold sent me to bed. Her late husband had been a preacher in some religious sect, and I remember the text at the end of the bed, ‘The Lord Loves You.’ Every evening I thought, ‘No, he doesn’t’ and turned it over.
Every day I found it correctly placed. Never a word was exchanged between us on the subject. I can only explain my actions on the fact that I was homesick and desperately anxious about what was happening at home. We knew that Tyneside, with the Armstrong Munitions Works, the ship yards and factories, would be targets for enemy bombs.45
John Windett and his younger brother were sent to a house in Derbyshire. In the days that followed they were often hungry, though this was a situation that did not last:
We were moved from Whaley Bridge to a little village near a quarry and there was a small boy living there already. We weren’t fed very well at all and I can recall being given sandwiches containing bacon rind while the couple had the bacon!
Soon after moving in, our mother visited us with our baby sister and informed us that our father had joined the RAF and that she was making arrangements to come to Whaley Bridge to look after us. While she was visiting us she made arrangements with a small restaurant for me to have lunch when I came out of school. Around this time my Grandmother, plus my father’s youngest sister and their dog, moved up from London. Luckily, my Mother managed to rent a small cottage in Furness Vale at the side of the canal. Now we were all together again.46
Jean and Bern Noble were sent to the home of their grandmother’s brother, Frank, in Reading. Jean remembers their arrival:
So began a bitter-sweet period of my life in Reading. Bitter because we were not happy living with our foster parents, but sweet because it introduced me to the countryside. On arrival, we were shown our bedroom and I was pleased to discover it contained a lovely dolls house filled with furniture, a Noah’s Ark and a lovely doll about 2 feet high with beautiful clothes. They had belonged to the daughter of the couple we were staying with, who had died when she was quite young. These took the edge off my homesickness but a few days later I arrived back from school and they were no longer there. No explanation was given. Perhaps they reminded the parents too much of the child they had lost.
Life was very different in our new home. The whole atmosphere seemed cold, stern and Victorian, so different from the loving family warmth we were used to and I do not recall ever being cuddled while we lived there. Our foster parents were accustomed to a different diet to the one we were used to at home. One meal served was tripe and swedes neither of which we had ever seen let alone eaten. The food stuck in my mouth and I gagged, while Bern did manage a couple of mouthfuls.
Unable to eat the food we were told we had to go hungry until the next meal and were lectured at length about wasting food in war time. We often went hungry when we found ourselves unable to eat some of the meals served. Pigs trotters, brains, brawn and the infamous tripe and swedes.47
George Osborn never forgot his first foster family on the Isle of Wight:
I was put with a Mrs Wilson and family. She had a short temper, but not as short as Mr. Wilson’s, and positively sweet compared to that of her father, a wizened old man who mumbled discontent for the whole of his waking hours. There was also a very spoilt daughter of about eighteen years of age called Mavis, who sulkily mooned around the house waiting for her betrothed – a lusty Naval Petty Officer – to come home on leave. Mavis disliked me intensely but she seemed to dislike everybody – except her Petty Officer.
There was no room for me in the house, it was as simple as that. When it came to sleeping I couldn’t stay in Mr. and Mrs. W’s bedroom and Mavis wasn’t going to be lumbered with a small boy in hers. The dog slept on the couch downstairs so I ended up in the grandad’s bedroom. Firstly in his bed with him, then relegated to the bedroom floor on some sort of mattress when he said I kicked and moved about too much in bed. His loud snoring kept me awake and things deteriorated over the next few weeks.
Mrs. Wilson wouldn’t let my sister Brenda into the house, even though she walked home with me from school. Her billet was at the other end of the village. At weekends Brenda took me for walks but always had to leave me at the garden gate. It was the loneliest feeling in the whole world to me, watching as she walked away waving until she disappeared from sight.48
Children who were placed in homes which were superior to those that they had left behind had to find their place within the hierarchy of family and domestic servants. As will be shown in later chapters, some of these children found it difficult to re-adjust to ‘normal life’ when they returned to their families.
Marjorie Parker and her sister were evacuated from Lowestoft to Glossop, where they were sent to a very large house:
They moved us into Talbot House, an enormous house which belonged to Lady Partington who owned mills in Glossop. She had five maids, a cook, two gardeners and a chauffeur. There were three Rolls Royces in the garage. We lived in the maids’ side of the house and the maids – Nellie, Muriel, Bertha, Ellen and Ethel – made new clothes for us and gave us hugs. We had everything we wanted but, at times, the maids could be quite strict with us. When Lady Partington had dinner parties my sister and I used to wait on her guests, wearing little aprons.49
The Headmaster of Guernsey’s Torteval School, Frank Le Poidevin, arrived in the village of Alderley Edge in Cheshire with his family and pupils. Frank’s family was billeted with one of the wealthiest households in the village, but they did not really fit in. His son, Nick, recalls:
We found ourselves dwellers in a no-man’s land, in an invidious ‘between stairs’ position. We were given a bedroom on the same level as the family, but we were considered to be below them in social status. We were told to use the servants’ staircase that led past the kitchen and the servant’s wing, but we were considered too highly placed to be welcome there.50
Doreen Acton was billeted in Bowden Hall. Located in the High Peak of Derbyshire, the imposing Bowden Hall was first built by the Bowdon family after the Black Death. From the period between the wars to 1963 it was occupied by Francis Alexander Lauder. Unsurprisingly, Doreen vividly recalls her arrival:
After a short drive in a chauffeur-driven car, my friends and I arrived at an impressive mansion outside Chapel-en-le-Frith. We were greeted by a friendly looking elderly gentleman who shook our hands. Freda and Beryl were directed to bedrooms in the mansion to unpack. Audrey and I were taken to the chauffeur’s cottage, a snug little dwelling close to the house. We did not know then that the chauffeur and his wife had hospitably given up their bed to us. We went back to the main house and again met our host, Mr Lauder. It appeared his wife was away visiting their daughter.
Chrissie, the Scottish maid, was a very good cook and we were served up delicious meals. I had been used to breakfast, dinner, tea and supper – we now switched over to breakfast, lunch, evening dinner and a hot drink before bed. After about a week or two, Mrs Lauder returned home.
At first I got the impression that she thought we had been allowed too much liberty. We were consigned to the kitchen for meals. Very soon however she realised we were quite house trained and not a threat to peace and good order. From then on she treated us as kindly and generously as her husband.51
Another Doreen, in this case Doreen Holden, would describe her arrival at her new home, which also turned out to be an impressive Derbyshire building:
We arrived in Matlock and I was taken into a Manor house with two lads from my class. It had its own grounds and a nursery. They put us in the nursery and we played with some children’s toys. We were allowed in the kitchen and garden but not in some of the rooms. Mum made breakfast for us during the week that she was there.
One day, the man who owned the Manor house shot himself as he was worried that he might go bankrupt due to the war. I was then sent to another nice house on Starkholme Road. The husband and wife chose me because my name was Doreen, the same as their little girl’s!52
Jim Marshall recalls his first impressions of a manor house in Gloucestershire:
My brother and I were chosen, along with 5 other boys, by Mrs Percival who lived at a huge manor house, Priors Lodge. It was dark when we arrived and the next morning we looked out of the window, with disbelief, to see a huge long drive which seemed to disappear for miles into the distance! We had been very fortunate to land in the lap of luxury!
Priors Lodge was enormous, with around 40 acres of grounds, a boat house, a trout lake, and tennis courts. As well as Mrs and Major Percival, there was a cook, two housemaids, a gardener and a woodsman. Mrs Percival was very involved in the local Women’s Institute, whilst the Major was in charge of Bream’s Home Guard unit. They had two sons who had been evacuated to Canada so it was nice for them to have boys in the house with them.53
Michael Stedman, aged five and his brother, Mark, were also taken to a mansion – though in their case it was on the opposite side of the Atlantic in Canada:
My Canadian-born mother took me, aged 5 and my brother Mark, aged 7 from Dundee to Vancouver then quickly onto Victoria on Vancouver Island. This was to get us away from the bombing aimed at the U-boat bases in Scotland. We were welcomed by relations in a huge mansion, Sissinghurst.
They built us a Wendy house in the front garden and a large sandpit at the side of the terrace overlooking the fine croquet lawn. They had plenty of staff, Chinese cooks, gardeners and drivers but it was not really a suitable home for young children as they were all very old.
Later Mark and I were sent to live with Mr and Mrs Sendey in a small house on the outskirts of Victoria.54
For six months, Dorothy Ogier lived in Glasgow with the Thornton family, who provided her with the finest of food, clothes, toys and books:
Eventually my mother, who had arrived in Stockport from Guernsey, managed to locate me and I was put on a train to Manchester.
As I waited on the railway platform I spotted my family. My heart sank as I looked at this scruffy woman with her grubby kids. I wanted to go straight back to Mrs Thornton, who was clean and respectable with nice clothes and a gentle voice. It started to sink in, we are still poor and this is real life, and life in Glasgow was like a dream, just pretend.55
Along with his friends, John and Ronnie, Len Roberts moved into the home of the Mayor of Bury, in Lancashire:
Me and my two pals were chosen by a tall, elegant lady, Mrs Whitehead. We had followed her and her uniformed chauffeur to a Rolls-Royce car. Arriving at the home of John Whitehead, landowner and Mayor of Bury, the servants were lined up in the hallway and we were introduced. The extensive grounds had cascading ponds, summer-houses, a tennis court and an orchard. We found ourselves in a fortunate position, and were made a great fuss of by the staff. Eventually I was reunited with my family who were also evacuated to West Yorkshire. We had left our Guernsey home and all our possessions but we now had each other again.56
When Jessica Young left West Sussex with 200 disabled girls, she never dreamed they would be sent to the stunning Peckforton Castle in Cheshire:
We drove up a dark, tree-clad drive to a full-sized eighty-roomed castle, all dark and shadowy. As we entered the castle in the dark because of the blackout, Mrs Thomas reassured us by saying, ‘Now the dark is like blind man’s bluff, so hold on to the one in front.’
With a teacher holding a torch to show the way, we went down the spiral steps, leading down into the long corridor which went the whole length of the castle. We passed lots of rooms until we reached the big servants dining hall which had one long table nearly the length of it and lots of trestle tables with forms, each for eight children to sit at.
The walls were white washed and decorated with heads of foxes, deer and antlers. A local potter had made us all a pretty flower mug each, in several designs, they now contained soup. How good it tasted with a thick slice of bread to eat with it. After supper we climbed another staircase and got into bed. We slept that night in vest and pants, not knowing where we were, too tired to care, and hundreds of miles away from our families. In the morning I looked out of the window, it was lovely, like a fairy tale palace, all glistening pink stone.57
Vera Liniham still recalls the kindness of one Mrs Barlow at Woodville Hall in Cheshire:
My two younger sisters and I, along with my best friend and her younger sister, were collected by Miss Groves who was the Housekeeper at Woodville Hall in Marple. We were taken by chauffeur-driven car, no less, to meet Mrs Barlow. It was the beginning of an experience I have never forgotten.
Mrs Barlow was waiting to welcome us. She was a sweet lady, of average height, slim with snow-white hair. Her clothes were very Twenties style. We met Jean who was from Carlisle and Violet who was from Glasgow – the House/parlour maids. Mrs Barlow had her own lady’s maid, which was a slightly elevated position in the order of the staff. There was also a cook, a scullery maid, two gardeners and Mr Cheyney, who was the chauffeur.
We were taken to our bedroom and were amazed to see five single beds in this enormous room with a dressing table for each and a couple of wardrobes for our use. We later discovered the room was actually the ballroom! Mrs Barlow always came to say ‘Goodnight’ each evening when we had milk and biscuits for supper. We were treated like we were her own but as you can imagine it was a very different life to what we were used to as children of working class parents.
Although the war was such a long weary slice of our lives with more than one sad incident to live through, my stay at the Barlow family home was a time I remember with lots of happy memories. I am 87 years old now and the only one of the five of us left. I will always remember Mrs Barlow and her daughter for their kindness to five frightened little girls.58