The aim of evacuation was to send children and adults to safety until the war was over, But the war took many forms, and few places in the UK were completely free from danger. Air raids, unexploded bombs, military vehicles, guns and minefields posed risks to the children, wherever they were posted.
Some did not even reach their destinations, the most notable and tragic instance being the sinking of the SS City of Benares in September 1940 which, amongst other passengers, had been transporting ninety British evacuees to Canada.
After the fall of France, the British Government had developed plans for evacuating one million children to the United States, Canada and other overseas Dominions. The scheme was administered primarily by the Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB), a British government sponsored organisation. It began its work on 17 June 1940, when Under-Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs Geoffrey Shakespeare was tasked with implementing this evacuation programme. The same day, negotiations opened with the travel agency Thomas Cook & Son for the new organisation to be housed in its Head Office at 45 Berkeley Street, London.
Speaking in the House of Commons on 2 July 1940, Shakespeare outlined to MPs the ‘main elements of the scheme which we are charged to administer’:
In the case of all children who have reached the age of five but have not reached the age of 16, parents can make application for their children to be sent overseas, to the Dominion of their choice. The benefits of the scheme are open to school children within those ages, wherever the children are now situated, or whatever the circumstances of the parents. For easier administration, we have divided all children into two categories, namely, those who attend State grant-aided schools such as elementary and secondary schools, and those who attend other schools.
No mother is eligible to accompany her child overseas, but an exception may be made in the case of the widow of a man who has lost his life in active service in the present war. If parents are excluded, it is clearly necessary to organise a system of escorts or helpers, to look after the children on the journey.
No charge will be made for the railway journeys or voyages, to the parents of children from grant-aided schools but they will be asked to contribute, week by week, the same amount as they are now contributing, or as they would contribute under the United Kingdom evacuation scheme …
As regards the quota, we have decided on a fair quota in respect of the two kinds of schools. In England and Wales, 75 per cent. of the children will come from grant-aided schools, and 25 per cent. from other schools. In Scotland, 49 out of 50 children will come from what are termed local education authority schools, and one out of 50 children from other schools. These quotas follow roughly the proportions of children existing to-day in the respective kinds of schools. It may well be that if we cannot satisfy the quota in respect of either category, we shall be forced to select children on some other basis. Hon. Members will see that there is no ground for the constant reiteration by Lord Haw-Haw that the benefits of the scheme are exclusively for the rich.1
The Under-Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs then went on to provide a little more detail of the mechanics of the actual journey itself:
We are also securing the services of teachers from the schools in these areas who will travel with the children to the port of embarkation, and further, we are securing the services, both centrally and locally, of those who belong to the Women’s Voluntary Services Organisation ... The children will be detrained in the vicinity of the port of embarkation, and will sleep for at least one night in hostels there provided. We have already provided suitable hostel accommodation near enough to the ports of embarkation but far enough away to ensure the children’s safety. The escorts and helpers who will take the children on the voyage will join the children at these hostels. Hon. Members will be interested to know that we are working to a scale of one helper to 15 children, in addition to nurses and doctors …
Each child will have been given a luggage label with its C.O.R.B. number and as each child embarks it will be given an identity disc with its C.O.R.B. number. There will be an expert staff to check the final list of the children that embark on any ship; one copy of the document will go to the Dominion, another copy will come back to us at headquarters, and the third copy will go to another place of safe keeping in this country, in case our records should be destroyed. We shall know actually and absolutely the number of children that embark on any one ship.
As to the voyage, the Admiralty, the Ministry of Shipping and my Department have been conferring as to the best means of providing protection, and I will say no more about that. During the voyage, the escort leaders and helpers will get in touch with the children and talk to them about conditions in the Dominions to which they are going. There will be doctors, nurses, and a chaplain on each ship. I should like to emphasise that children, from whatever school they come, will proceed in the same ship without any distinction. It will be, as it were, a boys’ club or a girls’ holiday camp proceeding overseas under the proper supervision of experienced persons who have done this work all their lives.2
As part of the westbound Convoy OB-213, in which she was the flagship of the convoy commodore, City of Benares had sailed from Liverpool on 13 September 1940, bound for the Canadian ports of Quebec and Montreal. The journey was relatively uneventful until late on the evening of the 17th, when the liner was spotted by the crew of the German U-boat, U-48. Its commander, Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Bleichrodt, fired two torpedoes at the British ship at 23.45 hours – but they both missed. Just after midnight, Bleichrodt fired a third. This time the German U-boat was on target – the torpedo struck City of Benares in the stern. She sank in just thirty minutes. Seventy-seven children and 187 adults were killed.
Sonia, Derek and Barbara Bech represented the only evacuee family to survive the disaster intact. Sonia remembers only too well the events that fateful night on the icy waters of the Atlantic:
Little did we know at 10 o’clock that night that a U-boat had spotted us and was out for us. We rushed out onto the deck and the lifeboats had already been lowered into the sea which was very rough and we were on a sinking ship with no lifeboat and we wondered what was going to happen next.3
Barbara managed to climb a rope onto a lifeboat, while her mother, Sonia and Derek spent six hours in the Atlantic before being picked up by the destroyer HMS Hurricane – but not before despair had set in. Derek recalled that, ‘Our mother told us “Let’s just undo our lifebelts and we’ll go to sleep in the water’. It was Sonia who refused to let the family die and urged them to keep hoping until the lights of rescue vessels appeared out of the dark. Safely on board and recovering from hypothermia, they waited for news of Barbara, as Derek continued:
My mother kept on calling ‘Has anyone seen Barbara?’ A report came in that some people had died in their lifeboat and then another report came in that everybody had died in another boat. It went on and on and my mother was virtually giving up hope until in the last minute a sailor came down to my mother and said ‘Here’s your Barbara’
It is one of those stories that never fades in the retelling and is a stark reminder to all of us of those dark days of the Second World War when terrible things happened to men, women and children.4
Fifteen-year-old Bess Walder was being evacuated on City of Benares along with her younger brother Louis, then aged nine. Bess was asleep in her bunk when U-48’s third torpedo struck. Accompanied by another evacuee, 14-year-old Beth Cummings who had been in a neighbouring cabin, Bess headed out on deck to find a lifeboat:
Lights flickered and dimmed, then went out. Freezing water cascaded into the stricken ship’s interior, and bodies bobbed past.
Bess Walder and Beth Cummings managed to scramble on deck and into lifeboat No.5, which was lowered into the blackness of the ocean but took in water almost at once. It bucked wildly on the waves before upending, throwing both girls into the sea.
By the time they had swum and clawed their way back to the lifeboat, it was upside down. In the darkness and through the spray and rain – the liner had been attacked at the height of an Atlantic storm – Bess Walder could just make out Beth and, beyond her new friend, a line of wrists, fingers and whitened knuckles where at least a dozen people were clinging on the other side to the lifeboat’s upturned keel …
For nearly 20 hours during the night and day that followed, Bess Walder and Beth Cummings, with only their adrenalin to sustain them against cold and exhaustion, clung to their overturned lifeboat in the stormy seas; they were clad only in pyjamas and dressing gowns.
At first about 20 other passengers hung on, but one by one they let go and drifted away, eventually leaving only Bess Walder and her friend.5
‘Our bodies were very badly bruised,’ Bess later recalled. ‘Every time waves came we were lifted up and flung down again against the side of the lifeboat.’ The pair’s ordeal, though, was not yet over and, exhausted but unafraid, the two girls concentrated on staying alive by clinging to a rope wrapped around the lifeboat’s keel. Afterwards they could not open their hands for two days.
In time, Bess passed out. When she came too, she found she was onboard HMS Hurricane. Beth had also survived. Bess’ good luck, though, was initially tinged with sadness for she was under the impression that her little brother had drowned:
After her rescue by Hurricane … she [Bess] was summoned to the captain’s cabin: ‘He banged on the door and he said he had a surprise for me and pushed my brother into the room ahead of him.’ Louis, rescued from another lifeboat, had seen his sister’s wet dressing gown hanging in Hurricane’s boiler room to dry.6
Passengers such as the Bechs and Bess and her brother were the fortunate ones. In total, 260 of the 407 people on board City of Benares were lost. This included the master, the commodore, three staff members, 121 crew members and 134 passengers. Out of the latter, seventy-seven were child evacuees. Only thirteen of the ninety child evacuee passengers embarked survived the sinking.7
Following on from the earlier attack on the SS Volendam, which had been carrying child evacuees (though they all survived), the CORB programme had already been subject to official scrutiny. The City of Benares disaster sealed its fate. The government soon announced the cancellation of the Children’s Overseas Reception Board’s work, and all children who were preparing to sail were ordered to disembark and return home. It had, up to this point, evacuated over 2,600 British children. They were sent mainly to the four Dominion countries of Canada (a total of 1,532 individuals in nine parties), Australia (577; three parties), New Zealand (202 in two parties), and South Africa (353; again two parties), with also some to the USA. Official overseas child evacuation efforts came to a halt with the end of the CORB, but largescale private evacuation of a further 14,000 children continued until 1941.
Of course, an evacuee did not have to be at sea to be killed through enemy action. Four-year-old John Stobart, for example, died when a pair of semi-detached houses in Gower Street, Newcastle-under-Lyme received a direct hit from a bomb on 26 June 1940. ‘Planes were heard and several bombs fell in a residential suburb within a radius of 50 yards,’ ran a report in the local newspaper. ‘One hit a bungalow and demolished the living rooms, but left the bedrooms, occupied at the time by a family of three, intact.’ John Stobart was not so fortunate as the bomb that struck the house of the two semis where he was staying crashed through the bedrooms to the ground floor. ‘The dead boy and most of the people injured were trapped in the two semi-detached houses, which were completely wrecked … Rescue and fire squads worked heroically to release the victims.’ Though most of those inside the two houses were injured, only one woman was hospitalised and poor young John was the single fatality. He had only arrived in the district a few days earlier from his home in Romford, Essex.8
Child evacuees from London were amongst eleven people killed when high explosives fell on a Devon town in January 1941. ‘The baby sister of two children who died was saved and their mother was admitted to the local hospital suffering from cuts and shock,’ reported the Western Times on 24 January 1941.
The bombs, though, did not necessarily have to be German. Florence Webb, originally from Carshalton in Surrey, had evacuated to Friends Green near Weston. At about 09.00 hours on the morning of 26 August 1944, the skies overhead the Hertfordshire village were full of USAAF bombers as they headed out from their bases to targets in Europe. Amongst this aerial armada were the Bowing B-17s of the 390th Bombardment Group which had taken off from Framlingham (Parham) in Suffolk.
Disaster struck as some of the bombers passed over Weston. One B-17 from 568 Squadron, nicknamed Ding Dong Daddy, collided with another from 569 Squadron. The Sunday Post of 27 August takes up the tragic story:
Florence Webb … was killed by a bomb which crashed through the roof of a bungalow in Hertfordshire but did not explode. The tragedy occurred when two United States bombers came into collision in the air near Hitchin. Four members of the crew escaped by parachute. In total, fourteen United States airmen, a child and the evacuated mother died.
Cathy Hammond lost her baby brother during an air raid alert in Bolton, Lancashire – though it was not a bomb that was the cause:
One of the air raid wardens came to help my mother by carrying my baby brother whilst she looked after Pamela and me. Unknown to my mother he dropped my brother on the way to the shelter.
On arrival he handed him back and did not say what had happened. Nicholas died during the night, leaving my mother shocked and devastated. She later learned that the warden had been too afraid to say anything.9
The death of a young evacuee from Southsea, was reported in the Portsmouth Evening News of Saturday, 5 April 1941:
John Ferrari (16), from Portsmouth, was killed last night when assisting to extinguish incendiary bombs at a South of England village. His death is believed to be due to his being struck by a shell fragment of an A.A. shell.
He was originally at school in Portsmouth, but with his brother Peter, who is two years younger, was evacuated to the village some months ago.
Though there was danger for the children wherever they had been removed to, the reasons why they had been evacuated from the London area was made all too painfully aware, as revealed the bleak headlines in The Times ‘Returned Evacuees Killed By Flying Bombs Launched From Aircraft’ of 20 September 1944:
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, early yesterday. It is believed that the flying bombs were discharged over the North Sea from aircraft based on aerodromes which may be in the island of Sylt or even farther away. An intensive A.A. barrage was put up. Vivid flashes were followed by two explosions, and it is claimed that the A.A. gunners, including mixed batteries, shot down two bombs. The whole action lasted under 20 minutes.
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 a southern England town to Birmingham. Then a few days ago the menace seemed to be ending, and the parents, who had now 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 their house was demolished early yesterday rescue workers dug for two hours. They could hear Margaret crying for help, and found her with her mother’s arm around her. It was feared that nine people were killed in this incident, including members of the family next door.
A large number of houses were seriously damaged. At another place four people were killed and eight seriously injured. Some of them had been sleeping in their houses, having discontinued going to their shelters when they thought the raids were practically over.
During the Second World War, a total of 14.5 million acres of land, 25 million square feet of industrial and storage premises and 113,350 holdings of non-industrial premises were requisitioned by the British Government.
The War Office alone requisitioned 580,847 acres between 1939 and 1946, much of it for training purposes.10 Such activity came with its own inherent risks, not least the question of unfired or unexploded munitions left littering the ground.
The armed forces were urged to ensure the dangers were minimised. ‘How would you like your son or your young brother to take home a ‘dud’ grenade as a souvenir?’ noted one set of instructions. The same document went on to add:
When ordered to search for or mark down or destroy ‘blinds’ [unexploded ordnance] make a clean job of it. Leave nothing to chance and leave nothing lying about for other men’s children to find. Remember that children pay even less attention to warning and out of bounds notices than soldiers do. No fencing and no notices will keep out small boys.
Do not leave explosive articles lying about where children can get at them. If you think you have found a ‘blind’, leave it alone, mark the spot, arrange for a friend to guard it if possible, and report it to an officer at once.
A ‘blind’ goes off sooner or later, and if it goes off because a child treads on it or picks it up when bird’s-nesting or blackberrying or hunting for souvenirs, someone’s child is killed.11
In 1943 alone no less than 118 civilians, ‘including many children’, had been killed and a further 390 seriously injured directly, or indirectly, as a consequence of military training.12 Some of the casualties were evacuees.
In Cardiff, Philip Anthony Fry died when he accidentally hit a detonator with a stone. He lost a hand and a leg in the blast.13
Similarily,John Bartlett died of multiple injuries due to the accidental explosion of a rifle grenade. Mirroring the military instructions quoted above, at the subsequent inquest it was stated that proper precautions should be taken by the Army to clear up at the end of their training exercises.14
Fixed anti-invasion defences also posed a very real risk – though the intended victim was supposed to be an invading enemy. Sophie Rosenthal and her friend were killed when two land mines exploded in the West of England:
A witness said that the young woman appeared as the smoke of the first explosion cleared away. He shouted at her to stay still but she could not have heard him. She stumbled on about a hundred yards, another mine exploded and she was blown up.
The jury asked that the military authorities should take steps to prevent any further occurrences. A police officer said that it was possible to walk from the sands onto the minefield as there was only one warning sign.15
Danger from ordnance was all around, as the Western Daily Press reported on Saturday, 24 April 1943:
A 10-year-old boy, named John Peter Bartlett, of Forest Road, Walthamstow, London, who was evacuated to the country nearly three years ago, was killed on April 7, through the explosion of a rifle-grenade.
At a West Country inquest the jury returned a verdict that death was due to haemorrhage and shock and multiple injuries to the accidental explosion of a rifle-grenade. They considered that no blame [should] be attached to anyone. They however expressed the opinion that proper precautions should be taken when clearing up after firing had taken place.
Another fatal explosion occurred on Sunday, 30 July 1944, when six boys climbed through barbed-wire fencing into an anti-tank minefield on a beach near Gunwalloe in Cornwall. The only witness, an Auxiliary Coastguard, saw the boys climbing through the wire from his lookout post about half-a-mile away. In his statement to the inquest into the death of two of the boys, one of whom was a local lad and the other an evacuee which was reported in the Cornishman of 3 August 1944, the Auxiliary Coastguard said that when he saw the boys trying to enter the minefield he waved a red flag and blew his warning whistle. One of the gang, eleven-year-old evacuee, Peter Michael Reed said:
The two deceased boys and four others, including himself, went towards the minefield. [Harry] Dale and [Donald] Munting entered by getting through and over the wire fencing, and shortly afterwards the explosion occurred.
When asked by the Coroner if he had not seen the danger warning notices, Peter Reed replied that, ‘The only notice I have ever read is the one which stated that there is danger when a red flag is flying and planes are exercising.’ The father of Donald Munting believed that, ‘the place was not sufficiently protected and the nearest warning notice was not facing in the direction the boys approached the minefield. The evacuees had not been warned about the minefield.’
In response, Major Ernest Harvey Jarvis, Royal Engineers, declared that: ‘The minefield was protected by various forms of wiring, of a width of six feet. The wiring was periodically inspected, and was in good order. The fence was put there as a deterrent and not with the intention of making it impossible for anyone to get through. The number of warning notices was larger than the official instructions required to be placed there.’
The Coroner summed up the sad episode with these words: ‘Boys of such intelligence must have known that they had no right to be inside the fence. The result was extremely sorrowful for all concerned.’
An equally reckless, or one might say, senseless, act was reported in the Aberdeen Journal that same summer, 26 July 1944:
Three boys, including a South of England evacuee, were killed and two others seriously injured, in an explosion on the Lancashire Moors last night. They were playing with an explosive missile when it exploded. The three were killed instantly.
Aside from enemy action and ordnance, there were, unfortunately, so many different ways in which an evacuee could come to harm. With the increase in military traffic, the roads could be dangerous places for young children. This was the case with Patrick Pearson, a fourteen-year-old, who died in Spilsbury Hospital, Lincoln, after being knocked off his bicycle by an RAF lorry at East Keal. He suffered severe head injuries and died without regaining consciousness. A similar story was reported in the Bucks Herald of Friday, 22 September 1940:
A little boy named Alan Mearing, aged six years, an evacuee from the Metropolitan area, was picked up dead on Saturday afternoon after a military motor lorry had passed Brook Cottages, Soulbury, where his mother stood talking to another woman on the roadside. Neither the mother or the neighbour or driver of the lorry saw the accident happen, and no one saw the child in the road at the time …
George Henry Mearing, a lorry driver, of 44, Priscilla Road, Bow, London E., said that he was father of the child, who, with his mother, had been evacuated … Mrs. Phyllis Edith Mearing, the mother of the boy, stated that … she was outside her house and was talking to Mrs. Ella Norman. She saw a military motor lorry coming towards Soulbury from the direction of Linslade. The lorry passed her, and before she saw this lorry her little boy was a little distance in front of her, and there were other children playing near; but her son was not very far from her; and she had not noticed a stationery motor car on her side of the road. After the motor lorry had passed her a military motor lorry went by, and after it had passed she saw her son lying in the road.
She went over to her son and when she picked him up she saw he was seriously injured. He was covered with a coat by a soldier as they waited for a doctor to be summoned. The woman that Mrs Mearing was talking to, Ella Norman, likewise did not see the accident.
Private Philip Malcom McKillop, RASC, was one of the passengers in the military lorry, which he said was being driven at a normal speed. He was in the back of the lorry and saw two women waving their hands. He shouted at the driver to stop, before jumping out to see what assistance he could offer. The next statement was given by the driver, Private Reginald William Lambourne, RASC. He said that he was driving at a normal speed and that he knew the road:
Near Brook Cottages the road was somewhat bent and he was just gathering speed when he had to pull in to pass a stationery car on the side of the road. He did not notice the two women standing by the side of the road, nor did he notice any children, and his attention was not distracted by anything. The road was only about 17 feet wide. He heard shouting from the back of his lorry and stopped gradually. He got out and saw a little boy lying in the road a little distance back. He did not go down the road to the child, but his passenger did … He examined his lorry but found no marks whatever on it.
Young Alan Mearing was taken to the Royal Bucks Hospital but was pronounced dead in the ambulance. Dr Patricia Gertrude Cooper said that she examined him and her findings appeared to contradict the driver’s story. She found,
A large laceration on the left side of the head, and a fracture of the skull. The injuries were such as would result from a direct hit. There were no signs that a vehicle had passed over the child and death was due to fracture of the skull and laceration of the brain.
A similar incident took place in the summer of 1941, which was reported in the Western Daily Press on Monday, 9 June:
A verdict of ‘Accidental death’ was returned at an inquest at Taunton on Saturday, on an eight-year-old evacuee boy – one of the first to arrive in the Taunton district – who was knocked down by an Army staff car, on the Bridgewater-Taunton road, at Bathpool, and was killed instantly …
The car involved in the accident was driven by Driver George Turle, R.A.S.C., who did not give evidence. An eye-witness stated that the boy halted part way out in the road, looked in one direction, and then took a step forward. But for this the car, which carried the boy along, might have avoided him.
In pronouncing the verdict of accidental death, the Coroner said that there was no evidence of criminal neglect on the part of the driver.
This was not the case in an incident witnessed by evacuee Terence Frisby in Doublebois, Cornwall:
Soldiers were always billeted in the grounds of Doublebois House and we children constantly hung around them, cadging rides, wearing their forage caps and swinging upon the big iron gate at the entrance so that cars, lorries and even Bren Carriers could rumble in and out. The gate was deemed by the military too much of a bother constantly to open and close, so was taken off its hinges and leant against a wall to be removed. Instead of swinging on it we just sat on it.
The smallest of us all was five-year-old Teddy Camberwell, evacuated with his mother and baby sister. He was not one of the Welling crowd. I call him Teddy Camberwell, but I don’t remember his surname, just that he was bombed out from Camberwell in the Blitz. Teddy, his mother and little sister were billeted at 3 Railway Cottages and he tagged along with us in most of our play.
On this particular day he was at the end of a row of us sitting on the gate, when a lorry came round the corner, caught the gate, tipped it forward and left us falling backwards into the bushes – except for Teddy. He was thrown forward and went under the gate and under the lorry.
I clambered out and looked at the scene before me: the driver, staring aghast at the result of his tiny error; the unbelieving sentry; three other children, one with his hand in his mouth, all beyond tears. Teddy’s crushed body under the gate, leaking blood and other things.
I turned and ran for the only help I trusted. ‘Auntie Rose, Auntie Rose. Come quickly. Teddy Camberwell is dead. He’s dead. Teddy Camberwell’s dead.’
She stared at me, shocked. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘A lorry went over the gate.’
We ran back up the main road and met the sentry, accompanied by the bemused driver and three children, carrying Teddy’s tiny, crumpled body to his home at 3 Railway Cottages. Auntie Rose shouted at them, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing, man?’
‘Are you the mother?’ asked the sentry, probably dreading the answer. ‘No, where are you taking him?’
‘The boys said he lives in the cottages here.’
‘What are you trying to do? Give his mother a present, you bloody fool? Take him back to the camp.’
The sentry, no more than a teenager, was hopelessly out of his depth. ‘I didn’t know where to –’
Auntie Rose practically pushed him. ‘Go on. Take him to your medical officer. His mother will be out any minute.’
I next saw Auntie Rose taking Teddy’s mother into our house, where she lay collapsed and sobbing on the sofa, watched by Jack’s and my detached, curious eyes until we were driven out.
So much emotion seemed more than one person could contain. Her body jerked and heaved as her grief tore its way out of her. The next day a soldier appeared in the courts: a private, Teddy’s father. He was accompanied by an awkward-looking army padre, an officer, and stood mutely, arms pinned to his side by his wife as she clung to him and sobbed anew. What guilt she must have suffered besides her simple agony. To have brought her son to Cornwall for safety and then to have this news for his father.
Driver error was also the cause of another evacuee being killed which was reported in Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser of Saturday, 15 February 1941.
Irene Joyce Wells, aged eight, was fatally injured when an Army truck crashed into the Unitarian Church on Friday afternoon. A witness stated that the lorry came round the corner quickly and with a very big sweep towards a car, then it shot right across the road towards the church, crashed into the railings outside and knocked the child over. She had been standing at the doorway of the church … The railings outside the church were smashed and were wedged inside the cabin of the truck. There was a bicycle entangled with the broken railings.
The cause of Irene Joyce’s death was shock from multiple injuries, ‘consistent with the child having been pierced by an iron instrument and pinned against a wall.’
The driver of the Army lorry explained what went wrong. He had backed into one street and was going forward again:
As I was pushing the clutch pedal in with the intention of changing into second gear my seat slipped back. This caused my foot pedal to fly out and my right heel to slip back. This caused acceleration and the truck went forward, mounting the pavement. Then I hit the rails. I found the little girl lying just inside the gates. I picked her up and carried her into the church.’
The final comment on this case by the Coroner gives an indication of just how dangerous the roads of Britain were in those days with Army vehicles rushing around the country, when because of rationing there were less civilian journeys being undertaken: ‘Mr Christopher Rowe, at the Hospital on Monday, expressed the view that something must be wrong for so many as 300 a day to occur.’ Clearly one of the unrecognised statistics of the war.