How did wartime evacuation affect the lives of all those concerned? John Welshman once wrote that ‘the feelings of love and separation experienced by the evacuees had a significant effect on them at the time and in their subsequent lives.’1
Some children faced a huge conflict, having a loyalty not just to their own parents, but to the foster families that had cared for them. For some, the evacuation left lasting emotional scars or destroyed family relationships. For others, it offered new experiences, a wider experience of life and increased opportunities for education and employment.
In the post-war years, evacuee reunions have allowed people to reconnect with other evacuees to share wartime experiences and come to terms with wartime traumas. Reunions also allow them to examine how the evacuation actually shaped their lives.
In the 1990s, Grace Fry reflected on five years of caring for a large number of evacuees in Scotland. She admitted that it had deeply affected her life: ‘It was the evacuation that decided me, well and all, that I was not going to get married and I was not going to have children. Because during the war I had had enough with all this!’2 Similarly, Mrs Tippett found it difficult to return to the traditional role of housewife and mother after the war. Her son, John, recalled, ‘During our evacuation, Mum worked, paid the bills and looked after us whilst Dad was in the forces. It changed her outlook and ideas on what women were actually capable of doing.’3
June Somekh’s evacuation left her with lasting emotional scars:
Having been away from my parents for four years, I had become very attached to Miss Smith, her extended family and Winster. I didn’t think my parents had neglected or abandoned me. In fact my father always sent pocket money for all of us and my mother, the most generous person I have ever known, often sent goodies for us. Many, I am quite sure, are things she would have enjoyed herself.
We each returned home when we were ready to go to our secondary schools. Mother, especially, was very keen for us to have a good education. I am not sure how this, further disruption, affected my siblings as we rarely discussed feelings, but I felt devastated. My parents must have been heartbroken. I was very bitter and resentful and I know I said some very hurtful things which, even now, I am not prepared to repeat. A lifetime after the event, the scars are still there.4
John Helyer’s evacuation damaged his relationship with his Guernsey parents. ‘First of all, I did not know what my parents looked like, I had no photos. When we met I didn’t understand them and they didn’t understand me. We had all sorts of problems – it didn’t work out like I had expected. And my father died a few months later.’5
Rex Carre also returned to Guernsey, leaving behind his loving foster parents, ‘Auntie and Unk’ Morgan in Oldham:
I found settling in after the return far worse than my parents realised as I kept it all bottled up inside. After the first flush of family feelings, my relationship with my father showed up as far less happy than it had been with Unk. I think subconsciously, I bitterly resented having been ‘left to it in 1940’ and I have reason to believe I was not the only Guernsey refugee to feel that way. My father did not really want me to continue my education at Elizabeth College for the Higher School Certificate and certainly not university. However my mother had solemnly promised Unk that I would go as he was convinced I would do well. I was admitted to Elizabeth College but did not appreciate the absurd amount of sport or the ridiculous Corps we were forced to join by Major Caldwell. However I tried to keep quiet about all this as my father’s reaction to any complaint was always ‘Why don’t you leave?’ I am eternally grateful to Johnnie Martel, Deputy Head of the Castel School, who helped me get into Southampton University.
I kept up regular contact with Unk and Aunty Morgan and my mother and I went to Oldham for the first post war Christmas. Then Aunt and Unk came to Guernsey for two summer holidays. It was just wonderful to be with them again, and they enjoyed the comparative peace and quiet, and the beauty of my island. I passed my 2:1 Economics Degree and Teacher’s Diploma and applied for jobs wherever Grammar schools were advertising. I received two invitations for interview – the first in Oldham, the second at my old school in Guernsey. I was offered the Oldham post and my Oldham family were thrilled. Unfortunately Aunty and Unk had moved to Boston-le-Sands but I was able to go over and see them from time to time up to Unk’s death. Aunty then went to live with her stepson in Oldham. I firmly believe that fate decided the pattern of my life. As Shakespeare says, ‘There is a divinity that shapes our ends, roughhew them as we will’.6
Bonds forged between evacuees and their wartime carers were often hard to break. Sheila Gibson stayed in touch with her wartime foster family until their death. ‘I returned home in September 1944, but every year I returned to Derby, to visit Mr and Mrs Croft, their son Nigel and his wife. I attended Mrs Croft’s 100th birthday party in 2012. Mrs Croft passed away at the age of 101 but I will always remember her with fondness.’7
Likewise, Percy Martel never forgot the kindness shown to his pupils by the people of Cheadle Hulme in Cheshire. In April 1946 as the Guernsey primroses came into bloom Percy sent 1,000 bunches to the villagers as a thank you. Douglas Wood remained in touch with his wartime ‘Aunts’, Edith and Kate: ‘Auntie Kate died in 1949 but I continued to visit Auntie Edith. She came to my wedding and my 25th wedding anniversary. I visited her a few days before she died in 1989, three months before her 100th birthday. Being an evacuee with my lovely ‘aunts’ changed the course of my life. They will never be forgotten.’8
Philip Doran benefited from the influence of his Welsh foster mother, Mrs Roberts:
Of the seven of us [evacuees], I was one of the last to leave Mr and Mrs Roberts. This meant that, for some time, I had the benefit of having Mrs Roberts’ kindness all to myself.
When I left school, having signed up as a seaman, I would write to Mrs Roberts telling her of my real life adventures and describing all the wonderful places I had visited. Many years later, after I’d married and had children of my own, I returned to Penlynn Farm. Tom had sadly died; his old war wound finally getting the better of him, but Mrs Roberts was there, still her same old self. Hugs and kisses all around and a sumptuous tea produced from nowhere.
I sat there listening to Mrs Roberts reminisce, I looked around the room and it took me right back to that happy time as an evacuee. I noticed little things that hadn’t changed in all that time: there on the shelf was the little butter mould, which ejected the butter into its perfect shape, complete with a beautiful swan imprint. Despite its age and being riddled with woodworm, it still symbolised to me all that was good about Penlynn Farm.
After several hours and lots of chat we said our final goodbyes, not knowing if I’d ever see this woman again. It was a difficult moment saying goodbye to someone who had such an influence on your life, someone who gave us light when all around seemed darkness. My wife and children all thought that Mrs Roberts was a wonderful lady, she was indeed but she was more than that, she was an angel, my guardian angel. I’m sure that if there is a heaven, Mrs Roberts will be there, once again looking after all the little children, whilst poor old Tommy … well, he’s probably flying around in his best suit with ‘Watney’s Beer’ stamped on his wings.9
Ron Gould stayed in touch with Miss Yearsley who had cared for him so well in Cheshire and remembers their final meeting:
My last visit took place in October 1984 and she was now in a nursing home. It was a shock to see her. Her only space was a curtained-off corner of a large room which she shared with a number of other old ladies, most also in a very sad state. We said goodbye to her, almost in tears, and she passed away in early January 1986. My wife Hazel and I felt the least we could do was pay our last respects so we flew from Guernsey to Southampton, hired a car and drove up to Hale, through the snow, for the funeral.10
Richard Singleton will never forget the Welsh couple who lovingly cared for him and his brother:
When, at fourteen years of age, Mam had taken me away from Aunty Liz and Uncle Moses and their farmhouse, to go home to Liverpool, I had cried bitterly. I next saw Aunty Liz when I took my own family on holiday to Bronant in the 1960s. I took them to Tancwarel Farm to show them where Ron and I were evacuated. Aunty was in the field where we had once reaped the hay and she had a dog with her. I gave her a hug and was going to kiss her on the cheek but I couldn’t. She had cancer of the face. She told me that Uncle Moses had died and she wasn’t able to look after the farm.
We didn’t stay too long, I was too upset – in fact I feel like crying now writing about it. We left the way we had come, across the fields over the stiles like Aunty, Ron and I did when we went to the village and chapel in the 1940s.
I returned to Bronant again in 1989 for an evacuee reunion and went into the chapel. I cried my heart out. The war was a terrible thing, but to me it didn’t exist, I loved being evacuated. The cemetery was so small that it didn’t take long to find the graves of Aunty and Uncle. My regret is that I never told Aunty that I loved her for giving me and Ron a wonderful life while we were under her care.11
Win de La Mare is still in touch with her wartime foster sister in England:
It wasn’t easy to leave England, in fact, the truth is, I have never really settled. When I got back home to Guernsey, my mother had two more children, who I didn’t know, and I often felt that I just didn’t fit in.
Also I really missed Ruth, the daughter of the family that had looked after me in Cheshire. She had become a sister to me during the war. We wrote to each other when I got back, which kept me going, and we are still in touch now, and visit each other as often as we can.12
Dorothy King is another who treasures the kindness of her wartime family:
After the war I went back many times to stay with Mr and Mrs Waller in Bedford, even taking friends with me and really enjoyed being there. They came almost as often to visit our parents in London.
Then Mr Waller died – just as he was about to retire. They had moved to a comfortable little house on the other side of the town and Uncle had equipped an immaculate workshop for himself which should have given him years of pleasure. Mrs Waller lived on for several years, increasingly lonely and even rather embittered. A sad return for their hard working lives. Many years later, long after the war, when I was taken to see Mr and Mrs Waller’s old house, empty, mouldering and awaiting demolition, I felt a surge of nostalgia.13
Len Page remembers his last meeting with his foster father, Mr Knight:
After the war, I kept in touch with the Knights. Mrs. Knight died in 1972 and dear old Harry died in May 1987, aged eighty-nine years. Fortunately I went to see him three weeks before he passed away.
By [then] he lived in an old people’s home at Bicester, near his now married son Sam and wife Doris. We talked about the war years that I stayed with them; I always thought of him as my second dad and although I never got round to calling him Harry, I don’t think I could ever show more respect than calling him Mr. Knight. Harry always introduced me to his friends as ‘My little evacuee from London’.14
Terence Frisby also has fond memories of his wartime foster parents:
Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack. Auntie and Uncle. Not father and mother but not distant either, just in-between relatives. In fact, of course, they weren’t even that; they were our foster-mother and father, not relatives at all. But even now, seventy-three years later, I still cannot say their names without a full heart and a lump of gratitude in my throat. We stayed in contact with them both for years; indeed they came up to Kent for my brother’s wedding. Then Uncle Jack died quite suddenly of heart failure and we lost touch with Auntie Rose who went to live with her son and daughter-inlaw in Weston-Super-Mare.
In 1988 I produced a radio play about my evacuation story and received a letter from Auntie Rose’s granddaughter. Auntie Rose had told her stories of us both and she said, ‘You felt like the brothers I’d never met.’
We became friends with her and her family. She couldn’t get to the first production of the stage musical in Barnstaple in 2003 so I sent her a DVD and she was in floods of tears because the actor playing Uncle Jack brought him exactly to life again. She was right, he did. Both my brother and I couldn’t watch him and stay dry-eyed. She and her family met my son and his children at my book launch along with her cousin and we all now keep in touch.15
With the ties created during the war still strong, and almost unbreakable, Derek Trayler visited his wartime foster family many times:
After the war my brother and I went back on separate occasions to meet our foster parents in Norfolk and their daughter came to stay with us for a short visit. However, when Dr Beeching closed their railway line it become more difficult to get there.
By 1967, I had a wife and three boys, and we were on holiday on the Norfolk Broads. I found that we were not that far from the village we had stayed in 1940. I decided to take my family to see the place and hoped we could meet our foster parents again. I drove right though the village twice as I didn’t recognise it at first. A place looks much larger when you are walking to school as a seven-year-old than it does in a car as an adult. We knew that the family had moved since we were there but had no new address.
We stopped at the village shop/post office and asked for them by name. The postmistress looked at me and asked if I was one of the evacuees. She directed us to our foster parent’s new cottage and we spent happy hours remembering the time we spent together.
Our ‘Auntie’ mentioned that my eldest son was the same age I had been when I arrived. She also reminded us I had only been there for three weeks and had to go into hospital in Norwich to have my appendix out. This was reported in the National Press as, ‘The first evacuee to be taken into hospital’. Three weeks after we came home from holiday my eldest son was taken in to Oldchurch Hospital to have his appendix removed!16
Several evacuees have revealed how they were not encouraged to maintain contact with their wartime foster families after the war and their return home. Richard Titmuss believed that ‘some mothers were afraid of losing the affection of their children to someone who appeared more important or who had more material things to offer’17.
Alice Greenston wrote several letters to her foster mother in Scotland but never received a reply. ‘I was upset,’ she recalled. ‘But a few years later, my mother me that she had ripped the letters up rather than posting them.’18
Jenny La Mare19 was never allowed to mention her wartime ‘Auntie’:
My Guernsey mother did not want to hear me talking about my ‘Auntie Maisie’ in England, such as what she did for me, and how much I missed her. I soon stopped talking about my time in Lancashire, as I could see it upset my Mum. She felt I couldn’t love both her and Auntie Maisie – and several of my school friends had the same problem.
Lily Dwyer was discouraged from writing to, or making contact with, her wartime foster family:
In the years following the war, I used to write to Mrs Bee’s daughter, Elizabeth, and send her little drawings. One day I was doing a drawing for her and Mum came into the room and saw what I was doing. She took the letter off me and said, ‘Don’t write to her any more, you don’t live that life now, you live here’. I now wonder if she had actually ever posted the previous letters.20
Some evacuees have revealed that they feel physically connected to their place of evacuation because of the death of a relative or foster parent. Valerie Sarre’s brother died during the family’s evacuation to Wakefield:
My mother, father and brother Alan were evacuated to Wakefield from Guernsey in 1940. Sadly my brother, Alan, died of scalding in 1941. My family had made friends with a Mrs Hampshire and her son, John, who were Wakefield residents and when my parents returned to Guernsey in 1945, the Hampshire’s looked after my brother’s grave for them.21
Sixty-eight years after leaving his foster mother, Geoffrey Durrant felt duty bound to restore her grave:
During the war my brother Malcolm and I were evacuated from Lowestoft to Glossop, where an elderly widow, Mrs Booth, took great care of us. When we returned to Lowestoft in 1943, my mother continued to correspond with Mrs Booth and in 1946 she received a letter to say that Mrs Booth had passed away. Malcolm and I would often talk about her and always remembered her in our prayers. Malcolm died in 2001 and in 2005 I was persuaded to join the Lowestoft Evacuee Group. I placed a letter in the Glossop Chronicle asking if anyone remembered us at Mrs Booths and received four replies.
After returning to Glossop in 2008 for an evacuee reunion, I began a quest to find Mrs Booth’s burial place. It took two to three years to find it with the help of Sam Fielding and Ian Webster in Glossop. When I saw the grave, I was overcome. It would have been the icing on the cake if my brother had been there with me. It was in a sorry state so I asked a local stonemason to repair and restore it. It was a labour of love for a wonderful lady. We visit the grave every year with other evacuees and our good friend, Sheila Webster, places flowers on it at intervals on our behalf.22
For John White, the discovery of a family grave, seventy-two years after the end of the war, revealed why he had not been taken home in 1945 – a story that starkly reveals the tragedy surrounding so many evacuees’ wartime experiences. John and Fred White had always assumed that their mother did not want them and John recalled:
Years later I was amazed to discover that my mother had actually lived through the war. I’d always wondered if she must have been killed during the Blitz and that was why Fred and I never heard from her when the war ended. Seventy-two years later a friend tracked down my mother’s name as she had remarried. I decided to visit her grave in Edmonton cemetery. I noticed that it was nicely kept and at the bottom of the grave was a rose bush which had just been watered. I wrote a letter and put it in an envelope in a freezer bag, saying ‘Read me’ and put it under a vase.
My half-sisters found it and rang me. I found out that my father had died in 1943 and that my mother had remarried. I was told that there had been big family gatherings after the war and people would ask, ‘When are the boys coming home?’
However, Mum had told her new family that we had been evacuated to Australia, rather than just the countryside, and that we had never been found. Whenever she asked her new husband about us returning, he’d tell her that if we were to show up, he would sell the house and leave her! That explains why we never heard from her again.23
Many evacuees believe that through experiencing life away from home they gained a lasting sense of independence. They also realised that there was a different way of life available. For his part, Bill Smith developed a lasting love of horticulture during the war:
All the gardening that I did whilst an evacuee in Dunning started my interest in horticulture. Before I arrived there I was a proper town lad. Now I’m vice-chairman of the Scottish National Chrysanthemum and Dahlia Society. I’ve been a committee member there since 1970 and I’ve shown all over Scotland and the north of England. I’ve won a gold medal for best vase in the national show, and some of the cups there. All that interest in growing things started right there in Dunning when I was an evacuee.24
Peter Hopper’s evacuation to Skegness led to a career in journalism:
At the age of twenty, I joined the Grimsby Evening Telegraph as a reporter. Being a wartime evacuee actually helped me to get my first job as a journalist on the weekly Skegness News when I was only fifteen. I had no educational qualifications whatsoever, just enthusiasm. However, I became lifelong friends with Mrs Elsa Barratt, who had been the Evacuation Officer in 1939 and later became a Councillor, Chairman and Mayor of Skegness. Thirteen years after my unexpected arrival in the resort, I became a reporter for one of the two local newspapers and in 1953, a photograph was taken of me as a gawky, perhaps over-confident youth, dancing with Mrs Barratt at an official function. That year I was in her company almost on a daily basis, reporting on her year of office.
This began a forty-five-year career in journalism, during which I specialised in agricultural journalism. As Agricultural Editor of the East Anglian Daily Times for twenty-seven years, I travelled all over Europe; won two national and several regional awards; met several members of the Royal Family and received a presentation from Princess Alexandra of a framed print of the Suffolk Show at Ipswich in 1869. The presentation was for twenty-five years of coverage at the show. For the past eighteen years I have been an Honorary Life Vice-President of the Suffolk Agricultural Association and I even worked for Prince Charles on one occasion, writing an article on his visit to a Norfolk agricultural research station for his Highgrove Estate magazine.25
The opposite experience to those enjoyed by the likes of Bill Smith and Peter Hopper is that sadly many child evacuees endured traumatic experiences which still shape their lives. Edna Dart’s experiences have left her with agoraphobia and claustrophobia:
The authorities didn’t check on the people they put you with and I was physically abused by my foster father. It wouldn’t be allowed to happen today. When I went back to my mother, she said she would never let me be taken away again. Those twelve months as an evacuee have shaped my life. I don’t travel far nowadays, but when I do go anywhere, the fear only disappears when I’m returning home. Consequently, I haven’t been able to go to the places I would’ve liked, because I wouldn’t have felt safe. I’ve learned to control it to a certain extent, but not completely.26
Jean Bell cannot forget the cruelty that she and her sister experienced in South Wales:
It made me very sad to write my story down and I feel sorry for the two little girls that we were. We were very vulnerable at the time having been away from our mother from a very early age. I was very shy and withdrawn when we finally returned to London for good although my sister seemed to cope with everything much better.
My husband was curious to see the village in South Wales to see if it was as bad as I had painted it. I had absolutely no wish to return but a few years ago we were in South Wales when we finally went to see the village. My husband could not get over how run down and dirty it was. The mine had closed so I suppose there was no work for the men there … I certainly have no wish to visit this village again.27
Some of the evacuees who had bad experiences or witnessed the unhappiness of others, began careers in child care when they left school. The dreadful experience of being constantly passed from billet to billet during the war certainly altered Sheila Whipp’s future:
I decided to work with children in care because of my experiences during the war. Children didn’t have any rights then about where they were placed. None of the billeting officers had ever asked me if I was actually happy. They never spoke to me, on my own, to see if I was OK. I was invisible. As a result, my childhood influenced my future and my career.28
Studies undertaken during and since the war have shown that many family relationships were irretrievably broken down because of evacuation. Susan Isaacs examined how the evacuation scheme impacted upon the welfare and education of school children who had left their parents behind.29 The chief difficulty, Isaacs found, was the break in family life, and the survey concluded that any future evacuations should be planned with ‘more understanding of human nature’ by the authorities involved.
One report issued in Guernsey, where half the population had been evacuated, described the far-reaching effects:
The parental separation had a long term effect upon the children, persisting after the reunion with the parents. Of the fourteen children who had problems in adjusting to life on return to Guernsey, eight of these made a satisfactory adjustment after the initial difficulties. So for the population as a whole, the numbers of those who could have been permanently adversely affected by the evacuation could be very large.30
Marion Wraight’s mother could not afford to support her after the war, so Marion remained in Staffordshire with her wartime foster parents. This had a huge impact on her life and on her relationship with her real parents:
I left school at the age of fourteen and worked full time on my foster parents’ farm. I then met a local farmer’s son, became pregnant and was told that I had to marry him. It was a bad match and had a massive impact on my whole life. I had three children, then in 1972 John had an affair and our marriage ended acrimoniously. My Dad died in the 1960s in a mental institution and was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Mum wrote to tell me about it but I didn’t feel anything.
After forty-two years of not seeing Mum, my daughter Christine and I decided to visit her. She lived in Canterbury by then. I was happy to see her but it was not very emotional. I also met my sister Lilian in April 2015, for the first time since 1938.31
Lloyd and Lorraine Savident were reported as ‘killed in an air raid’ on the day they arrived in England in 1940. Four years later, in 1944, their parents in Guernsey received a twenty-five-word Red Cross message telling them that their children were actually alive. Lloyd recalls:
We returned to Guernsey after five years away from our family. A lady came up to us and said ‘I am your mother, these are your sisters and your brother’.
He was quite a bit older than me. I turned to my sister Lorraine and said ‘I want to go back!’ I felt completely lost.
We went to our house and my Dad couldn’t speak to us. Lorraine and I spoke English but the only English Dad knew was ‘Hello’ and ‘Cheerio’ – he [only] spoke Guernsey patois. This meant that we could not communicate properly.
In addition, there was no bathroom or running water and the toilet was at the bottom of the garden, which took some getting used to. It took me a long time to get over our return home and Lorraine still says today that she found it quite traumatic.32
For Lourdes Galliano’s mother, the stress and strain of the experiences brought on by evacuation ultimately shortened her life:
Seven weeks after our family’s joyful return to Gibraltar my mother suddenly collapsed in the street and died of heart failure.
She was only forty-nine years old, but the war had turned her into a sick, worn out woman. We were thankful she was granted her wish to die and be buried in Gibraltar.
But once again we were plunged into deep sorrow at another separation, this time permanent. I was seventeen years old at the time. My father never recovered from this blow and became practically a recluse for a long time. It was then that we discovered that things could never be the same again. Gibraltar had changed, each and every one of us had changed. The old ways were to be no more. We began to realise then what a key role Gibraltar had played in the war as guardian to the entrance of the Mediterranean. But this had only been made possible by the Gibraltarians who had sacrificed their homes, their families and their way of life for four long years.33
The evacuation deeply affected the lives of Alderney evacuee, John Glasgow and his father. In the spring of 1947, John left Winchester and his loving foster parents to live in Guernsey with his father. For a child, the situation was not ideal:
We lived in a chalet style bungalow but my father soon recognised that he wasn’t coping too well in looking after me. I was then billeted at a café, The Café Bon Bouche – the proprietors had a son of about my own age and we shared a bedroom. All was well until I was evicted from the cafe when it was discovered that the boy and I were smoking. Father and I then returned to Alderney where my father was independently able to support us both financially with his artistic painting. He would work without interruption for two or three days before stopping. Mealtimes if they existed were irregular.
Sadly he would sometimes become a victim of the Black Dog or mild depression. I believe this could have been the events of the past, losing his young wife, losing his home and other exigencies of the war. He began drinking. Always beer. In this he would seek oblivion.
This would cause anxiety to me and if he wasn’t home I would expect the inevitable and go looking for him. Starting in one pub asking if my dad was there. No son, he has gone on. And so on to the next. In the late summer of 1947, my father needed to return to Winchester on business, among other things, stocking up on painting materials. He brought me with him and took me back to my foster parents, bliss. When it came to return, I didn’t want to go back. I did love him but it was the lifestyle that was the problem.
After some heart-breaking discussion and counsel with some Channel Island people he knew in Winchester and could trust, he accepted the situation and returned alone, leaving me at my foster home. There had been a time when my foster parents were willing to formally adopt me, but understandably he didn’t want this. He had made a promise to my mother.
In November 1947 I was surprised to hear from my father that he had remarried and that I had acquired a stepmother. Again he collected me from Winchester to return to Alderney leaving my foster mother heartbroken once more. After a few months it became evident that mutually my stepmother and I were not compatible and I was sent to a boarding school on Guernsey. Came the summer holiday of 1948 and my father asked me if I would like to go to stay with my foster parents in Winchester. I was sent a single plane ticket to Southampton Airport and I never returned to Alderney.
My father became terminally ill and died in May 1951. My stepmother wanted me back in Alderney and work. I tacitly refused, whereupon she tried to send me to Australia under the post war immigration scheme. Advised by my foster father, Uncle Fred, I sought professional help from our local church who took up legal advice resulting in my being placed in the technical care of the NSPCC with my foster parents becoming my legal guardians. In hindsight, my father ensured I was returned to a place of safety and loving care, just as I had been in 1940.
My foster parents died, Uncle Fred on 11 August 1985 at the age of eighty-three, and Ma on 13 August 1995 aged ninety-three. They lie together in Magdelen Hill Cemetery in Winchester. It wasn’t difficult to consider an epitaph for their headstone. It reads, ‘Remembering all their loving kindness’. This says it all for me and the countless others who received their kindness and care in some form or another during their lifetime.34
The organisation of evacuee reunions has allowed evacuees to reconnect after years apart and to give thanks to the communities which cared for them during the war. Memorials have been installed in many of the places where evacuees were billeted. Lowestoft evacuees hold regular meetings where they share wartime memories and a plaque has been placed at Lowestoft railway station. Some of the evacuees make a yearly pilgrimage to Glossop where they were billeted. The wartime presence of Ben Howard’s school at Sayers Camp has been preserved for ever:
Early in 1942, the art master had the idea of painting murals on the blank chimney breasts at each end of the dining hall. Two talented boys were appointed to produce a design, each was to be fifty-four inches square and to take the form of fifteen diamond shapes. Each diamond to depict one of the camp’s activities. The murals were painted in oils and kept a number of artistic boys busy for some months. They depicted various winter and summer activities and are now registered as war memorials.
Stained glass ‘evacuee windows’ have been installed in a number of churches. In Sudbury’s All Saints Church there is such a memorial which was presented to the community by former evacuees from Manchester. The three schools that were evacuated to Kettering installed stained glass windows in the new St Edward’s church. Each school had their school badge and motto set into their window.
Channel Island evacuees will never forget the families who cared for them during the war. On 9 May 1946 a Liberation Day Parade in Guernsey gave thanks to communities on the British mainland. Between 1945 and 1953, Guernsey sent gifts to many of the towns and villages that had cared for evacuees.
Evacuees from Jersey have installed a plaque at Weymouth and communities in England, Scotland and Wales which received Channel Islanders have installed plaques and memorials. Every May, Disley church, in Cheshire, raises the Guernsey flag in memory of the evacuees who came to their village. In May 2010 Guernsey held an evacuee reunion and unveiled a plaque at the harbour. In June 2010, a blue plaque was installed at Stockport railway station35 and the Bailiff of Guernsey gave an emotional speech regarding the kindness of the wartime community.
In 1995, The British Evacuees Association was formed to ensure that the true story of the great evacuation would become better known and preserved for future generations.36 Founded by former evacuee James Roffey, it aims to place on record the impact that the evacuation had upon communities throughout the United Kingdom, not just those in the departure areas, but also those in the reception areas.
After all, the events surrounding the evacuees are as much a part of the UK’s wartime experiences as for those who fought on land, at sea or in the air.