Operation Pied Piper: what to feed the children?
Government guidelines for caring for evacuated children
1939
In February 1939, a mere five months after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from negotiations with Hitler in Munich declaring that he had secured ‘peace for our time’, the British government was making preparations for war with Germany. As this letter shows, in what we now know as an interwar rather than a ‘peaceful’ time, discussions were going on behind the scenes between the Food Department and the Ministry of Health about how British children would be fed if German attacks from the air forced mass evacuation from towns and cities to the countryside. Six months later, the evacuation plan, codenamed Operation Pied Piper, swung into action on 1 September, moving schoolchildren, pregnant women, mothers with young babies, and the disabled to areas less threatened by bombing.
As the evacuees assembled for departure at railway stations across the country, often clutching gas masks and suitcases containing a spare set of clothes and food for the journey, most had little idea of what would greet them upon arrival. Some would be staying with family or friends, but many were sent to live with total strangers.
Government guidelines stated that hosts should treat evacuated children as members of the family, giving them the same diet as they would their own children. To this end, the state provided a weekly allowance of ten shillings and six pence (around £15 in today’s money) in the hope that this would guarantee children away from home a decent standard of living. But right from the start, experiences of evacuation varied enormously. Upon arrival at their destination, the children were lined up and one by one picked by their would-be hosts. An evacuee from Bethnal Green later recalled: ‘I noticed a woman looking at evacuees’ hair and opening their mouths, but one of the helpers said: “They might come from the East End, but they’re children, not animals.” Nonetheless, the smartest and cleanest evacuees were usually picked first, and girls tended to be preferred over boys, since it was thought that they would cause less trouble.’
Concerned to ensure the welfare of young evacuees who were often billeted with people who had no experience of looking after children, the government issued hosts with guidelines. ‘Baths should be given as often as possible’, the advice intoned. ‘It should be remembered that young children need 11 hours’ sleep’, it warned. And furthermore, ‘a well-balanced diet with plenty of changes’ was considered key to having a happy and healthy child. State-recommended ‘specimen meals for a child of school age’ included a lot of bread and butter, washed down with weak tea, and despite predictions back in February 1939 that bacon would be hard to come by in wartime, it too featured among the suggested fare for breakfast.
By the end of the war, 3.5 million Brits had been relocated to rural areas. Thanks to the careful planning six years earlier, only 5,000 of the 60,000 British civilians killed during the Second World War were children. A similar number of children, 5,200, had settled in so successfully with their host families during the war that they stayed there permanently once it was over.
