In London and other major cities, adults saw long files of children led by teachers or other officials walk toward bus or railroad stations for their journey to different parts of the country. British Ministry of Health poster. The first and largest exodus lasted four days. Other smaller evacuations occurred up until September Ultimately more than 3. Finding homes was often traumatic for the children. As a rule, billeting officials would line the newly arrived children up against a wall or on a stage in the village hall, and invite potential hosts to take their pick.
Corporations and private relief organizations in the United States arranged for thousands of children to stay in the country. In New York City, a radio interview of six evacuee children living there was broadcast back to England on Sept.
Given the large numbers and different social classes involved, individual experiences ran the gamut from excellent to terrible. On Dec. British women and children in Singapore began to be evacuated shortly after Japan launched its attack on the colony. After a harrowing experience on their ship, one group eventually reached Australia in early January It changed his life and that of his younger brother, Phil.
Mrs Coles, their foster mother, gave them something their own mother could never have done: a love of books and learning. And it was not one-sided. Twenty years after the war, Mrs Coles wrote to Don to say that she felt the children had been sent "to cheer her up". I learned to appreciate all these different things from Mrs Coles.
I learned how to talk to people and to address them properly and with confidence. I developed a different accent, dropping my Black Country slang.
In fact, I have to say that Mrs Coles changed me completely and she loved me — I'm ashamed to admit it — more than my mother ever did. She made me feel wanted. She called us My Boys and that really meant something to us. When the boys went back to West Bromwich after the war, Don was dismayed by his mother's reaction to his new found interest in books and education.
She cursed him for being "a bloody big 'ead" and was constantly nagging him to "shift yer bloody books". Even parents who were delighted that their children had had life-enhancing experiences and opportunities, found it hard to adjust to the changes. Fathers, often forgotten in the evacuation story, also felt they had lost out. In , Ted Matthews wrote to one of his four daughters whom he sent to America in "Sending you away has been, in some ways, a tragedy.
I still think it was the right thing to do, even though events proved different from our fears. But it has been heartbreaking to miss these years of your lives. We shall meet again as almost strangers. Michael Henderson and his brother, Gerald, were sent to Boston in , aged eight and six. They lived with a loving family and completely absorbed the culture, education and American way of life. Now, as then, it felt like a positive gain on every level.
Yet he wrote: "Returning home, it was hard for us to step into the lives of parents who had survived the bombing — and more recently the V1 and V2 rockets — and would jump at any loud noise.
Our parents' admonishments were met with, 'We don't do that in America. It took months for the four Hendersons to re-establish a family relationship — a lot longer, Michael notes wryly, than it took to remove the accumulated dirt they had acquired on the aircraft carrier en route back from the US.
Sometimes children observed their parents afresh and found their way of life different from what they had grown used to with foster parents. John Mare, who had been evacuated to Canada aged seven, was horrified, as only a child can be, by what he found on his return to Bath. He told his friend Penny: "My mother wears lipstick and powder. They drink and smoke, and even the dog is called Whisky! The gulf in experience was not just felt between the generations or within families in which some children had been evacuated and others had not.
Nigel Bromage and his twin brother, Michael, spent two years of the war on a farm in south Wales. They shared a room, they went to the same school, experienced the same foster family and saw the same sights in the countryside. They were seven when they arrived and nine when they left. Yet they had two opposite responses to their evacuation. They had 20 cows, all of which had to be milked by hand, and the only aid was a horse. For Nigel, there was no down side. It is not perhaps surprising.
We were very different personalities — he an introvert, I an extrovert. World War Two ended in September , however evacuation did not officially end until March when it was felt that Britain was no longer under threat from invasion.
Surprisingly, even 6 months after the war had ended, there were still 5, evacuees living in rural areas with their host families.
In April , the Government began to make travel arrangements to return the evacuees to their homes when the war was over. Why was evacuation introduced by the Government? Follow me on Twitter mbarrow. This site uses cookies. See our Cookie Policy for information. You may not redistribute, sell or place the content of this page on any other website or blog without written permission from the author Mandy Barrow. Evacuation of Children and Women during World War 2. What is evacuation?
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