The Day We Went to War

by Terry Charman

  ‘The Good Old Horse Comes Back’ read one magazine headline in October. ‘Horses,’ it reported, ‘which for many years had been slowly disappearing from the London streets, had a remarkable “comeback” when rationing took effect.’ On 27 September, Minister of Transport Euan Wallace announced that the ban on horses using certain thoroughfares in the capital was now being lifted in view of petrol rationing and the resultant reduction of motor vehicles on London streets. A tradesman in Westwood, Thanet, solved the problem of carrying on making deliveries by hitching a horse to his car. In the country too, the article concluded, ‘many a pony and trap and dog-cart were once more on the roads after being regarded for years only as lumber’. Just as British motorists were coming to terms with petrol rationing, a news item appeared in the press which put things into perspective. A Warsaw banker, desperate to leave the besieged capital had, it was claimed, paid £2,300 for just twelve gallons of petrol.

  Fourth on the list of the British public’s war grumbles and grievances was evacuation. It was one that would dominate the press and public debate throughout the last four months of 1939. ‘The Children’s Trek To Safety: A Triumph of British Civilian Organisation’ had been one paper’s headline at the start of the Government’s evacuation scheme. Altogether, 659,527 evacuees from the London area and 1,220,581 from the provincial urban areas had been evacuated between orders going out on Thursday, 31 August and Monday, 4 September. The majority of those evacuated (1,134,235) were schoolchildren accompanied by their teachers. But there were other groups also deemed vulnerable to air attack who were evacuated. These included young children with their mothers, expectant mothers, blind and physically handicapped adults. In the London County Council area, schoolchildren had taken part in a rehearsal on 28 August, while some had even actually been evacuated during the Sudeten Crisis the previous year. The evacuees went by train, bus and even boat. A number of London’s distinctive ‘Green Line’ buses had been specially converted to take hospital patients. The Government had agreed to pay the evacuees’ hosts ten shillings (50p) a week for the one child, or 8s.6d (43p) each for more than one, £1.1s.0d (£1.05p) for a teacher or helper, 5s (25p) for a mother and 3s (15p) for each child with her.

  At first all appeared to go smoothly. An anonymous welfare worker on the scheme was much quoted: ‘I maintain that it was a miracle of organization and not a simple transmigration. For two days, I was the humblest worker in the thick of it, and I take my hat off successively to the L.C.C., the Board of Education, the Ministry of Health, the teachers, the railways, the transport companies, and the organized workers. And finally, the biggest and longest hat-raising of all to the British mothers and to the children.’

  And the newspapers were full of photographs that seemed to back up his words. For as a later and cooler appraisal of the scheme put it, ‘The daily press of that period did much to spread the story of the successful venture. Boys and girls who had never seen farmlife before provided good material for the Press photographer. He was able to snap groups of happy children racing down the village lane when the lunch-bell rang, or setting out on a blackberrying expedition, or watching one of their number emulating Henry Cotton on the golf course . . .’

  But very soon the first rumblings of trouble and discontent began to be heard. On 15 September, The Times summed up the situation: ‘It is not surprising that the House of Commons was impelled last night to discuss the problems of evacuation. Certain troubles and grievances were bound to follow the dispersal of nearly a million and a half town-dwellers, mostly children and women, into the country and other places of safety. None of the complaints put forward in our correspondence columns has been trivial or unreasonable. Collectively, however, they are serious and even more widespread than the published letters have indicated. The Ministries of Health and Education have, in communications to the local authorities, recognized the necessity for remedial measures, and are stirring up the authorities to helpful and sympathetic action, and assuring them of Treasury assistance.’

  Hospital patients as well as children were evacuated from London and other vulnerable towns and cities at the beginning of September 1939. Many left in specially adapted ambulance trains.

  Minister of Health Walter Elliot, who had previously ‘twice broadcast on his Department’s wonderful performance’, now had to admit that there was cause for complaint. He told MPs that ‘tact, tolerance, and understanding, as well as administrative enterprise and ingenuity will be required’ to sort the problems out. But his voice was soon drowned out in a veritable whirlpool of evacuation ‘atrocity’ stories. On the war’s first day, Evelyn Waugh recorded in his diary that ‘Mr Page [a neighbour] has a destitute woman, pregnant, with four children in his stable loft. We took them a bed and some clothes. The woman was sitting at a table in tears, Page ineffectually trying to put wire round the railings to keep the children, which the mother won’t control, from falling through them. Little groups of children are hanging round the village looking very bored and lost . . .’ Five days later, he noted, ‘The discontent among the evacuees has increased. Seven families left the village amid general satisfaction. Those who remain spend their leisure scattering waste paper round my gates.’

  Now the press was full of similar stories, and worse. Typical was that of a letter from a John Marshall that Picture Post published on 28 October: ‘I’m sick of you and your sweet little refugees [sic]. Perhaps this story will make you sit up. Some friends of ours had seven lousy little Birmingham brats parked on them. These friends were farmers and kept poultry. Going into a coop where turkeys were kept, they found the little brats had cut the heads off thirteen turkeys. For fun! This story is perfectly true. I’d rather have a savage from Fiji than a child from Birmingham.’

  But Picture Post was not sympathetic: ‘It won’t make us – or anyone else – sit up unless we believe it. Come forward with your own address and details. If true we’ll print them. If not we’ll forward you a savage from Fiji.’

  Evacuation caused such a great disruption to the British education system that on 28 October 1939 Earl de la Warr, President of the Board of Education, said, ‘We cannot afford as a nation to let three-quarters of a million grow up as little barbarians, and the government have not the slightest intention of doing so.’

  Mass Observation was inundated with stories similar to John Marshall’s. Two Blackpool landladies were quoted as saying, ‘If you say two words to them they turn around and swear at you. I’ve seen a lot of dogs with better manners.’

  ‘Carve their initials on the sideboard. Wrote all over the wall. Eat their food on the floor. Broke half the china.’

  But it was not just the evacuees’ hosts who had cause for complaint or who could recount ‘atrocity’ stories. The wife of a Romford hairdresser, evacuated at the beginning of the war with her children, recounted her experiences to an observer from Mass Observation: ‘They had to share a verminous bedroom with a young married woman and her baby. The window was broken and the door loose, and before long everyone in the room had influenza. The baby developed whooping cough and kept the rest of them awake at night. The younger child of the hairdresser’s wife caught some sort of vermin in her hair and had to have it cut off. The landlord and landlady were drunkards and beat their children.

  ‘The woman couldn’t stand it any longer and came home. Observer met her in the street, and she said, “I’d rather be bombed to bits than go back again. Not at any price will I leave my home again. It’s taught me a lesson.”’

  Another mother complained, ‘My boy is sharing a bed, single, with an improperly washed coalman.’

  To establish the truth was nigh on impossible, as a schoolteacher evacuated to Brighton found out: ‘The first week of evacuation was unbearable. The rumours of lousy, dirty, ill-behaved children bandied about Brighton were exasperating. We knew that 90 per cent of the children were well behaved and happy. But the only stories regaled to me were of the horrors of the wild London children.’

  The majo
rity of complaints that Mass Observation received about evacuation concerned ‘dirty, diseased or ill-mannered children’. Bed-wetting was a particular problem and one of the major faults found with evacuee children, ‘regardless of the fact that it is a form of nervousness . . . brought on under the unaccustomed conditions of evacuation’. But with a little sympathy and understanding it was relatively easy to cure: ‘Edna, seven, the eldest, wet her bed every night, but didn’t last night, a result of being given a sweet instead of lemonade at night.’

  Much of the trouble, however, was due to social and class differences, as a Mass Observer from Bexhill-on-Sea reported: ‘The main problems between evacuees and hosts arise from mixing up families on different social levels. One case which struck me was of a woman putting a parcel of fish and chips on her host’s polished table.’

  With the debate on evacuation still waging fiercely in Parliament and the press, Picture Post, in its edition of 18 November, sought to present a more balanced view. It pointed out that mistakes had occurred, ‘but to carry out a social revolution such as this in four days without a hitch would be a miracle’. Moreover, ‘without denying faults, without defending anyone, it must be acknowledged that the whole country rallied amazingly to pull the scheme through’. Where difficulties had arisen it was because ‘never before have town and country been thrown so closely together, or rich and poor found themselves in such intimate contact’. And to remedy this, ‘understanding and patience is needed on both sides’.

  Even before the article appeared, parents had started to bring their children back to the towns and cities. Picture Post sternly warned against it: ‘they have deliberately taken their children back to danger. The fact that raids did not come in the first weeks of war is no reason for false security. Devastating air-raids may be very near.’

  Concluding its survey, the magazine admitted, ‘the present scheme has its weaknesses. But one fact remains – evacuation is essential. Somehow, between us all, we have got to make it work.’

  But there was another and a much brighter side to the evacuation coin. Queen Elizabeth, on one of her visits to evacuated families, called on Mrs Bridge, the wife of an electrical engineer in the Royal Navy. At her home in Birdham, near Chichester, Mrs Bridge had eighteen children to look after, seven of her own and eleven evacuees. She began her day at 5am, cooking eighteen breakfasts of porridge. Then she sent the children to school, where they got lunch. Every other evening each child had a hot bath. The children did their homework in one room, and played games in another. ‘A wonderful woman’, was the Queen’s comment.

  Queen Elizabeth visits evacuated children ‘somewhere in Sussex’, 8 November 1939. The Queen later sent a personal message of appreciation to those who had taken in evacuees: ‘By your sympathy you have earned the gratitude of those to whom you have shown hospitality, & by your readiness to serve you have helped the State in a work of great value.’

  And among the thousands of letters that Picture Post received on the subject there was one from Mrs E.A. Hemming of Great King Street, Hockley, Birmingham, who wrote, ‘My son, just six years old, has been evacuated to Monmouth, South Wales. I went to see him on Sunday, and I can’t really express my gratitude and how much I appreciate the kindness shown to him and myself in the wonderful way in which we were welcomed. I didn’t think there was so much kindness in this world. If you could see the smiling faces in Monmouth, it would do you a world of good.’

  And a middle-aged couple in Kettering told the magazine that they had always wanted children, and now, at last they had them: ‘They scream and race about the place and yesterday the little girl was sick on the drawing room carpet. But that’s what we have always wanted. Thank God for our little evacuees!’

  Fear of devastating air raids brought about the mass slaughter of domestic animals in the first few days of the war. Some estimates put the number of animals destroyed at 2,000,000, but the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) calculated that around 200,000 dogs had been put down. In the East End of London there was a ‘secret burial-ground’ near excavations for a Tube extension. According to the Sunday Express, 80,000 animal carcasses were buried there in one night. As well as the danger from air raids, many animal lovers had their pets put down because they feared there would be no food for them anyway. Thousands of others claimed that there had been a Government announcement ordering the compulsory destruction of cats and dogs. For those pets retained by their owners, the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) offered gas-proof kennels at £4 each, while gas masks for dogs retailed at £9 a time. In London’s Hyde Park, the Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee put up a large number of white posts, with leads and chains, for dog owners to attach their pets before going down into the park’s trench shelters.

  Writing to the Topical Times, Mr E.J. Foster of 2 Hazel Avenue, North Shields came up with his own solution to the problem of how to protect pets in gas attacks, earning himself five shillings (25p) in the process: ‘In wartime, a grand way to stop pet birds (budgies, canaries &c) from being gassed is to wrap a wet towel around the cage and so exclude all poison gas. Another way is to put the cage in the bathroom and close all windows and door. Then turn on the hot taps and so fill the room with steam. The steam keeps away all gas which may seep in.’

  London Zoo evacuated some of its animals, including the elephants and pandas, to Whipsnade. Others, especially the whole collection of poisonous and constrictor snakes and black-widow spiders, were given a lethal dose of chloroform by their keepers. The aquarium, which if it had been hit by bombs would have released 200,000 gallons of water, was emptied and used as a storehouse for newsprint and paper. During air-raid alerts that autumn and winter, posses of keepers at London Zoo and at the Scottish Zoological Park at Edinburgh were armed with Lee Enfield rifles with instructions to shoot any larger flesh-eating animals which might escape in the bombing and be a danger to the public.

  But some animals were in danger themselves, as the Daily Express reported on 23 October:

  WATCH YOUR CATS – THIEVES ARE BUSY

  Watch your cats. Thieves have been busy in London since the war began stealing them – especially Persians.

  An animal welfare authority said yesterday that the thefts appear to be organized. There is a shortage of cat pelts in the fur trade.

  A monkey family proud of the sandbag defences in front of the cage at London Zoo. Larger animals had been evacuated to Whipsnade, and after the Zoo reopened on 15 September 1939, its Californian sea lions were sent ‘on loan to the National Zoo Park, Washington, for the duration of the war’.

  A month later a Hampstead cleaner had heard the rumour: ‘You know what they’re doing with all them cats what vanishes? They use the skins for lining British Warms [overcoats], and they boil the fat down for margarine or something. They do say there is cats in pies.’

  A month before Armistice Day, Picture Post published a letter from Mrs Stelfex of Broadoaks Road, Flixton, Manchester: ‘The Cenotaph here is desolate and flowerless. Men hurry by and do not raise their hats. What is going to happen on 11 November this year? To have the usual two minutes silence in honour of those who died in the Great War would be a paradox when lives are still being given in the same cause . . . Yet we can’t just forget our 1914–1918 heroes.’

  Picture Post answered Mrs Stelfex: ‘There will be no service at the Cenotaph this year, in all probability, because crowding together into a public place is forbidden in war-time. Question of silence is still being considered. There is no danger of the men of 1914–1918 being forgotten.’

  Officially, there was no two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day 1939 but on the first stroke of 11am, traffic came to a voluntary standstill and passers-by stood bare-headed until two minutes had elapsed. At the Cenotaph, wreaths were laid on behalf of the King and Queen, followed by the chiefs of staff, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, General Sir Edmund Ironside and Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall on behalf of the fighting forces. Then, a French
matelot and a Polish staff officer laid wreaths on behalf of Britain’s allies. To mark the anniversary, King George and President Lebrun exchanged telegrams. And in Paris, the Grenadier Guards took part in France’s commemoration of the Armistice at the tomb of the Unknown Warrior at the Arc de Triomphe.

  Picture Post wrote eloquently of the scene in Whitehall: ‘all through day, a crowd of men and women stand around the wreathladen Cenotaph . . . In the grey November light, with their sombre clothes and gas-mask cases, they look pathetic, almost like ghosts from another age. Some come to lay flowers, some come to look at the wreaths, some come to stand for a moment and think about the men who died – the men whose sons are fighting in a new war now.’

  That same day Queen Elizabeth broadcast to the women of Britain and the Empire: ‘War has at all times called for the fortitude of women. Even in other days, when it was an affair of the fighting forces only, wives and mothers at home suffered constant anxiety for their dear ones and too often the misery of bereavement . . . Now this has all changed, for we, no less than men, have real and vital work to do . . . All this, I know, has meant sacrifice, and I would say to those who are feeling the strain: Be assured that in carrying on your home duties and meeting all those worries cheerfully you are giving real service to your country. You are taking your part in keeping the home front, which will have dangers of its own, stable and strong . . .’