Evacuees found the intense darkness of a country night alarming; but for country people the blackout brought little change. It may have encouraged them to stay indoors at home after nightfall, but it also stirred deep feelings, evocatively described by the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, who lived in Kent:
The moon has gone, and nothing but stars and three planets remain within our autumn sky. Every evening I go my rounds like some night-watchman to see that the black-out is complete. It is. Not a chink reveals the life going on beneath those roofs, behind those blinded windows; love, lust, death, birth, anxiety, even gaiety. All is dark; concealed. Alone I wander, no one knowing that I prowl. It makes me feel like an animal, nocturnal, stealthy. I might be a badger or a fox …
I think of all the farms and cottages spread over England, sharing this curious protective secrecy, where not even a night light may show from the room of a dying man or a woman in labour … I wander round, and towards midnight discover that the only black-out I notice is the black-out of my soul. So deep a grief and sorrow that they are not expressible in words.
One magazine commentator inadvertently made himself ridiculous to later generations by remarking that ‘the countryman is accustomed to going about in the dark, and, alternatively, to staying in at nightfall’, then adding:
Townsmen at present may still be, on the whole, a race of gropers after nightfall; but they are undaunted gropers, and will develop the sense which enables them to find their way in the dark.
Even undaunted gropers found nocturnal sounds disturbing. The mellow hoots of a tawny owl were enough to scare East Enders witless, and, as winter came on, the dry triple bark of a dog fox on his nuptial round, or the scream of a vixen mating, might terrify anyone who did not know what creature was creating the disturbance. The boy from Surrey who found delight in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors remarked on ‘the weird, cackling laugh’ of grouse: ‘Had I been a stranger walking on the moor at night, I might have thought it was some evil spirit leering from the darkness.’ There was an awful lot to learn. One boy who had never been in a car before was driven up to his foster-home by the vicar, and noticed a strange diagram on the knob of the gear lever. When he reached the house, he reported that the driver had a swastika in his car – with the result that the local bobby was alerted, and went round to interrogate the priest.
Hardly any cottages or farms had telephones, and soon communication became even more difficult, for, under the guise of maintenance, General Post Office engineers began cutting subscribers off so that most of the system, such as it was, could be reserved for essential purposes of defence. Householders who lost their line were compensated, but had no right of appeal. Telegrams were much used, and boys could earn useful pocket money by conveying them to their destinations – 7d for a bicycle trip out to a distant farm, 2d for a shorter ride. If a message contained bad news, the postmaster (who, of course, had read it) would tell the boy not to wait for an answer. Besides the difficulties of communication, another annoyance was the suspension of weather forecasts, which were suppressed indefinitely for fear that they might somehow help the enemy.
Many boys turned out to be natural country lads. One, from Finsbury Park, in north London, and from what he described as ‘the sort of street people lived in when they couldn’t afford a slum’, was translated to the head gardener’s house on an estate in Essex, where he and two friends quickly attached themselves to the gamekeeper ‘like leeches’.
Rough shooting in the mornings, rabbiting in the afternoon, we learned more about the countryside in six months than we ever learned before or since. Can you imagine an eleven-year-old kid from a London slum recognising the flight of a snipe, feeding pheasants and partridges on their nests, handling a .410 shotgun, gutting and skinning rabbits, moles or anything else that came within range?
Few wartime children can have been luckier than the boys of Dulwich College Preparatory School, in south London, which was closely allied to the college of the same name; for their headmaster (and sole proprietor of the school) John Leakey was a man of exceptional resource and determination. In 1938, expecting London to be heavily bombed the moment war broke out, he decided to construct an evacuation camp of his own in the grounds of a manor house owned by his father-in-law at Coursehorn, near Cranbrook in Kent. There he built six big wooden huts and put up bell tents.
The boys, aged from eight to fourteen, loved being in the country. They helped farmers, rode around the lanes on bicycles and learned to read Ordnance Survey maps. Soon they became extremely fit, and Leakey ‘felt a great surge of life and activity pulsing through the camp’. In spite of flu and German measles, they survived one of the coldest winters in living memory, and then revelled in the lovely summer weather of 1940 – until the fall of France suddenly rendered Kent unsafe.
In an urgent search for another site, Leakey’s wife Muff explored possible houses in the West Country, but all were too expensive or had already been requisitioned by the Government. Hearing of a hotel in the far north-west of Wales, at Betws-y-Coed, among the mountains of Snowdonia, she sped thither, only to find that it too had been requisitioned. Then her luck changed, and she hit on the Royal Oak Hotel, in the same village, which she managed to rent for £1000 a year, the landlord to retain the bar.
On a baking hot day a special train brought the whole school from Kent to Betws, only to find the hotel still partially occupied – but as soon as each room became vacant, the boys stripped it to make space for their own furniture. When a new scare flared up – that the Germans would seize Ireland and invade England from the west, through the Welsh passes – bloodhounds were trained for tracking parachutists or other infiltrators. Joining the defence initiative, the Leakeys worked with the Home Guard to hide caches of emergency rations in remote caves, and the boys were briefed to make for prearranged rendezvous in the mountains.
Between lessons, they lived a wonderfully free outdoor life, walking, cycling, fishing, going for picnics and rock-climbing on Tryfan (one of Snowdon’s neighbouring 3000-foot peaks). Parties went out into nearby Forestry Commission plantations to brash the lower branches of young conifers; they also dammed a stream to make a pond for fire-fighting, and themselves put out two forest fires. So useful was their work that at the end of the war the Commission named a new plantation after the school.
They helped the war effort even more directly by collecting sphagnum moss (which is four times as absorbent as cotton wool and contains iodine, making it ideal for use at forward dressing stations, as it can be applied to wounds without being sterilized). One of the boys reported, ‘We are collecting stagnant moss for use in the hospitals’. Their foraging also brought in male fern, foxgloves and nettles (useful for medicaments and dye), and rose hips for the production of syrup rich in vitamin C. One evening Leakey took some of the boys into the graveyard of St Mary’s Church and, as they sat among the ancient tombstones, continued his reading of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: an experience they never forgot. Many of the poet’s rolling cadences – ‘Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,/The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep’ – stayed with them all their lives.
As in Kent, the boys became self-reliant and tremendously fit (even though contaminated now and then by new evacuees from Liverpool), and Leakey derived enormous satisfaction from comparing the ‘splendid specimens’ which he had at Betws with the white-faced children with dark lines under their eyes who had remained in London. Later in the war, when the threat of invasion had evaporated and the Blitz on London had died down, the Betws boys went south on overcrowded trains for their holidays, but always rejoiced when they returned to the mountains.
The Government had realized that, in the event of war, it would not be possible to evacuate all schoolchildren to private homes, and the Camps Act of April 1939 prompted the creation of the National Camps Corporation. The aim was to build fifty camps in attractive, wooded country, but in the event only thirty-six were completed, thirty-one of them in Engl
and and Wales, five in Scotland. Designed by the distinguished Scottish architect T. S. Tait, each could accommodate 350 children in huts made of Canadian red cedar.
One of the first was at Colomendy, near Mold in North Wales, where construction began on two sites, upper and lower, in April 1939, on the side of a lovely valley. Known to its inmates as ‘Collo’, the camp was created as a safe refuge for 170 boys and 125 girls from schools in Liverpool, some twenty miles to the north. Many of the inmates were scared by tales of Peg-Leg, the resident lame ghost said to haunt a particular bed in one of the huts; but agreeable recreations included exploration of the local caves and ascents of Moel Famau, the highest hill in the area, whose bare slopes were alleged to be alive with snakes, and from whose summit the fires raging in Liverpool after big air raids were clearly visible, lighting up clouds all over the sky. One girl remembered the peace and quiet of Colomendy as ‘absolute bliss’, but she was terrified for her family who had remained in the city, and she kept writing letters home without knowing if the house was still standing.
Another successful camp, in a less dramatic setting, was Kennylands, near Reading in Berkshire, which took in the 300 boys of Beal Grammar School from Ilford. The camp’s setting, in twenty acres of land, gave scope for gardening, pig-rearing, potato-picking and bee-keeping, as well as for adventures in the surrounding woods, which the boys loved. At school many of them were inspired by the teaching of William Finch, a talented artist and writer who came from Lowestoft and created a unique pictorial record of the east coast fishing industry. On 30 September 1940 good reports of Kennylands attracted a visit from King George and Queen Elizabeth, during which the King startled his retinue by scratching a pig’s back.
Many schools moved out en bloc, among them the girls of the Royal School in Bath, who were welcomed to the grandeur of Longleat by the owner, Lord Bath, and given the run of the Elizabethan house, including the library, with its priceless collection of books and manuscripts. The boys and staff of Malvern College, whose buildings were requisitioned in September 1940, also landed on their feet, for the Duke of Marlborough offered them the use of his vast home, Blenheim Palace, on the edge of Woodstock, in Oxfordshire. Indoors, screens were built round the walls to protect precious tapestries, and the state rooms, together with the 180-foot-long library, became dormitories. In a splendidly sustained burst of energy, the masters dug a half-mile trench to accommodate a new gas main from Oxford.
Did any prep school have worse luck than St Peter’s at Broadstairs? When Kent became too dangerous, the boys were evacuated to the relative safety of Shobrooke House, near Crediton in Devon; but during the night of 23 January 1945 the building caught fire, and pupils and staff alike, trapped on balconies, were forced to abseil down makeshift ropes made from torn-up sheets and blankets into six inches of snow. One of the boys, Peter de la Billière, then eight, never forgot that nightmare:
The sheets were so old that the strips kept tearing through. As every third or fourth boy went over the edge, there would come a yell, followed by a dull thud – and another rope was needed … As we waited on the balcony, the sound of the blaze rose from a muted crackling to a roar, and suddenly the whole [central] dome, with its little bell cupola above it, collapsed downwards into the well of the stairs, sending a fantastic eruption of sparks into the sky.
One matron and three boys were killed, and another, who lived, fell onto an iron spike which speared his throat. Peter survived physically unscathed, but was left with a horror of fires, and for the rest of his life has made it his first priority, on arriving at a hotel, to check the escape facilities.
Altogether the evacuation from cities and towns displaced nearly four million people. In the first three days of the official exodus one and a half million left London – 827,000 schoolchildren, 524,000 mothers and children under five, 103,000 teachers and other helpers, 13,000 pregnant women and 7000 disabled persons. It is thought that another two million people made their own arrangements: some settled with relatives or in safely situated hotels, and thousands emigrated (or at least sent their children) to the United States, Canada, South Africa or Australia. Under ‘Plan Yellow’ more than 20,000 civil servants were moved to hotels in seaside resorts and spa towns.
When the expected massed air attacks failed to materialize, foster-families complained vociferously that they were giving sanctuary to people whose houses or flats were standing intact and empty. Thousands of city-dwellers returned to their homes – and none were keener to go back than the mothers who had accompanied their children into the sticks but had been disgusted by the lack of facilities (mainly shops and picture houses) that the countryside offered. During the relatively calm period that became known as the Phoney War, which lasted into the spring of 1940, it seemed that the whole upheaval had been unnecessary – a huge waste of time and effort, and the cause of untold anxiety. Yet many evacuees took root where they had landed, and grew up to be country people. Martin Wainwright, later Northern Editor of the Guardian, reckoned that ‘for all the initial scares about vermin, disease and incomprehensible Cockney or Geordie, the close-knit world of Britain’s villages benefited from this fresh blood’. Others agreed that the great migration brought positive social benefits. A leader in Country Life entitled ‘Converting the Townsman’ declared:
The old drift to the cities has not only been stemmed but reversed … It is a vital matter that we should make it impossible, when the immediate crisis of the war is past, either to relapse again into indifference or to resume the old antipathy between town and country.
The least fortunate victims of the mass evacuation were domestic pets. Alarm about the possibility of immediate air attack gripped people so fiercely that during the four days after 3 September 1939 a colossal number of pets were put down. Some were killed by their owners, who brought them to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for burial; others were destroyed by vets or welfare organizations such as the Canine Defence League and the PDSA, the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals. The slaughter – by captive bolt, gas, electricity or lethal injection – was appallingly rapid; corpses of dogs and cats were soon piled high in and around the killing premises. Thousands of carcasses were incinerated, others dumped and buried on wasteland. The RSPCA gave the total as 200,000, but one later estimate was 750,000, and another 2.5 million – a vastly greater number than that of British civilians (60,000) killed in the whole of the war.
The panic seems to have had multiple causes. A rumour had gone round that it was compulsory to get rid of all domestic animals; but this was officially denied – and the idea was refuted by many newspapers, including The Times. Another rumour suggested that Hitler would try to introduce rabies into England, in the hope that the disease would spread from domestic animals to farm stock – but even at the time this must have seemed far-fetched. The immediate trigger was a notice, Advice to Animal Owners, given out by the National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee (a unit of the Home Office), which recommended that, ‘if at all possible’, animals should be taken out into the country ‘in advance of an emergency’, but if they could not be placed in the care of neighbours, ‘it really is kindest to have them destroyed’. Memorial notices, feline and canine, began to appear in newspapers. Bereaved cat-lovers immediately predicted a disastrous increase in the rat and mouse population.
Determined efforts were made to save as many pets as possible – and pre-eminent among the rescuers was Nina, wife of the 13th Duke of Hamilton, who led a crusade to provide animals with alternative accommodation. First she opened her house north of Regent’s Park as a clearing station; then she created a sanctuary at her country home, Ferne House in Wiltshire, where 200 dogs settled in the coach house, and 200 cats pitched up in the hangar on the private aerodrome. Such was her energy and compassion that she became known as ‘that lady of the dogs’.
Four
Braced for Invasion
This fortress built by Nature for herself,
Against inf
ection and the hand of war.
Shakespeare, Richard II
Big, black capitals stand out starkly from the Ministry of Information’s poster: ‘If the INVADER Comes’. When the Phoney War ended, with the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk at the end of May 1940 and the capitulation of France in June, fear of a German invasion increased sharply. Within days of the fall of Paris on 14 June Hitler’s armies were on the Channel coast and starting to mass for Operation Seelöwe (Sealion), the assault on Britain. In his Directive No. 16, issued on 16 July, the Führer stated his intentions with characteristic subtlety:
As England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, still shows no willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare, and if necessary to carry out, a landing operation against her. The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English mother country as a base from which the war against Germany can be continued, and, if it should be necessary, to occupy it completely.
His Army Commander, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, who was to take charge of Britain if the invasion succeeded, had clear ideas about his treatment of the conquered people. In his Directive No. 5 he proclaimed: ‘The able-bodied male population between the ages of seventeen and forty-five will … be interned and dispatched to the Continent with a minimum of delay.’ There were also rumours that all young British men were to be sterilized. In his Proclamation to the People of England von Brauchitsch stated: ‘I warn all civilians that if they undertake active operations against the German forces, they will be condemned to death inexorably.’
Our Land at War Page 5