by Ann Howard
I took my faithful old pushbike and a quantity of rabbit traps with me. Rabbit skins went up to astronomical prices (to us) as the army wanted the fur to make soldier’s felt ‘slouch’ hats. There were plenty of rabbits around Morawa. Also the townspeople always bought the skinned and gutted rabbits from us for 9 pence each, probably because we were the ‘little evacuees.’ I still have the fondest of memories for Morawa, particularly Hope Granville, the milkmaid and her horse ‘Baldy’ for they made us more welcome than anyone, if that were possible.
War news from Britain meant further anxiety for Australians, many who had close ties. They watched as the British authorities, fearing incendiary bombs and poisonous gas, acted fast. The children were Britain’s future and they had to be moved away from high density urban centres. Australians wondered what would be the fate of their friends and relatives in Britain and whether they would have to face evacuation too. They read about Britain’s ‘Evacuate Forthwith,’ order, Thursday, 31 August, 1939. In a quasi-military exercise called ‘Operation Pied Piper’, 1.5 million women and children were evacuated within three days. In the original Pied Piper story, the children never returned, to punish the townspeople for not paying the Pied Piper for rescuing them from a plague of rats. When the young English evacuees did return after scant contact with their birth parents during their formative years, they seemed more like an older sister or brother versions of themselves.
In 1940, after France fell, when coastal towns were perceived as stepping stones for invasion, more people were moved and again in March 1944, when flying bombs threatened London and the Southeast - 3.5 million evacuees in total. Defence Regulations informed house occupiers: ‘…You are required to provide until further notice…accommodation, consisting of shelter and reasonable access to water supply and sanitary conveniences for the persons hereby assigned… Should you fail to carry out this requirement, you will commit an offence.’
Hosts were paid a small sum. As town children met country children, some enjoyed leaving poverty stricken tenements for the good food and bluebell woods of the gentle English countryside, and did not want to return home. They were all bewildered at first, their fathers gone to fight, their mothers left weeping at the station. They found themselves in a strange place, where people spoke with a different accent and could be hostile. Signposts and names of stations had been removed, to confuse invading forces. Some children were welcomed with warmth and understanding and kept in touch with their host family for years after the war. Sadly some children were badly treated, resulting in post war prosecutions. They could not bear to visit their evacuee’ home’ again, so deep was their trauma.
Australians read British evacuation was ‘a dreadful muddle which has ‘done wrong’ to a very large number of children.’ Six months after the first mass evacuation, 43% of unaccompanied children and 86% of those accompanied by mothers, had returned home. Out of 30,000 children evacuated from Sheffield, all but 1,500 had returned by August 1941. This meant large numbers of children remained in or returned to danger areas without education, as teachers could not be in two places at once. In November 1939, there were 80,000 children without schools. Juvenile crime escalated in the ruins, laying the seeds of post war criminal gangs. The film I Believe in You with Cecil Parker as a probation officer in Britain’s 1950s shows hardened young criminals. Their childhood had been seeing dead bodies, some of whom they had known, before they turned to looting and smashing up houses which had not been bombed. The British Government announced the end of official evacuation on 7 September, 1944. One day later, the first V2 rocket fell on London and a whole new wave of people moved out of the city.
The interwar years had been quiet for most Australian families, mowing lawns in front of their Californian bungalows, housewives spent up to six hours a day preparing food, which arrived at their house by van, cart or bicycle. Only 4.4% of women were employed outside the home in 1933. Walls were cream and green. Tea sets and vases were often Japanese imports. Who would have guessed the country would be in turmoil for fear of an invasion by the ultranational Japanese Imperial Army.
As part of the war effort, before Japan entered the war, guns were sent off to England. Stan Gratte writes about his father, who was in the rifle club in Geraldton:
…the rifle clubs handed in their rifles and these were all sent off to England, a move which was later regretted by the authorities. At the time we were only at war with Germany and Italy.
About 8,000 women and children were evacuated from Malaya and Singapore and about 3, 000 from Hong Kong, mostly to Australia. Appalled at the speed and brutality of the Japanese advance, civilians had to make decisions: were they safe on the home front sending men, money and supplies overseas, accepting refugees, ‘doing their bit’, or in danger of losing their own country?
By January 1940, Melbourne factories formerly making lipstick cases were now making munitions. In September, the British prison ship Dunera docked, filled with Germans, Austrians and Italians fleeing Hitler, some highly educated, but accused of being spies, after an horrific voyage from Britain, after which they arrived pale and emaciated, to be interned at Hay. Newspaper reports of mistreatment by the Pioneer Core running the ship, demonstrated British authorities in so much confusion that the friend was confused with the foe.
Australia with a population of 6,898,541 accepted 15,000 political refugees from Europe. Even before war was declared, children were being moved about the globe in significant numbers, many Jewish children already being rescued. Horace Goldsmith, on kindertransport from Germany to England, who was treated very well in England and eventually settled in Australia, was just one small child suddenly parted from everyone he knew:
Yes, it is now time for me to go away! We are going early in the morning. We go by train on a long journey to Hamburg, where the harbour and the sea is. Papa is taking me. It is a long, long journey in the train and when we get there at night we go to a big hall where there are many children and Papa picks a big boy to look after me for when we get on to the ship tomorrow. That night we sleep together, Papa and I in a hotel and before we go to sleep I say to Papa, ‘don’t come to the ship to see me off, it will only upset you!’ I was nine years old in December 1938. All my family perished, even my grandmother who was so kind and used to make me little cakes.
The typical laconic ‘she’ll be right’ parents had to be frantic to send their young children long distances, especially when they could not communicate with them easily. By 1939, Australia was seventh in the world in telephone ownership, but farms and small towns, where children were usually sent, were without telephones in the 1940s, although some shared party lines. Parents taking or sending children to destinations on long journeys by cars, trucks or trains, returned home and waited impatiently on letters, staring at small, empty beds and praying that their son or daughter was alright.
Meryl Hanford lived at Neutral Bay, in a beautiful house by the water:
My father, a boat builder was sent to Garden Island to work in the dry dock. People were worried that it would be a Japanese target after Pearl Harbour.
Peter Grose, author of the ground-breaking book A Very Rude Awakening recounts that his father’s two unmarried brothers had urged him as a married man with family responsibilities, to stay home:
In January 1942, he decided that Sydney was too close to the invading Japanese for my mother and five month old me. The three of us travelled by train to my Nan’s house in Adelaide, where my mother and I were told to stay put until the war ended. My father enlisted in the army on February 3, 1942 at Collinswood in South Australia, naming my mother as next of kin.
The same concerns were being felt in New Zealand. Jane Putt was a child on a New Zealand farm:
At the farm in the valley of North Island where I spent my childhood, electricity was put on in 1927 and by the time I was born in 1929, we did have a phone. This was because we just happened to be in the path of the lines from the power station to the towns. Some farmers waited years
to be put on. Young boys were trained as runners, to get the message to farmers if there was an invasion.
Sylvia Palmer gives an example of confused thinking about safe locations:
My husband, who died recently aged 85, told me his three cousins, Karen, June and Thelma Hocking were at Port Kembla, and were sent to my husband’s family at Little Hartley, 20 kilometres southeast of Lithgow. My father, sister and brothers all worked at the Small Arms factory - we lived close by it. I don’t remember people being worried about being attacked from the air, but we used to play in a hole in a paddock, which we called ‘The dungeon’, which I realise now was an air raid shelter. We had AA guns on Scenic Hill and at South Bowenfels.
A sequence of turning points like the decisive Battle of Midway changed the appraisal of danger and external threat and children quickly began returning home, only to be sent away again, when the threat returned. The confusion felt at the time is apparent all these years later. Joan Craymer sees things in perspective:
I understand my friend Lynton Bradford did get in touch and give you a short account of his bike riding experience with the damage in the Eastern Suburbs. The funny thing was, it had not previously occurred to me that the reason for him going to live at Gerringong with his Aunt Grace was to keep him safe, I had always thought it was because his mother became ill and died about that time, but now it all makes sense.
Bevan Walls only became aware of why he and his mother had ‘a holiday’ at The Oaks as he read Peter Grose’s book A Very Rude Awakening, a few years ago.
We lived at Ashfield at the time and I had always known I was three years old when we went to stay at a farmhouse owned by two unpleasant old ladies. There was no one else there other than my mother, and dad came to visit at weekends. At home my dad had put timber screens on all our windows so we could have the lights on and still have air, or maybe they were to reduce the impact of a bomb blast. We had an air raid shelter in the back yard shared with the neighbours, though I don’t remember going into it other than when my dad was growing mushrooms after the war. The open spaces at the farm were pleasant and I wandered around outside, playing with pieces of timber off cuts and getting stung by stinging nettles. Mealtimes were not at all pleasant as I remember being locked in their pantry for not eating my dinner, not by mother, but by one of the mean old ladies. I still have a vague memory of the railway station, probably Camden. I don’t think we stayed long, a few weeks maybe but I vividly remember my night time fears at Ashfield of imagining someone might walk through the back door at any moment. I can only imagine I heard too much talk of the possibilities of a Japanese invasion. That fear remained with me for many years and into adulthood. There were also the regular reminders of the war: ration cards, dad making his beer, and the regular testing of the local air raid siren at midday. I also remember dad taking me to see the searchlights scanning the night sky near the Heads and the boom gate across the Harbour when we went on the ferry to Manly. I can well imagine we might have even heard the exploding torpedo at our house.
In any war situation, information is unreliable or non-existent, because of censorship, broken lines of communication and no means of verification. News filtered through and decisions had to be made. To say people were uninformed is an understatement.
Who made the decisions? If it was a woman on her own with children, because her husband was overseas fighting or because she was widowed or single, she had difficulties in making a choice, because she was not used to being allowed to make decisions so large and important. In the Depression, women were criticised for working outside the home. Social mores deemed women ill-equipped for anything other than homemaking and child bearing in the forties. They were subservient, with exciting career opportunities closed except to a few lucky, daring or rich girls. Trying to protect their children when it was not economically viable to relocate meant that women applied for housekeeping jobs, which did not always work out.
Peter Bates:
I was born in 1936. My mother and I went to a rented house in Armidale and stayed there two or three years. Armidale was pretty small in those days. Initially we went up to a farm where my mother was supposed to be some sort of governess but that didn’t work out, so we rented a house. My father, who had been in the first world war joined up in the second. I was an only child. My father visited us once or twice. We were happy there. We got to know people. It was pretty basic. I remember the taps wouldn’t run hot for ages.
Women alone also had economic constraints. More than half the population owned or were buying their own house by the end of the forties, the rest were either living with their parents or paying rent. Prices for basic foods in the 1940s were approximately: a four pound loaf of bread, five pence, a quart of milk, seven pence, (sugar was impossible to get), butter one shilling and seven pence a pound, potatoes a shilling a pound, with tea scarce. In the 2nd AIF, before they embarked the rate of pay for a married man with wife and child was up to nine shillings, after they embarked, it was up to eleven shillings. Soldiers had to agree to a dependant’s allowance, which was three shillings a day for the first dependant and one shilling a day for each additional dependant. Grounds for cancelling payment to a wife were misconduct: living with another man, giving birth to a child by another man, prostitution, drunkenness and neglect of his children. Compulsory deductions could be made if a soldier was missing or a prisoner of war.
Some women had to have a job, and the war meant there were jobs available. They could not work and care for their children, so for the first time, they looked to relatives and friends for help in child caring. Their relatives in some cases where themselves just scraping a living after the Depression.
Miriam Bates was sent from Lidcombe with her two brothers because the family lived near a possible target:
We went to Penrith, to mum’s brother’s place for a few months as my parents were worried about the munitions factory near us at Lidcombe. My father was a policeman and had a house attached to the station. We used to go there for holidays and I loved it there. After the Depression, my uncle never had much money and he used to collect wood. I’d ride in the wheelbarrow out to get the wood and have to walk back. He’d put the wood in the back of his 1927 Chevrolet, sell it and use the money to buy food. Mum used to take him up packets and packets of Weet-Bix. I can’t say I was frightened about the war, although one of our uncles, a stretcher bearer, was killed. He was only eighteen. When we had a practice air raid warning at school, we had to lie on the floor and cover our heads and I was a bit scared then. Afterwards we moved to Strathfield and my father built a wonderful air raid shelter in the back garden, with interior lighting. We loved it and used to play in there. Then it rained and rained and the shelter flooded. Our toys were ruined!
There was no equal pay for women. In 1941, the ACTU called three conferences to deal with the problem of equal pay, - raising the women’s basic rate of pay, which was still only 54% of the male base rate.
In the First World War, women had to struggle with wearing long skirts while driving ambulances, and were disallowed lipstick in case they inflamed the male patient’s ardour! That war changed a lot of these perceptions. In WWII, as the men were drafted overseas, the Women’s Land Army took over running the farms. One in three workers at munitions, aircraft and shipbuilding works was female by 1943. At this time, the number of women in banking and insurance increased by 31.3 per cent, in rail and air transport by 68.6 per cent. Women in the services had a ‘sisterhood’ and were rarely alone.
Kev Murphy and his mother fled to Umina, a short train trip from Sydney:
On the night of the Japanese sub attack on Sydney Harbour, my mum, who had been instructed by my father (at the time encamped in the army in NQ prior to leaving for Egypt) to take me up to my maternal grandmother’s house at Umina on the Central Coast, so I might be safe from the expected Japanese landing in Sydney. Some twenty of my cousins had been given similar instructions from my aunts and uncles, but would take some weeks to get their �
��flight to safety’ effected. For me however, it was instantaneous obedience. My mother was in the Land Army and working sewing gaiters for the soldiers at the Ford motor factory off William Street, and straight away took me in to the city when she got the call in the afternoon. We had to overnight at the People’s Palace in Pitt Street as the last train to Woy Woy had gone. We had an upstairs room, with a window on the Harbourside. When the crackling of the guns and the flashing of the searchlights began, it disturbed mum so much she pulled me to the floor and we spent the evening under the single bed. In the morning we walked to Central station and caught the steam train to Woy Woy and out of harm’s way. At the time I was three years old and we lived in Stanmore.
Kev provides an insight into the mindset of the Sydneysiders:
Sydney’s population up to the 30s and through the war was heavily in the southern beaches and the eastern suburbs, with the borders of this ‘bowl’ the Harbour and the Georges and Parramatta Rivers and not too far into the west, protected by the Green Belt; south inhabitation versus north was likely five to one and the northern beaches were just a series of beachside camps visited by homesteaders from Lidcombe and Concord. There were probably twice as many people in the band stretching from Parramatta to Hornsby as there were on the northern beaches themselves. People in the south zone of Sydney did not go north until the Harbour Bridge was ready for traffic. Even then, growth was stagnant due to the Depression. So it was during the war, panic raged in the southeast. Even the Hills Districts, Bundanoon and Katoomba seemed safe to us in the southern sector of Sydney. It was us southerners who alone had to face the Japs. I well remember the barbed wire stretched along the beaches of Coogee and Maroubra and there were parts where railway sleepers had been embedded in the sand, running into the surf as if they would impede the Toyota and Datsun tanks coming ashore. I’ll bet the defence forces didn’t lay any impediments onwards from Harbord to Palm Beach although I didn’t set foot that way myself until the 50s. Of course, once the war was over, the balance in population quickly righted itself and the northern beaches occasioned the enormous growth we see today. ‘Our war’ was to be won or lost on the heights of Randwick, we reckoned. With that fuzzy thinking, our parents deemed us safe the moment we exited the reaches of the electric-train network. We were still at risk as far south as Port Kembla but all other points south, west and north (but - careful, don’t get too close to Newcastle) were safe as houses.