by Mike Brown
Although some of the changes that the war brought to the lives of children did not come about immediately (rationing, for example, only came in later, as the war dragged on), others had already been introduced before the outbreak of war, such as gas masks, or followed almost immediately, as with ID cards and the spread of Anderson shelters.
* Catchphrase of the contemporary comedian Rob Wilton.
TWO
Evacuation
As the threat of war had increased during in the late 1930s, the government had begun laying plans for evacuation. These directly affected children, especially those living in London, the industrial cities and the great ports.
There had been air raids on Britain in the First World War and people were very concerned about the danger they posed. In the summer of 1938, it was decided that, should war come, those least able to fend for themselves – children, the elderly and the disabled – should be evacuated from those places most under threat. In September, at the time of the Munich crisis, plans were drawn up splitting the country into three types of area: Evacuation; Neutral; and Reception. Evacuation areas were mainly those places where people were thought to be in the most danger of air attack, although some places were cleared of civilians to provide training areas for the forces. The first Evacuation areas included Greater London, the Medway towns, Merseyside, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Reception areas were safer parts to which evacuees – those being evacuated – would be taken; they were mainly rural areas such as Kent, East Anglia and Wales.
Schools were to be evacuated en masse, the children and their teachers moving all together to the same area, where they would usually share the neighbourhood school with the local children. Children from the same family would go together, with the younger ones going with the eldest’s school. Pre-school children were to be evacuated with their mothers.
On Monday 28 August 1939, before the summer holidays had actually ended, London schoolchildren went back to school to take part in an evacuation rehearsal. Many of the children had assembled by 6 am, carrying their kit. A government leaflet outlined what this should comprise: ‘a handbag or case containing the child’s gas mask, a change of under-clothing, night clothes, house shoes or plimsolls, spare stockings or socks, a toothbrush, a comb, towel, soap and face cloth, handkerchiefs; and, if possible, a warm coat or macintosh. Each child should bring a packet of food for the day.’ Every school had been given a number and had been told when to go to which railway station or where to board the coaches. The cost of the journey was paid for by the government.
On the morning of 31 August 1939, three days before war broke out, the order was given for the evacuation plans to be put into operation, and during the next four days nearly 1.9 million people were evacuated, including almost 1.5 million children, over half of whom were in school parties. Parents of schoolchildren were told when their children’s school would be leaving, although they did not learn the destination until after the children had got there; mothers of younger children were told where and when to assemble. From the London area alone 376,652 children and their teachers, 275,895 pre-school children and their mothers, 3,577 expectant mothers and 3,403 blind adults were transported out of the capital. Any operation involving these vast numbers could easily have lapsed into complete confusion but overall this phase of the operation was surprisingly successful.
Vivien Hatton was evacuated from Bermondsey
I was 9 years old when the war broke out, A few days beforehand I had been evacuated along with my older sister Audrey with her school, Aylwyn High School, to Worthing. I was terribly frightened. My mother made us sandwiches for the journey. We carried our gas masks round our necks and had a badge pinned to us to say who we were. We were billeted with a family I didn’t like, they were quite dirty – we arrived there about nine o’clock but were given no food, so we lay in bed and finished our sandwiches. I cried but my sister told me not to be such a baby.
We had some friends who were billeted with a Salvation Army couple, Mr and Mrs Crump, and they said they could arrange for us to transfer to them. The Billeting Officer said we were very ungrateful children.
On the children’s arrival at their destinations, the first real problems began to appear. It had not always been possible to transport schools to places where suitable, or even sufficient, school accommodation was available. The teachers set about putting things in order. Soon village halls and large buildings of all sorts had been put to use as temporary schoolrooms, and by Christmas almost all the evacuated children were receiving full-time education. At the beginning of the war Alan Miles, who was 9 at the time, was evacuated from New Cross to Brighton. His mother kept the letters he sent home, and they make a fascinating record. This is his first letter (spelling mistakes and all):
Dear Mum,
I am having a nice time. I went to school on Monday and in the prak [park] in the Afternoon. Do you know that I have tow [two] shillings and nine pence and I buot [bought] two commics one is Larks and the other is tip Top. I hop Tinker [his cat] is all right and reads this letter out which I am just going to write miow miow miow for the cat. Is dady making some more guns and I hop dady’s foot is better. Is mumy still finding the cat on my bed. Mrs bodmin went to the pictures and Enid and I went to fech Mrs bodmin and Mr bodmin.
Love from Alan
Another letter dated 2 July 1941 shows how contact with home was ensured – ‘I am at school writing this letter as every Wensday morning Londers [Londoners] have to write letters home.’
One particular problem sprang up in North Wales, where some children were placed with Welsh-speaking families, but with the ready adaptability of youth, many soon picked up enough Welsh to get by, and their schools arranged for Welsh to be included in their lessons.
The months that followed soon came to be known as the ‘phoney war’. Hitler had not expected Britain and France to go to war at this time and was not ready for a full-scale attack on them. Throughout the winter of 1939/40 the German U-boat assault on merchant shipping was pressed ahead, but on land and in the air almost nothing happened. The expected air raids failed to materialise and in Britain more civilians died in black-out traffic accidents than soldiers were killed by enemy action. Many evacuees were homesick, some had been hurriedly placed in the most unsuitable billets, dirty and insanitary, or with people unwilling or unable to look after them properly. Barbara Courtney from Nunhead remembers: ‘We were evacuated to Salisbury, you always tried to be nice, tried to please. The woman where my brother and I were billeted, she said she’d burnt the rice pudding. I said I didn’t mind, then I saw it – it was black. She cut all the bits off and put them on my plate. Her husband said, “You can’t make her eat that!”, but she said I’d said I liked it, so she made me.’
Many parents missed their children dreadfully, and as the precautions seemed to prove unnecessary, more and more evacuees came home – after only a few weeks the Minister of Health was advising mothers of young evacuees not to bring them back to the cities, but by Christmas nearly half of all evacuees had returned.
Alan Miles wrote home on 26 January 1940: ‘Mrs Gatehouse said to me that I am being moved but I do not want to move I want to come home. If you want to know why it is because I am getting a bit tired of being down here by my self and another thing is because I want to see my dear little Tinker. I think my teacher Mrs Howard has gone back and all my friends have gone back like Lawrence has gone back so that it is not very nice not to have friends.’
Sylvie Stevenson from Chingford, aged 4 when the war began, remembers:
I was evacuated for about two weeks, somewhere near Bedford. I’d never had cream before, and the lady said; ‘Would you like some cream?’ I said ‘Yes’, so she gave me kippers with cream! I hated being away from home and Mum and Dad came down and got me. Dad was in a reserved occupation, making ammunition boxes for the army.
We had a boy called Bernard Muggeridge at school, he didn’t turn u
p for a long time – someone said he’d been killed in an air raid, someone else said he’d drunk the school ink and died. Later he came back – he’d been evacuated.
Then came the German invasion of western Europe, the ‘Blitzkrieg’. With the fall of France in June 1940, Britain became the next target. Invasion was expected on the south coast of England, which was hastily changed from a Reception area to an Evacuation area. Hurriedly over 200,000 children in the area were evacuated, or, in some cases, re-evacuated to Wales or the Midlands. Some were sent to America, but this was stopped when in September the City of Benares, a ship carrying evacuees there, was torpedoed and sunk. Apart from this, evacuees were relatively safe; in the first two years of bombing, the heaviest part of the Blitz, only twenty-seven evacuees were killed by enemy action.
On the whole, most of the evacuees who were part of the official government scheme came from the poorer and more crowded parts of the big cities. The children of the urban middle and upper classes often went to live with relatives or schoolfriends in the country. Vivien Hatton recalls: ‘The school asked the girls who lived in the North of England if they would take one of us to stay for the summer holidays; I went up to Birmingham with one girl – I hated it. I wrote to my mother saying “Please, please, can I come home?” She wrote back saying that there was only the kitchen and shelter left to come back to – we’d been blasted!’
The countryside to which the official evacuees had been moved seemed a different world from that of the inner-city tenements and slums many of them had come from, but on the whole they soon adjusted. The streets were exchanged for the fields, city dogs and cats for cows and sheep, packaged food for farm goods. With the open air and fresh food many flourished. Alan Miles (July 1940): ‘Every night when I come home from school I get the eggs for Mrs Colwill. Mr Colwill is letting me milk the cow tonight. There is another thing I do at night that is getting the cows and driving them home half a mile.’
Parents were expected to pay towards the keep of their evacuated children; in London this was set at 6s (30p) a week each, although poorer parents were charged less. People taking in evacuees were paid more, from 8s 6d (43p) up to 16s 6d (83p), depending on the age of the children, the difference being made up by the state.
Evacuation was not just a one-way process. In June 1940, 29,000 civilians were evacuated to mainland Britain from the Channel Islands, and in September 1940 about 2,000 children from Gibraltar were evacuated from there to London. Few spoke any English, but they soon settled in, with several Scout groups being set up for them. They eventually returned to Gibraltar in the summer of 1944. And they were by no means unique; refugees from all over Europe had come to Britain seeking safety, starting with German Jews in the early 1930s, among them many children.
At about the same time as the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944, a new air assault began, first from the V1s, the ‘doodlebugs’, then from the V2 rockets. A new wave of evacuation took place between July and September, although before it could even begin more than 200 under-16s had been killed. In the first two weeks 170,000 official evacuees left, along with half a million who made their own way out of the target areas, but again many soon returned as the threat proved less serious than expected.
THREE
Children in the Front Line
Children who had stayed in the cities, or whose parents had taken them home again after they had been evacuated, were to find themselves with ringside seats when the air raids began. But in the first winter of the war, 1939–40, enemy aircraft activity was confined to attacks on shipping in the English Channel, or mine-laying around the coast. The first civilian air-raid death in Britain was during an attack on the Orkneys’s naval base on 16 March 1940, and the first in England was not until the end of April; even then it was caused by a German mine-laying bomber crashing at Clacton-on-Sea, killing its crew as well as two civilians. In the two years before the outbreak of war a series of measures had been introduced to counter, or at least minimise, the threat posed by bombing. These soon became part of everyday life.
AIR-RAID WARNINGS
In May 1938 the government had set out a system of air-raid warnings which would be sounded to warn of an imminent air attack, giving the public time to take cover. The warning would consist of a two-minute signal from a siren, rising and falling in pitch; the ‘All-clear’ signal would be given in the same way, but at a constant pitch. The up-and-down noise of the warning siren led to its becoming known as ‘Wailing Willy’ or ‘Moaning Minnie’. The ‘Alert’ sound itself became hated – some people found it more frightening than the noise of the actual raids. But most felt like Christine Pilgrim of Peckham: ‘When you heard the siren, it wasn’t so much that it frightened you – you knew what you had to do – it was, “Oh no, not again!”’
The siren was followed by a second type of warning, which indicated what kind of bomb was being dropped. For poison gas the air-raid wardens sounded a gas rattle (a kind of huge, old-fashioned football rattle), to warn people to put on their gas masks. The gas ‘All-clear’ was given by the ringing of hand-bells. If incendiary bombs were dropped, wardens or police sounded a series of short blasts on whistles, or, in some areas, banged dustbin lids, like gongs. This signalled that people should come out of their shelters and put out the fires. In The City That Wouldn’t Die, Richard Collier describes one such occurrence: ‘at Kennington, Station Officer Walter Bunday stopped short for a strange sight: a deserted street . . . a shower of incendiaries . . . every front door opening as one, and householders, silent and purposeful, whisking out to deal with them . . . men, women, small children, armed with sand and buckets of water. Then every front door shutting again like clockwork and not a word exchanged – “Like something out of Disney”.’
There were several tests of the warning system in the months before war broke out, so that everyone recognised the sound immediately. From 1 September 1939 the sounding of sirens, or of factory hooters, which were used to back them up, was made illegal for any reason except for air-raid warnings.
SHELTERS
In just about every cowboy film ever made, there is a point in the shoot-out when somebody suddenly stands up, and is just as suddenly shot – it’s pretty obvious that the rule is ‘Get down and stay down’. A similar rule applies to being bombed: ‘Take cover’. At first simple measures were used to provide cover, such as digging trenches, or the use of sandbags to make defensive walls, but these were clearly suitable only as stop-gap measures. Christine Pilgrim remembers: ‘Dad putting bunks up in the cellar so that we could go down there in a raid.’
At the beginning of 1939, the government had announced the introduction of a small air-raid shelter which could be put up in the back garden of a house. The ‘sectional steel shelter’, as it was officially known, soon became universally called the ‘Anderson’ after the then Home Secretary, and was supplied free of charge to the poorer inhabitants of danger areas, and for a small fee to anyone else. It was delivered in sections and had to be put up by the householder. This entailed digging a large hole, in which the shelter was half buried, and the leftover earth was then piled on top to give added protection. Barbara Courtney remembers the arrival of an Anderson at her family’s home in Nunhead: ‘I was almost 5 when the war broke out. The first I knew about it was when they delivered our Anderson shelter. They delivered it in sections and you had to put it up. I helped my dad, well, I did a bit of digging – he did it really.’
Being half buried certainly added to the safety of the Anderson, but it also caused its chief problem; during wet weather it tended to fill up with water. Still, damp and uncomfortable as they were, although no shelter could survive a direct hit, there is no doubt that they saved many lives. Charles Harris from Chingford, then aged 7, remembers: ‘There were three land mines came down near us, one went off in the reservoir, one failed to go off, and the third one caught in some telegraph wires and came down on a shelter about 100 yards down our road. They were all killed. We were in our shelter
and the door came in and I got hit over the head. Three houses and two bungalows were wrecked, and all the rest had their windows blown out.’ By mid-1940 over 2.25 million Andersons had been supplied.
However, many people did not have back gardens; for them the government produced a booklet, ‘Your home as an air-raid shelter’, which showed various ways of using mattresses, old doors, etc., to strengthen one of the downstairs rooms as a refuge. Other common practices were to use the cupboard under the stairs or to get under a table, but neither of these was completely satisfactory. Barbara Daltry from Windsor remembers one incident when she was 16: ‘Once I was walking home in the black-out, it was 3 miles, when I got there Mother said, “Get under the table, there’s an unexploded bomb in the back garden!” I told her I was too tired – if I was going to die, I’d die in bed. Actually the bomb was in the woods some way away.’
At the end of 1940, the government introduced a shelter for indoor use. Nicknamed the ‘Morrison’ after Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Home Defence, it was a low, steel cage, which, when not in use, could double up as a table.
Like the Anderson, the Morrison was delivered in sections and had to be assembled. A shortage of council workmen meant that people were encouraged to put up their own shelters, but this was often not possible, so youth groups such as the Scouts were brought in to help. Michael Corrigan was a Scout in Bristol:
Later during the war when we had air raids over Bristol many houses were issued with Morrison shelters which were solid metal, table-like constructions which were erected in the home, usually in the dining room, often taking the place of the dining table. The shelters were delivered in pieces and we were informed by the authorities of the addresses and we would then go out, after school, and erect them. This meant finding a suitable place in the house, moving any existing furniture out of the way, getting the solid metal legs in place and placing a very heavy solid sheet of metal on top and bolting the whole thing together. Interlaced metal strips were then stretched across the bottom framework ready for the householder to bring down their mattress and make it their bed as well as their shelter.