by Abrams, Fran
The wide world comes to Britain
At Dartington Hall School, many of the staff had been dispersed – a few into the forces, some simply scattered, one living on a remote island to avoid being called up – and replaced by refugees from Germany, Spain and other parts of mainland Europe. Unsurprisingly, the presence of foreigners at the school soon began to attract attention. And this time, there was good reason – theoretically, at least – for the security service to be interested. In May 1940, MI5 filed a note from a C. A. Carrington,18 who had been seized by outrage while attending a performance of Handel’s Rodelinda at the Old Vic, staged by the Dartington Hall arts department. ‘The great majority of the audience consisted of German-speaking people, who were conversing all the evening in German,’ she wrote. ‘Certainly the curriculum of the school of art was or is founded on Nazi or German methods.’ A note was added by an officer of the security agency in August of that year: ‘We have nothing to add to our previous minutes. A number of reports have reached us which appeared, on investigation, to have little foundation and it seems probable that these are no more than can be expected about a progressive institution in circles which are not perhaps very advanced politically.’
Scandalous gossip would continue to surround these progressive schools. As the war progressed and Dartington’s headmaster, Bill Curry, continued to campaign for peace, there were even allegations of devil-worship in the school chapel: there had been, according to one anonymous letter-writer to the Home Office, ‘certain rites of black magic’ which ‘have to be performed on sanctified ground . . . in this room certain boys of the school saw a ceremony conducted by men and women wearing masks of animals’.
And while MI5 seemed increasingly irritated by its correspondents’ efforts, its officers were concerned enough by the political activities at the school to intercept wartime mail in which it was mentioned. Thus did a letter to a friend from an apparently dissatisfied parent, a Mrs Dorothy de Witt, find its way into the National Archives: ‘The school was not very suitable . . . in fact the whole place was a perfect sink of a rather middle class immorality,’ she wrote. ‘The headmaster was running an irregular ménage and had a pornographic library famous throughout the district, and the whole place was a centre of some rather sinister form of politics. The instruction was very good but Dorian was turning into an unkempt young savage.’
Mrs de Witt recounted how, on boarding a boat to return home to Ireland, her son was searched by CID and relieved of two radical magazines named Social Credit: ‘I thought we would miss the boat as they . . . questioned us most closely about Dartington etc, and finally let us go but kept the papers.’
Dartington, with its rather cosmopolitan attitudes, had always been a place where different nationalities met, and where children came into contact with people they would never otherwise have encountered. But for the average child, it took a war to make this happen. Even for those children who were not evacuated, war brought a life populated by a much greater variety of people.
Michael Foreman, born in 1938 in Pakefield, near Lowestoft in Suffolk, barely knew in his early years that war was not the normal way for life to be. But looking back he could see his mother’s village shop, situated by the bus terminus, filled with a rich cast of characters: ‘What I remember is the bustle in the shop, from 7.30 a.m. until 7.45 p.m. I was in the shop all the time and that’s the memory, of crawling in between the legs before I could walk and being surrounded by giants in uniforms,’ he said.19
There were soldiers stationed near Lowestoft from all over Europe – the Free French, Czechs, Poles. And to a small boy who had never known peacetime, their presence seemed normal, even humdrum: they were billeted around the village; they went with the fishermen as they clambered past the mines and through the barbed wire on the beach to their boats. Even to a child growing up in a small village in Suffolk, the world was becoming a bigger place, with more possibilities. But it was the arrival of the Americans that really caught this boy’s imagination: the GIs were different. They lived miles away on bases, and arrived in Jeeps bearing gifts of nylons and chewing gum. And they were utterly fascinating to a child.
‘It was just the children who held them in that esteem,’ Michael Foreman said. ‘I think some of the older villagers would have thought they came in a bit late, as usual. But they were healthy-looking, and had well-cut uniforms. Things like baseball caps – we’d never seen such things. And they would wear them at a cocky, jaunty angle. They had wonderful flying jackets – everything was just better cut, and it fitted. Nice material, whereas the British Tommy had this old, kind of hairy uniform.’20 Later, some of Michael’s friends’ older sisters would marry GIs and go away to the United States, and then exciting presents of silver six-shooters with fake cowhorn handles would arrive in the post. They seemed to be glimpses of a sunnier, more glamorous world: ‘We just thought that was what it was like in America. Whereas in point of fact one or two of these GI girl brides had a very rough time of it. They found they weren’t going to Hollywood, they were going to a trailer park in the back side of Texas somewhere.’21
The new faces arriving in Britain were not all adult ones, either. Many thousands of child refugees from Europe had settled in Britain just before the war, some of them with their parents but many unaccompanied. Most of this last group were the beneficiaries of a decision by the British government in November 1938, just after the ‘Kristallnacht’ series of attacks against Jews in Nazi Germany, to accept unaccompanied children arriving here. In the ten months before the outbreak of war, 10,000 such children were to be brought to Britain, most of them under the auspices of the Jewish Refugee Children Movement. Seven hundred were helped by a stockbroker called Nicholas Winton – and among them was a young Czech girl called Hana Kohn from Pilsen. Neither she nor her twin brother Hans were told the real purpose of their journey – instead, they were told it was an extended holiday, so they could learn English: ‘Of course we were excited, we’d never seen the sea, never been on a boat,’ she said.22 ‘We were very aware of the different atmosphere on the train from Prague which was a third class train with wooden seats and there were German soldiers. We were just told not to laugh or talk too much if they were around.’
Hana and Hans were sent on to south Yorkshire, she to a family in Sheffield and Hans to Rotherham. They only found out many years later that the later train carrying their elder sister had been turned back. Hana recalled settling in quickly with her new parents, a headmaster and his teacher wife, and learning English rapidly: ‘You had to be prepared for making faux pas and people laughing. I never minded, because I felt people were laughing with me, not at me.’ Within a year, she had won a place at grammar school: ‘I think I was what they used to call a goody goody. I was a good learner and very happy and I eventually became deputy head girl for a couple of years.’ Just as they learned from their contacts with English children, surely those English children must, too, have gained from them a sense of a wider world around them.
For boys, in particular, the war brought opportunities to learn about places they might never otherwise have heard of. A Mass Observation report on children and the war recorded the excitement with which many were watching the hostilities abroad:23 ‘There is an increased interest in the weekly periods devoted to current history in the senior forms. Maps are eagerly consulted . . . They will discuss eagerly the latest news as soon as they hear it,’ the Headmaster of Bembridge grammar school on the Isle of Wight remarked. The Headmistress of a private school, evacuated to Devon, added that there was rejoicing when the Allies scored a victory – in particular, when the Navy rescued British prisoners from a German ship off Norway: ‘The boys are much more topical than the girls. They have the Daily Telegraph map and always follow the movements of the troops in Norway. They were thrilled, of course, about the Altmark, and the sinking of the destroyers and everything like that. The girls aren’t very interested, but the boys definitely, most of them, would love to be out there helping.’
/> Children in the world
The rest of the world was becoming much more real to a far greater number of children than before, and for a variety of reasons: ‘The war had been going for nearly a year when my parents received the news that my sister Joyce and I had been selected with other children from Bristol to be evacuated to New Zealand,’ Jim Porter would write later. ‘I was not aware at the time that we had been chosen from “deprived” families. I knew that we were not rich but we did have our own shoes!’24
Ten-year-old Jim and his twelve-year-old sister had been selected by the Children’s Overseas Reception Board, and were to be among around 2,700 children who would be evacuated to Britain’s overseas territories – in particular, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand – between June and September 1940. Initially, the scheme was intended to go much further. The first wave of emigration alone was meant to take 20,000 children, and even before it was up and running, huge numbers of families had applied. At its height, the board had more than 200,000 children’s names on its list.
For a boy from a poor area of Bristol, who had spent the early part of 1940 staring through cracked front windows at the remains of a neighbour’s house, avoiding the bombs in a damp air-raid shelter on bad nights and sharing a bed with the lodger when it was quiet, the opportunity to escape was welcome. Jim had been used to twopence a week pocket money, but now he was given twelve shillings and sixpence to take with him, along with new – as opposed to secondhand – clothes, and his own toothbrush and toothpaste: ‘I was up to date with the “Sea Vacs” serial in my weekly comic so I knew exactly what to expect. There would be fun and games and I would be the hero who sighted the U-boat periscope and saved the convoy!’
The CORB scheme, as it was known, would come to a tragic end in the early hours of 18 September 1940, when the SS City of Benares, a ship carrying ninety child evacuees and their escorts to Canada, was torpedoed and sunk 250 miles north-west of Rockall. In total, seventy-seven of the children were killed, along with 171 of the adults who were aboard. With the whole nation in shock, the overseas board was immediately disbanded. While some children did continue to be sent abroad privately – about 14,000 in total – the official programme was no more.
By then, though, Jim and Joyce Porter were in the Pacific and well on their way to New Zealand. Their ship, the Rangitata, had also come under torpedo fire in the Atlantic, and another ship in their convoy, the Volendam, was hit: ‘I was suddenly woken to thumping noises and the sound of the alarm bells. We put on our lifebelts and stumbled our way to the boat stations on the first class deck, on the way sighting the Volendam, brightly lit and apparently on fire, falling astern of us. Someone said that a lookout on the front of the ship had actually seen the torpedo passing just a yard ahead of the Rangitata before it hit the unfortunate ship. We heard that the convoy had been ordered to scatter and felt the engines below vibrating as the ship picked up speed.’
As Jim Porter recognized, the experience was a terrifying one for the older children and the adults who were aboard. But for a boy of ten with an adventurous spirit, it was all part of the excitement: ‘We lay on the deck just outside the lounge, wrapped in blankets. There was chatter, chaos, hot Bovril and biscuits to see us through until morning. Despite being summer, it was quite chilly and we were eventually taken under cover and fell asleep on the soft luxurious carpet of the first class lounge.’ The passengers and crew of the Volendam, among them 320 child evacuees, were rescued and returned to Scotland. The children who did make it across the Atlantic were not told what had happened to them, and nor were they told about the sinking of the SS City of Benares.
Arriving at Auckland, Jim and Joyce were separated – Jim going to a wealthy family in one part of the city, Joyce to a working-class home in another part. They met once a fortnight: ‘Looking back, I can understand the culture clash of a back-street boy from Bristol descending on a refined and respected local family. My table manners left a lot to be desired and it was hard being taught, quite severely at times, how to eat food and behave properly at the table.’
Yet despite all this, and despite having to move on because of illness in the family, Jim thrived in New Zealand, becoming a Scout troop leader, going to grammar school and eventually winning a scholarship to a college of art.
Preparing for peace
Jim Porter would write later that his world ended the day Germany surrendered. He had no desire at all to return to a United Kingdom which had suffered six years of war. Yet the overseas resettlement board which had sent him to New Zealand seemed very keen to send him back again – so keen, in fact, that he and his sister were already in the Pacific before Japan, too, was forced to surrender.
There was little to comfort them when they finally docked: ‘We eventually arrived at a grey, subdued Liverpool, and stayed the night at a horrendous house where all there was to eat was dark bread and margarine. “There’s been a war, you know!” The following day, we took a train through the most dull, overcrowded and dismal countryside I could ever remember.’25
Britain in 1945 did not seem a warm or a welcoming place to a boy who had grown used to bluer skies, a more affluent life and plenty of good food. Yet while Jim and Joyce were now almost grown up – Jim sixteen and Joyce eighteen – the next generation of children would reap benefits from the lessons learned through the experience of war children like them.
The war had barely run half its course before serious discussions started. The general tenor was this: that having had its eyes opened to the appalling conditions in which some of its population were living, the nation could not allow the situation to continue. Lord Airlie, speaking in a parliamentary debate in 1943, spoke for many: ‘Who would have believed that it would have been possible that such bodily conditions and such insanitary behaviour could have existed in a country which calls itself a civilized nation as came to light after the evacuation took place in this country? The only hope is to deal with it as a national problem at the earliest moment . . . possibly the only solution will lie in trying to teach our children how to train their children to do those very things which used to be taught in the old days in the home and at the mother’s knee.’
Lord Airlie spoke of cleanliness, discipline and religious adherence, and he spoke of the need to transmit these through family values. Others spoke of better education, better housing, better food. And the widely accepted solution was that the state should get involved, in a big way. As early as 1940, a committee named the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services had been set up, and within two years it had produced a report with a huge, all-embracing vision: for the building of a better Britain once peace had dawned. It seemed the time was right for grand designs and all-embracing visions, and the Beveridge Report, as it was known, provided both. There were ‘five giants’ of evil in Britain, it said: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. These should be combated through family allowances, a free health service and full employment, and benefits should be paid at subsistence level so that poverty could be abolished. The public reaction was so ecstatic that Churchill was forced to announce immediate plans for legislation.26
There were good reasons for making grand plans. First, signs of cynicism, even bitterness, about the future were being detected among troops who had by now been at war for four years. A failure now to commit to radical action that would lead to improvements in many of their lives might be detrimental to the course of the war, it was felt.27 Second, if things continued as they had done, there would be serious concern about the future of the race. The press revelations about the state of the inner-city children who had arrived so badly clothed, filthy and generally unkempt on the doorsteps of their rural hosts bore many of the hallmarks of snobbery, of course. But there were real grounds for concern. Despite all the recent advances in public health, far too many children were still dying of preventable or curable diseases: in 1940, for example, more civilians died of tuberculosis in Britain than were killed by enemy action.
28 And far too few were being born. While the middle classes of the early twentieth century had worried that they would soon be outnumbered because they had discovered contraception while the poor had not, now all sections of the population were having smaller families. The nation desperately needed more of those children to survive, in all classes, Beveridge had warned: in 1901 there had been five children under fifteen for every pensioner. By 1961 there would be one child for every pensioner, and by 1971 there would be three pensioners for every schoolchild.29 ‘In the next thirty years, housewives as Mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race.’
All the political parties were in broad agreement: Britain needed more children. The Conservative election manifesto of 1945 would call for an increase in maternity beds, and for mothers to be given a special status. Churchill had even used a wartime broadcast in February 1943 to ram home the point: ‘One of the most sombre anxieties which beset those who look thirty, or forty, or fifty years ahead . . . is the dwindling birth-rate . . . If this country is to keep its high place in the leadership of the world and to survive as a great power that can hold its own against external pressure, our people must be encouraged by every means to have larger families.’
Most of Beveridge’s proposals were accepted in a 1944 White Paper. The National Health Service and Family Allowances were to come later, after Labour had swept to power in the 1945 election. There were other measures, too, aimed at building a stronger population: a national milk scheme, a vitamin welfare scheme for under-fives and nursing mothers, more maternity beds. In fact, the nutritional health of schoolchildren had already begun to improve before the war ended – by 1945 about a third of children were receiving free school meals, and they were also benefiting from the wartime diet – sweets were hard to come by, and the wartime meal tended to contain less fat, more vegetables and more wholemeal bread than its pre- or post-war equivalents.