I’m reading Chronicles of Narnia right now, and the book mentions that the kids were sent to live in the country to escape London during WWII air raids. This raises several questions.
How widespread was this practice? Was London esentially devoid of children for a period of time during WWII? Were other large cities in Britain emptied of children?
Was this done by law, by order of the Crown, or was it just generally considered a Good Idea™? Did some government committee or some authority match up children with potential caretakers?
What was the fate of the kids who were sent into the country? Were they generally well-cared-for by their surrogate parents? ISTR reading somewhere (sorry, no cite) that a great number of such children were sent to horrific sexual abuse, apparently with the knowledge and approval of those who sent them. Were some sent to be basically slave labor on the farms/manors they went to? Also, if a child were sent into the country and his/her parents died, did they stay with their country caretakers? Or were they placed into whatever foster care system England had in those days?
Here’s one of many good resources about evacuees. Yes, it most certainly happened, on an immense scale - and the main evacuation took place before the declaration of war in 1939. Events in Spain and elsewhere had left governments in no doubt that their civilian populations would be targets in any war.
The practice wasn’t restricted to the UK. My mother was evacuated from Sydney to live with relatives in the country after the Japanese mini-submarine attack in Sydney Harbour in May 1942.
I don’t think so. My mother (who was 12 years old in 1939) lived quite close to London during the entire war, along with her two sisters. She has many interesting stories to tell of bombs falling, V-1s flying by, etc. Some of these took place at her school, where there were plenty of other children.
I was recently reading a great book called My East End, which said that many children (and young moms, who went with their new babies) came back after a while. They preferred being at home with the bombs to living away, understandably enough. No one was forcing them to stay out of London.
It’s absolutely fascinating to read about; many children spent years away from their families, upper- and lower-class children mixed to an extent unknown before, some were well cared for and others neglected or mistreated.
Oh, another interesting book is P.L. Travers’ I go by land, I go by sea, about children being taken to Canada for safety–it’s a novelized account of her own experiences as a chaperoning adult. (Yes, she of Mary Poppins fame!) Evidently that was not entirely uncommon, either.
This is quite correct - there were three phases of evacuation. The first, at the onset of war, resulted in complacency because little bombing occured in the first months. With the Blitz came a second wave of evacuation. And the third smaller one was towards the end of the war with the twin fears of V1 & V2 bombs, and of a last-gasp gas attack by Germany.
My friend’s father was one of the children evacuated to Australia during the war. He was also one of the children whose records were lost (or perhaps never kept in the first place) and was unable to be reunited with his family. I believe he finally tracked down his siblings just three or four years ago. I understand a good many of the war evacuees were never returned to their families.
Yes, that’s certainly set around about the same time, possibly even in the pre-WWI Edwardian era. It’s ages since I’ve read it. But I don’t think it was an evacuation scenario. I think the children’s father had been arrested or gaoled or something for treason (unjustly of course) and the subsequent impoverishment was what caused the family’s removal to the country.
I had - and cannot now find - a copy of a book called something like Women At War, Citizen Journalists Describe Life in Britain during WWII That’s probably not the title. Anyway, these women kept journals of their experience for the specific purpose of compiling the journals later for posterity, it was a whole association. Some of the women talked about being needed to work in the factories but it was impossible to get childcare, some talked about how difficult it was to get a job and do something useful, even if you had the skills and the government was begging to help, because you were a woman… some talked about how they couldn’t get extra food even if they were assigned evacuees to care for, some talked about being unable to adjust to life in the country, or (if a host family) unable to adjust to city people with their strange ways. And of course it wasn’t just children who were sent away, it was pregnant mothers and mothers with small children - often to houses where they weren’t welcomed, or (as often) weren’t grateful to be. Pretty rough time for everybody.
There’s a huge amount of literature on this subject. My favourite would be The Evacuees by Jack Rosenthal, a brilliant TV drama based on the playright’s own experiences as a Jewish kid evacuated from Manchester with his brother to live with a family who, among other things, gave them pork sausage to eat. Very funny in parts.
Was it Mass Observation you were referring to ? That organisation collected the diaries of hundreds of both men and women during the war and afterwards
Just by chance the BBC broadcast a programme a couple of weeks ago about evacuees returning home after the war. Some of them took a very long while to adjust. They had only briefly seen their mothers and siblings for sometimes five years, they had been living in the country instead of the inner city and some had missed out on education for that time. Another problem was that many fathers had also been away for years and they also had to readjust to being back in the family. This also was a source of tension between family members.
One man ( Michael Aspell the TV presenter) said that when he returned to school in south London after the war, his class-mates had acquired a mixture of accents ( Somerset , Welsh. Norfolk etc.) depending on where they had been evacuated to.
Were some sent to be basically slave labor on the farms/manors they went to? Also, if a child were sent into the country and his/her parents died, did they stay with their country caretakers? Or were they placed into whatever foster care system England had in those days?