Excuse me, The Railway Children.
The relevant volume of the British government’s series of official histories treats the subject in exhaustive detail.
No. Only about a half of children from London of school age were evacuated during the peak period in 1939.
The plan was to evacuate all the major cities. Remember that all British cities were potential targets and that it wasn’t just those in the South-East that would suffer heavy bombing. But there were wide local differences in the numbers that left. The numbers evacuated from London were actually proportionately lower than in many Northern cities. That was because…
It was basically voluntary. In early 1941 the government, using its emergency wartime powers, did declare that it could forcibly evacuate children from London, but that power was only used very rarely. Otherwise it was a case of them arranging evacuations and then encouraging families to make use of the opportunity.
At the other end the arrangements were coordinated by the county councils.
The official statistics show this pattern very clearly. But with the interesting complication that the pattern was less marked for the classic group of evacuees, the unaccompanied children. The reason for that was that from 1940 the authorities began to encourage mothers to go with their children and adults were more likely to take the initiative in returning once they thought the danger had passed.
Another classic children’s book with a WWII evacuation theme would be Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War.
Title to a good reference book, please?
I believe quite a few children went to Canada and one who came to the US was movie actorRoddy McDowall.
FWIW
Please forgive if this is straying too far off topic or into Café Society territory.
For an upcoming alumni affair[sup]*[/sup] I just read On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood, the memoirs of Irmgard Hunt. She grew up in Berchtesgaden, in the countryside near Hitler’s retreat. While she was already in the country, she does mention her town’s and other’s population growing in part due to women and children’s exodus from other parts of Germany. This was in addition to refugees and whatnot fleeing bombed out cities, slaves sent from occupied territories, etc.
While she did not go into the specifics of the relocations (she was a little girl at the time) I thought it was worth mentioning in this thread as it seems (from what is implied in her book, though I don’t know the scale) that Germany too had a relocation program.
[sup]*[/sup] A Meet the Author shindig, not alumni of the war.
I remember reading a memoir by a British author who was sent to live with a rich family in Oakwood, Ohio, a wealthy suburb of Dayton, during the Second World War. I’ve been trying to remember the title – all I remember is that the author’s first name was Antony or Anthony. Anyone know what book I’m talking about?
This might be the answer to your question Evacuation Across the Atlantic . Part way down the article, there is mention of a writer called Anthony Bailey. Is that him?
Ah, yes. Anthony Bailey. The memoir was called America Lost and Found. I listened to the audiocassette recording.
Yep, by Mary Norton. I read the book before I saw the movie, and I remember thinking that I preferred the book.
The Battle of Britain Museum, adjacent to the RAF Museum in Hendon, north London, has a touching section portraying the separation of families at the railway stations.
childrens’ experiences ranged all the way from very happy to unpaid farm labourer or domestic servant to serious child abuse. Some people sent their children to North America but after the liner City of Benares was torpedoed on Sept 13th 1940 with considerable loss of life this was discontinued.
My rifle club secretary recalled, “I was old enough to read the papers and form some opinions about the world, and I was quite convinced that if there was going to be another war my parents would be killed, and I didn’t want to go on living without them. So I didn’t want to be evacuated, but my fool of a cousin convinced himself that if we went we would have a high old time, so we did go. When we got to this place I found to my horror that it had no flushing lavatory, just an earth closet [common in country districts then] in the garden. I solved the problem by not going at all for the two weeks we were there, until we contacted our parents and persuaded them to bring us home.”
Statements like this are disingenuous. For many kids coming from inner-city slums, it was a vast improvement on the living conditions they left behind.
Presumably they were the very happy ones. How in the world is his statement disingenuous?
Ahh, I misread the statement :smack:
Not just Britain, by the way, although I believe it was most common and best organized there. City children from parts of Occupied Europe were sent to friends or relatives in the country, either for safety or simply because of food shortages in the cities. My father-in-law and his brother were sent to stay with relatives at the family farm in Gudbrandsdalen during school vacations, to be “fattened up”, and the trains were always full of kids when they left. They were well-treated and have good memories of those times, though of course they got homesick too.
This also happened in Finland. About 80 000 children were evacuated to Sweden, Denmark and Norway during WWII. In proportion to population, this was one of the largest such operations in history. My great-aunt was one of these “war children”. I believe she was around two or three years old when she was sent to Sweden. She says she remembers this time as a sort of generally vaguely happy thing, kind of like an extended holiday. Her host family had a Finnish-speaking mother, so she kept her Finnish skills. But for many children it wasn’t that easy. Some children had difficulty adapting to a different lifestyle and learning Swedish, while for others, the problem was after they had been returned home. Some weren’t returned to their families until many years after the war, and they had already learned Swedish, forgotten most of their Finnish, and started to think of their Swedish host family as their real one.
This war child phenomenon has recently come up quite often in Finland; one of the most talked-about movies showing in theaters right now is a film about war children, and there was a documentary in theaters last year that was also very popular. It’s quite fascinating, really, although some of the stories are quite sad.
The children were also evacuated from the Channel Isles to England, and missed the German occupation. Most of them forgot the local patoir dialect (a variety of Norman French) and the start of it’s steep decline in the islands dates from that time.
I don’t understand how/why it was so hard for some children to be reuinted with their families after the way. All a kid has to do is say “I’m Nigel Codswollop from Number Four Mayfair Street, London. My mother is Matilda Codswollop and my father is Reginald Codswollop.” Then someone puts him on the appropriate train.
not so easy if there’s no where for them to live when they get there, if the house has been knocked flat or is uninhabitable, or the mother is already sharing with several other families, or the school has been flattened. All of which happened. There was a great shortage of housing at the end of the war, something which took many years to solve.
There were some instances of parents simply abandoning their children, moving out leaving no forwarding address.
…or she’s dead. Across seven years, a lot of women will have died, not just because of enemy action but for mundane reasons, too. In this case, finding a father who’s yet more likely to be dead or untraceable, or identifying next-of-kin (who may not want the burden of an orphaned child), would all be difficult.
If they were evacuated in 1939 as a toddler, you’re talking about an eight-year-old who has no memory of anything other than his or her wartime lodgings.