How was the evacuee programme managed in WW2?

[DetailMouse]

Just thinking about the proposed refugee scheme and personally, expecting that there'll be very little take up. I feel very sorry for all involved but not enough to share my home. I'll try and "do my bit" but it won't involve taking strangers in.

To our modern sensibilities the evacuee programme seems almost impossible. Send small children away to stay with strangers? Accept strangers' children into your home and be responsible for their wellbeing (and discipline?)

Was an incentive offered? Did host families get a contribution towards cost? Did the children's families have to contribute? Was it compulsory to send your child and/or to host if you had space?

My gran always spoke fondly of "their" evacuee (gran was also a child at the time) and kept in touch through letter writing until she died, but there was always an air of superiority about having taken in this poor child. That child was probably well cared for, but there must surely have been 100s who weren't? Was any "safeguarding" done?

And, if we house refugees with host families, what checks will be done to make sure they're not being exploited or harmed in any way? I'd love to think everyone who takes them in is doing it out of human kindness, but we know that won't be true in every case

My relatives were evacuated to Seahouses on the coast. They had a lovely time, but their mum went with them too. Quite a few mums went, it wasn’t all children on their own.

My grandad speaks quite fondly of being evacuated from London to Cornwall. 15 years ago we went back to the house he stayed in and he found it quite emotional.

My grandmother however ran away from where she was evacuated age 7 and got the train back to London on her own. A house was bombed on her street.

Just under 70,000 civilians were killed in WW2. It was a v real possibility that the Nazis would use gas and everyone was issued with a gas mask. There were even special ones for babes in arms. We lived in an outer London suburb. I remember being put to sleep under the table. My mother was on her own and I didn't see my father for 2 years because he was in Sierra Leone with the RAF.

Churchill was I/c the conduct of the war and Attlee ran the Home Front. When you think of the organisation involved for the evacuation, Anderson Shelters in backyards, street shelters, rationing, transport, warehouses of cardboard coffins, blackout for every house, relocation of bombed out families, whole streets of them in the Blitz and later with V1s and V2s, it was an extraordinary achievement.

Makes me very angry at the sheer inefficiency of the current government, with Patel and Truss contradicting each other and even themselves on a daily basis.

persephonebooks.co.uk/collections/grey-books-wwii/products/good-evening-mrs-craven-the-wartime-stories-of-mollie-panter-downes

"Good Evening, Mrs Craven" has some good short stories involving evacuees, though from the perspectives of the hosts. It's a great collection for seeing how people really felt about aspects of the war.

This far and no mention of "Carries War" ?

DM passed in 2017, born in 1937. All I know is that my DGM was adamant she wasn't going to be evacuated (from Purley).

Sadly I don't know why.

My mother was evacuated and spoke very fondly of her foster family who she called auntie and uncle. I think she stayed with them for 5 years. Her brother though went to a different family ( no idea why as her family took in 3 other children) but wasn't happy with them.

She said they went with their school, so they at least knew all the other children they went with.

If anyone’s interested in delving further, one of the best non-fiction books on this - and every aspect of everyday life in the war - is still Norman Longmate's How We Lived Then. It’s full of brilliant first-hand accounts.

He explains that evacuation was voluntary but billeting was compulsory. The allowance for taking in unaccompanied children started out at 10/6 for one child and 8/6 each for more than one (a week, I assume), and there were huge numbers of children evacuated in 1939, but by Christmas that year many of them were going home for various reasons. The government also started requiring parents to make a contribution to costs and I’m sure many of them just couldn’t afford to.

My dad and his sister were ww2 evacuees. His sister was 6yo and she never got over it, she had some health problems and the family neglected her and she had no one to turn to but herself in pain at 6yo it's so utterly sad.

She became a drug addict. She was actually a very intelligent and nice lady but she was also quite bitter at life in general. She died early as a result too. My dad is still going at 91 and hardly ever talks of it except to say that one of the homes he went to were sick in the head as he puts it and one he remembers asked him to help do the work on a farm, he'd be up at 5am to start work aged 9 but he said he actually like it.
He said they were hard London street urchin dc so when they arrived in the countryside they were flea ridden in & in dirty clothes and he and his sister were the last ones standing at the station to be picked. They were then separated. It is utterly utterly heartbreaking.

Michael Caine’s story of being an evacuee was horrifying. He was fed only pilchards and shut under the stairs, eventually his mother came to get him and punched the woman who had treated him so terribly.

Fascinating stories

Has anyone else read "Puddles In The Lane"? It's another children's novel about evacuation. Stayed with me for years.

I was talking to an elderly relative about this the other day, he was evacuated along with his brother and sister. The boys were kept together, and went to a family with two boys the same age and had a marvellous time. They kept in touch for years. His sister however was abused by a male member of the household she went to. Thankfully another person in the house realised and she was sent elsewhere, to a very strict spinster. He saw her at the school they went to but she could never stay out and play into the evening like the boys were

She died a few years ago and had never spoken about it, so I do think it affected her a lot more than the boys, understandably

@AtomicBlondeRose

I think they had quite a nice family but they only went to school in the mornings and from what I could make out rather ran riot around the town in the afternoons.

This was common, as in some small places there would be the same amount of evacuees as there were children already resident, so the schooling was in shifts - evacuees in the morning, local children in the afternoon. Or there wouldn't have physically been enough space for them all!

The number of "unclaimed" children at the end of the war was surprisingly small, once those who had lost parents altogether were taken into account. There were some, of course, but statistically it wasn't a large proportion. Most people were very keen to get their children back and children being sent back to cities too soon was a bigger problem.

My grandparents had one of the unclaimed evacuees, the boys parents hadn’t visited at all for the whole duration and when the authorities tried to locate his family they could find no trace of them. There was apparently nothing to suggest that the parents had been killed. My grandparents kept him, happily, but were refused permission to officially adopt him because they weren’t white.

My grandfather as a village school headmaster had to do a lot to support and organise the evacuees sent to his village. Most came from south London, the one that was taken in by my grandparents went back at the request of her mum after a few months.

My maternal grandparents hosted a mother and child from London. It didn't work out as the woman stole food and money from them (I'm sure from desperation). The memory of finding the larder bare and being unable to feed her own children because their food had been taken haunted my late DGM when she had dementia.

My paternal grandfather taught in a private girls' boarding school that evacuated to Wales. My DGM and their youngest boys, including my DF, went with them, the older boys stayed in London with a sister who was married. MY DGM and the little ones returned after a year because the village primary school was Welsh speaking and the teacher just left the boys to read story books in a corner of the room.

They weren't back for long when their house got hit by a bomb and destroyed. The family were all in the Anderson shelter except for one teenage brother who refused to leave the house and, by some miracle, was rescued from the wreckage unscathed because a wardrobe had fallen over the bed and protected him.

My grandmother refused to have her children evacuated. She'd been sent to a Belgian Convent School before WWI started and wasn't able to come back until after the war - from some accounts I've read, the things she must have experienced and seen whilst only aged 9-14/16 led her to decide that her children were staying with her in case of invasion, as she would know what to do whilst others had no idea what it was like to be under direct attack and occupation.

The memory of finding the larder bare and being unable to feed her own children because their food had been taken haunted my late DGM when she had dementia.

My DGMs last days of dementia saw her asking my Aunt if she had "mad it through the bombs OK". It was clearly the place in her mind she retreated to when all else was lost.

This was 1991. Wars cast long shadows..

My mother was born during the war - my grandmother was evacuated from North London to Oxford with her 3 year old whilst she was pregnant. Mum remembers that my nan said she used to cry all day and watched her little boy playing from the hospital window, but wasn't allowed to play with or speak to him. It was heartbreaking for all concerned I think. I'm not sure my nan or my uncle ever really recovered. As soon as my mum was born, my nan went straight back to London with the children and took her chances against the Luftwaffer. They had an anderson shelter which they used regularly and my grandad was in a protected trade so stayed behind to firewatch around the City of London. Mum was 3 by the time the war ended and can remember the rifle next to the front door...

We've a spare room (a sitting room, but it has room for an airbed) and we will sponsor a refugee family as soon as the scheme is announced on Monday. I'm sure it will be pretty shit for us AND for the family who seek shelter with us, but the way I see it, our old way of life is gone anyway and I'd rather embrace the future with hope and a sense of agency than to watch the news every night and just worry what's coming our way.

My great-gran didn't send my grandma away. They were in central Manchester and had a lot of heavy bombing. They hid under the stairs during raids! My grandma has never talked about it until literally this past fireworks night, when she mentioned she was upset by the fireworks as they were reminding her of the raids.

I can't imagine keeping my little ones at home in that situation. I'd just do whatever it took to get to the countryside with them.

From what my great aunt didn’t say, I came to the conclusion that she was abused. Sadly it affected her marriage, and she was bitter for the rest of her life.

My grandma lived in a town between Manchester and Liverpool. Whilst they weren't evacuated, she and her parents moved in with her grandparents to allow a family evacuated from Liverpool to stay in their house. I don't know how common arrangements like that were.

I remember a friends grandma hiding under the stairs when it thundered. As kids we thought it was funny, as an adult I can see the trauma she must have suffered.

Fascinating thread. From what I've read, newsreel footage of carpet bombing of cities during the Spanish Civil War was shown in cinemas (to huge audiences - no TV or internet then, of course!) and caused much alarm and fear that this would happen in the UK too if there was another war. This was a huge factor in the decision that as soon as war was declared children, pregnant women and many hospital patients should be evacuated to areas that weren't likely to be bombed. One of the reasons so many evacuees returned within weeks or months was because in the early stages of the war there was very little bombing. The war began on 3/9/39 and the Blitz began about a year later, at which point some evacuees left the cities again.

As far as I know, my Dad's family stayed put in Edinburgh, which wasn't considered as high risk as Glasgow or London or other cities with ports and shipyards as well as a lot of heavy industry. My Mum's family lost their home when her Dad was conscripted (at not far off 40), as he was a gardener for a private family and they lived in a tied cottage. They actually had to move to the outskirts of Glasgow as that's where he was sent, to join the Fire Brigage. It only occurred to me after he died that he must have seen some terrible things during the bombing of Clydeside and Glasgow itself. I don't think he ever spoke about it.

My Mum has told me that there were times when Mum and her sister were walking to the primary school in the morning and the sirens sounded, and they had to decide whether they were nearer home or school, and run as fast as they could to get under cover. Big responsibility for such young children.

At the outset of war, before Grandpa was conscripted, Mum and her sister had been sent to stay with their Granny on a Scottish island, and they went to school there for a bit. I think they went back home when it became clear they'd be safe enough on the mainland for a while.

I learned this from a sharply-written book, 'The Wireless in the Corner', which is a combined memoir and research; what I had not appreciated was that the evacuation of children from London, in particular, was ordered and got going very suddenly. The author describes this as delayed and muddied due to some wrangling over categories at school levels, which made things drag on until, on 31 August, the operation was put in place for the next day, 1st September. Full trains departing all stations, every 9 minutes, for 9 hours. I cannot imagine how this would be process-able as a parent or as a child.

Some more here: www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/the-evacuation-of-children-during-the-second-world-war/

There had been meetings in schools and information provided months earlier, IIRC, so people had had time to think about it and decide what they were going to do - send the children away or keep them at home. Everybody knew it would happen as soon as war was imminent, and that was looking more and more likely all through 1939. Germany invaded Poland on 1st September and at that point the UK was inevitably going to declare war on Germany.