Evacuation

At the very beginning of the war, 800,000 schoolchildren were evacuated from cities likely to be bombed along with 550,000 mothers and children under five. Many of these children came from poor inner city areas and were unused to the way of life of their often unwilling middle-class hosts in the countryside. By January 1940 most of these children had returned home as the expected air raids failed to take place.

In the summer of 1940, the evacuation of children began all over again as German air raids finally did arrive. For some of the 200,000 children evacuated from London and the south-east the experience was to last the next two years. The government published photographs of happy children meeting the pleasant new hosts who would take care of them for eight shillings a week (40p). The government slogan was 'Keep them happy, Keep them safe'.

The reality was often very different and heart-breaking as the actor, Michael Caine, remembered (from Ben Wicks, No Time to Wave Goodbye, 1988):

'At first everyone was very nice and then the woman that had taken us there [the billeting officer] left and we sat down to eat. The woman said, "Here's your meal", and she gave us a tin of pilchards between the two of us and some bread and water. Now we'd been in this rich woman's house and so we said, "Where's the butter?" and we suddenly got a wallop round the head. From then on it started ... not the husband, he was never there ... just her. What we later found out was that the woman hated kids and was doing it for the extra money. So that food was the cheapest meal you could dish up ... a tin of pilchards and dry bread'.

The country hosts of these poor, working-class children found it difficult to adjust to their different habits. The children were unused to sleeping in a bed and preferred to sleep underneath it. They did not know how to use a knife and fork. The strange surroundings and customs led to a lot of bed-wetting in the early weeks, as one young boy from east London remembers:

'The first morning after it happened we went to school as usual, but when we returned the door flew open and I was whisked into the front room where the mattress was drying in front of the fire. The lady of the house thrust my nose into the mattress and said, "How do you like that, you little pig?".'

One result of the evacuation process was that many people woke up to the poverty and poor standards of health that these children faced in their inner city homes. Many had skin diseases, scabies and suffered from poor hygiene and a bad diet. Plans for a free, National Health Service were drawn up during the war and were put into effect shortly after the war ended.

Neil Demarco: The era of the Second World War; Oxford University Press, 1993/2000, page 59 f.