Jambusters (11 page)

The most significant problem about evacuation was that it was not compulsory and parents could wait until the last minute to decide whether their children would go or stay at home. However, the government gave the Ministry of Health power to make billeting, together with the feeding and care of evacuees, compulsory. A householder who refused to take evacuees could be fined £50 or given a three-month prison sentence. ‘This is to apply not only to evacuated children but also adults who are given the right to share the kitchen and everything else in the house, and not only for a few months but for the duration of the war.’
⁵

In 1940 a member wrote in puzzlement to the editor of
Home & Country
:

I live in Road A of a reception area which contains some dozen houses each standing in a good half-acre of ground. The billeting officer came among us and we all with one consent began to make excuses. So she passed on to Road B, which contains about four times as many houses in a smaller space. Here she planted children thick and firm, softly murmuring a phrase about police powers when protests occurred. When asked later why Road A got away with it, she said, ‘It’s useless to dump children in big houses: it never works.’ That I can well believe; but why were we not summonsed and fined for evading duties thrust upon our neighbours. Is the government afraid?

It was a knotty problem and one that was never properly addressed. Some very large houses – Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth and Buscot Park in Faringdon – were made available to evacuees and schools but it is true that the poorer households in the countryside took on far more evacuees proportionally than the wealthy.

A Divisional First Aid commandant from Merstham in Surrey posed an interesting question about compulsory billeting and one that directly related to women. How should a woman, trained for example as a first-aid worker, deal with the dilemma she would almost certainly face if there were an air raid? Would she go out and do her duty or remain behind to look after children who had been committed to her care? ‘How can any woman leave a house of frightened children during an air raid to work with a first-aid unit? And furthermore, would she be doing her duty if she did?’
⁶
These and many other questions remained unresolved.

At 11.07 a.m. on Thursday, 31 August 1939 the Ministry of Health sent out a brief order: ‘Evacuate Forthwith’. The enormous machine that had been prepared over the previous months and years cranked into motion. The transport arrangements ran efficiently and as Tom Harrisson of Mass Observation wrote later: ‘Because a lot of trains took a lot of people in a little time,
our leaders turned cart-wheels of self-satisfaction; uncritically, un-analytically they wallowed in Maths. There was a chorus of self-congratulation, and relevant ministers ladled out congratulations to every conceivable local authority: to the teachers and mothers, to the hosts and to the children of Britain.’
⁷

James Roffey, who had been evacuated to Pulborough in that first wave, remembered first the excitement and then the anxiety of evacuation. At the end of a long day he just wanted to see his mother and father again. He wrote in his memoir: ‘“So this is evacuation!” I thought. “A long journey in a crowded train, followed by ages spent in the pens of a cattle market. The smell of disinfectant that has trickled down my neck. Now a feeling of anxiety as we all sit on the bare floorboards of a school in a place the name of which I still didn’t know.” I didn’t like evacuation anymore; I just wanted to go home.’
⁸
Despite his distress he was able to register the trestle tables all down one side of the school room piled high with sandwiches, cakes and biscuits. ‘There were jugs of lemonade and big teapots filled ready with hot tea, beside bowls filled with sugar, jugs of milk and rows of cups and saucers.’
⁹
He learned later that the local women, organised by the WI, had been working since the early morning to get the refreshments prepared for the incoming evacuees. Some of them had been baking cakes for several days previously, he recalled, though the children were too nervous to do justice to the spread.

Acts of kindness such as the feast laid on for James and his schoolmates were recorded in several memoirs. A group of mothers and infants in Bedfordshire were delighted to see marquees with teas laid out ‘just like at a garden party’ but all this was swiftly forgotten as the process of billeting began. Children were herded into halls, meeting rooms, schools, and scrutinised, picked or left by families who were prepared to take them in or
leave them. Many were left unhoused and the hapless billeting officers spent hours traipsing around lanes, knocking on doors, urging unwilling householders to accept a child here, a pregnant mother there, a tearful brother and sister who would not be separated. The evacuees, exhausted, homesick and hungry, felt anxious at the prospect of who they might be sent to live with. The would-be foster parents felt the resentment, foreseen a year earlier by the WI, that they had no choice in the matter. Mary Marston’s mother was a billeting officer in Cheadle Hume, near Manchester. Mary’s early wartime memory is of hordes of children carrying gas masks being directed into the school hall. They were sorted and sent off to live with families all over the village. After all the billeting was over Mary’s mother was left with the adults, who also needed housing: ‘We had a headmistress from Wood’s Lane School billeted with us. I remember being surprised that she called my mother and father by their Christian names. I never saw any children from her school but later on there were evacuees from Manchester High School at our school.’

Initially there were problems as children and mothers found it hard to settle down. Jean Ridgeway and her sister, Fran, went to live with Mrs Winter, who was a billeting officer and treasurer of her local WI near Barnstaple in Devon.

At first we were terribly homesick and Mrs Winter was quite hostile towards us. At least that’s how it appeared. She was very busy sorting out children who had gone to homes that didn’t work out and I expect she thought we would get on at her house because we were sisters but we were homesick and everything was new and smelled strange. One afternoon she found me comforting Fran in the garden and I think it made her sad to think we were so unhappy. After that she paid us more attention and things worked out OK. I remember she was constantly going to ‘the institute’ to sort things out but she never talked about that. She was a good cook and a great cake maker, that I do remember. We were with her for about eight weeks, then Mum came to pick us up as the bombs had not come.

Long after the journalists had lost interest in the evacuees, and those families and children who were only briefly in the country had returned to the cities, WI members were left caring for children and young mothers who, uprooted from their homes, had no choice but to learn to settle in the countryside. For both sides there was unfamiliarity, some early hostility and much adjustment, but where it worked it worked well and whole communities changed and flourished as the incomers learned to adapt to a different way of life.

In common with most village families, the Simses in Bradfield had evacuees. They had two boys: Albert Mersh and his brother, Harry Boy. Albert was six and Harry Boy was a little older. Ann Tetlow recalled the shock she felt when she realised that the children had come from a tenement in Stepney with one lavatory for twenty-one people. The boys had two sisters who lived with Mrs Worthy down the road and there was another sibling who lived in the next village. Harry Boy stayed in Bradfield until he was fourteen, when he went back to live in London, but Albert was too young to leave so when the Simses moved to Burgess Hill for eighteen months, he moved in with the family’s maid, Emily, where he was very happy. He eventually left and became a goldsmith but as far as Ann knows, he never made contact with either Emily or her parents again. However, Harry Boy did come back to Bradfield to visit her mother after the war. His had been one of the many happy experiences, which tend to go unrecorded in the histories of evacuation.

Like other villages around the country, Bradfield had been led
to expect one sort of evacuee and received quite another. Mrs Ward wrote a description of the September 1939 evacuation in a little notebook that her daughter Dorcas found and transcribed many years later. It made for uncomfortable reading. As Dorcas explained in her accompanying notes: ‘I have modernised the spelling, but have not edited the language or attitudes, believing them to be representative of the reaction of country people to the poverty and distress emerging from London sixty years ago, when the bombing was still only anticipated – a mixture of planning and chaos, good will and misunderstanding leading to exasperation.’ Following the census of accommodation available in Bradfield carried out in early 1939 the Rural District Council told villagers that they should prepare to receive 300 evacuees in two consignments. Closer to the time they learned that they were to receive 270 children and 30 teachers, in effect increasing the size of the village population by over a quarter. ‘The whole parish was re-canvassed, and a fine response was made by those prepared to take in children up to this number,’ wrote Mrs Ward.

On September 1st the blow was . . . that there were no blankets or mattresses. However everything else was ready. The billeting officer had every household’s voucher ready filled in with details as to numbers of children and money due, only the names of the children remaining to be added, so that we reckoned the whole 300 could be disposed of in about one hour. This being so we decided that it would not be necessary to provide refreshments other than water (which had to be fetched from a farm nearby) and that the present sanitary arrangements would be sufficient.

The children were due to arrive on the Sunday but on Saturday evening the billeting officer received a telegram to say they would not be arriving until Monday.

At 11 am on Monday another telegram arrived, ‘expect children this afternoon’. At 3 pm a third telegram, ‘arrangements cancelled’. The billeting officer disperses the helpers and goes out. At 5.30 a fourth telegram, ‘children arriving 6 pm’. Billeting officer’s small daughter cycles frantically round parish searching for her father. WVS committee hastily re-assemble. 6.30 billeting officer found. Large numbers of club members and children arrive on spot. 7.30 buses arrive. They unload their contents – 35 school children, 220 mothers and infants!

There was dismay on the part of the villagers, faced with this now completely new problem. The evacuated mothers were equally upset to find themselves being billeted to private homes in a village far from anything or anywhere familiar. Several spent the night in the club house and then returned to London. Others stayed but were difficult to house. Mothers with as many as six children were clearly a much bigger problem for the billeting officer than unaccompanied schoolchildren. Some spoke no English as they came from the Polish, Jewish or Chinese communities in Poplar, Limehouse or Stepney, and Mrs Ward was as shattered as any of the villagers by the extreme poverty and destitution of some of the families who arrived in the village:

For the last two days we have laboured unceasingly to fix up the worse cases of hardship. The LCC [London County Council] helpers, both men and women, have been unfailingly tactful, hardworking and efficient. We appeal to the RDC [Rural District Council] for help. They tell us we must keep them all in the parish somehow, but can offer no helpful advice. We have fixed up a few empty cottages and sheds for some families. The school children and the sprinkling of respectable families are happily housed. But there is a residue so uncivilised as to completely defeat our efforts at solution.

Over the next few weeks the situation eased. Many women who could not bear the idea of life in the country returned to London. For them it was not just the lack of familiar surroundings and husbands but the enforced inactivity, which left many feeling uncomfortable. As the war progressed and bombs did not drop on the capital others returned, so that by Christmas 1939 only a very small percentage of mothers and children who had originally left the cities were still living in rural villages. Some of the women who came into the village as evacuees settled well and soon brought a breath of fresh air to village life and to the WI in particular.

Three stood out in Ann’s mind and became members of Bradfield WI during the war: Mrs Clarke, Mrs Amor and Mrs Turner. Mrs Amor was a Londoner, despite her exotic surname. Ann recalled: ‘I remember her well as a plump lady in a very tight purple dress and high heels and with a pompadour hair style (very different from our village ladies) but she was a first class blackberry picker and was very active in the WI.’ Mrs Clarke turned out to be keen on amateur dramatics and took part in several wartime productions in Bradfield. Ann remembered her performances well and looked forward to them. Mrs Turner never returned to London. She and her family felt so comfortable in Bradfield that they stayed on after the war and Mrs Turner’s daughter still lives in the same house.

In recent times much has been made in the evacuation history about the difficulties encountered by the Liverpudlian children who were sent to North Wales, where the clash of cultures between them and their chapel-going hosts was perhaps the most extreme. Trenchant views held by minorities led to unpleasant
insults on both sides with Tom Harrisson remarking in a book published in 1940: ‘Thousands of cases in our files, atrocity stories about our own people which exceed anything yet about our enemies. Is that a measure of the national unity so constantly trumpeted by King, Halifax, Chatfield, Stanhope and other lords?’
¹⁰

A counter-view was offered by a Denbighshire village which helps to redress the balance and show how the story of evacuation was primarily a human story. The reception committee in the village had been working for several weeks in preparation for the arrival of schoolchildren with over thirty enthusiastic women canvassing their districts for billets for the evacuees from Merseyside. On 1 September the big red buses drew up outside the school gates and the long ‘march in’ began.