Jambusters (13 page)

The unaccompanied schoolchildren were not wholly abandoned to their foster families in the countryside. They were accompanied by a whole raft of teachers and support staff. The latter group left quickly but the teachers remained as long as sufficient children from their schools stayed in the countryside. Some of these teachers were men who had been called out of retirement as younger teachers joined up. Others were women who had had to resign from teaching when they married. Many of them could see the benefits offered by evacuation.

A teacher wrote with regret: ‘When we are not in school pegging away at the 3 Rs, we become the Evacuee Hikers. This exercise in the beautiful fresh air has made a difference to the health and well-being of these children. It has been of great interest and disappointment to record daily the absence of
children who were evacuated with us. May I say that most of the children have returned to the vulnerable areas not because they wanted to but because the parents so desired.’ Nearly half the unaccompanied school-aged children who had been evacuated from the cities in September were home by the end of the year. The teacher foresaw problems when the children returned: ‘Having tasted of the fruits of such a good life, they will be very loath to settle down again to the routine of home.’ This is so very different from the portrait painted in the press that autumn, where stories of badly behaved children running amok in villages are countered by tales of intolerant housewives who fed their guests on bread and dripping while feeding their own children on the townies’ rations. Reports of boys asking for chips and beer for tea, eating soup with a knife and refusing to sleep in a bed ‘because that’s for dead people’ flooded the letters pages of the national newspapers.

In December 1939 the WI conducted a survey into evacuation, which was published in 1940. The object of the survey was ‘to provide the authorities with the comments of Women’s Institute members on the condition and habits of the evacuees whom they received into their homes in September 1940’.
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The authors felt the WI was uniquely placed to compile such a report because of its spread throughout England and Wales. They hoped the material would throw light not only on the 1939 evacuation but also on ‘the long term social problems which have been so strikingly laid bare by recent events’.
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Questionnaires were sent to all institutes and members were asked to answer honestly and constructively, not in a spirit of grievance. Members were used to being canvassed for opinions and over the past twenty-four years they had contributed to numerous reports, so that those who took part saw this as an opportunity to make their comment on the state, as they saw it,
of children’s health and education, which was something they were concerned about. The National Federation received replies from just over a quarter of institutes, representing a wide band of the rural reception areas. The report pointed out that only a proportion of the children were sent to rural areas. Many had been sent to towns in safe areas, such as St Albans or Ware in Hertfordshire, Horncastle in Lincolnshire or Taunton in Somerset. The details of their findings were sent first to the health and education officials in the areas where the children had come from and the authors were delighted with the reaction: ‘It would be difficult to overstate the value of this survey, so obviously unbiased and full of acute observations,’ wrote one official, while another thanked the WI warmly for conducting the survey ‘which I found intensely interesting and of great value to Public Health. Can you not make it more public, for these conditions should be ventilated and corrected. In spite of all that the Public Health Authorities have done and are doing, the neglect of the parents is astonishing.’
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In the introduction the authors wrote: ‘When evacuation took place, our members did their very best to make their town visitors comfortable and happy, and made great sacrifices to this end. It was a real shock to them to find that many of the guests arrived in a condition and with modes of life or habits which were startlingly less civilized than those they had accepted for a lifetime. It is therefore all the more satisfactory that very few indeed of the reports sent in by the institutes were written in anything but a generous spirit.’
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The main thrust of their concern, the authors concluded, was that people in authority should take notice of the findings in the report and tackle ‘the weaknesses in our social system of which they have had first-hand experience of such a distressing kind’.
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The WI’s Evacuation Survey, like Mrs Ward’s report of the
evacuee mother arriving in Bradfield in early September, reflects the era in which it was written. It was an age when class distinctions were clearly defined and the gap between town and country was felt to be a gulf, which led to a great deal of misunderstanding. The report shows up some of the prejudices held by rural women about their town counterparts and the women they classed as slum-dwellers. The first and overriding concern of the women who took children into their homes was hygiene. The report suggested that almost every batch of children contained some with head lice or skin conditions, such as impetigo, while others were bed-wetters. Early press stories spoke about lice-ridden children arriving in the villages in their hundreds and it was this, almost more than anything else, that came to symbolise the state of the children arriving from the cities.

The subject of bed-wetting was a distressing one and several institute record books refer to the purchase of plastic sheets for village homes, but individuals who contributed to the report suggest that bed-wetting was usually a short-term problem that went away once the child settled down and felt comfortable in the home. They also conceded that many had not been used to outside lavatories or chamber pots for night-time use, but above all it was children’s distress at being away from home and in a strange situation which was the trigger for most damp sheets.

Skin diseases upset host mothers particularly and they found themselves feeling very sorry for children who had sores. An extract about children who came from Liverpool read: ‘It appeared they were unbathed for months. One child was suffering from scabies and the majority had it in their hair and others had dirty, septic sores all over their bodies.’
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One advantage of evacuation for children who stayed on with their host families and who were well treated was that they had plenty of fresh food. The authors wrote:

it is frequently remarked that the children ‘looked at the country food at first with dark suspicion’ but soon became accustomed to it. In many areas it is apparently the custom to give the child some pennies and for it to buy biscuits or fish and chips to eat in the street. There are frequent reports of children being quite unaccustomed to having to sit down to meals and using knives and forks; when they are hungry they are given hunks of bread and margarine which they eat sitting on the doorsteps or elsewhere. Some children said they had never seen their mother cook anything and had no hot meals at home.
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The Women’s Institute members were nothing if not persistent. One wrote in triumph that children from Southampton evacuated to her village in Dorset were doing really well: ‘Children gained in height and weight and it is remarkable how many things such as soup, green vegetables, milk puddings the children now enjoy which they would not touch four months ago.’
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By and large, where children stayed on, rather than going home after a few days or weeks, there grew genuine affection on both sides. One evacuee child remembers settling so well into his village school that by the time the next wave of evacuees came from London in May 1940 he saw himself as ‘a proper little village urchin’ and teased and tormented the ‘townies’ as he called them. ‘I had the accent an’ all,’ he said. A foster mother in the North East wrote in her report: ‘The children, after a few weeks’ kindness, showed us what lovely natures they had, had they been helped and treated properly.’ Another said that the children from Newcastle ‘have joined in the village life and have become part of the community, helping the housewife and doing jobs on the farm’.
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But the implicit criticism of these children’s home lives is never far from the surface. The authors comment:

Such children have to fend for themselves from an early age onwards as their parents go out to work all day and then go to the pictures in the evening. Certain cases are reported of where the art of stealing had apparently been taught the children by their parents as part of their outfit for life. One boy returned to his billet in Dorset with a live hen under his arms and informed his landlady that he could ‘get plenty more for her’.
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The group who came in for the highest praise by the WI survey were the teachers. Unsung heroes of the evacuation scheme and without which it could not have functioned, many of them were uprooted from their homes and sent to live with strange people in the country and shoulder responsibility for their pupils twelve or fourteen hours a day, six or even seven days a week: ‘Much of the success here [is] due to excellent relations existing between head teacher and staff and parents, boys and billets,’ wrote one institute member. ‘The school staff have gone out of their way to express to the villagers their gratitude for what is being done for the children,’ wrote another and finally, for children and their teachers from Fulham: ‘The children have settled in well and behaved well; a state of affairs assisted by the splendid staff of teachers.’
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Teachers were on call seven days a week, dashing in and out of houses where children were billeted, explaining habits and characteristics of seemingly difficult youngsters, moving boys and girls from unsuitable to more welcoming billets, teaching half days in school rooms and the other half days out of doors, never knowing how many children would be in their class on a Monday morning after parents swooped down from the cities to pick up their offspring they were missing so badly. Theirs was a huge and often thankless task but by and large they were praised by women, families and their charges alike.

One wrote a breathless account of her first two days in the country with her charges from Walthamstow:

The next and following days proved to be full of district visiting, interviewing foster-parents, explaining the whys and wherefores of difficult children – various purchases (chiefly mackintosh sheets!) – correspondence with Walthamstow parents . . . During the day many tasks have been the teacher’s lot. l anWe, as a school party, did not take any helpers with us so we have had such duties as: taking children (and sitting for 2 hours) to the clinic, being very tactfud tolerant with foster-parents, washing children who come to school a little the worse for wear, and attending to their education. In spite of this, some of us found time to do a little voluntary clerical work at the local Food Control Office so ‘Life has been full of a number of things, that I’m sure we have [all] been as happy as Kings.’
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The main problem for the teachers was that evacuation had been planned under their own local education authority and carried out under the same but as soon as they arrived in their town or village they were under a different authority. Many of them, having grown heartily sick of plans for evacuation that had occupied them over the summer and into early September, now found themselves taken aback by the singular lack of preparation for their arrival in the reception areas. No contact had been made between the reception and evacuation schools and this led to weeks and sometimes months of confusion for teachers and pupils alike. The most common outcome was that village schools and incoming schools had to share premises with one school having mornings one week and the afternoons the following week. ‘I think that if the home council of all evacuated schools
had set up an office and medical staff in each reception area so that we had had our own officers to represent us, the organisation might have been considerably simplified. We have with us
one
of Walthamstow’s nurses who has the colossal job of visiting all the schools evacuated in this area,’
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the same teacher wrote.

Edith Jones had schoolteachers staying with her at Red House Farm in Smethcote from the middle of September. She mentions their comings and goings in her diaries in her matter-of-fact manner: ‘Miss Loughran, evacuee teacher, comes to lodge with us for a fortnight. I go to Shrewsbury, buy a new hat and shoes and slippers and wellingtons etc.’ Over the next six years she had a series of private evacuees from Middlesex, an evacuee called Billy Murphy from Liverpool and paying guests from Northampton and Rugby. The latter came four times between 1942 and 1945. When they returned home after their first visit Edith wrote in her diary that she had given them nine hens as a present. As she was practical and good with her hands, Edith was constantly being asked to make and mend things for the children billeted in and around Smethcote. One evacuee mother, on hearing that Edith was practical, brought her a pram for repair.

Where the report was uniformly negative was in its criticism of the evacuee mothers.

Warm tribute was paid by the Institute hostesses to those who showed themselves competent mothers, but they found it hard to be sympathetic to women who could neither cook, sew nor conform to the ordinary standards of human decency and whose one idea of enjoyment was to visit the public-house or cinema. They were frankly horrified and disgusted at the state of filth in which some of the mothers left their billets and many reports reflect the conviction that this state of affairs is a serious slur on our educational system.
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