The Day War Broke Out Read online

  There was also the issue of medical treatment: at a time when there was no free healthcare via the National Health Service (which was not established until after the war had ended), medical treatment had to be paid for. Arrangements were made with the medical profession that they would treat all evacuated children free of charge or, if necessary, treatment in a local hospital would be free.

  Further government information, like leaflets for The Protection of Your Home Against Air Raids, were distributed to all households in July and August 1939, giving all details of the evacuation scheme. Additional public information leaflets, Your Gas Mask and Masking Your Windows followed. Distribution of these leaflets ensured all families would be coming to terms with the idea of possible attack. BBC Radio even broadcast an air-raid siren warning everyone to take shelter, so people could recognise the sound.

  However, despite all efforts to encourage families to evacuate their children, the overall take-up for the scheme varied considerably. In Manchester, 75 per cent registered for evacuation. In London and Liverpool, 65 per cent agreed and in Glasgow 62 per cent, but in cities like Birmingham, Coventry and West Bromwich, the take-up was much lower, just 24 per cent of the local population.

  On 31 August 1939, the government informed the local authorities in the evacuation areas that evacuation from the cities would commence the following day. BBC Radio public announcements informed listeners that even if anyone had not formally registered, they could still go. By then, many who had registered had changed their minds about sending their children away.

  Joan Strange, from Worthing, West Sussex, was a physiotherapist in her thirties who became directly involved in helping Jewish people escaping from Central Europe and the Nazi regime in the late thirties. In January 1939, she helped establish the Worthing Refugee Committee. Her tireless efforts helping displaced persons and refugees in post-war Europe and South-East Asia continued throughout her life until her death in 1994.

  Joan’s wartime diary records the early effect of the evacuation in a West Sussex seaside town like Worthing, which had agreed to take in 13,000 evacuees.

  1 SEPTEMBER

  Wireless news at one o’clock told us that the London schoolchildren would be evacuated tomorrow. Terrible, as it makes war seem nearer. Surely it can’t happen. It’s dreadful to think that the ‘victors’ will be those who use most effectively the most diabolic instruments of death as quickly as possible.

  The papers are very depressing – all the pictures are of soldiers, sandbags, ARP, city girls evacuating from their offices, guns, aeroplanes and so on. One neighbour has a £400 dugout bomb-proof (?) shelter erected in his garden, disguised as a rockery but with two doors and two chimneys visible.

  On 6 September, she wrote:

  The first week of the war – it has been impossible to write daily for the last week as life has suddenly become very difficult under wartime conditions.

  The blackouts have started, no one must show a glimmer of light anywhere. Cars have the merest glimmer left and have to be painted white in front, rear and on running boards – the roads have a white centre line and the kerbs whitened. Some food, especially sugar, is very scarce. Worthing, being a safe zone, has had over 10,000 evacuees from London billeted on the inhabitants. On Saturday, a friend and I helped billet some Bermondsey blind people. We both felt how terrible it was that so much money, time and trouble is taken to help these poor, old, ill, blind people while we send healthy, young, virile people to be killed. They were a really pathetic lot of people, mostly old (I took several who were over eighty), all dirty and several ill.

  Worthing and the South Coast towns did not, of course, remain safe zones.

  By spring 1940, with the increasing threat of invasion of England’s South Coast, some 200,000 children, including the West Sussex evacuees, had to be evacuated or re-evacuated away from the coastal areas to safer locations.

  Organising transport for the first wave of evacuation in September 1939 was a complicated logistical exercise. The Ministry of Transport and the railway companies estimated that transport by train, bus and in some instances, boat or ship, would be needed for nearly 3.5 million.

  These were huge numbers. Effectively, the planners viewed the transportation of huge numbers as a military operation. Consequently, insufficient attention was given to what would happen when the evacuees arrived at their destination.

  The planners over-estimated the numbers by more than 50 per cent. In the event, in the first three days of the official evacuation, less than 1.5 million were moved. The moving process involved teachers, local authority and railway staff, as well as 17,000 women from the WVS; these women were deployed to look after the evacuees and provided refreshments at railway stations and reception areas.

  Families and teachers had been primed. Children needed to carry a kit: a handbag or case containing the child’s gas mask, a change of underclothing, night clothes, house shoes or plimsolls, spare socks or stockings, toothbrush, comb, towel, soap and facecloth, handkerchiefs and, if possible, a warm coat or mackintosh. Furthermore, each child was required to bring a packet of food for the day. Poorer families certainly struggled with this, though billeting officers, teachers and volunteer workers did their best in the circumstances to improvise and provide help wherever possible.

  Every child would have a luggage label pinned to their coat, bearing their name, school and evacuation authority. They remained unaware of where they were going, what they would be doing – and when they would be returning. It was, by anyone’s standards, enormous upheaval for everyone involved.

  While the evacuation plan succeeded on a logistical level, i.e. in transporting the 1.5 million without accident or injury, at the receiving end, it came close to chaos. Without the heroic efforts of the teachers and the volunteers accompanying the children, it could have been even worse.

  The planners had focused on the logistics of moving large numbers of children and adults, but they had not fully understood the difficulties of placing unaccompanied children into billets.

  Receiving families sometimes found it difficult to cope with the reality of accommodating a total stranger in their midst – or a mother with babies or toddlers who had no wish to be separated from them, even briefly.

  ‘The women of England are depressed to death over the idea of the shared kitchen and the children unknown,’ wrote Surrey housewife Constance Miles in her wartime diary on Wednesday, 30 August 1939.

  Constance lived in Shere, a small village near Guildford in Surrey. The following day, on hearing that the evacuation of the children was due to commence, she wrote: ‘Seventy children are due to arrive by buses here at 10.30. The evacuation notices are most inappropriately given out by BBC young men who know little what despair enters the hearts of various women expecting the strangers and afraid to have them.’

  The confusion that often awaited the evacuated children and mothers once they had reached their destination stemmed partly from the fact that far fewer numbers than expected had turned up. Because of this, the carefully plotted train schedules for the first day of evacuation were thrown into total disarray. Many groups of children herded from schools to railway stations wound up boarding trains, irrespective of destination.

  Such was the mix-up, reception areas expecting schoolchildren found themselves greeting different groups, i.e. mothers with under-fives or pregnant women. Or schoolchildren who had been carefully sorted into groups when their journey began were often split up en route if the journey involved a change of trains and ended by bus. In some places, children were taken away to billets by volunteer helpers before a list of names could even be taken. It would take a week or more before teachers who had started out travelling with groups of schoolchildren were then able to discover where their pupils had been taken. Families at home also had to wait to find out where their children were located.

  Given that during early months of the war – dubbed ‘the Phoney War’ – were confusingly uneventful because the anticipated ma
ssive aerial attack did not take place at all, the many problems experienced by families or children finding billeting an unwelcoming or uncomfortable experience resulted in one thing: many just wanted to go home.

  By Christmas 1939, over half of evacuees had done just that.

  Logistically, Operation Pied Piper, as the large-scale movement of Britain’s children away from the cities was known, had been a success in the first part. But for those who had been evacuated? Sometimes it was a very different story . . .

  EVA’S STORY

  Here is Londoner Eva Merrill’s memory of evacuation:

  Eva lived with her family in Haringey, North London. Eva, twelve, was the eldest of three. Her sister Dorothy was nine and their little brother, John, nearly two years old.

  The Merrills were an ordinary family, living a happy, well-ordered life in the rented downstairs flat of a large terraced house. Eva’s father, James, worked as a messenger in the City of London for a large firm of stockbrokers. He also had a part-time job on Sundays as a doorman at the BBC TV studios at Alexandra Palace. Eva recalled:

  We didn’t see a lot of him as he seemed to be always working, but we had a comfortable lifestyle and were in a far better financial position than many working-class families around us.

  In 1938 I passed the scholarship and was a pupil at Hornsey County Grammar School. The following year, when Britain was planning for war in earnest and contingency plans were made for the evacuation of children from London and other cities, Dorothy and I brought letters home from our schools in the summer term of 1939, regarding possible evacuation.

  Dad and Mum felt Dorothy and I should be evacuated so our names were put down at our respective schools. It was then announced that mothers with children under the age of five should also consider evacuation, taking their toddlers with them. As John was not quite two years old, Dad felt Mum should also be removed from possible danger, so they too registered for the evacuation programme.

  Far from being nervous or worried about evacuation from their home, the Merrill girls cheerfully accepted the situation.

  Most of our classmates had duly brought their forms back, all consenting to evacuation, rather like signing up for a mammoth school outing, Eva recalled.

  Our school was issued with special songbooks in preparation, full of rousing and patriotic numbers which the music teacher rehearsed us in relentlessly. We were told that if and when we left London, we were to sing our heads off, there may be a war, but we were BRITISH and must never be downhearted. I can still remember us all bellowing out ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and ‘There’ll Always Be An England’ plus similar uplifting songs in the school hall, months before the war even started, just so that we should all be in good voice if that fateful day ever arrived.

  Dad had been persuaded by his firm to join the Territorial Army in 1937, so along with several of his work colleagues, he had spent a week away at camp on Army manoeuvres each year. Mum thought it was all rather silly – after all, he was forty-two. She said they were like a lot of schoolboys playing games. However, Dad enjoyed the week or so away and as his employers paid his wages when he was on these jaunts, not too much notice was taken as to how he’d committed himself – nor did we realise the full implications.

  By July 1939, Eva had completed her first year at grammar school and had settled in nicely. She was enjoying the new experience and coping with all the academic requirements. Dorothy too was doing well at junior school and toddler John was happy and contented.

  We must have been more affluent that year for Dad had booked a two-week summer holiday for us at Winchelsea Beach, near Rye, in Sussex. This was to be in a disused railway coach, a great novelty – obviously a forerunner of caravan holidays. We travelled down to Winchelsea Beach by coach in early August and had a glorious ten days there. It was John’s second birthday while we were there and I still have a photo of him, beaming away astride a large mock lion. It was a happy time for all of us, our parents were relaxed and carefree and the railway coach provided an endless source of amusement for Dorothy and I.

  In the middle of the second week a telegram arrived, telling Mr Merrill to report to the Territorial Army barracks: ‘He had to be there AT ONCE – he was already a day overdue because the letter telling him to report had gone to our home, causing some consternation all round. There we were in the middle of a lovely holiday and this bombshell arrives!’

  The family packed up frantically and headed for home:

  Dad was full of anxiety, fearing he would be arrested as a deserter, Mum furious at what she thought was the Territorial Army playing still more silly games. Us girls were somewhat resentful and upset at this sudden curtailment of our holiday, so it was a very unhappy little family that arrived back in London.

  Once home, Dad picked up the travel warrant that was waiting for him on the doormat, along with instructions, and he rushed off to report to the army barracks. We were left to unpack our cases feeling thoroughly fed up and let down. No explanation was given as to why Dad had to go off in such a hurry, or how long it was for.

  The days went by and there was still no letter or message from Mr Merrill.

  We all grew very worried. Mum’s money ran out and at last, in desperation, she contacted his employers. They were less than helpful, they told her they did not know where Dad was. They had merely been informed that he had been called up for the Army. As he was no longer an employee of theirs, there would be no wages forthcoming. Mum should contact the Army.

  The next few days were difficult and bewildering for the family:

  I don’t know how Mum got through or how she found money to feed us all. I think she probably pawned her engagement ring and watch with other bits and pieces. There was no welfare state in the 1930s and no agency one could go to for help. Food had to be paid for with hard cash and our gas supply was operated with a pre-payment slot meter. ‘The Army’ seemed a vague concept; how or where one set about finding information Mum had no idea, and nobody seemed able to offer any suggestions. It was all such a shock. One week we were a happy family on holiday, the next we were penniless on our own, with Dad spirited away into the British Army.

  Ten days passed before Dad arrived home resplendent in full Army uniform. Despite being blind as a bat without his glasses, not in very good health and forty-two years of age, he was now a private in the London Rifle Brigade. He’d also served in the First World War, from 1916 to 1918.

  None of the men called up at this time had been allowed to contact their families or give any hint of the massive behind-the-scenes call-up.

  Dad had been frantic with worry about us all, particularly our financial situation, for he knew Mum had very little money when we came back from holiday in such a rush. But he had been powerless to do anything. Fortunately, he had brought an Army pay docket home with him, which Mum was able to cash, and a weekly allowance had been made out for Mum and us three children. This was about half what she had previously had coming in. His employers had earlier indicated to their staff when they persuaded them to join the Territorial Army should they ever be called up, the firm would consider making good any loss in wages. In the event, they declined to make good any such shortfall.

  Dad spent a short leave with us and then returned to camp. He gave Mum his address but warned that he did not know how long he was to remain at this particular base as movement was likely. A day or so after Dad left, Mum received a letter saying we all had to meet at South Haringey Junior School on Friday, 1 September at 9.30am. We were all going to be evacuated.

  There wasn’t much time to get ready:

  Mum hurriedly packed up for us, sent a note to Dad telling him of our impending departure and rushed around making the necessary domestic arrangements concerning the house. We were only allowed to take the minimum of luggage, nightwear and toilet articles, a change of clothing, a top coat and a second pair of shoes or boots. Each child had to have his own bag or case and, most essential of all, a gas mask. We’d b
een issued with these some time earlier. After the initial novelty of trying them out had worn off, they’d been left lying around in their cardboard boxes.

  On Friday morning, 1 September, the Merrills joined the other children from South Haringey School and Hornsey County Grammar School in the playground.

  Mums were there to wave their children off while others, like ours, were coming with us, complete with toddlers and babies. They tried to assemble us in some sort of order but with our party, it was difficult, Dorothy should have been with her junior school classmates, me with the Hornsey County group, Mum and John with the mother and toddler contingent. We were on three separate lists, it seemed. But Mum wasn’t having that: she insisted we were all staying together, even though the officials assured her we’d all eventually arrive at the same place.

  Outside the school, fleets of coaches (or charabancs as they were known then) were lined up to transport everyone.

  Nobody knew where we were going. It was all a deadly secret, very hush-hush. Parents were virtually sending their children off into the unknown and there were many exhortations to ‘write and let us know where you are’ passed around. Why the parents could not be told on that day where their children were going, I do not know – many must have spent anxious days worrying about their children and waiting for information as to their whereabouts.

  As Mum was so insistent that we four were to travel on the same coach, it was finally agreed that Dorothy and I should join a mother and toddler group. We waved our respective classmates onto their coaches and climbed onto a coach full of mothers and toddlers under five. Dorothy and I were the only school-age children on that coach – a fact that was to cause problems later on.