Evacuation

What – Evacuation was when children were sent away from cities which were thought to be targets for bombers.

When – The first children were evacuated in September 1939.

Where – Children were sent away to small towns and villages in the countryside.

Who – School children, teachers, mothers with babies, pregnant women and some disabled people.

Why – The government were worried that the futures generations would be lost.

How – By train and road.

FACTS –

Many evacuees left their new homes in the countryside way before the war ended.

3 million children left their families for around 5 or 6 years.All children had to wear name tags.

It was hard to make a decision. To keep them with you or to send them away where they are safe – however never seeing them grow up.People came to chose who they wanted to take into their homes.

Siblings were split up.You couldn’t take all of your favourite belongings, and you had to live with STRANGERS.

How would you feel?Most children were evacuated with their schools.Some children had never left London. They had never seen farm animals, trees and never smelt fresh air.

Many evacuees did not understand what was happening to them, some wondered whether they would ever see their families again.

“We did not have evacuees, but our neighbours did. They were dreadfully homesick as they come from London. The farm animals terrified them.”

“We were lined up and the various people would take evacuees came and picked us out. If only they liked the look of us!”

“It was like they were out puppy dogs from a shop window.”

Evacuation

Many evacuated children were homesick, sometimes bullied by new parents and often poorly fed. Others were treated really well and saw cows and rabbits for the first time.
Some teachers were horrible to evacuated children.

Many people thought they would be stupid or smell because they came from the cities.

More than a million mothers and fathers had to say goodbye to their children at school gates and at railway stations all over the country. If the bombing was as bad as expected then they might never have seen them again.

Evacuees could be spotted easily by the labels on their coats, the bags in their hands and their gas masks.

The British Government gave out a leaflet called ‘Evacuation, Why and How?’ telling parents all about evacuation. Those who stayed in the cities were there to keep the factories, offices, hospitals and shops open. The areas evacuated under the government scheme were: London; Essex; Tottenham; Middlesex; Portsmouth; Gosport; Southampton; Liverpool; Manchester; Sheffield; Leeds; Bradford; Hull; Newcastle; Glasgow and Edinburgh. In all these places local councils organised trains and timetables. Headmasters made lists of those children who were being evacuated. Parents were given a list of what to pack for there children. Some families were very poor and could not provide all of the clothes on the list. “ We marched through the streets of Wandsworth just as we had done several times before, heading for the railway station. Only this time people stood on there doorsteps to watch us pass and shopkeepers gave us sweets” – Michael Aspel, taken from ‘The Evacuees’ by B.S.Johnson.

Children at War

“The forgotten victims of World War Two were the children who endured it. More than a million were torn from their mothers arms and taken from Britain’s bomb-threatened big cities to the safety of the countryside. Some saw the start of the war as the begging of the great adventure, but the grim reality of gas masks, evacuation and rationing made it clear that they had lost there care free childhoods forever - years they would never recover.

Many lost their lives: one in ten of those killed in the Blitz was a child.