It’s October 1939, and an aristocratic couple are discussing how to manage the horde of ill-spoken, slovenly evacuees from the city who have been billeted in their house. Not to worry, the husband tells his wife: bringing the children into a more refined environment will soon civilise the youngsters.

Ad

Instead, as the sketch plays out on the BBC Home Service, the couple’s lordly airs and graces disappear. It’s the evacuees – sent away from home at the behest of the authorities – who change their hosts, rather than the other way around. It’s a skit that fits with how the story of Second World War evacuation has often been constructed, both at the time and in the years since.

Here is a narrative that emphasises a clash of cultures: the rural rich suddenly confronted by the urban poor – a moment replete with topsy-turvy possibilities. But the circumstances around the recording of the sketch itself reveal how evacuation was a much larger and more complex event than this straightforward narrative suggests.

It was performed by a cast of variety performers who had also been evacuated, from London to Bristol. That move was part of the BBC’s own preparations to maintain a schedule of light entertainment to intersperse with the news bulletins and government announcements expected to dominate the airwaves over the first weeks of the war.

Seen in this light, the first wave of evacuations was specifically a product of conditions in the autumn of 1939 – but it was also an event that came to have a deep significance in the British folk memory, emblematic of the longer and wider disruptions, separations and anxieties experienced by so many civilians. It was, too, part of a global phenomenon, as states and communities sought to move people out of harm’s way.

Thinking about evacuation therefore helps us understand not only Britain’s war, but also a wider human experience – national and local differences notwithstanding – of the impact of mechanised conflict.

Pre-emptive action

In Britain, three types of evacuation were undertaken: official, organisational and private.

Official schemes evacuated children, mothers with infants, pregnant women and disabled adults from cities to locations in the surrounding countryside – so-called ‘reception areas’. These were set in motion on 1 September, once war was imminent but before it had been declared.

More of these evacuees came from London than any other single city but, with the exception of Northern Ireland (where evacuation didn’t start until 1940), this was a nationwide phenomenon. In total, more children were evacuated from other conurbations including Greater Manchester, Tyneside and Merseyside, than from the capital.

Schemes were set up to relocate important parts of the state machinery that would run the war, too. The Air Ministry was later sent to Harrogate, the Admiralty to Bath and a new Ministry of Food was based in Colwyn Bay. At the same time, the BBC wasn’t the only organisation that evacuated its staff. Others, including banks, galleries and universities, moved part of or all their operations away from big cities.

Meanwhile, many private citizens with the means to do so took it upon themselves to head to the homes of rural relatives or seaside resort hotels. In those first days of September 1939, as many as 3.5 million Britons may have been in transit by train, boat, coach or car. Being evacuated, as well as seeing evacuees depart, travel or arrive, were shared common experiences that lodged in the memories of those involved.

As evacuee Donald Wharf recalled: “I will never forget standing, dazed and bemused, on the forecourt of Paddington Station… I also felt very alone in a world gone horribly mad. That was, of course, in spite of the fact that the station was virtually full, mostly with East End evacuees with labels and gas masks like me. But that was the way I felt at the time – maybe some others did too – while lots, who were similar in age to me, just put down their boxes and cried.”

Anticipating attacks

The rationale for these relocations was simple. There was a widespread expectation that any new conflict might start with a devastating air attack by enemy bombers. Such a raid would inflict all the horrors of the front-line trenches of the First World War – not just high explosives and slicing shards of metal but also choking and blinding gas – on civilian populations.

The best way to protect vulnerable people and essential services was to move them out of danger. Such fears substantially overestimated the power of combatant air forces at the outset of the war, but it was the perception of risk that mattered. Had anything close to the worst-case predictions come to pass in Britain, the impact would have been so awful that it might have broken the country’s will to carry on.

Local authorities were responsible for planning official schemes for evacuating children, some mothers and vulnerable adults. Teachers and members of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), the civilian organisation set up under the auspices of the Home Office in 1938 to support civil defence and war work, then implemented these schemes.

Local arrangements varied by area – how parents signed up their children to be evacuated, how much form-filling was involved, and how active local government officials were in communicating with families.

As part of Britain’s official war history, Richard Titmuss was commissioned to study the effects of evacuation and bombing. In the resulting book, Problems of Social Policy (1950), he suggested that the varying quality of these local arrangements, and the confidence (or lack thereof) they inspired, influenced whether parents registered their children to participate in the scheme.

Meanwhile, in the reception areas, WVS billeting officers arranged accommodation for evacuees. Householders with empty bedrooms could be compelled to take in evacuees, but in practice the overwhelming majority volunteered. In return, they were paid an allowance by the government.

Most were not owners of stately homes or manor houses. Instead, it was typically lower-middle-class and working-class families who most often offered help. Their willingness to take in evacuees at short notice, creating considerable inconvenience, spoke to a moral acceptance of the obligation to help the needy in a time of national crisis.

Unlike the wealthy, however, those of more modest means often lacked the space to separate themselves from evacuees whose manners, lifestyle and expectations were frequently very different from their own.

Mass movement

In some ways, the official scheme was an extraordinary success. In just a few days it moved around 1.5 million people from urban to reception areas without a single fatality. Had the expected aerial apocalypse arrived, this would have looked like an even greater achievement. Yet those journeys, and the travellers’ experiences on arrival at their destinations, did not feel so orderly to those involved.

Most evacuees did not travel far, at least by modern standards. The majority went to rural areas relatively close to their home cities, though some were despatched much further afield. More than 250,000 were billeted in the Home Counties, 73,000 in East Anglia, and almost 57,000 in Wales.

However, transport difficulties sometimes turned even journeys that were relatively short in miles into drawn-out tests of endurance. “I remember crying all the way to Wales,” evacuee Beryl Fermor (née Hedges) later wrote.

In just a few days it moved around 1.5 million people from urban to reception areas without a single fatality. Had the expected aerial apocalypse arrived, this would have looked like an even greater achievement

In London, in particular, the pressure to quickly clear mainline stations saw evacuees packed onto trains as they arrived, breaking up school parties and disrupting organisation in reception areas. In some cases, it was weeks before billeting officers and teachers tracked down all their charges.

Patriotically eager to bolster morale and reassure parents, journalists conjured up visions of the positive reception evacuees received. Reporting from “somewhere in Buckinghamshire”, the Daily Express painted a picture of women preparing spare rooms and putting “hot water bottles in the beds in which London children would sleep”. In practice, the situation was more varied and often chaotic.

In some cases, billeting officers got the children they had been expecting and had already allocated to receiving households, and children were dropped off to their hosts in a process that was brusque but at least efficient. In others, unexpected parties of exhausted evacuees were left in draughty church halls while locals came to choose the ones they’d like. Even when things went well, there were inevitable confusions and complications that compounded the uncertainty and distress.

Hostile hosts

Some evacuees enjoyed warm welcomes from kind strangers who recognised the novelty and terror of the children’s situation. Having been instructed by his mother to look after his younger sister and “never let go of her hand”, one former evacuee remembered his eight-year-old self watching anxiously as all the other children in their party were found a billet. Every potential host found reasons not to take on two siblings.

Finally, however, a married couple arrived who asked how they could help and, when the situation was explained, “without any hesitation they offered to take us both into their home”.

Conversely, some evacuees found themselves picked by those grudgingly looking for the least filthy or the most useful for household labour. “In retrospect,” Audrey Demers (née Jones) recalled, “we were treated in a similar fashion to cattle, as the villagers came and looked us over and selected or rejected.”

Split up from friends and siblings, some children found themselves living with hosts who were abusive, neglectful or simply unwilling to tolerate for long this strange imposition on their home. Maintaining the dignity and welfare of evacuees in reception areas had been less of a concern in the planning than the need to get people out of the cities quickly. Even judged on these terms, however, the official scheme fell short.

Take-up was highly variable. Only about half of London’s eligible schoolchildren were evacuated. In Newcastle, the figure was as high as 70 per cent. In Sheffield, only 15 per cent of those eligible took part. Some families could not organise themselves to meet the timetable of evacuation. Others were unwilling to trust their children to strangers. For many, warnings of the horrors of war only strengthened a protective desire to keep their families together.

In the event, the UK did not come under sustained air attack until the summer of 1940 and the Blitz. As a result, adult evacuees soon left the reception areas and families brought their children home. The rate of return varied substantially. Many London children stayed away for the whole war.

Conversely, in Clydebank, Scotland, from where more than half of the children had been evacuated in 1939, all but 5 per cent had returned by the end of 1940. They were still there in March 1941 when the Luftwaffe launched catastrophic raids that, according to official figures, left 528 people dead and 617 seriously injured.

The initial experience of evacuation often brought differences to the fore. At the household level, the mixing of families in such close proximity inevitably exposed gaps in habits, routine and religion. Clashes of cultures released a flood of rumours in the reception areas – stories that revealed and reinforced class-based and regional prejudices about the urban poor.

It was said that dirty children and slatternly mothers had arrived in inadequate and lice-infested clothing. They lazed around billets that were left increasingly filthy by their ill-mannered incontinence, it was claimed, and never contributed to household chores. In an angry Commons debate, Sir Henry Fildes, the Liberal National MP for Dumfriesshire, called evacuation “the dreadful scourge… placed upon the homes of Britain”.

Head lice and bed-wetting

In practice, the deplorable condition of some evacuees was usually the result of poverty, not preference. Two in five child evacuees from Liverpool and Sunderland, for example, had parents who depended either on out-of-work benefits or on very low incomes.

Evacuation came early on a Friday, when wages were most stretched. Many families simply could not afford to kit out their children with new clothes or items on the packing lists supplied by schools. Problems with head lice and bed-wetting were not helped by long journeys on packed trains or by billeting at unfamiliar houses with forbidding hosts.

“I can honestly say that we enjoyed being evacuees,” remembered one, almost 65 years later, adding that “we were well treated and obviously loved by our adopted parents.” For him, the experience made a lasting difference. His parents also moved out of London when they were bombed out of their home, and he never returned to the capital. Yet his words indicate that he knew others had not been so fortunate.

And evacuees’ experiences did not have to be awful to be painful or to leave a lasting mark. “Home is not where one lives,” said one girl, evacuated from London’s East End to Oxford, “but where one has all the people one loves and knows.”

In an angry Commons debate, Sir Henry Fildes, the Liberal National MP for Dumfriesshire, called evacuation 'the dreadful scourge… placed upon the homes of Britain'

Another evacuee, interviewed at the same time, recalled the differences between their home lives and the repressed respectability of their middle-class hosts, explaining: “I cannot do as I like in the house; I must also come in when I am told and sit down and eat my meals properly and not run out into the street with a slice of bread in my hand.”

A third bemoaned the fact that “If we play ball in the streets, a window opens and an old lady puts her head out and starts telling us off.”

Mothers' misery

Those women who had joined their children on evacuation had a particularly miserable time. Accompanying teachers quickly sought to organise education for school-age children. In contrast, there had been no official preparation to support evacuated mothers. Their presence impinged on the private lives of host families in ways that embarrassed everybody.

They had been separated not only from the family groups that formed their closest networks of support, but also from the world of urban leisure – particularly cinemas and dance halls – that offered some temporary respite from the travails of motherhood.

Devon’s Inspector of Education reported that the lack of space and privacy created “a very bad psychological disturbance for both mothers and children. They become difficult, the children cry and are irritable, and the nervous energy of the mother is sapped. Sometimes she punishes them for nothing at all and at others she is over-indulgent and sentimental.”

Yet if women sought to go out, they often had to traipse the streets idly or risk further condemnation for moral lassitude. Given all this, it was little wonder that mothers returned home quicker and in larger proportions than any other evacuees.

Those providing accommodation didn’t have it much easier. Having offered their homes in a crisis, they found themselves committed to sharing space with evacuees with whom they might have little in common, for the duration of a war that, the government made plain, would probably last for years.

Even those for whom this proved a joyous experience found it demanding – not least because the value of the allowance they received from the government was rapidly eroded by the pace of early war inflation.

A phenomenon so large inevitably involved a full range of human characteristics. There were good and bad hosts among those opening up their homes, just as there were good and bad evacuees. While acknowledging the worst and the best behaviour, we also need to recognise the stoic tolerance of the majority who just tried to get by.

Second World War evacuations across Europe and Asia

The UK was not the only country in which civilians were evacuated – or evacuated themselves

Japanese aggression during the Sino-Japanese war (starting 1937) forced 60 million people to flee their homes in China. Evacuating industries, ministries and civilians to the west became a key part of the Chinese Nationalist government’s strategy to survive the war.

When fighting broke out in Europe in September 1939, France and Germany both evacuated civilians from areas on each side of their shared border in anticipation of military operations – although, just as in the UK, the lull in action over the winter of 1939–40 encouraged some to return.

The surging tide of Axis military victories in 1940–42 spurred enormous waves of mass flight. The 9 million Belgian and French refugees who took to their country’s roads and railways in May–June 1940 offered a frightening vision of social dissolution and encouraged other states to put more effort into controlling population movements.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, one of the most violent but impressive state-organised evacuations of the conflict saw the core of the Soviet war industry relocated from the path of Axis forces and rebuilt beyond the Urals. In Malaya (now part of Malaysia), Burma (Myanmar) and India.

Meanwhile, the chaotic efforts to manage the flood of refugees from Japanese advances after 1941 further delegitimised British colonial rule.

Allied success in reversing early Axis victories depended on massive aerial and ground campaigns that forced evacuation and refugee flight. Through an expanding programme that came to include mothers as well as children, Germany evacuated millions of its urban inhabitants from the threat of Allied bombing and the advance of the Red Army.

In France, occupation authorities required non-essential civilians to leave fortified coastal towns.

As the fighting fronts swept back through Europe and Asia, millions fled the demolishing force of the ground campaigns. Events at the end of the conflict, including the territorial settlements, ethnic cleansing and politically violent nation-building that underpinned the post-1945 order, displaced still more people.

There were many differences between the experiences of those in flight – what forced them to move, who organised their departure, and whether they could ever return. But there were also commonalities – physical relocation, tensions with those receiving them, and a sense of powerlessness.

The experience of evacuees in Britain was distinct, but it was far from unique – and indeed more common than the stories of combatants. Altogether, about 175 million people became refugees because of the conflict – far more than were mobilised into all of the militaries and munitions factories.

This was an unprecedented scale of simultaneous popular displacement, involving about 8 per cent of everyone alive on the planet at the time.

Clearing the coast

There were further waves of evacuation – officially organised and otherwise – later in the war. Following the fall of France in June 1940, the new proximity of German air bases and the threat of invasion sparked schemes to evacuate coastal cities.

And after the start of concentrated German night-time bombing raids on British cities in September 1940, fresh rounds of urban evacuations were organised, both pre-emptively before the raids and afterwards to relocate those who had been bombed out.

Uptake rates on later schemes were lower than in 1939. Only in 1944 did evacuation on a similar scale occur. That summer, as London was ravaged by V1 flying bombs, more than a million people temporarily left the capital, including 307,000 children and mothers. This time the danger was immediate and real, but once again few people stayed away long. Most returned even before the government declared that it was safe to do so.

By that point, evacuation had already been the subject of numerous publications. Even as it was ongoing, the process was being narrated back to the British people by journalists, commentators and comedians. It was also analysed by social scientists and, inevitably, co-opted by politicians eager to establish their own version of what the war should mean.

The public discussion that followed demonstrated the widespread appeal of the idea that the conflict ought to lead to societal change, but also the persistence of older ideas – notably the urban-rural divide and the alleged irresponsibility of the poor. The potency of both radical and conservative narratives was such that even today, when we think about what evacuation might have meant, they can colour our thinking.

In truth, what evacuation meant to those who experienced it very much depended on their individual experiences.

Dan Todman is professor of modern history at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Britain’s War: A New World, 1942–1947 (Allen Lane, 2020)

Ad

This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

Ad
Ad
Ad