Country Life

A guest post by David Long. This article first appeared in London Historians Members’ Newsletter of May 2019. 

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Britain had never seen anything quite like the mass evacuations of 1939, but a surprising number of Londoners felt they were better off back home.

As early as 1934, less than a year after Hitler had come to power, secret plans were already being hatched to move children and vulnerable adults away from those towns and cities thought likely to be targets in any coming war. Some local authorities, it is true, took steps to protect its civilian population from air-raids without removing them from any potential blast zone. In London’s Lincolns Inn Fields, for example, hundreds of yards of deep trenches and armoured bunkers were excavated beneath the elegant lawns and fitted with airlocks against poison gas attack. But by the time of the 1938 Munich Crisis it was abundantly clear that it would never be possible to provide sufficient shelters for Britain’s entire urban population.

Evacuation therefore seemed the most sensible alternative, and it is now estimated that something in the order of 3,500,000 people managed to move out of the most vulnerable areas within the first week of war being declared on 3 September 1939. Some, around 5,000, left immediately for North America, but the majority looked closer to home: to Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, anywhere that looked to be far enough from a major city to be safe from enemy attack.

Detailed plans had long been in place to move government departments out of the capital too. Parts of the BBC were quickly dispersed to Bristol and Worcestershire, the Bank of England relocated to Overton in Hampshire, and treasures from the National Gallery were safely stacked in racks deep underground in a disused Welsh slate mine. It was then natural that the staff would follow, as well as many hundreds of thousands of children, once their parents had agreed to let them go.

Children leave London under the civilian evacuation scheme.

Accompanied by teachers, by their own mothers if they were under five, by expectant mothers and by the long-term sick or disabled, the trip to the countryside came as a profound shock to many. Not just because so many people had never been separated from their homes and families before, but also because many of the evacuees had literally never left the London streets. Thus, for many, the journey into the country was to be a very real voyage of discovery – like the little boy who reported back in a letter, ‘they call this spring, mum, and they have one down here every year.’

Transported by road and rail to smaller towns and villages considered unlikely to be targets, the initial evacuations had been sufficiently well ordered to enable around three-quarters of a million to be moved out of London within just three days. Thereafter the removals tended to be more piecemeal, with more than 300,000 returning home to London in the early months of the war (when the threatened air raids had not yet materialised) only to then go back to the countryside in successive waves starting in June 1940.

That was when the sudden fall of France raised expectations that enemy bombers soon really would be over the south-east of England. Then, the following autumn, the terrifying force and destruction of the Blitz brought the reality of war even closer, and much later the sight and sound of V1s and V2s in the skies prompted yet another exodus from London.

In 1939 the initial evacuations had proved, if not seamless, then reasonably efficient although the lack of catering arrangements meant many children had travelled for up to twelve hours without a break or a proper meal. But there was worse to come. For many children the reality of country life was to prove as big a shock as the one the rural communities got when they were cajoled into opening their rose-bowered front doors to scores of apparently wild and unsanitary Cockneys.

Their arrival, not to put too fine a point on it, was a revelation to the polite country classes who suddenly found themselves surrounded by bedwetters, lice and scabies. The story about one mother telling her weak-bladdered child “don’t do it on the nice lady’s chair but up against the wall like we do at home” may be apocryphal but a member of Churchill’s government (the future Lord Chandos who had agreed to take ten such children but received more than thirty) later recorded in his memoirs that he had no idea English children could be so ignorant of the rules of hygiene as to ‘regard the floors and carpets as suitable places upon which to relieve themselves.’

That said, some of the evacuees were poorly treated too. Jewish children as young as five or six (including the author’s mother) were literally turned out into the night, front doors slammed in their faces by Cornish families unwilling to ‘take in Germans’. Elsewhere the canny ability of many better off householders to avoid the whole grisly business meant considerable numbers of urban poor were billeted on the often even poorer rural poor. Here families had to sleep in shifts because their houses were so cramped.

The dispersal of so many such obviously deprived slum-dwellers had its upside too, of course. Not simply in preserving life, which it undoubtedly did, but also because the stark realities thus observed by more fortunate village and town dwellers served to raise awareness around the country of the plight and poverty of the average city child. As such, it probably did much to speed the development (and to frame the design) of the post-war Welfare State.

On arrival in the country many of these children, perhaps unsurprisingly these days, refused to eat wholesome, natural food, but instead clamoured for fish and chips or sweets and biscuits. Others found the marked cultural differences difficult to deal with, perhaps feeling as they adjusted their personal habits as if they were betraying their parents. The mothers who followed their children to the country were often unhappy too, clearly not much liking the clean air, the space and the greater personal safety of this new, bomb-free Arcadia.

Instead, ‘missing the neighbours, the shops, the gossipy streets’ as one writer put it, many returned home with their children as soon as they possibly could. And interestingly, the greatest proportion of returnees were those going back to what was clearly a prime target: the docks and dark streets of London’s East End. It’s true that some from this area, as many as 5,000 a night, sought sanctuary by camping out in Epping Forest. But many more both here and in the big provincial cities preferred what came to be known as ‘trekking’, the practice of leaving the centre of town for the edge each evening rather than moving out lock, stock and barrel.

And of course thousands every night went underground. The majority went to sleep in tube stations, an arrangement which seemed both obvious and convenient once the rules were changed to allow it, and which brought with it a sense of safety in numbers when there were so many people doing the same thing. The luckier ones ended up in Regent Street, in the basement of Dickens & Jones. Here department store staff handed out cakes and coffee at the start of each evening, whilst their ‘guests’ had took comfort from knowing they were protected upstairs, by a large and robust modern building.

Most now judge Britain’s first – and so far only – mass evacuation a worthwhile exercise, but forget that many Londoners preferred stay at home and face the enemy in their own manor. In times of trouble, it seems, familiarity counts for a lot and perhaps that’s why fully 60% of Londoners continued to sleep in their own beds right through until 1945.
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A Founder Member of London Historians, David Long has been a prolific author of non-fiction books about the capital, though by no means exclusively. One of them, London’s Secret Square Mile, will be re-published next month in a paperback edition with a foreword by the current Lord Mayor Alderman William Russell, is available to pre-order here.
David’s web page.

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