LAURENCE REES: Can you talk a little bit about the scale of the evacuation in the autumn of 1939?

JULIET GARDINER: We don’t know how many children were evacuated because an awful lot of evacuation was done privately. Children would go and stay with relations, or friends in the country and, of course, they never showed up in figures. So when we talk about the number of children evacuated we really mean the government scheme which started on the 1st of September 1939 and was really completed within 3 days. That was the plan and that was what happened. They were expecting three and a half million children to go and, in fact, one and a half million went. Most of them, of course, from the big cities because the idea of evacuation was that children had to be got away from where the bombs were going to fall, and they were going to be on London and Liverpool and Manchester and all those sort of places. And they were sent off to the country; and children over five tended to go with their schools and they went with their teachers. Children under five went away with mother or their carers, slightly different in Scotland where they didn’t go with their schools they went with their parents, but, you know, that was the principle.

LAURENCE REES: One and a half million people - that’s one of the biggest population movements in the history of this country.

JULIET GARDINER: As one of the Dorset papers said, it makes the biblical exodus look  small scale, and the logistics would have been absolutely huge. And of course there were mistakes made, but when you think that the idea was that everybody expected that the minute war was declared the Blitz would start, it was essential to get the children away as quickly as possible. So they were basically trained out of all large cities, they went and were carried out by train out of the cities, and then of course, in a sense, the problems began to start. But it was an amazingly smooth operation, as I said, it went over three days and there were no casualties apart from the odd finger trapped in a train door.

LAURENCE REES: What sort of issues did this immense social dislocation cause?

JULIET GARDINER:  Nobody had to send their children away, so there were all these sorts of issues again about whether you should send your children; there was no obligation to send your children, there was encouragement, but no obligation. There was an obligation to take children in. If you had the space and you were surveyed then you were obliged to take children in. Though, actually, if you refused, you could have been prosecuted and made to take children in, but very sensibly that was very rarely done because it would have been very unwise to send a child to somewhere it wasn’t wanted. There were all sorts of social issues that the evacuation brought up. On the whole, children tended to go from inner cities and a lot of those children of course were poor.
There were very high levels of poverty, unemployment and underemployment in the Thirties and a lot of people were living on very low wages, what we now say is below the poverty line. A number of the children were suffering from malnutrition, and a lot were living in extremely poor housing conditions, and it was a revelation to a lot of those people in the countryside who hadn’t realised quite how poor and how badly looked after some of the children were.

I think part of the problem of this was that it tended to be exaggerated, obviously there were some instances of very anti-social children and very disturbed and very disruptive children, very poor children, but a lot of children, okay, they were poor, okay, they didn’t have any underwear, they came from Glasgow or Liverpool, for example - Liverpool got known as plimsoll city - they came with very inadequate clothing for the countryside, they often came with nits or they might have a skin disease, but a lot of these were the signs of poverty; that society and the government had basically let down a large percent of the population. But some people would translate that and say this was fecklessness, and the old idea that urban society is kind of feckless and not responsible in the way that the countryside is. But this was basically a myth and I think we mustn’t forget that there was a great deal of rural poverty. So those working class children - sewn into their clothes, brown paper for the Winter - no underwear, nits, no table manners and were brought up on a diet of chips and cups of tea, all this would feature in the press. There was very little news during the war, everyone was expecting war news but there was very little, so this got very, very high visibility and high profile. You can imagine the Daily Mail story every day.

But we mustn’t forget that a lot of these children were actually middle class or they came from working class families but their mothers had done their very best to equip them for evacuation. Some of them were getting in debt to make sure that they went off with a decent set of clothes and all this sort of thing, and they were going to rural poverty. There was a lot of rural poverty and they’d go to conditions that were much worse than those they had left. So it was a very mixed thing. But I think the social effects were mixed. Sometimes they would simply confirm people’s prejudices, you know, that the working class were profligate and they didn’t look after their children. Sometimes they would have the complete reverse effect, that actually this was shameful, this was the underbelly of British society and the state had let these children down, and that medical services, school services and housing services must all be improved.

LAURENCE REES: And those were the short term consequences, what were the longer term consequences of this do you think?

JULIET GARDINER: I think the lessons learnt from evacuation sort of mapped into a general sort of feeling for a better deal after the war. I always think this has been something that had been growing in the Thirties, but the whole point about the war was that it concentrated and made everything more intense, it gave a real focus, and I think that did feed in very much, and obviously there was the 1944 Education Act, though, of course, that had been in the pipeline before the war. But during the war I think children began to become a priority that perhaps they hadn’t been before. I mean, for example, even when it came to things like rationing, it was made sure that children were guaranteed eggs and milk in the way that adults had much less. If there were any oranges, for example, or fruit that came in the shop, they were always given priority to children. There were things like welfare blackcurrant juice and then later orange juice that was imported from America; those were given to children. There were vitamins available for children. Now, not everybody took advantage of them but they were there, so in a way the notion of a more child centric society was very much a legacy or an acceleration of a legacy of war time. And I think the other thing of course, when we talk about legacy, was the notion of separation. For a lot of children of course it was a very happy time, the evacuation experiences, they were put with very nice families, they had a lot of fun, and often it was more fun than being at home - if you talked to a room of evacuees a third of them will say they preferred being evacuated than they did being at home, which of course had its own problem when they came back, but I think people began to understand.

I mean, Susan Isaacs, for example, the child psychologist did a Cambridge survey on separation and began to think about why did children bed wet, why did they have these sort of psychological problems. And I think that the whole idea of maternal deprivation and attachment had its seedbed in this evacuation. Because I think evacuation was an absolute laboratory for people, the authorities if you like, to be able to study children and what children needed and what society needed to do for children.

LAURENCE REES: And, of course, what happened in practical terms was that since there were no mass bombings in the autumn of 1939, quite a number of them came back didn’t they?

JULIET GARDINER: An awful lot of children did come back by Christmas. I think it was something like 60 or 70 percent of children who actually came back because the parents hadn’t wanted them to go, and so they came back. And the people who came back in droves were, of course, the mothers with young children who hated living in the country as they were away from husbands if their husbands were at home, and they were away from their kinship, their family networks and communities, local pub and so on.

But the other point I suppose it’s important to make is about education. A lot of people who we talk to nowadays who were evacuees say that their education suffered grievously and they never, ever made it up. And the reason for that obviously was that even though schools were evacuated and some of the teachers would go too, schools had to double up with village schools. So, often children perhaps would only go to school for half a day; the local children go in the morning, the evacuees go in the afternoon. There weren’t enough textbooks to go round and a lot of teachers worked as a reserved occupation, but only up to a point, so a lot of younger teachers went off to fight or went off to factories. A lot of children were taught by people who came out of retirement, some of those of course were wonderful, some of them most certainly weren’t. So I think that was another real legacy of the war, a whole generation who didn’t get proper schooling.