Evacuation and Evacuees

Evacuation

At the start of The second world war many thousands of children were taken from their homes, schools and parents and evacuated to towns and villages less likely to be affected by the war. The evacuation of children was not obligatory, but thought the sensible thing to do.

At 11.07am on Thursday 31st August 1939 the order was given to evacuate. Over the next four days a quarter of the British population (nearly 3,000,000 people) were evacuated to the countryside.

There were no big bombing raids on Britain in the first months of the war so by early 1940 many children had returned home. When heavy bombing raids started in the autumn of 1940 Children were once again evacuated.

By the end of the Second World War around 3.5 million people, (mainly children) had experienced evacuation.Some children were evacuated to other British Dominions (countries that were part of the British Empire) such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.

The first to be evactuated were school children-some as young as 3 -and later younger children with their mothers, pregnant ladies and the blind and infirm.

For some For some it was an adventure; With their gas masks hung around their neck and a small suitcase of belongings and with a name label attached to their coat button it was something that just had to be done. Children were transported to places in groups and allocated to homes to be cared for, for the duration of the war.

For some it was a happy time, but for many quite the opposite. Sibling groups were often split up, and placed in unfamiliar surrounding in often quite rural areas and found life very different to that to which they were used to.

Tired and bewildered, children were taken, usually on a train accompanied by teachers as their travel guardians, to their destination to be picked by their host family whose home became their 'billet'.

People memories of being evacuated vary greatly - for some it was a happy time, full of adventure in the countryside and time spent with people who came to love them. For others it was a time of great sadness- not all host homes were the perfect host, and some remember ill treatment and sometimes even cruelty.

At the end of the war, chidren were returned home, those that were lucky enough to have homes and families to return home to - some were not so lucky - they had no parents or homes to return to.