The photograph however has it’s uses, it shows children of all ages being evacuated from London; the children are all smiling and seem to be generally happy. I can see that this shows success because from my own knowledge I know that a lot of children were happy to leave their homes as they thought they were going on a big adventure with all their friends. Lots of them hadn’t even seen the countryside or been on a train before so this was a big deal for them, and it caused much reason for happiness among the children. In fact some of the children enjoyed it so much that after the war ended even if their parents were alive they stayed in their foster home.
Source C, D, E and F, on the other hand, show both successes and failures. C is an extract of a children’s book printed after the war making it a secondary source, which are sometimes questionable. We are not sure when the author was born, or if she had any part in evacuation making it less useful than if it had been written by someone who experienced evacuation first hand. Source D is an appeal from the government to ask more people in Scotland to help in the War effort, and consider fostering a child. One problem is that it is designed by Government officials and I know that in the early years of the war the Government was trying to encourage evacuation as much as possible because it was voluntary. They desperately needed more homes to send the children too so they had to make it as convincing as possible to get people to sign up. Source E was an extract of an interview the observer did with a father from Southend. It does not tell us who the interviewer was so we do not know if they are biased, we do however know that it is from a mass survey which only a Government official would take, and as an official they would want to encourage evacuation in the entire interview there is only one word in italics, “they don’t have too evacuate” emphasizing that it is a voluntary scheme as an official they therefore may be asking leading questions. Source F is a clip from a film made about the war, the fact that it is a film is the first problem, in this time period the British film Industry was starting off with lots of people watching them and people do not want to go and watch something boring, so even if the film is based on real life it will have been dramatized to get people to watch it.
However these sources are very useful, to start with the extract from the book is written from the point of view of an evacuee from a large city, who stays with someone in the countryside. The foster parents make an assumption that they are “too poor to afford a pair of slippers”. Although the real reason they don’t have slippers, is because the amount of clothing they were able to carry. This would be the attitude that some foster parents would have had, that the children they were fostering were poor, because they were from rural areas. This was a common misconception among a lot of foster parents in the countryside, however this misunderstanding started the opening up of Britain; country folk had little or no understanding of the city children, all they knew is what they saw, and what they saw was children covered in dirt and lice. After the war many rich influential people from the country began to demand more from their MP’s to help these poor deprived children, this improved communications between the countryside and the cities and also helped start the first free health service the NHS. The source also shows that the children in the novel were having a good time because they didn’t get angry at them for the mistake about the slippers they simply giggled.
Source D says in one line of the poster “All you need do is enroll your name with the local authority” While most would look at this and think the Government are just trying to make it as quick and easy as possible to help things along, there are some who would simply see the chance to get a child without having to have a police check so you can imagine there were quite a few unsavory people such as pedophiles and abusers that signed up just giving their name and getting a child that they had with them for the next four years. This backs up my own knowledge about lack of organisation the Government put into evacuation despite having realised many years ago that in the event of another war evacuation was likely. It is a well used phrase “but when I looked at their faces my heart melted and I couldn’t say no” I imagine this is what happened when people saw the picture of the two smiling children featured on it. Half of the background is of a lovely countryside scene with sunshine, perhaps Scotland where it was to be circulated. The other half however is a blacked out city with planes and bombs. Anyone whose heart melted at the little children would certainly want to take them away from that dreary scene. Also the language used in the text is very persuasive using such things as “kindly folk”, “greatly helping” and “take them out of a danger zone where desperate peril may come at any moment” which would convince many people to foster such small innocent children and take them away from harm. When in the countryside the children gained many experiences, not only did a lot of children’s health improve with the clean air but many children also got to do many things like work on farms, carry on/start education, learn how to use many different kinds of machinery and make many new friends, for many of the younger children evacuated this would be the only memories of a home they would have.
The interview in source E shows one of the biggest success’s of WW2, the opening up of Britain and also the setting up of the NHS. The father being questioned evidently has no idea what people from the countryside are really like, he assumes they are all poor dirty jobless people who wouldn’t be able to take good care of his son.
Although probably rather over dramatized with light effects, smoke and more Source F shows a good representation of what evacuation was like for both children and parents. The parents are constantly changing their minds about whether they should send their children away or not which caused them great distress which could have been prevented if it were a compulsory scheme, and the children are angry about being showed up in front of their friends whom they were going on holiday with. It also showed the utter chaos at the train station with everyone milling around not knowing where they were going, a complete lack of organization. I know from my own knowledge that although the Government did a great job of evacuating so many children in such a short space of time, they were poorly organized not having arranged enough homes for all the children or done police checks on people fostering them.
Source B however, I feel, was a failure. On the one hand it was written 40 years after the event took place, and memories can fade over time or change because she has seen so many programs and such with different information that the facts and what she has seen has all blurred together in her head, on the other hand something as emotional as evacuation is something that you will surely always remember especially as she was a teacher at this time so would have known the truth about what was going on as apposed to little children she was with who thought they were on holiday? We also don’t know who the interviewer was so they could have altered the answers or asked leading questions. She also says that “we hadn’t the slightest idea of where we were going” I know that with the poor organization the people didn’t know where they were going till they got there. This is also just one person’s opinion in the war.
With the help of the above sources I have concluded that although there were many problems with evacuation, which can only be seen now in hindsight, that evacuation was indeed a great success, after all it did save millions of lives and was the biggest mass movement in British history.
