Some areas had too many evacuees and some areas didn’t have enough children for the area. A lot of rural schools were too small to cope with the extra children, which meant that many children enjoyed a lot of ‘holiday’ time, which was often spent farming this is also shown in Source H as it shows problems and limitations. Many evacuees or children evacuated had a fantastic time, met new friends and saw areas that they had never seen before. A lot of them had not been on holiday before and had no experience of farming or living in the countryside. It was an experience most of them enjoyed. However it wasn’t all like that. It was proved that for a small minority of evacuees it was an unpleasant adventure. They were bullied in the rural schools, they lived with people they didn’t know and sometimes they were with families that were a lot richer or poorer than their own.
Unfortunately some children were exposed to physical, verbal and emotional abuse as well. The adjustment to a different life was hard for many children and also for host families. Source E shows that some of the families’ habits affected the host families. The source also points out a main judgement against the evacuated city families; they were stereotyped and all thought of as dirty and untidy this shows a major downfall in the evacuation process because it caused so many social problems between the different social classes. Source F also proves another point; that not all of the common views were true.
As soon as the war was declared September 1939 literally hundreds of thousands of children, mothers and children were evacuated using trains and buses to rural areas from September 1939 to April 1940 their was the so called ‘Phoney war’. There was very little German activity in this period. They were finishing the invasion of Poland and then refitting their armies ready to attack Western Europe. The phoney war ended in May 1940 when Germany attacked their western offensive invading the Netherlands, Belgium and into France. Although the evacuation process was gained a success there were some problems. The government ha began to spent lots of money on advertising and propaganda to convince parents living in inner cities to keep their children evacuated. When the Germans started to bomb cities like Plymouth and Bath, which had not been expected or planned for, the government, which criticised for not evacuating more children. Although there was some flaws I would agree with the statement during the war around 40,000 ordinary British people were killed, another 45,000 injured and about 1million houses were destroyed or damaged.
How many lives were saved due to evacuation? Hundreds of thousands of children got another chance thanks to the government. Many people were not just saved by evacuation. The British population had been warned in September 1939 that air attacks on cities were likely and civil defence preparations had been started some time before. Evacuation had many more vital effects. It freed up many mothers to take on vital war work. It also had a very powerful social force. Young children from tough inner cities were shown the different areas of the countryside. After the war many people from the country voted for politicians who wanted to stamp out poverty. In total 827,000 school children were evacuated, 524,000 mothers and small children, 13,000 pregnant woman, 7,000 blind and disabled people and 103,000 teachers; a grand total of 1,474,000. All of which, none were killed or seriously injured.
When mothers sent their children to be evacuated, it gave them chance to join in the vital war work. The mothers could join the WRENS (women’s royal naval service), woman’s land army and the air transport auxiliary service. Although women in the war played a vital part as soon as the men and children came back it became yet another issue in there discriminations towards women until the mid 1950s.
