The job of a billeting officer was the most difficult job, as it was extremely hard to organise where all of the evacuees were coming from and where they were going to stay. When the billeting was organised well, the evacuation was a success. The children would have tags around their necks with their names on and the foster parents would come along and pick up their children without any problems. If the billeting officers were complacent, and they did not organise the evacuation well, then the evacuees would be lined up when they reached their destination, and the foster parents would chose children on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. This would be very harsh on the children involved, as some would have to have the humiliation of being the last chosen from all of their friends, this would be a bad start for the experience, as the children would know that they were not wanted and the parents were not happy in having the rejects of the rest of the crowd. Sources G and E show us how children were treated as if they were poor. In source E, a foster parent says how the children ‘urinated on the walls’. Most of the children evacuated were poor, and did not have many manners. People accepting children saw of all the children in this way, but there were some upper class children evacuated as well. The stereotype of the evacuees was of a scruffy, dirty boy from London’s East End. In source G the receiving aren’t says, ‘why should you have slippers?’ Here the parent is believing in the agreed stereotype, and also mistreating the children. Source F shows us how some of the children were higher in class than where they were evacuated. ‘It is just as upsetting for…other way round’. He is used to the higher life, but people were not treating him as well as he would be at home.
After the original success of the evacuation, there was no bombing of England until May 1940. Because of this, many people believed that this was a “Phoney War”, and many of the evacuees returned, 40% of evacuees had returned by the beginning of January. Only a quarter of evacuees from the beginning of the war stayed throughout the war. The numbers of evacuees were at their highest in September 1939, and the number of evacuees never returned to this, despite the biggest period of danger appearing during the Blitz. The government encouraged children to evacuate before the Blitz, but people were not as interested as they were at the beginning of the war.
People did not flea overseas mainly due to when the City of Benares ship was torpedoed by the Germans in 1940, killing 77 people. Churchill also thought of evacuation abroad as runaways, and this was not good propaganda for Britain in the war.
Evacuation was made voluntary in Britain for a few reasons. The government thought that it would be best because it would stop people alienating from the government, if they did not agree with it. It would be even harder for the government to organise if evacuation was made compulsory. The government made evacuation voluntary, but they still used a lot of propaganda to encourage people to evacuate. A bad thing with voluntary evacuation was that people were able to return, and they did so when this opportunity arose. People did not evacuate again after returning home, because they were accustomed to the conditions of bombing.
There were problems with evacuation. Parents used to mistreat and abuse children, and the children would therefore not enjoy the experience. It was hard for foster parents to look after another child. The government did not sponsor children, so the money had to come out of the receiving family’s wage. Eventually centres were set up so that evacuees could meet up, wash their clothes, bathe and other things away from their foster homes. This took some pressure off of the receiving families. Source D shows the evacuees in one of the centres, but as the government issued this photo, it is probable that it could not be reliable. The government would have issued this photograph to stop rumours spreading that people were not enjoying evacuation.
There is no doubt that evacuation was a success at what it was trying to achieve, which was to save lives. It did this due to the government’s efficiency in organising evacuation. There were some failures, but these only occurred in areas where the evacuation was not organised well. Overall, evacuation was a success.
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