Source D however suggests that evacuation was not successful because it indicates a shortage of willing foster-parents. This would certainly be a problem because even if the children’s parents were willing to allow them to be evacuated, this obviously couldn’t happen if there were no foster-parents willing to look after them. This poster was part of the government’s campaign to make sure that evacuation was as successful as it could be. Even before the outbreak of war the government had used posters, leaflets and messages on the radio to persuade parents to evacuate their children. This shows that parents had to be persuaded to evacuate their children. On the other hand, not many people would send their children to live with complete strangers after being asked only once. People needed time to consider what was best for their children and I believe that is a reaction to be expected. That fact that 20,000 people had already volunteered to be foster-parents in Scotland (if the poster is to be believed) demonstrates a degree of success but the government believed that even more could be done.
The father’s reluctance to evacuate his child in Source E however is an example of the type of attitude that undermined the success of evacuation because he simply refuses to send his boy away to be evacuated and doesn’t really have any particular reason to justify his refusal. This source is part of a mass observation survey and therefore is reliable because it is an official document used by the government to collect information. On the other hand its reliability must be doubted because the father’s words have been documented by someone else and therefore could have been misheard or even deliberately modified in some way. This is also the view of just one man, in total one and a half million people were evacuated, many of whom were children. Their parents obviously did not agree with this man’s views.
Although the photograph in Source A shows that some children were happy to be evacuated, other photographs of the time show that many children were very afraid and did not want to leave their parents. Source B describes how afraid some children were at being evacuated. This source is reliable because it is primary evidence; the account is coming from someone who was actually there at the time. The teacher says “…the children were too afraid to talk.” This is significant because there are not too many occasions were children are too afraid to talk. Children are lively, fun loving people and for them to be silent in such a way shows how traumatic an ordeal evacuation was for them to deal with. Although the children were not necessarily happy to be evacuated, they were evacuated nevertheless and were therefore away from the dangers of the cities, which shows a large element of success in the British government’s war plans.
The sources therefore show that the success of evacuation varied at an individual level, with some children not being evacuated because of their parent’s reluctance and others being sent to live with people that wanted them as a free maid or farm hand. For some foster-parents, evacuation was a blessing for the reasons mentioned previously. It all depended on who you were chosen to live with and why your foster-parents had agreed to look after you.
There is evidence like Source A that shows that some children were looking forward to being evacuated, but this could have been because they didn’t really understand what was happening to them. This could also have been because the lucky children, who had relatives in the countryside, knew who they were going to be situated with and had no reason to dislike those people, having met them before. Of course, their views could and in many cases would change once they were settled with their foster-families.
There is also always the possibility that a source may not be reliable, as is the case with Source B. The source is a recollection of events by one person and so that person’s memories may not be accurate. However, evacuation is such an emotional experience that many people did not forget and the teacher’s reminiscences might therefore be totally reliable and accurate.
The extract from “Carrie’s War”, a novel (Source C) demonstrates the problems that some evacuated children were likely to face. Many evacuees were met with the unfair assumption that because they were from the city, they were poor, as is the case with Miss Evans in the source. “Miss Evans turned bright red and said quickly, “Oh, I’m sorry, how silly of me, why should you have slippers?” She obviously thought that the children were too poor to afford slippers, but the truth was that there simply hadn’t been enough room for them in their suitcases. Carrie and her brother Nick see the funny side of this incident but some evacuees would have found incidents like this to be extremely frustrating. Aside from Miss Evans’ incorrect assumption, the fact that she says “Never mind, as long as you’re careful and keep to the middle of the stair carpet where it’s covered with a cloth” shows that she is concerned about the children. Her genuine concern about the children’s well-being leads me to believe that, for Carrie and her brother, evacuation was a success, as it was for many real children who were evacuated in World War 2.
For the final source, Source F, I’m going to use the film “Goodnight Mr. Tom.” The film is about an evacuee called William Beech being evacuated from his home in London to the countryside. When William arrives on Mr. Tom’s doorstep, Mr. Tom makes his feelings clear that he doesn’t want an evacuee, but is told that he doesn’t have a choice. We learn soon after that Mr. Tom is still mourning the death of his wife, which is why he sometimes seems harsh. Mr. Tom’s feelings towards William soon change, when he wakes up in the morning to find that William has wet the bed. We soon learn that life for William Beech hasn’t been easy either, when he passes out on seeing Mr. Tom carrying a poker. The marks on William’s back show a constant stream of physical abuse from his mother, including marks from a poker. After this discovery, Mr. Tom opens up to William and learns how to love again, which is something he had been unable to do since the death of his wife. He discovers that William has a previously unknown talent for art, and does his best to encourage him as best he can. William eventually has to return to his mother in London, where he’s greeted by another stream of abuse. William is not allowed to write to Mr. Tom and is beaten whenever he mentions his name. Mr. Tom grows increasingly concerned about William’s well-being and sets off to London to look for him. When he arrives at the address he’s been given, William is found locked in a cupboard fighting for his life. His baby sister is not so lucky and sadly dies in William’s arms. Mr. Tom takes William back to the countryside to live with him as if he was his own son. The film in Source F shows that evacuation could be an enormous success for both the evacuee and the foster-parent. William is safe from the constant abuse from his mother, and Mr. Tom has someone in his life to care about, just like he did his wife. On an individual level at least, in this case evacuation was the best thing that could have possibly happened to these two individuals, and although is a fictional account evidence of the time describes similar experiences where evacuated children and their foster-parents benefited from the experience.
I conclude that evacuation was most certainly a success, in the short term at least. The British government had given themselves three years of preparation in which to draw up the plans for evacuation for war. This was definitely a good thing as they managed to organise the whole evacuation scheme before war was officially declared. For example, they dedicated the country’s transport system solely to the purpose of evacuation for four whole days. I believe that this alone makes the campaign a success in its organisation. At an individual level, some children may have only been taken in to be a maid or farm-hand but surely that’s better than being blown to pieces by a German bomb? There were people that evacuation did great favours for; Source F is a prime example. Although Goodnight Mr. Tom is a fictitious film, it is still worth considering basing an opinion on. There are true stories in which evacuation was highly beneficial for both the evacuee and the foster-parent and the film represents these extremely well. It has been argued that evacuation could not be seen as a great success because of the fact that children returned home during the phoney war – I disagree. There was a second wave of evacuation once the blitz started and all of the children that’d come home could be re-evacuated. This would obviously not be an ideal solution but it was a solution nonetheless. Yes, children were separated from their families for a while but they escaped with their lives, something which would never have happened without evacuation – The death toll would have been so much higher.
Without evacuation, far more people would have been killed during World War 2. Individual cases of unhappiness are inevitable and in response to the question, I agree that evacuation was a great success, without it Britain would not be where she is today.
