Explain the different reactions of people in Britain to the policy of evacuating children during the Second World War

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Explain the different reactions of people in Britain to the policy of evacuating children during the Second World War

In Britain, there were many different reactions to the policy of evacuation in the Second Wold War. Many different groups of society were affected by evacuation. Some of the people who would have been affected the most were teachers who looked after the evacuees, foster parents, parents of the evacuees, children who received evacuees into their homes as well as the evacuees themselves.

The group of people whose lives were most disrupted by evacuation were probably the foster parents who took the evacuees in to their farms and country houses.  The foster parents’ reactions differed greatly depending on the type of person. Some genuinely wanted to support the children whose lives had been turned upside down while others didn’t want the hassle of another mouth to feed.  The ones who helped the children took them in and treated them as one of their own, often by making their livelihoods better than when they had lived in the cities. Many of these families wanted to adopt the evacuees at the end of the war but were obliged to send them home to families who the children hardly knew.

When asked to take in an evacuee, many country-dwelling families said “we’ve got no room,” and closed the door on the children’s faces. These people where then accused of “shirking their responsibilities” by the government who even gave the foster parents an allowance to take care of the child’s needs. This was sometimes a welcome relief for the poorer families but more often than not, not enough to sustain safe passage for the child. Arriving from the dirty cities, many children were full of lice and were “sewn into their ragged little garments,” making many of the higher society families wary of looking after them. Children of the foster families who already lived in the country and who were forced to have evacuees living alongside them didn’t react graciously towards them.  Many disliked the idea of sharing their homes with strangers who had completely different values and attitudes towards life and reacting by bullying them both at home and at school. Many refused to make friends with the often lonely new children and in some cases it took years before the evacuees even began to integrate with the local children.

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The type of foster family an evacuee was placed with had a massive effect on their experience of evacuation. Although they were encouraged to see the trip as an adventure and told to seize the opportunity to make new friends, there was anxiety to leave their parents. Many were confused as to what was happening and where they were going. Some were so young that they had never been apart from their families before, let alone go outside the city and this was a major change to their lives, making many distressed and more often than not homesick. Evacuees treated ...

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