Explain the Differing Reactions of People in Britain to the Policy of Evacuating Children during the Second World War

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Explain the Differing Reactions of People in Britain to the Policy of Evacuating Children during the Second World War

During the Second World War, the policy of evacuation touched many people’s lives. Not only were children affected by evacuation, but also the hosts who allowed them to stay with them during the war and the others who were evacuated, including teachers and the blind and disabled. At the time of the war, there were distinct class divisions and evacuated children and their hosts would have sometimes quarrelled as they both had different mindsets of morals, manners and etiquette. These differences caused a wide variety of reactions from people during the evacuation.

When war was declared on the 1st September 1939, there was a mass evacuation of all the target areas as people thought that their children were at risk. The Government produced propaganda posters and broadcast on the radio advertising this Government scheme. Millions of children were evacuated and for a brief period of time, the parents were satisfied knowing their children were away from harm. However, no bombs were fired during the first year of the war and so parents began to believe that the cities were safe and asked for their children to return to them. This meant that when the Blitz began in September 1940, many children had returned and so when the city was deemed too unsafe by their parents, some children were sent back. In 1944 some children were evacuated back to the countryside when the Germans began to use the V-1 against Britain. The attitudes of parents changed radically between 1939 and 1945, with mass panic and evacuation in 1939, 1940 and 1944. Between these periods however, parents began to call back their children to their homes as they believed that nothing was wrong.

A lot of the children that were evacuated were the working-class children who lived in the middle of the large cities. When this group of people were evacuated, a large number of the hosts were not used to the lack of food and manners that the majority of these children were used to. Having come from inner-city areas, many had not been to the countryside before and so were startled to see the stark differences between the city and the country. Source 16 shows an example of this when a working-class child says that they have a spring “every year”. Having not seen a lot of rural areas before, this child is obviously shocked to see the changes in agriculture that show the beginning of spring. Sometimes, working class children were placed in middle-class families and so there was an even larger social gap between the host and the children, Source A shows this as it says of reports of “children ‘fouling’ gardens, hair crawling with lice, and bed wetting”. To the middle-class, this would have been outrageous behaviour as they would have been taught what they saw as simple manners from very early childhood. Reactions of the working-class child will have differed from between children depending on what sort of host family they were placed with. However, it is probable that, at least at first, working-class children placed with the middle or upper classes would have felt uncomfortable with the giant changes in how they lived.

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Middle class children were also evacuated from target areas to the countryside. Whilst the majority of middle-class children placed with a middle-class family would find the evacuation pleasant, the real clash in personalities was if a middle-class child was placed with a working-class family. Source F shows this clash when a former evacuee states that it was upsetting “for a clean and well-educated child to find itself in a grubby semi-slum”. Whereas a middle-class child would have been used to having people do their work for them, working-class families often asked the evacuees to work either doing chores or helping ...

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