This is supported by Source six which says “Some childen from poor areas have become almost unrecognisable within a few weeks. One small girl was so chubby that she needed a larger gas mask.” Thhis shows the quality of life for many children was improved dramatically when evacuated as there was more to eat. We are not told where Sources five and six are from; however they are writen in the present tense which suggests that they were writen by the people that were there at the time as opposed to reports made years later. This leads me to believe that they would be accurate.
However there were also problems with being evacuated, both from the evacuees and the host’s point of view. The evacuees came from large, busy cities and were not used to the country life; they may have found the rurality boring or found themselves separated from their friends. Many of the children were away from their homes and mothers for the first time. Some of the children were put into different social classes of their own and had to learn to behave differently. “I am treated like a slave. Fed three straight meals a day, but I am told I have to ‘earn my keep’. I have to wash dishes, do all the laundry, make all the beds and sweep all the floors…” Taken from the diaries of Tom Jacobs, an evacuee during the war.
There were also problems from the hosts point of view. Some of the children were very poor. They arrived badly clothed and were not used to keeping themselves clean. Some were very thin, or were covered in lice. Hosts found it difficult to cope with the behaviour of children very different from their own. Most host families were soon short of money because the money they had been given did not increase when food prices rose. “…the child was disgusting. His clothes were covered in his own excrement and it looked like he hadn’t bathed for years. His clothes were torn and he had scabies” This source was written by the deceased Mrs O Jones, who took 2 evacuees into her home.
Source seventeen is a letter written by Mr Jennings to his wife, who appears to have left the city. It is about the life in the city and it says that everyone in the public bomb shelters of the city were singing, dancing and generally delighting at “holding up Hitler”.
Source eighteen is a report made by local oficials and it states that there was mass “hysteria” during the blitz and that there was “no bead, electricity, milk or telephones”. This massive contradiction leads me to believe that Source seventeen was written for the sole purpose of making Mrs Jennings feel less worried about her husband in the city, deeming it unreliable. This is one of the main problems for young historians researching the blitz as there is no real way for them to know, therefore they must trust the resources they are presented with, meaning that they are often researching incorrect material.
Source 21 is written by a housewife in her diary of 1942. It talks of how women who have done “worthwhile things” during the war “settling to trivial ways” The diary is written in a way that is almost longing to do housework. During the war, when the men were away fighting many jobs became vacant and these were filled by women usually confined to the household. New jobs also became avaliable, for example in munitions factories and aircraft factories. The were also filled by women. In America this was encouraged by the government creating the poster character, ‘Rosie the Riveter’. Rosie the Riveter was depicted as an attractive, rosy-cheeked woman dressed in work clothes, designed to make the idea of working outside the home attractive and comfortable. She made it seem patriotic rather than unfeminine to work outside the home. With the help of the Rosie the Riveter publicity campaign, more than 6 million women joined the workforce during the war. When the war ended in 1945 most of the women lost their jobs, but it made working outside of the home more acceptable.
The diary source was written at the time by someone who had no reason to lie about the content, and therefore believe it to be reliable one.
Source 2 is taken from the book ‘Family at war’ Wales in the twentieth century. It says that ‘Wales was thought to be a safe area’ however only a few lines on in the text it says that children from Cardiff and Swansea had to be evacuated. This shows that Wales not a safe area, though it may have been thought to be. The book ‘family at war’ is a very simple one as it is for children not taking GCSE. Therefore, for the books limited information, this contradiction was kept in the book. Though Wales was thought to be a safe area, it was not. Many places in Wales were bombed including Swansea and Milford Haven.
The men, women and children of Britain experienced great changes to their lives during the Second World War, including the absence from the family of key members, loss of loved ones, food shortages and rationing, bombing and mass movements from homes. Of course people at home were greatly involved in the war effort by way of farming, munitions, industry and mining, nursing, scientific research and weapon development as well as teaching, shop work and clerical jobs. A number of organisations also played an active role, including the WVS (Women's Voluntary Service), the AFS (Auxiliary Fire Service), ARP (Air Raid Precautions) and Local Defence Volunteers, or Home Guard.
Jeanne Bullard’s husband, Paul, went to fight in north Africa. This is an account of them meeting again for the first time in three years.
“Well, I had a phone call from him and he said he was back in England and that he would come and see me the next morning, he would get the train to Bath, and I tried to describe to him actually where I worked, because I worked on a hutment right up on Lansdown on a hill on the edge of Bath, rather a lovely part and I described how he could walk up to me and there would be a little wicket gate and I would be waiting at the little wicket gate and of course I had a really nerve-racking morning in the office. I could not do any work of course and I set off to meet him and I waited at the gate and I saw him coming up the hill and I said "Paul" and so I met him. We looked at one another and we said "hello" and I think we both of us felt very slightly embarrassed because we had been writing letters to one another getting more and more loving I suppose over the time and it was a very long time since we had seen one another, three years? Something like that, and I think we both wondered, I know I did, how much we had built up about one another that wasn't quite true perhaps in the meantime. But anyway this only lasted for a moment, we were soon in one another's arms and it was soon all over but for the moment it was just a little bit awkward.”
The Home Front meant that daily life was disrupted and inconvenienced to an extraordinary degree, but then these were extraordinary times. Public awareness of the war was heightened by the sandbagging of public buildings and monuments, to protect them, and the growth of allotments (3.5 million by 1943) in every spare area of playing field or village green. Air raid sirens sounding ‘alerts’ and ‘all clears’ and the enforcement of a ‘Black Out’ from 1 September 1939 until the war’s end controlled the pace of life.
A final, popular image that seems to summarise World War Two Britain can be found with the establishment of the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) in May 1940, to repel a feared German invasion. Soon given the more dignified title of the Home Guard, we smile when we think of Captain Mainwaring, Sergeant Wilson and Corporal Jones in BBC Television’s Dad’s Army, but it was taken very seriously in the summer of 1940. Over a million men enrolled, which provided a welcome activity for older veterans of War One, though in the event of invasion, their military effectiveness would have been questionable. As one Berkshire Volunteer observed:
‘I think that none of us will forget our first LDV route march. On it a quarter of a century slipped away in a flash. There came memories of the Menin Road, of loose, shifting, exasperating cobbles, of the smell of cordite and the scream of shrapnel , of the mud and stench and misery of Flanders, of hopes and fears in battles long ago… There were few youngsters in that first platoon of ours…’
Whilst historian AJP Taylor summarised their role in his own way, from his book, English history, 1914-45:
‘The Home Guard harassed innocent civilians for identity cards; put up primitive road blocks, the traces of which may delight future archaeologists; and sometimes made bombs out of petrol tins. In a serious invasion, its members would presumably have been massacred if they had managed to assemble at all. Their spirit was willing though their equipment was scanty. Churchill proposed to launch the slogan: ‘You can always take one with you’ if the Germans landed…’
So, I have shown how life changed dramatically for the citizens of ‘Royal Britannia’ during the war and how it changed the lives of people forever. It liberated women from the home, it brought us ‘Dads Army’ but most important of all it brought a nation together, the likes of which we have never seen since.
“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Winston L S Churchill.
