“Westward Ho” is government information film from 1940. It was a movie shown to people at the cinema before the feature film came on. In it, it showed children being evacuated and has a scene similar to the one shown in the picture. Nearly all of the descriptions about the journey were happy, for example “smiling fields”. There was also nothing bad in the film, except for a brief moment when the children leave their mothers, but quickly followed by something happy again. The purpose of this source therefore is to convince people that evacuation ran smoothly.
However, this is a government photograph, so we must consider it to be propaganda, and therefore biased. I know this because the children all seem to be happy to leave, and consequently shows that the government wants to present the “ideal” image of evacuation. Another limitation is that it is just a photograph. It doesn’t show the children’s real emotion or what they were thinking. It just shows one set of children, on one day, so it is a limited time span. It also contradicts what Source C states which is that the children were silent and “too afraid to talk”, by showing them smiling and waving.
It is, however, usual because it gives us an understanding of how the government portrayed evacuation.
As already stated, Source C is completely different from the government image. It is taken from an interview with a teacher, retelling the evacuation with the children from her school. From my own knowledge, I know that teachers escorted the children on their journey. This also links with the adults in Source B. I also know that after the war had ended, and the government stopped the censorship of the war, people that had been evacuated started telling their story about how they hated to leave their families. David Prest, who wrote a book called Evacuees in World War Two - the True Story, interviewed many people about their evacuation experiences. He states that “Talking to evacuees … recalls painful memories … exposing the trauma of separation and isolation and the tensions of fear and anger”.
The usefulness also depends on the motives of the teacher and the interviewer. The questions the interviewer asked might be biased to get a better story, for example, or the interviewer may have not agreed with evacuation and therefore only wants bad things to come out in the interview. From my own knowledge, I know that many teachers didn’t want to be evacuated, and this must be taken into account when we think about the reliability of the source. This is also just one teacher, on one day, and will be a limited account of evacuation. In addition, the interview was given in 1988, 40 years afterwards, so the teacher may have forgotten some key details. What’s more, this interview is from an adult, telling it from an adults view. A child evacuee would have a completely different outlook on the process, so the interview does not tell both sides.
It is usual because it explores the attitudes towards evacuation.
In conclusion, both sources are useful to a historian, but it depends on what we wish to know. If we want to know about how the government portrayed evacuation, the Source B is more useful, but if we want to know about how about the attitudes towards evacuation, then Source C is more useful.
