Source C is an extract from ‘Carrie’s War’, a novel by Nina Bawden written in 1973. Although written many years after the war it is the semi-autobiographical account of her experiences as an evacuee during the war. She wrote about her experiences as a child when she was an adult, which gives her view of evacuation from sources A and B. This extract illustrates some of the preconceptions and stereotypical views of evacuees that some of the foster parents had. The woman automatically assumes that Carrie and her brother are poor children from the slums just because they are from a city when they tell her that they don’t have any slippers.
Source D is a government advertisement asking for more foster parents for evacuees in Scotland. It promotes fostering an evacuee as an enjoyable and rewarding task to encourage people to sign up as a foster parent. It was issued by the Secretary of State in 1940 and is designed to encourage more people to take evacuees. The two smiling children in the picture are there to make potential foster parents believe that these are the sort of children that they will be looking after. It takes a very positive attitude to evacuation because the government really needs more foster parents so they try to advertise it in the best way possible.
Source E is an extract from a Mass Observation Survey taken in May 1940. The interview is with the father of a seven-year-old boy from Southend. This source, like source B, shows how little people involved in evacuation were actually told. The man being interviewed says that he doesn’t want his son to go because they can’t look after him where they are sending him. He doesn’t actually know where the children are being sent but thinks that if his son is sent to “The Shires. Wales and the West” he won’t be properly looked after because “they were starving there before the war.” The interview was taken after seven months of the phoney war so the father would have seen the evacuation of his son as pointless as no cities had actually been bombed yet despite the governments fears. The man’s attitude toward the evacuation issue is very personal-he doesn’t want his son sent away from him to go and live with strangers.
For source F I watched the film ‘Hope and Glory’. In this the mother of the boy, whose point of view the story is told from, refuses to let her children be evacuated even though she knows that they would be safer. This is not a reliable source as it is fictitious and only the director’s interpretation of what evacuation was like. None of the actors would have had any experience of the evacuation process and, like the director; it is just their interpretation. The film is from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy, which gives a different view of what it was like. It is also the only source about a child who wasn’t evacuated but stayed in the city. However, this source is fictitious so it can’t be relied on as a reliable account. Also, due to the modern nostalgic view of the Second World War, the Blitz and the battle of Britain have been romanticised as examples of British courage in the face of adversity. We no longer see the Blitz as the true horror that it was and this would affect the maker’s of the film’s views making them different to those of people who actually lived through it.
Although sources C and F are both fictitious representations of a child’s view of evacuation, source C is far more reliable as it was written by a former evacuee whereas source F is made by people who had no personal experience of evacuation or the war in general. Source D is government propaganda and cannot be relied upon to give an unbiased view of evacuation. Source B, although still an eyewitness account was not taken until forty-eight years after the event. Consequently not only lapses of memory but also the impact of the propaganda of the years following the war may have influenced the teacher’s view and feelings of the events compared to as they seemed at the time. It is different to source E because it is lacking the emotional impact of the time. The differences between these sources show why historians need a variety of sources from different times and origins to come to a reasonably balanced evaluation of any historical event.