These were minor problems as in fact, evacuation was a success because it saved thousands of lives of British people during WW2 and the blitz. Overall evacuation was one of the British government’s best moves of the whole war.
In source B you can see the children are going off to be evacuated. The children appear to be going to be evacuated along with their parents and teachers. Some parents and teachers would have gone with their children/pupils. Seeing that the children are going with full suitcases and are fully clothed implies that they are middle or upper class.
The photo was taken in 1st September 1939 so the war had only started that day which means air raids on Britain hadn’t started, so the buildings of London weren’t damaged. The government was preparing for air attacks and had been very quick to organise the evacuation process.
Source B is a photo was taken in September 1939. Seeing that it is a photo it cannot be completely seen as reliable because, it could have been staged and censorship was in effect during the war.
The photographer, who was probably hired by the government, wants you to think that all the children were happy to be sent away from their parents. This would have been good propaganda because in 1939 people were a lot more trusting of the government and would have made the parents feel guilty if they were not evacuating their children.
Source C is an account of when a child was leaving from the station to be evacuated. It is reliable as it’s a first hand experience although, there is unreliability in the fact that it is from an interview 49 years after the event.
The child from the source doesn’t seem to be happy, which was the general feeling of most children. A quote that supports this attitude is ‘All you could hear was the feet of children and a kind of murmur, because the children were too afraid to talk’.
To conclude as a historian these sources are very useful. From the sources you can learn the view of a typical child evacuee and the government’s use of propaganda. Both sources are useful in their own way; source C tells you that children were scared and unhappy to be leaving their parents. From source B you learn that, the government wanted parents to send their children away, even though they would be miserable, by making all the children in pictures look happy.
