Explain the differing reactions of people in Britain to the policy of Evacuating children during the Second World War

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Asim Bhatti                                           Page  of                                              History coursework

Explain the differing reactions of people in Britain to the policy of Evacuating children during the Second World War.  

        In 1939 just before the outbreak of the Second World War the British government decided to evacuate school children, expectant women, and teachers, mothers with small children, disabled, the elderly and the sick from major towns and cities to the designated reception areas. This policy of evacuation had a big impact on people, reaction and change in morale on all the above people mentioned and other people not being evacuated such as fathers, the host families and the government. In this essay I will be looking at the different reactions of all the evacuees and even people who were not being evacuated such as the men. In this essay I will also be discussing how the different reactions of working and middle class evacuees differed and why they differed.  

        One of the main groups of people evacuation had an affect on was schoolchildren. It was feared that many child casualties would affect parents’ morale, so pressure was put on parents to send their children away to the safety of the countryside. To do this, posters and leaflets were issued from the government to inform civilians of the plans of evacuation as one is illustrated below:                                                                                                          

The children themselves had differing reactions to each other this is partially due to their social class. Some children were from middle class families while most were from working class families. In this paragraph I will be concentrating on how this difference in class affected the children’s reaction towards evacuation and how they were different to each other. I will do this by looking at different sources where children from middle class and working class families look back at their reactions and feelings towards evacuation.

Most small children would have been crying and hugging their mums in confusion as the sources explain. It states “We marched down the school with all the mums and children crying and carrying on”. The extraction from the Source states how the children’s reactions were different to that of the mothers. “Some (children) remained quite and held on tightly to their mums’ hands not really knowing what was going on…” The children would have held on to their mothers because they had no clue to what was going on.  

Source 2 also says how some children were happy “Others were quite happy, especially when the time came for them to part from their mothers.”

A few children burst into tears crying for their mothers.

When the small working class children got settled into their new homes they would still be confused because they were not used to a middle class way of life this is explained further below.

             A middle class person would have lived a very different life from a working class person. A working class person would have lived in a city house and would have to share a house with two families and would not even have an inside toilet they would live in an environment which consisted of factories which created smoke and smog, while a middle class person would have lived in a detached house with hot running water, a bath, an inside toilet and there own bedroom.

Therefore the children coming from such different backgrounds was bound to lead to differing reactions between the two groups.

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The countryside, to the working class children was a complete new world to them that they had never before experienced. Most working class people would have liked the experience such as William Blackley who was 14 years old in 1939 and looks back and says how he liked it because of the fresh air, which was better than the smoke and smog, and the fun that he had during his time there. He would have said this because he came from Gorton, an inner city area of Manchester, where there is lots of smoke and smog because of the factories ...

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