Jambusters

by Julie Summers

  Smethcote in Shropshire was far enough away from any major industrial city that the war had very little direct impact on the lives of its inhabitants. Nevertheless it rumbled along in the background for six years and shaped the work and focus of its WI.

  The effect of the war on Edith Jones’s life was relatively minimal. She had plenty of food growing in the garden, the village was not threatened by bombs and life was able to carry on more or less as normal, albeit with additional responsibilities such as evacuees, the family staying and paying guests, constant WI drives for knitting wool, fundraising for troops and collections for the local hospitals. Yet there is in her diary a rumbling sense of the menace of the war, which occasionally she comments on. ‘Bombs heard in distance’, she wrote in March 1941. ‘Planes overhead tonight’, she wrote three days later. Then ‘bombs fell at Chelmick [7 miles away] on Monday 7th. White washed the pantry.’

  3

  THE PIPER’S CALL

  The social needs of mother, teachers and children will make calls on the resourcefulness and ingenuity of every member.

  Miss Farrer, 1939

  The mass evacuation of people from the cities to the countryside is, after the Blitz, probably the single most famous event in the lives of the civilians living in Britain during the Second World War. Today the shorthand for evacuation is the image of a tearful child clutching a suitcase and wearing a luggage label waiting with crowds of others for a train at a station. Yet that is far from the whole story. In addition to women, children, the disabled, the elderly and other groups considered vulnerable by the government, went businesses, hospitals, government departments and private firms. James Roffey, an eight-year-old boy who was evacuated to Pulborough in West Sussex, remembered that the Max Factor cosmetic company moved one of their factories to West Sussex. ‘At Pulborough they took over a large house called Templemead to use as a packing factory. The young women who worked there . . . found the village too quiet for their liking and soon began to drift back to London.’ Great Ormond Street Hospital was evacuated to Tadworth Court, their country branch in Surrey, and other temporary locations outside London; the National Gallery moved its collections to a quarry in North Wales; the Bank of England moved to Whitchurch near Overton in Hampshire and senior Post Office staff were relocated to Harrogate. Hundreds of military camps, anti-aircraft posts, airfields, depots and secret training units were set up throughout the country, often on the outskirts of small villages or hamlets, so that the population of some areas of the countryside almost doubled, putting pressure on everything from transport, policing and schools to local services, shops and the water and sanitation systems, where they existed. Rural Britain was in a state of almost permanent flux. The Post Office recorded over 38 million changes of address during the war. That is nearly one move per head of population.

  Netherbury in Dorset was an example of how a small village was overrun with visitors during the early months. Their WI war record illustrates what happened:

  The first to arrive in September 1939 was a Roman Catholic School from Acton, which was evacuated to Slape House: the sisters living in the house, the Priest being billeted at the Inn, and the children in various homes. In September too, came a Company of the Lancashire Regiment, to occupy the village hall, and the Women’s Institute ran a canteen in the old New Inn premises for the soldiers. These were followed by the Sussex Regiment. In February 1940 a further batch of mothers and children came from Southampton. On this occasion there was trouble, as the mothers sounded as though they would rather have stayed to be bombed in Southampton, than be buried alive in Netherbury. A vivid recollection is of one mother who refused to get out of the bus or to be parted from her cat which she had in a wooden box.1

  By the middle of 1940 the village had almost twice the number of inhabitants as it had the previous year. The WI was affected by this mass movement of people on two levels: as an organisation and individually. Institutes played an important role in entertaining, catering for and helping out with any number of military camps and units, holding mending parties, dances and money-raising events for the forces. However, it was their work with the evacuees that affected the WI most deeply. In the first days and weeks they were wholly occupied with caring for children who ranged from the homesick five- or six-year-old to the truculent twelve- or thirteen-year-old. For some women this caring role lasted for the duration of the war and for many this developed on both sides into warm and loving relationships. However, at the outset everything was new and strange for both sides. Mrs Miles in Surrey was not sure about evacuation. She recorded her surprise at ‘the attitude [to the news of evacuation] of my charwoman which was pure joy. “I’m having 2 girls, poor kiddies. Could I rest when I have a spare room and I thought of them wanting a shelter?”’ Mrs Miles herself was more circumspect about the coming influx and was annoyed by the BBC’s announcements: ‘The evacuation notices are most inappropriately given out by BBC young men, who little know what despair enters the hearts of various women expecting the strangers and afraid to have them. Men just haven’t the foggiest.’2

  At the beginning of September 1939 over 1.5 million mothers and babies, unaccompanied schoolchildren, disabled and elderly were evacuated from Britain’s major cities to the countryside. A further 2 million children were evacuated privately and over the next six years the movement of people back and forth between the cities and the countryside was unceasing. Planning for the removal of non-essential residents in the event of a major aerial attack had been under consideration since the mid-1920s and detailed planning had been carried out over the latter half of the 1930s. During the Munich crisis in September 1938 the Home Office was swamped with enquiries about evacuation and the WVS, by then only in its earliest stages, was unable to cope. Miss Farrer suggested that the WI should lend the Home Office a typist and a typewriter, which was accepted ‘with deep gratitude’. Not only had the WI practical experience to offer at the national level but of course it had the unparalleled network of institutes throughout the country, which was of great value to the authorities.

  Following the Munich crisis, when an emergency evacuation of a small number of children had been carried out prematurely, Miss Farrer commissioned a short report from one of the officials involved. Mr Draper was very critical of the existing plans and made several suggestions which Miss Farrer condensed in a letter to Sir John Anderson, the minister responsible for air raid precautions and evacuation, in November 1938. The letter contained many of Mr Draper’s recommendations, the first being to suggest that every local authority should appoint an advisory committee representing voluntary organisations so that each society could be allocated particular duties, thus avoiding duplication or glaring gaps. He had been annoyed by the county council clerks’ complete dismissal of the WVS: ‘In one county which I visited, the Clerk refused to meet the representative of the Women’s Voluntary Service or the Secretary of the County Federation of Women’s Institutes or to give any information whatsoever about his proposed billeting arrangements.’ The government knew that they would have to rely on the goodwill of country families, and in particular housewives, to make evacuation work and this criticism must have stung because the WVS was responsible for helping with transport and billeting in the countryside and the WI took a great deal of responsibility for the women and children when they arrived.

  What bothered the WI in particular was the fact that an evacuation on the scale planned by the government would put pressure on all forms of local service. Miss Farrer suggested in her letter that ‘in a modern war the staff requirements for an evacuation service (doctors, nurses, teachers, local government officials, etc) are as essential as for military purposes.’3 She suggested that ‘it should be impressed upon country people that evacuation work will be an essential part of national service and that those wishing to do war work should not all leave for the towns’.4 This was not done until the propaganda drive in 1940 when the Ministry of Health produced a series of posters proclaiming that looking after
evacuees was a national service and as such should be seen as part of the war effort.

  Miss Farrer felt sure that ‘the majority of Women’s Institute members would willingly take mothers and children into their homes and do their best to look after them’. In an era when the caring role of women was taken for granted the government assumed that their motherly instincts would overcome difficulties. However, women were concerned with the practical matters that evacuation would throw up and which the government, in their view, failed to address. There were questions about the provision of after-school activities for evacuee children, crèches for two- to five-year-olds and the need for specialised carers and foster mothers for that group. ‘Country families, if they have refugees billeted on them, will be fully occupied in carrying out the extra domestic duties that this entails. They will have no spare time to superintend the children.’

  In January 1939 the Minister for Health approached the National Federation of Women’s Institutes and asked them for their cooperation in carrying out a major survey of 16 million homes in the countryside in preparation for evacuation. Such a monumental piece of work could never have been undertaken without the help of voluntary bodies and in the event 100,000 volunteers, including a very large number of WI members, completed the survey in record time. The purpose of the survey was to establish a comprehensive picture of the housing situation in reception areas and to pin down the number of households who would be prepared to take in children and mothers. When the survey was submitted Miss Farrer and her colleagues were frustrated by the government’s recommendation for billeting one child for every spare room, pointing out that larger houses not only had more rooms but also bigger rooms, which would be able to accommodate more people. This would put the onus on wealthier households to take responsibility.

  The most significant problem about evacuation was that it was not compulsory and parents could wait until the last minute to decide whether their children would go or stay at home. However, the government gave the Ministry of Health power to make billeting, together with the feeding and care of evacuees, compulsory. A householder who refused to take evacuees could be fined £50 or given a three-month prison sentence. ‘This is to apply not only to evacuated children but also adults who are given the right to share the kitchen and everything else in the house, and not only for a few months but for the duration of the war.’5

  In 1940 a member wrote in puzzlement to the editor of Home & Country:

  I live in Road A of a reception area which contains some dozen houses each standing in a good half-acre of ground. The billeting officer came among us and we all with one consent began to make excuses. So she passed on to Road B, which contains about four times as many houses in a smaller space. Here she planted children thick and firm, softly murmuring a phrase about police powers when protests occurred. When asked later why Road A got away with it, she said, ‘It’s useless to dump children in big houses: it never works.’ That I can well believe; but why were we not summonsed and fined for evading duties thrust upon our neighbours. Is the government afraid?

  It was a knotty problem and one that was never properly addressed. Some very large houses – Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth and Buscot Park in Faringdon – were made available to evacuees and schools but it is true that the poorer households in the countryside took on far more evacuees proportionally than the wealthy.

  A Divisional First Aid commandant from Merstham in Surrey posed an interesting question about compulsory billeting and one that directly related to women. How should a woman, trained for example as a first-aid worker, deal with the dilemma she would almost certainly face if there were an air raid? Would she go out and do her duty or remain behind to look after children who had been committed to her care? ‘How can any woman leave a house of frightened children during an air raid to work with a first-aid unit? And furthermore, would she be doing her duty if she did?’6 These and many other questions remained unresolved.

  At 11.07 a.m. on Thursday, 31 August 1939 the Ministry of Health sent out a brief order: ‘Evacuate Forthwith’. The enormous machine that had been prepared over the previous months and years cranked into motion. The transport arrangements ran efficiently and as Tom Harrisson of Mass Observation wrote later: ‘Because a lot of trains took a lot of people in a little time, our leaders turned cart-wheels of self-satisfaction; uncritically, un-analytically they wallowed in Maths. There was a chorus of self-congratulation, and relevant ministers ladled out congratulations to every conceivable local authority: to the teachers and mothers, to the hosts and to the children of Britain.’7

  James Roffey, who had been evacuated to Pulborough in that first wave, remembered first the excitement and then the anxiety of evacuation. At the end of a long day he just wanted to see his mother and father again. He wrote in his memoir: ‘“So this is evacuation!” I thought. “A long journey in a crowded train, followed by ages spent in the pens of a cattle market. The smell of disinfectant that has trickled down my neck. Now a feeling of anxiety as we all sit on the bare floorboards of a school in a place the name of which I still didn’t know.” I didn’t like evacuation anymore; I just wanted to go home.’8 Despite his distress he was able to register the trestle tables all down one side of the school room piled high with sandwiches, cakes and biscuits. ‘There were jugs of lemonade and big teapots filled ready with hot tea, beside bowls filled with sugar, jugs of milk and rows of cups and saucers.’9 He learned later that the local women, organised by the WI, had been working since the early morning to get the refreshments prepared for the incoming evacuees. Some of them had been baking cakes for several days previously, he recalled, though the children were too nervous to do justice to the spread.

  Acts of kindness such as the feast laid on for James and his schoolmates were recorded in several memoirs. A group of mothers and infants in Bedfordshire were delighted to see marquees with teas laid out ‘just like at a garden party’ but all this was swiftly forgotten as the process of billeting began. Children were herded into halls, meeting rooms, schools, and scrutinised, picked or left by families who were prepared to take them in or leave them. Many were left unhoused and the hapless billeting officers spent hours traipsing around lanes, knocking on doors, urging unwilling householders to accept a child here, a pregnant mother there, a tearful brother and sister who would not be separated. The evacuees, exhausted, homesick and hungry, felt anxious at the prospect of who they might be sent to live with. The would-be foster parents felt the resentment, foreseen a year earlier by the WI, that they had no choice in the matter. Mary Marston’s mother was a billeting officer in Cheadle Hume, near Manchester. Mary’s early wartime memory is of hordes of children carrying gas masks being directed into the school hall. They were sorted and sent off to live with families all over the village. After all the billeting was over Mary’s mother was left with the adults, who also needed housing: ‘We had a headmistress from Wood’s Lane School billeted with us. I remember being surprised that she called my mother and father by their Christian names. I never saw any children from her school but later on there were evacuees from Manchester High School at our school.’

  Initially there were problems as children and mothers found it hard to settle down. Jean Ridgeway and her sister, Fran, went to live with Mrs Winter, who was a billeting officer and treasurer of her local WI near Barnstaple in Devon.

  At first we were terribly homesick and Mrs Winter was quite hostile towards us. At least that’s how it appeared. She was very busy sorting out children who had gone to homes that didn’t work out and I expect she thought we would get on at her house because we were sisters but we were homesick and everything was new and smelled strange. One afternoon she found me comforting Fran in the garden and I think it made her sad to think we were so unhappy. After that she paid us more attention and things worked out OK. I remember she was constantly going to ‘the institute’ to sort things out but she never talked about that. She was a good cook and a great cake maker, that I do remember. We were with her f
or about eight weeks, then Mum came to pick us up as the bombs had not come.

  Long after the journalists had lost interest in the evacuees, and those families and children who were only briefly in the country had returned to the cities, WI members were left caring for children and young mothers who, uprooted from their homes, had no choice but to learn to settle in the countryside. For both sides there was unfamiliarity, some early hostility and much adjustment, but where it worked it worked well and whole communities changed and flourished as the incomers learned to adapt to a different way of life.

  In common with most village families, the Simses in Bradfield had evacuees. They had two boys: Albert Mersh and his brother, Harry Boy. Albert was six and Harry Boy was a little older. Ann Tetlow recalled the shock she felt when she realised that the children had come from a tenement in Stepney with one lavatory for twenty-one people. The boys had two sisters who lived with Mrs Worthy down the road and there was another sibling who lived in the next village. Harry Boy stayed in Bradfield until he was fourteen, when he went back to live in London, but Albert was too young to leave so when the Simses moved to Burgess Hill for eighteen months, he moved in with the family’s maid, Emily, where he was very happy. He eventually left and became a goldsmith but as far as Ann knows, he never made contact with either Emily or her parents again. However, Harry Boy did come back to Bradfield to visit her mother after the war. His had been one of the many happy experiences, which tend to go unrecorded in the histories of evacuation.