The Evacuee Children Who Waited While Strangers Decided Whether They Wanted Them

The Evacuee Children Who Waited While Strangers Decided Whether They Wanted Them

Imagine being seven or eight years old.

You have already said goodbye to your mum and dad, travelled to somewhere you have probably never been before and you are carrying a small case, your gas mask and a label with your name on it.

And then you find out that you still do not know where you are going to sleep that night.

Today I want to look at one of the most unsettling parts of the wartime evacuation: how children were actually found homes once they reached the countryside.

When the great evacuation began in September 1939, children usually travelled with their schools and teachers to designated reception areas. Around 1.5 million people were evacuated during the first three days alone, including hundreds of thousands of children.

But getting them off the trains was just the start.

Many were taken to schools, church halls, village halls or other reception centres while local billeting officers tried to find them all homes.

In some places, people came to the reception centre and chose the children that they were willing to take. The National Archives describes local people walking around and selecting children, some evacuees later remembered that it felt  like being at a cattle market.

Just imagine what that must have felt like.

One child disappears with a smiling couple.

Then another.

Perhaps somebody takes two sisters together.

Another woman wants a little girl.

A farmer might prefer an older boy who could work.

And slowly the room empties.

What if you were still standing there?

For some evacuees, being one of the last children to be chosen became one of the memories that stayed with them for the rest of their lives. Accounts describe children sitting or standing while strangers looked them over before deciding who they would take. Some former evacuees later compared the experience of waiting to be chosen to being at a cattle market.

It is difficult not to think about what might have gone through a child's mind.

Why doesn't anybody want me?

Is there something wrong with me?

Where am I going to end up?

Of course, not every evacuation was like this. In many places billeting officers allocated children directly to particular houses, and thousands of evacuees were welcomed into homes where they were treated with enormous kindness. Some formed relationships with their wartime families that lasted for decades.

But there was another question I had always wondered about.

Who were these people taking the children in, and were they vetted?

Before the war, local authorities had carried out a huge survey of accommodation in reception areas, looking at how much space was available in houses and other buildings. But this was not vetting in the modern safeguarding sense. Accommodation surveys concentrated heavily on finding suitable available space. Although billeting officers and other officials could inspect and supervise billets, there was nothing resembling the modern system of safeguarding and background checks that we would expect today, and standards of inspection and follow-up varied between areas.

Billeting officers and local officials were supposed to remain involved, and concerns about inspecting billets and supervising children's welfare were raised during the war. But arrangements could vary considerably from one area to another.

And did every family happily volunteer to take a child?

No.

Many genuinely wanted to help. They opened their homes willingly, cared for the children and sometimes came to see them almost as members of their own families.

Others were much less enthusiastic.

The government had powers to compel householders in reception areas to provide accommodation when necessary, and the possibility of compulsory billeting had been built into evacuation planning before the war.

So somewhere among those frightened children were youngsters being taken into homes who had not necessarily wanted them there in the first place.

For some children, evacuation became an adventure.

For others, it brought kindness and a second family.

And for some, it left memories of homesickness, rejection or simply standing in a village hall watching everyone else being chosen first.

That is the part of evacuation photographs cannot always show.

Were you evacuated during the war, or did your parents or grandparents ever tell you what it was really like? And did anyone in your family take an evacuee into their home? I would love to hear the memories that have been passed down through families.