The Children Caught in Britain’s War: How Bombs, Shelters and Evacuation Still Failed Them

The Children Caught in Britain’s War: How Bombs, Shelters and Evacuation Still Failed Them

Imagine sending your child away because you believed it would save their life.

Then imagine discovering that the journey to safety had placed them in danger too.

Or deciding to keep them at home, only for a bomb to fall on their school.

Over the last few days, we have looked at the children who were evacuated, the brothers and sisters who were sometimes separated and those who stayed behind with their families.

Today I want to look at the darker side of their story.

The children who became casualties of the Second World War.

When we hear the word casualty, we often think of soldiers. But this was a war in which the battlefield came directly to British towns and cities, and thousands of children were killed or seriously injured.

During the Blitz alone, 7,736 children were killed and another 7,622 were seriously wounded.

Bombing was the most obvious danger.

Children were killed when their homes were destroyed, when streets were hit and when bombs fell on schools, shops and other buildings. Even when a particular building was not being deliberately targeted, bombing from the air could never be precise enough to protect the civilians living around factories, docks, railway lines and other important targets.

One heartbreaking example happened at Sandhurst Road School in Catford, south-east London.

On the 20th of January 1943, the children were having lunch when a German bomb hit the school.

Thirty-eight pupils and six members of staff were killed and around sixty more people were injured.

Among those who died was twelve-year-old Sylvia May Ellen Head.

But bombs were not the only reason children became casualties.

Sometimes the attempt to protect people created dangers of its own.

On the 3rd of March 1943, an air-raid warning sent people rushing towards Bethnal Green Underground station in London, which was being used as a shelter.

A woman and child fell near the bottom of the entrance steps and people behind continued moving forward in the darkness. Within seconds, a terrible crush developed.

One hundred and seventy-three people died.

Sixty-two of them were children.

Perhaps the most extraordinary part of the story is that no enemy bomb caused those deaths. People had gone underground because they believed it was the safest place to be.

Even evacuation itself could end in tragedy.

Some British children were sent abroad because Canada and other parts of the Commonwealth were thought to offer even greater safety than the British countryside.

On the 17th of September 1940, the SS City of Benares was sailing towards Canada carrying ninety child evacuees when it was torpedoed in the Atlantic.

Only thirteen of those ninety children survived.

Seventy-seven were lost.

The disaster helped bring the government-sponsored overseas evacuation scheme to an end.

There was another cruel twist to evacuation.

When the expected bombing failed to arrive during the early months of the war, many parents decided they had had enough of being separated from their children.

By January 1940, almost half of the evacuees had returned home.

Then, later that year, the Blitz began.

Some children therefore found themselves back in exactly the towns and cities they had originally been moved away from to protect them.

And the danger continued even after an air raid had ended.

There could be burning buildings, shattered glass, unstable ruins and unexploded bombs. Children were drawn to bomb sites, the piles of rubble could quickly become makeshift playgrounds. They climbed through ruined buildings, collected pieces of metal and sometimes came across unexploded bombs or ammunition. What looked like an exciting wartime souvenir could still be extremely dangerous, and children were repeatedly warned never to touch unfamiliar objects.

It is easy to look back at photographs of wartime children with their gas-mask boxes and little suitcases and think mainly about evacuation, rationing and disrupted schooling.

But childhood itself had become dangerous.

A child could be sitting at a school desk, asleep in bed, travelling to safety or walking towards an air-raid shelter when the war suddenly reached them.

Perhaps that is one of the saddest things about the Home Front.

Adults could build shelters, arrange evacuations, issue gas masks and make endless plans to keep children safe.

But they could never remove the danger completely.

Can anyone in your family remember being a child during the bombing, or being hurried into an air-raid shelter when the sirens sounded?