Wartime Schooldays: Evacuees, Air Raids, Digging for Victory and Playground Fights

Wartime Schooldays: Evacuees, Air Raids, Digging for Victory and Playground Fights

Imagine arriving at school in the morning and not knowing whether you would spend the day learning arithmetic, digging vegetables, sheltering from an air raid or being sent home because there was simply nowhere for your class to go.

For children growing up during the Second World War, education could look very different from the school day we recognise today.

Today I want to find out what happened to Britain’s schoolchildren during the war, including something we sometimes forget: when thousands of evacuees arrived in new towns and villages, they did not always receive a warm welcome from the local children.

When war began in September 1939, the education system was immediately disrupted.

Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren were evacuated from cities considered vulnerable to bombing. Many travelled with their teachers, but once they reached the countryside they often had to join local schools that were already full.

There simply were not enough classrooms.

Some schools operated shift systems, with local children attending lessons during one part of the day and evacuees using the building during another. Lessons could also take place in church halls, village halls and other temporary accommodation.

In some areas, formal schooling was severely reduced for weeks or even months.

Some school buildings were requisitioned for wartime purposes but others were damaged or destroyed by bombing.

And then there were the teachers.

Men who had been teaching before the war could be called into military service, while other teachers left for different forms of war work. Retired teachers and others were sometimes brought in to help, but staffing shortages added another problem to an already disrupted system.

Children also had to learn how to respond to something no previous generation of British schoolchildren had experienced on such a scale.

Air raids.

Schools practised drills. Children learned how to reach shelters quickly and were expected to bring their gas masks with them. Lessons might suddenly stop when an air-raid warning sounded, with everyone heading for whatever shelter was available.

Wartime education was not only about reading, writing and arithmetic.

Children were encouraged to take part in the wider war effort.

Under the Dig for Victory campaign, school grounds and gardens could be turned over to growing food. Children learned to plant and tend vegetables, helping to increase food production at a time when imported supplies were under enormous pressure.

For some pupils, digging, planting and harvesting became almost another school subject.

There were also collections for salvage. Children gathered things up like waste paper and metal, and schools encouraged thrift and discouraged unnecessary waste.

And then there was the social side of evacuation.

It is tempting to imagine evacuated children arriving in country schools and immediately making lots of new friends.

Sometimes they did.

But not always.

Evacuees could arrive with unfamiliar accents, different clothes and different habits. Local children might think of them as outsiders, and evacuees sometimes thought the countryside children were strange.

There could also be resentment.

Local classrooms were suddenly more crowded. Teachers had new pupils to accommodate and village life had changed.

Arguments, name-calling and playground fights between evacuees and local children certainly happened.

We know this was not simply a general possibility because some evacuees later remembered it happening to them. Frederick Edward Wooding recalled bullying and fights among boys during his wartime schooldays, while Michael Wetton, who was evacuated to Gloucestershire in 1940, remembered being bullied by local children. Experiences varied enormously, and many evacuees did make good friends, but for some children arriving at a strange school meant coping not only with homesickness and unfamiliar lessons, but also with teasing, arguments and sometimes physical fights.

City children might be mocked for their accents or lack of knowledge about country life, while evacuees could also tease their new classmates. For children who were already frightened, homesick and separated from their parents, even a playground disagreement could feel enormous.

Of course, friendships formed too. Some evacuated children remained close to the people they met for the rest of their lives.

Wartime schooling was therefore far more than lessons interrupted by air raids.

For an entire generation of children, the war followed them right through the school gates.

If you had been an evacuee arriving at a completely new school, what do you think you would have found hardest: the lessons, the homesickness or trying to make new friends?