Why children evacuated

Place a photograph of a Morrison shelter in the centre of the diagram. Invite suggestions from pupils as to what they can see in the shelter and make notes in the layer of space directly surrounding the image under the heading "What can you see?

Ask pupils " Do you think this shelter looks safe? Give out copies for pupils to work in pairs. Lead discussion asking - " How do these two shelters differ? Who would have these? This will necessitate an explanation of class ie that certain kinds of shelter could only be erected in a dwelling with a garden - in effect at least a middle class household.

This should be kept simple, providing enough to have a working knowledge so as to apply this to the topic. The final question should be. British women and children in Singapore began to be evacuated shortly after Japan launched its attack on the colony.

After a harrowing experience on their ship, one group eventually reached Australia in early January Children evacuees from Bristol carry bags, suitcases and gas masks as they walk off the platform upon their arrival at the Brent Station, London, U.

They later continued on to Kingsbridge, U. Bristol later suffered severely from Luftwaffe air attacks. The return of evacuees to London was approved on June , but some began returning to England as early as The evacuation was officially ended in March YouTube features a number of videos about the evacuation. One such video is a mixture of posters, photographs, and Imperial War Museum footage. Another video features a young schoolgirl interviewing her grandmother about her evacuation experience, part of a class project.

By Dwight Jon Zimmerman. Michael A. Advertise with us. Like this: Like Loading They were home by the beginning of but when an invasion seemed likely, Joan announced that she wished to be evacuated again. None of her brothers and sisters wanted to go too, so she was sent alone, aged nine, to Northamptonshire. She lived there with a childless couple who loved and cared for her as their own. When she returned in she found it difficult: "I remember sitting on a sofa with a feeling of not belonging.

By that time we were really poor. Dad was still ill and unable to work. My family all commented on how I talked different, so I had that strange feeling of not quite belonging yet wanting to be there because they were my family. I soon got used to being with Mum, and she got used to me. But with my siblings it was more difficult. They are my family and I am very fond of them but they never went away like I did, so they don't understand that I have had these two lives.

Two lives. That is what so many children of that generation had and for some it was, in retrospect, a bonus. But it wasn't a bonus for parents. As a mother, I feel deeply troubled at the thought of being forced to miss out on five or six years of my sons' childhood. I'm profoundly grateful that I have never had to face that dilemma. In Operation Pied Piper, the family suffered but I feel the real losers, as in the legend, were the parents.

It was as tough for many as one would expect. Although some wrote of their immense gratitude to the kindly foster parents who had loved and cared for their children, there were far more stories of mothers feeling that they had missed part of their children's lives. Vera Brittain wrote in her memoir: "The small gallant figures which disappeared behind the flapping tarpaulin of the grey-painted Duchess of Atholl have never grown up in my mind, for the children who returned and eventually took their places were not the same; the break in continuity made them rather appear as an elder brother and sister of the vanished pair.

If you ask Don Bayley about his past he immediately talks about his evacuation to Lichfield, just 20 miles from his home in West Bromwich. It changed his life and that of his younger brother, Phil. Mrs Coles, their foster mother, gave them something their own mother could never have done: a love of books and learning. And it was not one-sided. Twenty years after the war, Mrs Coles wrote to Don to say that she felt the children had been sent "to cheer her up".

I learned to appreciate all these different things from Mrs Coles. I learned how to talk to people and to address them properly and with confidence.

I developed a different accent, dropping my Black Country slang. In fact, I have to say that Mrs Coles changed me completely and she loved me — I'm ashamed to admit it — more than my mother ever did.

She made me feel wanted. She called us My Boys and that really meant something to us. When the boys went back to West Bromwich after the war, Don was dismayed by his mother's reaction to his new found interest in books and education. She cursed him for being "a bloody big 'ead" and was constantly nagging him to "shift yer bloody books".

Even parents who were delighted that their children had had life-enhancing experiences and opportunities, found it hard to adjust to the changes. Fathers, often forgotten in the evacuation story, also felt they had lost out. In , Ted Matthews wrote to one of his four daughters whom he sent to America in "Sending you away has been, in some ways, a tragedy.

I still think it was the right thing to do, even though events proved different from our fears. But it has been heartbreaking to miss these years of your lives.