When England sent its children away
Highley, United Kingdom - July 10, 2014: View of the railway platform and station building as schoolchildren re-enact Operation Pied Piper, the 1939 evacuation of England’s cities. The children tote brown boxes that contain gas masks, as children did during the actual evacuation. Severn Valley Railway, Highley, Worcestershire, England, UK
Readers of War Bonds will recall the story opens as ten year-old Colin Clarke is evacuated by train from London at the dawn of World War Two. The trip takes hours longer than it normally would, as the train stops to collect hundreds of children whose families have made the awful decision to send them from their homes in the city to the less-populated countryside. While Colin’s mother insists he stay at his new home in Elsworth throughout the war, many actual British families retrieved their children from their foster families at different points in the war, when the German threat felt less acute, only to send them back as the war situation changed. So while the initial wave of trains spirited a million and a half children out of the cities immediately after Hitler’s Blitzkrieg in Poland, subsequent evacuations were undertaken as the Battle of Britain and the Blitz intensified, and later, when Hitler launched his buzz bombs near the end of the war. All told, the British Imperial War Museum reports 7,736 British children were killed by German bombs, with another 7,622 seriously wounded.
Haunting posters like this one, produced by the British Ministry of Health, encouraged parents not to bring their evacuated children back to England’s cities.
The History Press says Operation Pied Piper designated areas of Great Britain in three ways: Evacuation, Reception, and Neutral. So the cities —London, Birmingham, Manchester—sent children away, while places like Kent and East Anglia were Reception areas. Throughout the war years, the British government’s position was clear: leave the children in the less-populated areas outside the big cities, because German bombers targeted industrial areas to cripple Britain’s ability to wage war. The British Ministry of Health produced a series of posters like the one above, meant to discourage parents from giving in to what their hearts were telling them—to bring their children back home—as the city centers would remain targets until Hitler was defeated. Perhaps this massive, extended relocation—the largest migration in British history—helped the young evacuees quickly cultivate the stiff upper lip we’re so fond of ascribing to the British character.
September 1, 1939, 5:00 a.m.: As Blitzkrieg begins in Poland, schoolchildren assemble for evacuation at Myrdle School in Stepney, East End London, one of 1500 evacuation sites across Britain. Stepney suffered in the eventual German assault, losing an estimated one-third of its housing.
Upon arriving at British villages across East Anglia, children were sorted into their foster families much like I’ve described in the book: the evacuees lined up and the families took their pick. Imagine putting your own child on a train for a trip supervised by volunteers you’ve never met. After that, your child will be parceled out to strangers, people you pray are good and decent and will keep your little one safe. The sense of dislocation was a real issue for the evacuated children, some of whom had never seen a farm animal, never eaten the vegetables that were standard fare in the countryside, never had to go outside to use the bathroom. While many took to their new surroundings, finding lifelong friends and developing a deep appreciation of the sense of community they found, others suffered in less-than-welcoming situations that affected them for much of their lives.
The war’s end meant the children could return home—another upheaval for them and another readjustment as they sought to settle back into lives with parents and in some cases, siblings, they had not lived with for years. It’s a testament to the sanguine British character that so many were able to resume happy, productive lives—to Keep Calm and Carry On as the adage goes. We’re living through an echo of this today, with Poland welcoming more than one million Ukrainians since the start of the Russian invasion in 2022. Many of these refugees made the journey by train, as those British children did all those years ago, fleeing with little more than a suitcase full of clothes and perhaps the family pet. There are significant differences, of course, in these evacuations. Most of the Ukrainian children are accompanied by their mothers who can support and guide them as they grapple with the upheaval they face: the loss of their home and friends, the challenge of learning a new language, the adjustment to a new school. While the British evacuees did return home, it remains an open question when—or whether—the Ukrainian children will return to the lives they knew. Let us hope it ends as it did for the British, with families reunited and neighbor nations stepping in to manage a massive, cooperative effort to rebuild all that war has destroyed.
Read more about the evacuated children in this piece from Britain’s Imperial War Museum.
