Fleeing from the ‘wrath to come’

With war and terrifying air raids imminent, about two million people chose to leave London and other vulnerable areas. Most of them, like the unfortunate woman who died in a road accident at Hopcroft’s Holt on September 2, were probably planning to stay with relatives or friends in the country.

Many city dwellers had nowhere else to go and lacked the means to escape. To remove the most vulnerable of them to comparative safety, the Government devised an official evacuation scheme in 1938.

The country was divided into evacuation, reception and neutral areas with Oxfordshire being designated as a reception area.

Host families were promised payment for taking in evacuees and a census was carried out early in 1939 to establish how much accommodation was available.

Oxfordshire was asked to take up to 21,000 evacuees and Oxford city 20,000, later reduced to 12,550, places.

The Government scheme involved relocating whole schools, including their teachers, as well as mothers with young children, pregnant women and disabled people.

Fear of bombing encouraged many people to register with the voluntary scheme and the Ministry of Health ordered evacuation to begin on September 1, 1939.

Schoolchildren in the London area, carrying gasmasks and wearing name tags, marched from their schools to railway or bus stations bound for a destination that was always kept secret. These were heartbreaking moments for many parents and children but some youngsters thought they were just off to the seaside.

Most children arriving in Oxfordshire faced a virtual slave market in halls where householders tended to choose first the more attractive or potentially useful children. Other evacuees were hawked around the streets until all had been housed.

Some children fell on their feet. Fred Gallacher and his two brothers from London’s East End found ‘light, warmth, an indoor loo and bath, and a most loving environment’ at Mrs Preddy’s house in Warneford Road, Oxford.

Audrey and Edna Jones, also from East London, were among the less fortunate evacuees, regularly thrashed for bed-wetting at their billets in Bletchington.

Edna tried unsuccessfully to parcel Audrey up and ‘post’ her home but, by contrast, Amelia Dunn became so fond of her foster mother at Sunningwell that her mother, now a complete stranger, eventually had to drag her away screaming.

The official evacuation scheme was intended to cater for 3.5 million people in September 1939 but only 1.5 million joined it. Parents were reluctant to split their families and send their children away.

Crucial family income might be lost and, in addition, parents of evacuees had to pay a proportion of their billeting costs, imposing a financial burden which Stephen Desmond’s mother only paid off in 1953, nine years after he and his two sisters had returned to London from evacuation in Oxford.

As there were no air raids during autumn 1939, these underlying pressures — and dissatisfaction with dirty or unsatisfactory billets — caused many evacuees, both private and official, to return home. No mothers with young children were left in Burford by Christmas 1939 and the number of evacuees in Banbury and Witney rural districts halved by the beginning of 1940.

Evacuees flooded back into Oxfordshire in 1940 with the fall of France in May and the London Blitz in September. Oxford received 5,000 evacuees from Ashford in September, some of whom needed emergency accommodation in the Town Hall and several colleges.

Evacuee numbers began to fall again as the war dragged on but returning to London was fraught with danger. Winnie and Dora, two girls evacuated to Thame, were killed when the train taking them back was bombed. During summer 1944, the threat of V1’s or ‘Doodlebugs’ brought another surge of evacuees. In Bicester, a pregnant woman and her three children lived for a time in a stable; in Eynsham, an air raid shelter housed adults and children, 17 of them under five.

With the capture of the V-bomb sites in northern France in September 1944, this crisis was short-lived and mass evacuation gradually came to an end. Audrey and Edna Jones were overjoyed to get home at last on August 12, 1945.

Evacuation was intended to ‘Keep them Happy, Keep them Safe.’ The scheme undoubtedly kept most evacuees safe, but its impact on their happiness was more variable.

Many evacuees found that the experience broadened their horizons; some chose to stay in Oxfordshire or remained in touch for decades with their one-time foster parents.

Others hated to be away from home and big city life — some were abused in ways which would have a negative effect on their lives.

Perhaps only each evacuee can decide whether the process ultimately brought them profit or loss.