Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45

In Scotland 120,000 children left Glasgow within three days, spreading out into Perthshire, Kintyre and Rothesay. From Edinburgh some 50,000 headed north for the safety of the Highlands or down to the Border country. From Merseyside 130,000 dispersed into North Wales and northern England. As in the south, some fared better than others. Sara Cockburn, a young teacher from Glasgow, volunteered to accompany a group of evacuee children to Lochmaben, in Dumfriesshire, where they lived on a farm and were royally fed:

We had what I will have in heaven if I am spared – pin-head porridge with cream every morning. Usually I weigh about eight-and-a-half stone. When I went back to Glasgow, I weighed ten-and-a-half stone. I was spherical, and I couldn’t get into any of the clothes. All that was due to the boss’s cream.

Good food remained a lasting memory in the minds of many evacuees. Eleven-year-old Ray Fletcher was sent with his two sisters from Margate, in Kent, to the Staffordshire mining village of Landywood. The families on whom they were billeted were ‘kindness itself’, even though at first Ray could not understand a word of what they were saying, as their ‘broad Midlands accent’ seemed like a foreign language. But he never forgot the first meal he had with them – ‘the most enormous plate of egg and chips I had ever seen’, or the little potatoes which he fished out of a boiler as he sat in a barn, cooking up vegetable scraps for the pigs: ‘There were a lot of Oohs! Arghs! and Hars!, for they were hot – but that didn’t matter: they tasted delicious.’

In many villages the sudden arrival of extra children overwhelmed the facilities. At Orwell, near Cambridge, there was no room for new pupils in the school, so the evacuees sat on the floor and were kept separate from local children. ‘We were not accepted by them as friends, and we were often bullied by them,’ remembered James Kilfoyle. ‘As there were no teachers, my sister, aged thirteen, used to teach the younger ones.’

At Badminton, a small village near Bristol, on 11 September 1939 the school roll leapt in a single day from ten to seventy-seven – the result of an influx from Birmingham. A shift system had to be adopted: indigenous children were taught by their own teachers from 12.15 to 4.15, but had to surrender their classrooms at other times. The immigrants inevitably brought unwelcome fellow travellers with them, and a week after their arrival a local report recorded that ‘Nurse Brown visited and examined the heads of the seventy-two children present’.

Many urban children were already used to simple ways of life, but of a different kind. Some were poorly house-trained, if at all. Refusing knives and forks, they ate with their hands. Rather than use a lavatory, with which they were unfamiliar, they persistently relieved themselves in a corner of the room. One boy sent to the middle of Wales landed at an old-fashioned farm ‘with a two-seater loo over the edge of the hillside, and when you looked down, it was like a giant precipice’. When Bangor, in North Wales, was invaded by 2000 children and their teachers, most of the evacuees could not understand a word or read the notices in schools, for half the population spoke only the native language. Landing in a strange environment could be highly alarming. A five-year-old girl placed with a mining family near Doncaster screamed when the man of the house returned from work ‘all black, covered in soot, with just his eyes peeping out’.

Some city dwellers found the country ‘a place of vast loneliness and fearsome terrors’. There was too much open space in the fields, and too many big animals which might bite or kick or knock little people down. Cows were particularly frightening – their size, their horns, the loud bellows they emitted, to say nothing of the mess they left behind them. One six-year-old girl’s nightmare was having to walk home from school along a village street thronged every afternoon by a jostling, shoving milking herd on its way to the parlour (she never shed her fear of cows, and many years later her son recalled ‘some pretty strange evasions over hedges and once along a railway line to avoid herds in fields while we were walking’). To a five-year-old from Walthamstow, a seventeen-hand carthorse was a threatening monster, and the screams that pigs gave out were blood-curdling. Another London girl sent into the country felt she was going ‘on a journey to oblivion’, convinced that all the people at her destination would be ‘thick and dirty’.

In Kent the writer H. E. Bates ferried families to their appointed destinations in a huge, old, borrowed Chrysler, and was dismayed to discover that all they wanted was ‘shops, cinemas, pubs, buses, pavements to walk on … It was incredible to find that a huge section of our population were producing children who did not know how potatoes grew.’

The sudden arrival of evacuees sent many a rural community into a spin. The leading lights of Tolleshunt d’Arcy, a village on the Blackwater Estuary in Essex, had made elaborate preparations, including a census of houses with space to spare. Among the organizers was the thriller writer Margery Allingham, who recorded how they had carried out a survey, making comments on various properties and proprietors: ‘Good for nice girls’, ‘Good for tough boys’, ‘Good at a pinch’, ‘Would, but not keen’, ‘Could, but wouldn’t without a row’, ‘Impossible’, ‘Never on Your Life’.

The villagers had been promised, and had prepared for, ninety children – so they were appalled when eight London double-decker buses rolled in, ‘as foreign-looking as elephants’, and disgorged 300 exhausted, irritable women and babies. Frantic efforts were made to place as many of them as possible that evening, but it was only the arrival of another bus, sent to take some to another destination, that solved the immediate crisis. In another village, suddenly landed with seventy more children than expected, one of the organizers commandeered an empty house and herded the whole lot into that for the night.

Officials charged with the task of dispersing evacuees had a nightmare job. Twenty-three-year-old Alan Stollery, a traffic trainee, was sent to Norfolk to arrange the reception of 16,000 children coming from London, about 1000 (including their attendants) on every train:

My job was to assess the number of coaches required to meet each train, then to check the receiving villages to which each coach should be routed … For a train carrying 1,000 children, probably a minimum of thirty coaches was needed [but] for each train there were probably a hundred or more villages, each to receive a differing number of children.

As a retired army officer testily remarked, ‘We have all got to realise that the Englishman’s home is no longer his castle’; but many householders were dismayed by the idea of being required to act as foster-parents – and the higher up the social scale they were, the greater the difficulties they created about taking in urban children, shamelessly pleading lack of servants rather than lack of space. It was the poorest families, especially those with no children of their own, who were readiest with hospitality.

Children sent to the country were liable to be treated like the cattle they dreaded. When a bunch from Liverpool arrived by train at Ellesmere, in Shropshire, they were indeed put into cattle pens in the market, where people came and chose the ones they liked. Five-year-old Audrey Jones was similarly humiliated at Bletchington, near Oxford, along with her sister and two younger brothers, when locals looked them over critically in the village hall, selecting and rejecting. Her brothers James and Bernard were chosen quickly, as they were big boys, aged twelve and ten, and would be able to work for the farmer who picked them, but the two small girls were left until last. Many local people fancied Edna, who was six and a half, blonde-haired, blue-eyed and sweet looking; but they were put off by Audrey, who by her own account was a plain redhead with protruding red cheeks, and crouched under a table wetting herself.

In the end the Jones girls were taken by a Mrs Denton, with whom they spent their time ‘reading the Bible and being very clean’. When their mother came down to see them, she was denied access to the house and had to speak to her daughters on the doorstep. ‘Mummy could not believe her eyes on seeing me,’ Audrey remembered, ‘as when I left London I had long ringlets, but Mrs Denton had cut them off, saying long hair was sinful.’

The girls went to the village school, which they enjoyed, and after enduring only a month of Mrs Denton’s cruel eccentricities they were moved to another house in the village – but this turned out to be even more unpleasant. Insecurity still made them wet their beds, and for this they were ‘continually thrashed’ by their new guardian, Mrs Taylor, sometimes with holly branches. Small wonder that when they found some brown paper and string, Edna tried to roll her little sister up in a parcel and find a post box big enough to post her back to London.

Later they were moved again, this time to a Mrs Harris, who had a backward daughter, Christine, and lived at the end of the village in an old house with no running water or sanitation. The girls’ daily job was to walk to a well a quarter of a mile away, to bring back buckets of water for the house. When Audrey was nine she decided to run away – but of course she was found and brought back.

Out of doors, things were better, and gradually they learned about the country. One winter day they came across a dead sheep: it was stiff as a board with frost, but they took off their coats and covered it, hoping to bring it back to life.

Years later they realized that Mrs Harris was not really the demon she had seemed. The strain of coping with Christine (who ended up in a mental institution) and two London girls was more than she could handle – but, like other householders, she was paid 7s 6d per evacuee per week, and in those poverty-stricken days she desperately needed the money. After the war she showed that she must have had some affection for her young visitors, by always wanting to keep in touch.

The occasional child was insufferably bumptious. One six-year-old from London confronted her foster-mother at first meeting with the words, ‘Who’s boss here, Auntie?’ The woman, taken aback, replied, ‘I am the boss of the house, and Uncle (my husband) is boss of the garden.’ To which the child retorted, ‘Well, God and me are the boss of the lot.’

Little horror! But it is hard to believe that any evacuees were as poisonous as the three Connolly children who, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Put Out More Flags, are found ‘lurking under the seats of a carriage’ when their train is emptied at a country station. Acknowledging no parents, they speak only of ‘Auntie’ in London, to whom, it seemed, ‘the war had come as a godsent release’, and in the country they prove so rebarbative that they are passed from hand to hand by increasingly desperate householders – none less scrupulous than the smoothly dishonest Basil Seal, who, with his power as billeting officer, resorts to bribery and extortion to move them on.

Most new arrivals presented less of a problem – and many positively welcomed a move to the country. A youth sent from Surrey to the Yorkshire moors was delighted by his new environment: ‘One begins to realise after frequent moves from one place to another that all town is monotonous and boring and that every strip of country has its collection of vital interests.’ He was thrilled by the speed with which the mountain becks rose into rushing torrents after rain, and by the sight of snipe ‘flying off in their peculiar corkscrew motion’.

Bob Browning was similarly delighted to exchange the inner suburbs of Birmingham for the Gloucestershire village of Uley, on the western edge of the Cotswolds. With fifty other children, including his sister, he travelled by train to Dursley, and thence by coach to the village hall in Uley. There he was met by a smart twenty-five-horsepower Wolseley, driven by the local garage owner, Chris Bruton, and taken up a steep hill to Lampern House. High above the valley, the two Misses Lloyd-Baker, daughters of a land-owning family, lived in style, and for Bob it was astonishing to be waited on at table in a house with stone-flagged floors, oil heating and lighting.

This sybaritic existence lasted only a few days; but when he moved down to the village and lived with the Bruton family because their modest house was closer to the school, he was just as happy. To him the countryside was a revelation. The beech woods which cloaked the flanks of the valley were turning to copper and gold, and to be able to go straight out into green fields was ‘a miracle’. Mad as he was on football, he did not care if the grass was plastered with cowpats. The woods were ideal for hut-building, and Uley Bury – the biggest Iron Age hill fort in England, surrounded by a Roman race-track on an outlying ridge of the escarpment – made a thrilling natural playground for army games: boys would disappear up there after breakfast and not come back until lunchtime, having had a glorious, adult-free morning.

A system of barter helped fill gaps in the food supply. Since Birmingham enjoyed soft water, and people there had more soap than they needed, parcels of washing materials would come down to Gloucestershire, and freshly killed rabbits packed in moss would go the other way. Besides, there was pocket money to be made. Bob delivered milk from a churn on a round with a pony and trap, and with his friend Bill Bruton hunted cabbage white butterflies, of which there was a plague, swatting them with tennis rackets and filling jam jars to earn rewards at school.

The only member of the community who had a car was the doctor. Some houses had gas, but there was no electricity and people used oil lamps. Nevertheless, the village was lively: shortage of petrol (which limited visits to the nearest cinema) combined with the blackout to stimulate community life. There was a whist drive once a week, and a dance in the village hall on Friday night, from eight to one.

Dennis Swann, who lived near the Elephant & Castle in London, ‘where all was buildings and pavements and street noise’, landed at a farm near Colyton, in east Devon. Aged eleven, he had ‘never seen cows, nor even a green hill’, so he had never considered where milk came from, and found the sight of a cow being milked ‘astonishingly exciting’. John Swallow wrote from Kidderminster, in Warwickshire: ‘I broke my record by eating eight pieces of bread’; but then, asking if he might come home, he went on gloomily: ‘If we have to go, we might as well all go together – you have got to die sometime, and it might as well be painlessly by the bomb as by a long illness or something.’

Some city-based mothers, unable to bear the separation from their children, forged out into the country to reclaim them, only to find that the foster-parents had become so fond of them that they were reluctant to let them go. Most children were too far out for regular visits, but one father who worked for the Post Office in London sometimes cycled seventy miles in each direction to see his son in Northamptonshire.

When several evacuees landed in the same place, they tended to stick together, to protect themselves from gangs of village boys. This happened at Ditchling, in Sussex, and Diana Ansell still has all too vivid memories of being posted, as a five-year-old scout, to keep watch while her companions scrumped apples in orchards and gardens, among them that of the Forces’ Sweetheart, the singer Vera Lynn. Being a shy, quiet girl, Diana did not relish her role, but was forced into it with threats of dire tortures by her elder brother and his friends. A legitimate activity was working in the fields, for which they were paid pennies, and one day, as they were raking up hay, they were machine-gunned by a hit-and-run German pilot. By flinging themselves to the ground and burrowing under the hay, they escaped unhurt.

London and the northern industrial centres were by no means the Luftwaffe’s only targets. Belfast was also evacuated – and Emily Cathcart, who ran a small country store and post office in the village of Bellanaleck in Co. Fermanagh, vividly remembered newcomers arriving:

These city people were completely disorientated in the country. It was difficult to look after them. They rolled themselves in any bedding they could find. Although there was water laid on, some of the mothers made no effort to wash themselves or the children or provide for them in any way. Some of the evacuees wandered off to make their own way home. Altogether it was a terrible experience for anyone trying to help. One young lad was discovered with a stick in his hand, beating ducks around a house in a yard at his billet … Children in many cases couldn’t get used to the food provided. You would find food stashed away in a bedroom or maybe in flowerpots – anything to avoid admitting they didn’t like it.

Evacuees found the intense darkness of a country night alarming; but for country people the blackout brought little change. It may have encouraged them to stay indoors at home after nightfall, but it also stirred deep feelings, evocatively described by the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, who lived in Kent:

The moon has gone, and nothing but stars and three planets remain within our autumn sky. Every evening I go my rounds like some night-watchman to see that the black-out is complete. It is. Not a chink reveals the life going on beneath those roofs, behind those blinded windows; love, lust, death, birth, anxiety, even gaiety. All is dark; concealed. Alone I wander, no one knowing that I prowl. It makes me feel like an animal, nocturnal, stealthy. I might be a badger or a fox …

I think of all the farms and cottages spread over England, sharing this curious protective secrecy, where not even a night light may show from the room of a dying man or a woman in labour … I wander round, and towards midnight discover that the only black-out I notice is the black-out of my soul. So deep a grief and sorrow that they are not expressible in words.

One magazine commentator inadvertently made himself ridiculous to later generations by remarking that ‘the countryman is accustomed to going about in the dark, and, alternatively, to staying in at nightfall’, then adding:

Townsmen at present may still be, on the whole, a race of gropers after nightfall; but they are undaunted gropers, and will develop the sense which enables them to find their way in the dark.

Even undaunted gropers found nocturnal sounds disturbing. The mellow hoots of a tawny owl were enough to scare East Enders witless, and, as winter came on, the dry triple bark of a dog fox on his nuptial round, or the scream of a vixen mating, might terrify anyone who did not know what creature was creating the disturbance. The boy from Surrey who found delight in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors remarked on ‘the weird, cackling laugh’ of grouse: ‘Had I been a stranger walking on the moor at night, I might have thought it was some evil spirit leering from the darkness.’ There was an awful lot to learn. One boy who had never been in a car before was driven up to his foster-home by the vicar, and noticed a strange diagram on the knob of the gear lever. When he reached the house, he reported that the driver had a swastika in his car – with the result that the local bobby was alerted, and went round to interrogate the priest.

Hardly any cottages or farms had telephones, and soon communication became even more difficult, for, under the guise of maintenance, General Post Office engineers began cutting subscribers off so that most of the system, such as it was, could be reserved for essential purposes of defence. Householders who lost their line were compensated, but had no right of appeal. Telegrams were much used, and boys could earn useful pocket money by conveying them to their destinations – 7d for a bicycle trip out to a distant farm, 2d for a shorter ride. If a message contained bad news, the postmaster (who, of course, had read it) would tell the boy not to wait for an answer. Besides the difficulties of communication, another annoyance was the suspension of weather forecasts, which were suppressed indefinitely for fear that they might somehow help the enemy.

Many boys turned out to be natural country lads. One, from Finsbury Park, in north London, and from what he described as ‘the sort of street people lived in when they couldn’t afford a slum’, was translated to the head gardener’s house on an estate in Essex, where he and two friends quickly attached themselves to the gamekeeper ‘like leeches’.

Rough shooting in the mornings, rabbiting in the afternoon, we learned more about the countryside in six months than we ever learned before or since. Can you imagine an eleven-year-old kid from a London slum recognising the flight of a snipe, feeding pheasants and partridges on their nests, handling a .410 shotgun, gutting and skinning rabbits, moles or anything else that came within range?

Few wartime children can have been luckier than the boys of Dulwich College Preparatory School, in south London, which was closely allied to the college of the same name; for their headmaster (and sole proprietor of the school) John Leakey was a man of exceptional resource and determination. In 1938, expecting London to be heavily bombed the moment war broke out, he decided to construct an evacuation camp of his own in the grounds of a manor house owned by his father-in-law at Coursehorn, near Cranbrook in Kent. There he built six big wooden huts and put up bell tents.

The boys, aged from eight to fourteen, loved being in the country. They helped farmers, rode around the lanes on bicycles and learned to read Ordnance Survey maps. Soon they became extremely fit, and Leakey ‘felt a great surge of life and activity pulsing through the camp’. In spite of flu and German measles, they survived one of the coldest winters in living memory, and then revelled in the lovely summer weather of 1940 – until the fall of France suddenly rendered Kent unsafe.

In an urgent search for another site, Leakey’s wife Muff explored possible houses in the West Country, but all were too expensive or had already been requisitioned by the Government. Hearing of a hotel in the far north-west of Wales, at Betws-y-Coed, among the mountains of Snowdonia, she sped thither, only to find that it too had been requisitioned. Then her luck changed, and she hit on the Royal Oak Hotel, in the same village, which she managed to rent for £1000 a year, the landlord to retain the bar.

On a baking hot day a special train brought the whole school from Kent to Betws, only to find the hotel still partially occupied – but as soon as each room became vacant, the boys stripped it to make space for their own furniture. When a new scare flared up – that the Germans would seize Ireland and invade England from the west, through the Welsh passes – bloodhounds were trained for tracking parachutists or other infiltrators. Joining the defence initiative, the Leakeys worked with the Home Guard to hide caches of emergency rations in remote caves, and the boys were briefed to make for prearranged rendezvous in the mountains.

Between lessons, they lived a wonderfully free outdoor life, walking, cycling, fishing, going for picnics and rock-climbing on Tryfan (one of Snowdon’s neighbouring 3000-foot peaks). Parties went out into nearby Forestry Commission plantations to brash the lower branches of young conifers; they also dammed a stream to make a pond for fire-fighting, and themselves put out two forest fires. So useful was their work that at the end of the war the Commission named a new plantation after the school.

They helped the war effort even more directly by collecting sphagnum moss (which is four times as absorbent as cotton wool and contains iodine, making it ideal for use at forward dressing stations, as it can be applied to wounds without being sterilized). One of the boys reported, ‘We are collecting stagnant moss for use in the hospitals’. Their foraging also brought in male fern, foxgloves and nettles (useful for medicaments and dye), and rose hips for the production of syrup rich in vitamin C. One evening Leakey took some of the boys into the graveyard of St Mary’s Church and, as they sat among the ancient tombstones, continued his reading of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: an experience they never forgot. Many of the poet’s rolling cadences – ‘Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,/The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep’ – stayed with them all their lives.

As in Kent, the boys became self-reliant and tremendously fit (even though contaminated now and then by new evacuees from Liverpool), and Leakey derived enormous satisfaction from comparing the ‘splendid specimens’ which he had at Betws with the white-faced children with dark lines under their eyes who had remained in London. Later in the war, when the threat of invasion had evaporated and the Blitz on London had died down, the Betws boys went south on overcrowded trains for their holidays, but always rejoiced when they returned to the mountains.

The Government had realized that, in the event of war, it would not be possible to evacuate all schoolchildren to private homes, and the Camps Act of April 1939 prompted the creation of the National Camps Corporation. The aim was to build fifty camps in attractive, wooded country, but in the event only thirty-six were completed, thirty-one of them in England and Wales, five in Scotland. Designed by the distinguished Scottish architect T. S. Tait, each could accommodate 350 children in huts made of Canadian red cedar.

One of the first was at Colomendy, near Mold in North Wales, where construction began on two sites, upper and lower, in April 1939, on the side of a lovely valley. Known to its inmates as ‘Collo’, the camp was created as a safe refuge for 170 boys and 125 girls from schools in Liverpool, some twenty miles to the north. Many of the inmates were scared by tales of Peg-Leg, the resident lame ghost said to haunt a particular bed in one of the huts; but agreeable recreations included exploration of the local caves and ascents of Moel Famau, the highest hill in the area, whose bare slopes were alleged to be alive with snakes, and from whose summit the fires raging in Liverpool after big air raids were clearly visible, lighting up clouds all over the sky. One girl remembered the peace and quiet of Colomendy as ‘absolute bliss’, but she was terrified for her family who had remained in the city, and she kept writing letters home without knowing if the house was still standing.

Another successful camp, in a less dramatic setting, was Kennylands, near Reading in Berkshire, which took in the 300 boys of Beal Grammar School from Ilford. The camp’s setting, in twenty acres of land, gave scope for gardening, pig-rearing, potato-picking and bee-keeping, as well as for adventures in the surrounding woods, which the boys loved. At school many of them were inspired by the teaching of William Finch, a talented artist and writer who came from Lowestoft and created a unique pictorial record of the east coast fishing industry. On 30 September 1940 good reports of Kennylands attracted a visit from King George and Queen Elizabeth, during which the King startled his retinue by scratching a pig’s back.

Many schools moved out en bloc, among them the girls of the Royal School in Bath, who were welcomed to the grandeur of Longleat by the owner, Lord Bath, and given the run of the Elizabethan house, including the library, with its priceless collection of books and manuscripts. The boys and staff of Malvern College, whose buildings were requisitioned in September 1940, also landed on their feet, for the Duke of Marlborough offered them the use of his vast home, Blenheim Palace, on the edge of Woodstock, in Oxfordshire. Indoors, screens were built round the walls to protect precious tapestries, and the state rooms, together with the 180-foot-long library, became dormitories. In a splendidly sustained burst of energy, the masters dug a half-mile trench to accommodate a new gas main from Oxford.

Did any prep school have worse luck than St Peter’s at Broadstairs? When Kent became too dangerous, the boys were evacuated to the relative safety of Shobrooke House, near Crediton in Devon; but during the night of 23 January 1945 the building caught fire, and pupils and staff alike, trapped on balconies, were forced to abseil down makeshift ropes made from torn-up sheets and blankets into six inches of snow. One of the boys, Peter de la Billière, then eight, never forgot that nightmare:

The sheets were so old that the strips kept tearing through. As every third or fourth boy went over the edge, there would come a yell, followed by a dull thud – and another rope was needed … As we waited on the balcony, the sound of the blaze rose from a muted crackling to a roar, and suddenly the whole [central] dome, with its little bell cupola above it, collapsed downwards into the well of the stairs, sending a fantastic eruption of sparks into the sky.

One matron and three boys were killed, and another, who lived, fell onto an iron spike which speared his throat. Peter survived physically unscathed, but was left with a horror of fires, and for the rest of his life has made it his first priority, on arriving at a hotel, to check the escape facilities.

Altogether the evacuation from cities and towns displaced nearly four million people. In the first three days of the official exodus one and a half million left London – 827,000 schoolchildren, 524,000 mothers and children under five, 103,000 teachers and other helpers, 13,000 pregnant women and 7000 disabled persons. It is thought that another two million people made their own arrangements: some settled with relatives or in safely situated hotels, and thousands emigrated (or at least sent their children) to the United States, Canada, South Africa or Australia. Under ‘Plan Yellow’ more than 20,000 civil servants were moved to hotels in seaside resorts and spa towns.