with Germany.’
‘I hurried down the church drive,’ remembered Mary. ‘As I moved from the vestry into the church I felt the atmosphere — the congregation seemed to be holding their breath waiting for the vicar’s words — “The Country is at War.”’
Edna Gertrude Cole was a sixteen-year-old Guide living in Davenport, ten miles south of Manchester. ‘We were in the process of building an air-raid shelter in the garden when we went indoors to hear the broadcast. War had been declared. Then we went out and got on with digging the shelter. It was a hole, propped up with railway sleepers. As fast as we dug, it filled with water.’
‘On the Sunday morning,’ said Sylvia Rivers, ‘my Patrol Leader and I cycled to Abingdon again and helped until afternoon. When we arrived back at camp there was no one there, an empty space. War had been declared. Captain had struck camp straight away. She had already lived through the First World War and had lost her brother.’
That evening, BBC radio announcer Bruce Belfrage read the nine o’clock news: ‘The following advice is given: to keep off the streets as much as possible; to carry a gas mask always; to make sure all members of the household have on them their name and address clearly written; to sew a label on children’s clothing so that they cannot pull it off…’ Up until then, all newsreaders had been anonymous, but now they were told to announce their names so that listeners would learn their voices and be able to tell if they were being impersonated by the enemy and giving false information. Guides invented a new game — who could name the newsreader quickest before he identified himself?
Iris O’Dell was shopping with her mother and her brothers in Hitchin when the announcement of war was made. ‘Mum was wearing a dark green coat with a fur collar and a green velvet hat when she went into Timothy White’s to buy a jar of cod-liver oil and malt. We were outside minding Bob in the brown pram. When she popped the big jar under the pram cover, she whispered, “We are at war.” That night I laid awake straining my ears to hear the tramp of Germans marching up our lane.’
Many adults also believed that war would begin immediately, and there were rumours that the Germans would launch gas attacks from the air. Guides all over Great Britain rushed to find their gas masks and to help other people get theirs together. They knew from the news that in Poland aerial bombing had rained down explosives on small wooden villages and beautiful towns, and thousands of people had been killed or wounded. On the first day of the war, Guides all over Britain braced themselves against the feeling of panic that was in the air. They were determined that whatever lay ahead they were going to think of others, remain cheerful and set a good example of courage to other people. As Baden-Powell said, ‘Look up and not down, look forward and not back. Look out, not in — and lend a hand.’
Operation Pied Piper was set in motion. A poster produced by the Ministry of Health Evacuation Scheme depicted a boy and girl looking miserable, and the words: ‘Mothers — let them go — give them a chance of greater safety and health.’ Every city railway station was soon crowded with children, some with their parents, some from homes and orphanages. There was plenty for Guides to do. Those in cities helped children leave, and those in safe areas helped to entertain them when they arrived. ‘In Ilford, Guides are “keeping school” for the infants,’ wrote The Guide. ‘Left behind by the tide of evacuation which had swept the teachers along, they were having dull days with no teachers.’ ‘Our Guide company had to clean out empty houses to take evacuees,’ said Iris O’Dell. ‘Mothers and children from Manchester. It was quite dirty, but we had fun. The billeting officer came and sorted the families out, and children were taken round private houses.’
Margaret Collins was a keen Guide living in Maidstone, Kent.
The actual moment that war was declared, I was helping out in the Town Hall. We listened in the Mayor’s parlour to the declaration of war and immediately afterwards the air-raid sirens all went. The Mayor got very agitated and sent us down to the cellar. He dashed out onto the Town Hall steps and directed people furiously to ‘get under cover’ but everyone was just gazing around. The sirens had gone off by mistake.
Various information offices were set up and I helped direct the evacuees. First, we Guides scrubbed the large old houses along the London Road, which had stood empty because of the Depression. They were taken over by the council and we got them ready for pregnant mothers.
We hardly went to school at all, even though it was my last year. Once air-raid shelters had been dug and blast walls put up, then we got back to school. Then we welcomed an evacuated school from Plumstead. We had three little boys to live with us: Alfie, Eric and Ernie Bell. They arrived with hardly any clothing, and were very unused to baths. The countryside was quite new to them, and they soon enjoyed apple scrumping. Their billeting fee was paid by the government but after things got better organised, their families were required to pay towards this. Then a lot of them went home to their parents.
A Kensington Brown Owl accompanied her Brownies when they were evacuated to Sussex by bus.
We loaded up with picnic food. The Brownies also took dressing-up clothes and a wind-up gramophone so that they could give a performance of their latest concert once they got there. The Brownies sang their songs, but travel sickness overcame Alice, one of the liveliest and naughtiest Brownies. A more pathetically deflated sight I never saw. She lay back green and limp and for once almost silent. ‘Never no more,’ she groaned, ‘will I roam.’ Barley sugar, a reminder of the Brownie smile in time of trouble, and an assurance that I didn’t mind a bit if she was sick, helped a little. For these things, when she recovered, she was touchingly grateful. She was led away by the billeting officer, a little less green.
During this turbulent time, children could see the distress, upheavals and deprivations that their parents were coping with. But older Brownies and Guides had the advantage that they could see how to make themselves useful, which also alleviated their own feelings of helplessness. Families were separated and children sent to live with strangers, often of a different class, creed or culture, perhaps hundreds of miles from home. The children had to undergo long journeys to unknown destinations on overcrowded trains and buses. The younger ones had no idea why they had been wrenched from their mothers’ arms; the older ones had to cope with their own homesickness and the distress of their younger siblings. Unqualified adults, often not parents themselves, became surrogate mothers and fathers overnight to severely homesick children.
There was no time to match children and foster parents — the evacuees were simply handed out by billeting officers at railway stations, or driven around and deposited on doorsteps. The countryside was filled with urban children wearing labels and carrying their gas masks. Rumours circulated about the horrors of children who knew nothing about closing farm gates, were covered in lice, wet their beds and never stopped crying for their mothers. Local Guides came to the rescue by helping to bath and feed evacuated babies, playing with toddlers and organising games for older children. Evacuee girls over seven became Brownies in their local packs, and the older girls became Guides; both organisations provided instant friends. Small village companies with only eight or ten girls were suddenly swelled to fifty or sixty. Most of the evacuated children were young, so Brownie packs grew overnight. ‘Life was disorganised for everyone,’ wrote The Guide’s Miss Christian. ‘Schools took place in shifts, so that in many cases there was half a day’s holiday at least every day in the week.’ With children spending less time at school, Guide meetings could be held more often than once a week.
In addition to their gas masks, evacuees were expected to bring with them ‘a change of underclothing, night clothes, house shoes or plimsolls, spare stockings or socks, a toothbrush, a comb, towel, soap and face cloth, handkerchiefs and, if possible, a warm coat or mackintosh’. Many children were too poor to own half of these things, and their foster parents had to find clothes for them too.
Within a few days 660,000 children and carers were evacuated from London, and 1,220,000 from other towns and cities. By the end of the war the General Post Office had registered thirty-nine million changes of address — for a total population of forty-seven million. Never before had so many people from different backgrounds — the country and the city, the rich and the poor — been thrown so closely together.
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