The Day We Went to War (47 page)

This view was borne out by polls that Mass Observation and the British Institute of Public Opinion undertook after the food minister had made his announcement. The BIPO poll showed that 60 per cent of those questioned thought rationing was Necessary, 28 per cent said Unnecessary, while 12 per cent said Don’t Know. Mass Observation’s poll produced similar figures in favour of rationing.

In Germany, rationing had begun a week before the war, although some foodstuffs, such as butter, had been virtually rationed for years. Clothes and soap were rationed, too. Many in Britain saw this as a sign of German weakness, and during the first months of the ‘Phoney War’ there was much wishful thinking regarding Germany’s imminent economic collapse. But as the year came to a close, an article in
The War Illustrated
warned that while ‘Surely it is obvious, we argue, that if rationing has been carried to such lengths in Germany so early in the struggle, the front of our enemies must already be cracking . . . But, Germany’s rationing may be a sign not of weakness, not even of undue shortage, but of the determination to employ the available supplies to the best advantage, and so husband the resources that victory may be won.’

It was Britain’s 2,360,000 private-car and motorcycle owners who were the first to experience rationing, when, on 22 September, petrol was rationed. Even before rationing was introduced, brands like Shell and ESSO had been replaced by ‘pool’, a blended petrol reckoned to be better in quality to some cheaper peacetime blends. It cost 1s.6d (7p) a gallon, which soon went up after the Budget to 1s.8d (8p). Rationing and the increased cost of petrol and fuel was another major cause of complaint when Mass Observation conducted its poll in November. With the basic petrol ration, few motorists had enough fuel to do more than 200 miles a month. Many private cars disappeared from the roads, while some were converted over to gas propulsion.

‘The Good Old Horse Comes Back’ read one magazine headline in October. ‘Horses,’ it reported, ‘which for many years had been slowly disappearing from the London streets, had a remarkable “comeback” when rationing took effect.’ On 27 September, Minister of Transport Euan Wallace announced that the ban on horses using certain thoroughfares in the capital was now being lifted in view of petrol rationing and the resultant reduction of motor vehicles on London streets. A tradesman in Westwood, Thanet, solved the problem of carrying on making deliveries by hitching a horse to his car. In the country too, the article concluded, ‘many a pony and trap and dog-cart were once more on the roads after being regarded for years only as lumber’. Just as British motorists were coming to terms with petrol rationing, a news item appeared in the press which put things into perspective. A Warsaw banker, desperate to leave the besieged capital had, it was claimed, paid £2,300 for just twelve gallons of petrol.

Fourth on the list of the British public’s war grumbles and grievances was evacuation. It was one that would dominate the press and public debate throughout the last four months of 1939. ‘The Children’s Trek To Safety: A Triumph of British Civilian Organisation’ had been one paper’s headline at the start of the Government’s evacuation scheme. Altogether, 659,527 evacuees from the London area and 1,220,581 from the provincial urban areas had been evacuated between orders going out on Thursday, 31 August and Monday, 4 September. The majority of those evacuated (1,134,235) were schoolchildren accompanied by their teachers. But there were other groups also deemed vulnerable to air attack who were evacuated. These included young children with their mothers, expectant mothers, blind and physically handicapped adults. In the London County Council area, schoolchildren had taken part in a rehearsal on 28 August, while some had even actually been evacuated during the Sudeten Crisis the previous year. The evacuees went by train, bus and even boat. A number of
London’s distinctive ‘Green Line’ buses had been specially converted to take hospital patients. The Government had agreed to pay the evacuees’ hosts ten shillings (50p) a week for the one child, or 8s.6d (43p) each for more than one, £1.1s.0d (£1.05p) for a teacher or helper, 5s (25p) for a mother and 3s (15p) for each child with her.

At first all appeared to go smoothly. An anonymous welfare worker on the scheme was much quoted: ‘I maintain that it was a miracle of organization and not a simple transmigration. For two days, I was the humblest worker in the thick of it, and I take my hat off successively to the L.C.C., the Board of Education, the Ministry of Health, the teachers, the railways, the transport companies, and the organized workers. And finally, the biggest and longest hat-raising of all to the British mothers and to the children.’

And the newspapers were full of photographs that seemed to back up his words. For as a later and cooler appraisal of the scheme put it, ‘The daily press of that period did much to spread the story of the successful venture. Boys and girls who had never seen farmlife before provided good material for the Press photographer. He was able to snap groups of happy children racing down the village lane when the lunch-bell rang, or setting out on a blackberrying expedition, or watching one of their number emulating Henry Cotton on the golf course . . .’

But very soon the first rumblings of trouble and discontent began to be heard. On 15 September,
The Times
summed up the situation: ‘It is not surprising that the House of Commons was impelled last night to discuss the problems of evacuation. Certain troubles and grievances were bound to follow the dispersal of nearly a million and a half town-dwellers, mostly children and women, into the country and other places of safety. None of the complaints put forward in our correspondence columns has been trivial or unreasonable. Collectively, however, they are serious and even more widespread than the published letters have indicated. The Ministries of Health and Education have, in communications to the local authorities, recognized the necessity for remedial measures, and are stirring up the authorities to helpful and sympathetic action, and assuring them of Treasury assistance.’

Hospital patients as well as children were evacuated from London and other vulnerable towns and cities at the beginning of September 1939. Many left in specially adapted ambulance trains.

Minister of Health Walter Elliot, who had previously ‘twice broadcast on his Department’s wonderful performance’, now had to admit that there was cause for complaint. He told MPs that ‘tact, tolerance, and understanding, as well as administrative enterprise and ingenuity will be required’ to sort the problems out. But his voice was soon drowned out in a veritable whirlpool of evacuation ‘atrocity’ stories. On the war’s first day, Evelyn Waugh recorded in his diary that ‘Mr Page [a neighbour] has a destitute woman, pregnant, with four children in his stable loft. We took them a bed and some clothes. The woman was sitting at a table in tears, Page ineffectually trying to put wire round the railings to keep the children, which the mother won’t control, from falling through them. Little groups of children are hanging round the village looking very bored and lost . . .’ Five days later, he noted, ‘The discontent among the evacuees has increased. Seven families left the village amid general satisfaction. Those who remain spend their leisure scattering waste paper round my gates.’

Now the press was full of similar stories, and worse. Typical was that of a letter from a John Marshall that
Picture Post
published on 28 October: ‘I’m sick of you and your sweet little refugees [
sic
]. Perhaps this story will make you sit up. Some friends of ours had seven lousy little Birmingham brats parked on them. These friends were farmers and kept poultry. Going into a coop where turkeys were kept, they found the little brats had cut the heads off thirteen turkeys. For fun! This story is perfectly true. I’d rather have a savage from Fiji than a child from Birmingham.’

But
Picture Post
was not sympathetic: ‘It won’t make us – or anyone else – sit up unless we believe it. Come forward with your own address and details. If true we’ll print them. If not we’ll forward you a savage from Fiji.’

Evacuation caused such a great disruption to the British education system that on 28 October 1939 Earl de la Warr, President of the Board of Education, said, ‘We cannot afford as a nation to let three-quarters of a million grow up as little barbarians, and the government have not the slightest intention of doing so.’

Mass Observation was inundated with stories similar to John Marshall’s. Two Blackpool landladies were quoted as saying, ‘If you say two words to them they turn around and swear at you. I’ve seen a lot of dogs with better manners.’

‘Carve their initials on the sideboard. Wrote all over the wall. Eat their food on the floor. Broke half the china.’

But it was not just the evacuees’ hosts who had cause for complaint or who could recount ‘atrocity’ stories. The wife of a Romford hairdresser, evacuated at the beginning of the war with her children, recounted her experiences to an observer from Mass Observation: ‘They had to share a verminous bedroom with a young married woman and her baby. The window was broken and the door loose, and before long everyone in the room had influenza. The baby developed whooping cough and kept the rest of them awake at night. The younger child of the hairdresser’s wife caught some sort of vermin in her hair and had to have it cut off. The landlord and landlady were drunkards and beat their children.

‘The woman couldn’t stand it any longer and came home. Observer met her in the street, and she said, “I’d rather be bombed to bits than go back again. Not at any price will I leave my home again. It’s taught me a lesson.”’

Another mother complained, ‘My boy is sharing a bed, single, with an improperly washed coalman.’

To establish the truth was nigh on impossible, as a schoolteacher evacuated to Brighton found out: ‘The first week of evacuation was unbearable. The rumours of lousy, dirty, ill-behaved children bandied about Brighton were exasperating. We knew that 90 per cent of the children were well behaved and happy. But the only stories regaled to me were of the horrors of the wild London children.’

The majority of complaints that Mass Observation received about evacuation concerned ‘dirty, diseased or ill-mannered children’. Bed-wetting was a particular problem and one of the major faults found with evacuee children, ‘regardless of the fact that it is a form of
nervousness . . . brought on under the unaccustomed conditions of evacuation’. But with a little sympathy and understanding it was relatively easy to cure: ‘Edna, seven, the eldest, wet her bed every night, but didn’t last night, a result of being given a sweet instead of lemonade at night.’

Much of the trouble, however, was due to social and class differences, as a Mass Observer from Bexhill-on-Sea reported: ‘The main problems between evacuees and hosts arise from mixing up families on different social levels. One case which struck me was of a woman putting a parcel of fish and chips on her host’s polished table.’

With the debate on evacuation still waging fiercely in Parliament and the press,
Picture Post
, in its edition of 18 November, sought to present a more balanced view. It pointed out that mistakes had occurred, ‘but to carry out a social revolution such as this in four days without a hitch would be a miracle’. Moreover, ‘without denying faults, without defending anyone, it must be acknowledged that the whole country rallied amazingly to pull the scheme through’. Where difficulties had arisen it was because ‘never before have town and country been thrown so closely together, or rich and poor found themselves in such intimate contact’. And to remedy this, ‘understanding and patience is needed on both sides’.

Even before the article appeared, parents had started to bring their children back to the towns and cities.
Picture Post
sternly warned against it: ‘they have deliberately taken their children back to danger. The fact that raids did not come in the first weeks of war is no reason for false security. Devastating air-raids may be very near.’

Concluding its survey, the magazine admitted, ‘the present scheme has its weaknesses. But one fact remains – evacuation is essential. Somehow, between us all, we have got to make it work.’