General Chat

I am reading one of OH's Christmas books, about the Home Front during the war.

One of the chapters is about evacuees and was an eye-opener - the lack of planning was astonishing and the total ignorance about how children from the poorest parts of big cities lived compared with the middle classes who were giving them homes caused huge problems.

Some of it though, with hindsight, is quite amusing, although it probably wasn't at the time.

There is a photo of a motor boat with its crew and the caption underneath says "A Motor Patrol Boat guarding the canals in Birmingham against Pocket Battleships".

The mind boggles!! :-D :-D

The 1918 Education Act raised the school leaving age from 12 to 14.

Andysmum, I'm still getting my head around the evacuation of my mum's family!

Grandad had to stay in Southampton - he worked in the docks.

My uncle was born in Southampton in 1940. Pre-NHS, Granny had to pay £4.15/- to have the baby, £2.5/- to be paid before admission (I still have the letter).
I think mum (born 1930) and her sister (born 1926) were sent to a private school in Bournemouth - which they hated. I have letters written by them, begging to come home. Both became ill with mumps - then mum got diptheria.

Then, their house in Southampton got bombed, grandad moved in with his mother in law, gran and the baby moved to Bournemouth.

Gran appears to then tell the school she can no longer afford the school fees - I have a letter from the school offering to lower them.

Then, gran and the children were evacuated to 'Stanleys Estate' - a few semi-derelict old farm cottages on a vast Estate in the New Forest (now a holiday park!), where gran proceeded to argue with the farmer.
They stayed there for the rest of the war, being moved, in 1947 to a prefab in the village of Ashley, New Milton. Gran live in the prefab until about 1990, when they demolished them, and she was moved to a bungalow.

I lived in a prefab exactly the same as gran's on the outskirts of the village of Abbott's Ann, in the 1980's! It (and the other's along the lane) were remnants of the the 'Land Settlement Association' from the 1930's.

The school leaving age in 1940 was 14!
You can whaffle all you want.

In the early 1940's there were just under 1,400 secondary schools.
Agreed, after the 1944 act there were more - 4,500, but there were also Technical Schools and Grammar Schools after 1944.
I'm intrigued at your number of pupils - where did you glean that from?
It doesn't even cover a city!

Due to evacuees leaving, teachers being called up and the bombing of cities, about 50% of children didn't have a school to attend. Here's some information from the time:

"Where possible local authorities attempted to provide a full-time education by finding alternative buildings to accommodate the evacuated children and teachers. This included the use of churches, village halls and warehouses as classrooms. Berwick Sayers later wrote: "for weeks in some cases, teachers and children assembled at some agreed point and walked the country lanes until they could be housed in some suitable hall."

The government eventually accepted that evacuation had caused serious problems for education. In November 1939 Neville Chamberlain announced that some schools in industrial cities would be reopened in order to provide an education for those children who had not become evacuees."


Times Educational Supplement 21 December 1940

Eighteen East London elementary schools were reopened on Monday, December 15th. The recent house-to-house canvassing undertaken to encourage evacuation revealed that there were 2,680 children of school age still in Stepney and Whitechapel, and 2,800 in Poplar and Bow.... The decision to open the schools having been taken, it was necessary to find schools still in a habitable state... But several schools have been completely destroyed, and others badly damaged, while a number are still occupied by civil defence units. Hardly a school had escaped unscathed, and those that could be reopened after minor repairs had to have suitable shelters... A small percentage of children have been completely without schooling for 12 months, but the majority only since the beginning of September; all have settled down well and seem glad to be back.

Mr Owl’s granny lived in Barton On Humber during WW2 and she attended Barton Grammar School. The English teacher was a poet who happened to be staying in Barton at the time and the French teacher was someone else who lived in the village and went to France on holiday every year. Neither of them were qualified teachers but it was a case of doing what you could as so many teachers were called up.

The basement of Dame Alice Owen school in Goswell Road, Islington was an official air raid shelter.

On 15th October 1940 the school was hit by a land-mine and around 100 occupants of the shelter were either killed outright or drowned when the basement flooded from the adjacent New River.

Among them were five of my relatives, father, mother and three teenage daughters. The mother's body was never recovered.

The only family survivor was the eldest daughter who was not there.

Andysmum, what was the title of that book about the Home Front, please?

It's called "Careless Talk" by Stuart Hylton. I bought it from Postscript Books, but I have just looked at their website and it is now out of stock.

Hopefully you might find it somewhere else.

Sounds interesting.
Yet another book to browse charity shops and bookshops for,
when we're allowed out! :-D

It's available on Amazon, Maggie, at a reasonable price, too.

I was surprised to see that there are several other books called "Careless Talk", all by different authors, on sale. I didn't think you could do that - what about copyright?

Many thanks, Andysmum