How Evacuation Miscarried

The evacuation of the school children could have been a success; it might have been, even apart from its war purpose, a social revolution.

Last week, as bombs rained on Britain, its people had no time to ponder such post-mortems on the great evacuation, which started dramatically last Aug. 31, a few weeks later undramatically collapsed. But historians are not likely to overlook a clinical report on the evacuation which last week arrived in the U. S.

Obviously uncensored, the report (Evacuation Survey, George Routledge & Sons Ltd., London) was compiled by the Fabian Society, edited by its young Research Editor Richard Padley and Margaret Cole, wife and collaborator of famed Laborite economist and detective-story writer G. D. H. Cole.

Prime purpose of the evacuation scheme, which Britain began to organize in 1938, was to get British children and expectant mothers out of harm's way. Of some 3,000,000 urged to leave dangerous areas, only half actually left. Within four months, three-quarters of the evacuees went back home. Moreover, the scheme was based on an unworkable theory: that the population should be spread out, rather than removed from likely bomb targets.

After the failure of the first evacuation scheme, the Government last February announced a second, urged parents to register their children for re-evacuation. "Quite simply, the people refused to register." Up to last week, there had still been no mass evacuation from the cities.

Many were the reasons for evacuation's failure. Said Mrs. Cole: "The scheme failed to appeal, partly . . . because it was drawn up by minds that were military, male and middle-class." Typical miscalculations:

> Pregnant women (those near their time were identified by blue tickets) and mothers who accompanied their babies to the country were the quickest to return.

> Evacuee mothers and their hostesses quarreled over cooking arrangements, criticized each other's methods of home management, child raising.

> Hosts were horrified because their young guests wore their daytime shirts to bed, complained that they were often verminous, untruthful, rude, quarrelsome. Most common complaint: bedwetting. Usual reason: the emotional upset of leaving home.

> Many well-to-do families closed their houses and evacuated themselves rather than receive evacuees.

> Evacuated city children found the country lonely, inhospitable, missed their late city hours, cinemas, fish & chips shops.

> Big headache for country hosts was visits from their guests' parents, who sometimes "descended like locusts (often with friends and neighbors) and devoured the eight shillings, sixpence [paid weekly by the Government for each child's lodging] in one day's meal."

> Although each city school was to be evacuated as a unit, pupils often got separated. One London school was scattered over 50 miles of countryside. A group of eight pupils disappeared entirely, was discovered two months later on a farm. "They had never attended school but had been very useful to the farmer!"

> No. 1 casualty was "a complete dislocation of the English educational system." (As late as last month 33,000 youngsters were still playing hooky in London streets.)

Despite all these failures, the authors of Evacuation Survey could report many an evacuation gain, symptoms of the "social revolution" that might have been. E.g.:

> At the end of a year of war, many a British child, thanks to his country holiday, was healthier, happier, better fed than before.

> The evacuation scheme made "the countryside and the comfortable classes suddenly and painfully aware, in their own persons, of the deep and shameful poverty which exists today in the rich cities of England."

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