• Welcome to this forum . We are a worldwide group with a common interest in Birmingham and its history. While here, please follow a few simple rules. We ask that you respect other members, thank those who have helped you and please keep your contributions on-topic with the thread.

    We do hope you enjoy your visit. BHF Admin Team

Evacuation Of Children World War 2

  • Thread starter Thread starter Beryl M
  • Start date Start date
enjoyed reading that viv and i guess a typical story of many evacuees...could just be coinsidence but i knew a douglas family from nursery road.. my brother used to hang about with one of the children..i wonder if the writer john douglas was his dad


lyn
 
How wonderful that many children were permanently returned home in time for Christmas. Althoigh I expect a period of adjustment would be needed by parents and their evacuated children. It also shows there was a well thought through plan for the handover of children arriving back in Birmingham.

And interesting that some teachers found new jobs in places they were evacuated to. Perhaps inevitable, and offering an opportunity for some young teachers to move away and settle elsewhere, which otherwise might not have been possible.

Screenshot_20231212_155240_Chrome.jpgScreenshot_20231212_155245_Chrome.jpg
 
Thanks for that, Pedrocut,

Whatever our problems now, we can have no comprehension whatsoever of the feelings every parent must have had who were directly caught up in all this or were just being reminded about what was going on by reading the paper. It must have seemed that the world had been turned topsy-turvy. Nothing dreadful had happened yet but everyone knew that it was going to. And so, HOW do you protect your children when the world has gone mad?

I always have the utmost admiration for that generation who, in the main, just got on with it, did everything they possibly could to keep their children safe and cared for, whatever their own anguish, and despite everything, gave those of us who were there as happy a childhood as they possibly could.

Chris
 
It must have been an agonising decision for parents to send their children away.

Was there a plan for children born in the war years? My uncle was born in 1941 and he wasn't, though my dad was 5 years older and he wasn't either.
 
MWS said:
It must have been an agonising decision for parents to send their children away.

Was there a plan for children born in the war years? My uncle was born in 1941 and he wasn't, though my dad was 5 years older and he wasn't either.
Click to expand...
i agree mark how hard it must have been for parents to decide..a parents natural instinct is to keep your children safe and by your side so choosing to send them away to strange people in a strange place must have been an awful decision to have to make...my dad and his siblings were all evacuated to wales..his mom and her 2 year old was evacuated to stratford and as dads mom was also pregnant she gave birth in stratford...

on the other side my moms mom who was widowed chose not to have her 3 girls evacuated mom was the youngest age 11 and her sisters 13 and 15..they lived in paddington st and that area was heavily bombed so i think myself lucky that our mom survived the war...

lyn
 
Last edited:
I recall my Mother telling me that she, along with my elder brother, was evacuated to Devon during the war. I will ask my brother for details.



Steve.

I have just spoken to my brother.

He was born in January, 1940, so he is guessing that he was evacuated with Mom, in 40/41.
They went to stay at a farm by Halberton, just to the east of Tiverton, in Devon. They were only there a few months, because the farmer started making advances to my mother, so she headed back to Birmingham.

My brother and his wife took my mom and dad on holiday to Devon, many decades ago, and found the farm, which was visible from the village pub, where they were having lunch. It was pointed out to them by the Landlord who knew the family that farmed it.




Steve.
 
Last edited:
My nan agreed to evacuate two of her children, but after they were evacuated she went, herself, and brought them back to Birmingham. I don't know her reason apart from assuming she preferred them to be with her. It must have been a good reason as the risks at home were enormous given they lived not far from Kynochs etc.
 
MWS said:
It must have been an agonising decision for parents to send their children away.

Was there a plan for children born in the war years? My uncle was born in 1941 and he wasn't, though my dad was 5 years older and he wasn't either.
Click to expand...
I was born in 43, my sister in 36. We both grew up in Aston until after the war, our home was bombed, we just lived with relatives until the war ended and for a few extra years. I don’t think there was a plan for war babies, I could be very wrong.
 
Pedrocut said:
BIRMINGHAM EVACUATES MORE THAN 20,000 CHILDREN.
(Birmingham Gazette November 1940)

View attachment 190840View attachment 190841View attachment 190842
Click to expand...
80 years on we have some friends that live less than a mile from where I am sitting now ( we are friends of their two daughters), the wife who is 94 was born in Redditch (I think) and was evacuated to South Wales. Her husband was born in the US and every summer they would take their two daughters to England for the summer. We get together frequently and both wonder why my sister and I were not evacuated especially after the bombing, possibly because my parents did not want. Strange!
 
It doesn't say where these Birmingham children were, but could the second photo be Stratford-Upon-Avon, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in the the background?

Screenshot_20240803_213428_Chrome.jpgScreenshot_20240803_213443_Chrome.jpg

Source: British Newspaper Archive
 
my nan (dads mom)was evacuated from hockley to brewery st stratford..nan took her 2 year old daughter and was heavily pregnant with my uncle tony who was born in stratford..family has it that the lord mayor of stratford was tonys godfather..

nans other 4 children including my dad went to wales

lyn
 
THE LADYWOOD EVACUEES AND ME.

A memory from 1941. I will certainly have posted bits of this before. But I thought I would let you know that I have recently tidied it all up and put it online as a complete article.

"...........By the summer of 1941 when Hitler’s attentions were focused firmly to the East and we were no longer alone, intensive aerial bombardment of the country and the risk of invasion had both reduced, at least temporarily. My father decided that we should try to get a holiday. Since the mid-1930s, and before I was born, the family had stayed every summer at a farm in the South Hams of Devonshire, an area between Torbay and Plymouth, at that time remote and sleepy and little changed in the previous hundred years........

.......So off there my mother, sister and I went, to be joined a few days later by my father and elder brother, abandoning their work and Home Guard responsibilities for a short while in favour of the attractions of rest, fresh air and unrationed food. As a five-year-old I recall their exhausted arrival late at night in the farm's hallway as they stood blinking in the lamplight after their walk with their luggage in pitch blackness from Kingsbridge Station all the way to Keynedon Mill, near Sherford. How lucky we all were to have a holiday at that time.

We were not the only guests at Keynedon Mill on this visit. There were three boys there too, unexpectedly. Bob was probably a year or so older than I; he had an elder brother of 10 or 11 whose name I can’t remember and so I shall call him Billy; and the head of this family was the eldest, named I think Frank, a remote, grown-up fellow of 15 or 16 whom one saw only rarely. I was told that they came from a part of Birmingham called Ladywood and had been sent here to avoid the bombing. I hadn’t heard of that place before but I was struck by what a nice name it was and had visions of dense foliage and grassy, sunlit clearings occupied by ladies in pretty dresses having a picnic........."


It can be viewed here, if anyone is interested: http://www.staffshomeguard.co.uk/L8A16StreetlyMemoriesEvacuees.htm (It's safe to click on).

Chris

KeynedonMill.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top