Aberystwyth schools during WWII - part one

The lives of child evacuees were fundamentally uprooted and dislocated by the war. Evacuees were sent in many cases hundreds of miles away to a rural environment they had no prior experience or knowledge of. Being sent to Wales also entailed experiencing new customs, culture, holidays (St David’s Day, 1st March) and language. The log book for Breckfield Infants School, Granton Road Liverpool evacuated to Alexandra Road School, Aberystwyth is still prominently displayed in the Liverpool Archives. The log books for the school are  available at the Ceredigion Archives and give an excellent insight into the lives of teachers and pupils in Aberystwyth during the war years. Also available at the Ceredigion Archives are the log books for North Road School, where pupils from Liverpool’s Holy Trinity and St. Saviour’s school were evacuated to. There were around 971 unaccompanied schoolchildren evacuated to Aberystwyth, though by the end of 1939 there were only 389 in the town and 442 in the surrounding rural area. Some had moved to different areas but many returned home as British cities did not appear under threat after all during the so-called ‘Phony War’. At Alexandra Road School, boys and Girls departments were split into Welsh and English speakers, though the headmaster noted that "progress in Welsh tends to slow down as the children proceed up the school”. Although schools could help to restore a sense of normality, there was a limit to how far children could escape the impact of the war.

 

Evacuees at Liverpool Train Station, from the display in Liverpool Archives

 Air Raid Precautions

It would be a mistake to think,however, that people were isolated from the war out in countryside towns such as Aberystwyth. There were many ways in which civilians even far away from the big cities were directly impacted by the restrictions and requirements of wartime. Children and infants at Alexandra Road School were dismissed and dispersed several times a year to their billets or the house of anyone they knew in the vicinity (who lived less than a three minute walk from the school) during evening air raid warnings. If they could not make it to either, there was a sandbagged shelter at the school. A.R.P instructors would also visit the children and check their gas masks for them. Older pupils were also taken to the Air Raid Precaution Central Station at the University College of Wales. Holidays were granted so that teachers could perform house-to-house checks of the children’s homes for the Air Raid Precaution Scheme.

Wartime fundraising

Those working at and going to schools in Aberystwyth  made active and tangible contributions to the war effort. Children and staff members throughout the war years successfully raised significant sums of money towards charities, such as Dr. Barnardo’s, raising 14/11 ½ in 1939, £1.3s.5 ½ d in 1941, £1.5.2 in 1942 and 17s.7d in 1943 respectively. This helped to provide for those most vulnerable during the war. Money was also regularly raised by the school for the Hospital for Sick Children, Ormond Street, London.   Alexandra Road and North Road School contributed to government programmes such as War Savings Week, Warships Week, War Weapons Week and Salute the Soldier Week. The Honourable Secretary of the Aberystwyth War Savings Committee, Dr J. R. Davies, called at the school to present a certificate of honour in recognition of the school’s impressive fundraising during the Wings for Victory week in May 1943, which raised in total a staggering £428.3s.6d in the county (£20,000 in today’s money!).  

The children at Alexandra Road and North Road also helped out with the war effort in more practical ways. Older children canvassed the town searching for aluminium for the government war drive. Children also helped with the salvage of paper, with a half holiday granted on 30th January 1942 to enable them to participate further in the salvage campaign. According to the Alexandra Road School log book, the boys were ‘very enthusiastic’ about the salvage work and had already been hard at work with it for a whole month before this holiday. Children at Alexandra Road School were shown propaganda films exhorting all the benefits war savings. The proceeds of the tickets sold for H. G. Wells’ ‘Things to Come’, attended by 186 children from Alexandra Road School in October 1940, were given to wartime charity. The proceeds of the 4d from each ticket were given to the Cardiganshire Spitfire Fund.

Schoolchildren also had to sacrifice their Whitsun holidays at the start of the Battle of Dunkirk, around 14th May. This was due to the gravity of the war situation as the onslaught of the Blitzkrieg through France and the Low Countries appeared unstoppable. On 5th June 1940 the military took over two classrooms in connection with the arrival of the B.E.F. from Dunkirk. The two classes had to meet in the assembly and woodwork rooms instead until the B.E.F. relinquished control of the two classrooms a month later. Now that the crisis in France had been averted, the school was closed from the 7th-10th June to compensate for the earlier loss of the Whitsun holidays. In December 1940, the school lost two of its male teachers who left to join the RAF. These were replaced by a recent graduate and a teacher from Llanfarian school, who himself would leave and join the RAF the next year. The loss of these role models and mentors cannot have been easy in particular for the younger children, assuming they understood why their teachers kept having to leave for the war.

Illness and disease

The log books for Alexandra School Road describe at length how chicken pox, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, whooping cough, impetigo and other skin diseases raged throughout the school. This was corroborated with medical files describing the poor state of the evacuees upon their arrival, overwhelming the medical authorities such that they had to be released arrived without proper treatment to their billets. 

During the year 1939, the school nurse examined 1516 children in 6 schools, 481 of whom were found to be ‘unclean’ and 639 found to be ‘suffering from minor defects’, meaning less than a third were in a fully satisfactory state. Another document signed by the local Medical Officer confirmed that the extraordinarily low attendance (less than 60%) from 1st-4th July was due to an outbreak of chicken pox. The school nurse was usually called in to the school at least every fortnight to examine all children present. Several pupils (including Liverpool evacuees) would often be excluded for possessing symptoms such as a rash or scabies. In the bad winter months, such as December 1943, as many as 45 children were absent due to influenza alone. The school medical officer authorized the closure of the school for the whole week in response. 

 

 

On 17 December 1940 the school medical officer also authorized closure of the school for three days in response to alarming number of measles and scarlet fever cases, as well as from the 18th-26th May 1944 and between 17th-22th September 1944 because of an outbreak of scarlet fever. Children also contracted serious diseases such as scarlet fever during the holidays and were forced to go to the isolation hospital. In total around 13 Children from the Infants Department alone were taken to isolation hospital for scarlet fever and other illnesses from Alexandra Road Infants School from September 1939 to the summer of 1945.

This is also consistent with North Road School, which described ‘epidemics’ of measles, chicken pox and influenza at the end of 1940. There were also several cases of yellow jaundice at the school. The headmaster of North Road School, frustrated with low attendance, even appeared to resent one family suffering whooping cough for staying at home according to the regulations. At the end of 1939 there were 21 admitted evacuee in-patients to Cardiganshire General Hospital and 49 evacuee out-patients. 

Blog by Tom Buswell

 

The Londoners of Aberystwyth

If you were to stroll down Marine Terrace at any point between the spring of 1939 and 1945 you could be forgiven for thinking, upon first inspection of the grand Victorian houses which tightly hug the coastline, that these were the homes of local entrepreneurs, businessmen or important families. However, during this volatile period, these buildings played host to one of the oldest higher educational institutions in the world, University College London.

Shortly before the true onslaught of the Blitz was brought down upon London, it was decided that, to preserve the continuity of education and perhaps even the institution itself, University College and its departments would relocate outside of the capital to less dangerous areas. It may not be surprising that several, well-connected, university cities in England were chosen including Oxford and Cambridge; however, it was rural Wales whilst remote, yet with an established educational pedigree, which proved the ideal place for the majority of the University’s departments. These departments were consequently spread out amongst the colleges which made up the then University of Wales.

 

Map showing the distribution of UCL students during the WWII evacuation

 

 

As the above map shows, Aberystwyth, amongst the other colleges, provided refuge to several departments. The departments included Arts, Economics and Chemistry. As neatly summed up in the preface of the 1942 study handbook for new students, university life would be different, but still at its core the same:

 “Though exiles from their home, the Departments of the Faculties of Arts and Science, now at Aberystwyth, are far from having lost their life and vigour in the dwelling-place allotted them on the outbreak of war…While students will miss some of the cherished amenities of college life in London, which would have been theirs in happier days, they will also find some compensations for their loss. Their work will lie in the midst of a delightful countryside and among a kindly and hospitable people.”

It is almost impossible to not draw some parallels between students starting university during the Second World War and those who started during our current Covid-19 pandemic. Likewise, during this period of disruption student life did indeed continue. To keep a sense of community alive, the New Phineas magazine, was created to ‘unite the scattered ethos of U. C’ [University College London] and circulated amongst the evacuees. This was particularly important given that some of the students may have found it difficult settling into the culture of what was effectively, a different country. A cartoon from New Phineas in 1939, below, portrays a Beadle on the lookout for students in the evacuated UCL, with nearly all of the student lockers unsurprisingly available.

 

UCL students also continued in their extracurricular activities and the Dramatic Society shared their work with the locals by putting on a performance of Little Plays of St. Francis at the Kings Hall, a former hub of local life. Unfortunately, this venue has since been demolished and now provides a seating area on the seafront along with a restaurant and flats. The play was performed again to the students of the University of Wales the following year for students located in Bangor, North Wales.

 

University College London also shared its own educational expertise with the local community during its time in Aberystwyth. The physiologist and former President of the British Psychological Society, Dr. S. J. F. Philpott, gave an address on “The Price of Freedom” to the students of Ardwyn School. He compared the ideals of freedom in countries under totalitarian rule with those of democratic countries and how in the former they had been turning people into slaves of the state, whereas in the latter, the ideal of free citizens in a free nation is at its core. He also discussed some of the difficulties which were met in developing men and women with free minds and independence. He went on to comment that one of the key objectives of education should be to teach young people that they were born to be free to do any job they liked within the limits of their abilities but aided with the tools that a good education provides. He also shared commentary on the current issues of the day in the Welsh Gazette of 23rd February 1943, where he stated, “The state of Europe to-day seems to indicate that a new something is required”.  He concluded there was a need to protect young people against the poison of propaganda and extremism, and it was through education that they would be able to recognise it. It could be concluded this need for open-mindedness and tolerance is one that is especially relevant today.

University College London also generously commissioned a writing table for the senior staff common room, providing staff with a reminder of the ever-present link and history between the two educational institutions. However, this table is yet to be traced.

To many Londoners, Aberystwyth may seem a distant and remote place; however, for those London students between 1939 and 1945, the town and its university welcomed them with open arms and accommodated them within its unique community. Even today many Londoners come to Aberystwyth to study and holiday in a place far removed from home for the same benefits as those evacuees from UCL - tranquillity, reflection, and perspective.

 Blog by Andrew Wolckenhaar

 Many thanks to the Records Office at UCL and Ceredigion archives for providing access to the above documents.

Beagle cartoon and ULC distribution map reproduced from The World of UCL, eds. Negley Harte, John North, and Georgina Brewis, UCL Press, 2018