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
No comments:
Post a Comment