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At the outbreak of War the British government feared that Britain 's cities would soon be targeted by the German Luftwaffe, and within days of the war on Germany being announced the government ordered a mass evacuation scheme that had been prepared the year before.
The scheme involved the relocation of around 1.5 million of Britain 's most vulnerable city dwellers, including: children, their teachers, and mothers with pre-school children, and pregnant women from their homes to the safety of small towns and villages in pre-designated areas.
Such an evacuation would almost empty the threatened inner cities of the most vulnerable, keeping them safe from any bombing attacks that would inevitably happen. It was a bold challenge but one the government hoped would save many thousands of lives
With such a scheme in place schools in inner cities would not be needed and could be reallocated to other uses such as Civil Defence purposes. In fact around two thirds of inner city schools were used for this purpose.
However the mass evacuation scheme did not happen in the way the government had hoped.
Once war broke out people expected immediate attacks by the German bombers. This wasn't to happen.
As the months drew on and nothing seemed to be happening people became complacent and began to wonder if there really was going to be the war that the government had promised. This period was known as the 'phony war' |
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Despite the governments efforts to persuade people of the benefits for children to stay were they were, those who had been evacuated soon began to drift back to their own homes.
Homesickness, the phony war, and stories of a mixed welcome and treatment received by evacuees persuaded many parents to bring their children home.
By January 1940 nearly half of all evacuee schoolchildren had returned home. |
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Children taking lessons in a shelter |
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In some cities the figures were even higher.
London had just 34 percent of its evacuee children remaining in safe areas, while in the cities of Sheffield and Coventry, both heavily bombed in the coming months, the figure stood at less than 10 percent German raids and heavy bombing on British cities finally commenced during the summer of 1940.
On their return home, however, many city children found their schools closed - now being used for emergency and armed services. With nowhere and nothing for the children to do there were soon reports of increased acts of hooliganism.
Public air raid shelters were often the target of their attacks and in many areas the authorities were forced to keep them locked.
As well as losing their education, children from the poorer families also lost their free milk and school dinners. Medical inspections in schools also ended with the result of a dramatic increase in the number of children suffering from scabies and head lice.
As a result the government accepted that some schools needed to be reopened and 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.
However it was ordered that no school was to be reopened without adequate air raid shelters being provided. Due to lack of funds and speed of construction most of the shelters provided for schools were very basic. |
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Some were no more than reinforced rooms within school buildings such as a corridor or a basement which was not the precautions advised by the Board of Education's April 1939 circular "Air Raid Precautions in Schools." It advised that "School buildings were planned and constructed as not to lend themselves to effective precautions of this kind" and that "in times of danger children should not be assembled in groups of |
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more than fifty in any one protected room or compartment."
As an alternative, the board recommended shelters be separated from, but within easy reach of, school buildings and be constructed in the form of trenches. The board's guidelines recommended that the trenches should have secure roofs giving them "immunity from splinters, anti-aircraft shell fragments and machine gun fire," although no comment was made of their anticipated effectiveness against a direct bomb hit.
Many schools followed these guidelines and dug trenches in school playing fields, but others, especially inner-city schools, couldn't. Many had no playing fields and had to erect free-standing shelters, trench-like in shape, on the tarmac surfaces of the playground. Mostly the construction of shelters was basic. Walls of soil and sandbags were most common. Others were made from brick and. The Board of Education was careful to lay down strict requirements for shelter interiors.
The board advised that the shelters floors should slope, with a sump being located at one end of the trench, and that "provision must be made for pumping or bailing out this sump should it flood. Flooring should be of wooden duckboards or of cinders or ballast. Seating was to be arranged so that children sat along one or both the walls of the shelter on wooden benches, each child allowed 28 inches.
Gangways should be a minimum of 24 inches for a double row of seating and 18 for a single row. The height of the shelter was to be at least 72 inches.
Finally, each shelter was to possess a gas curtain over its entrance making the interiors "reasonably gas proof" but presumably also allowing children and teachers time to put on the gas masks that all civilians carried.
Even with the protection of air raid shelters tragedies still occurred
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| In September 1942 three bombs destroyed a Church of England boys' school at Petworth in West Sussex killing the headmaster, an assistant mistress, and 29 of the 80 children. No air-raid warning had been received. |
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The same was true on 20 January 1943, when a single bomb fell on Sandhurst Road School , Lewisham, south London . Here children and staff enjoyed their lunch break with large numbers either eating together indoors or out in the playground. A third group of "senior girls" was reported to have been "in a classroom on an upper floor eating sandwiches" waiting to leave for an "educational visit to attend the film 'Where the Rainbow Ends'" at a local cinema. This group was nearest the explosion. Altogether the school lost 6 teachers and 37 children, with a further 50 hospitalised
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| Tragedies such as these were few and far between but the fear of what might happen by daytime bombing meant that schools took seriously the sound of the air raid sirens and children would be hurriedly ushered to the relative safety of the air raid shelter often for an hour or more. False alarms were common, particularly during the heaviest times of bombing in 1940-41 and 1944 |
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