As in Kent, the boys became self-reliant and tremendously fit (even though contaminated now and then by new evacuees from Liverpool), and Leakey derived enormous satisfaction from comparing the ‘splendid specimens’ which he had at Betws with the white-faced children with dark lines under their eyes who had remained in London. Later in the war, when the threat of invasion had evaporated and the Blitz on London had died down, the Betws boys went south on overcrowded trains for their holidays, but always rejoiced when they returned to the mountains.
The Government had realized that, in the event of war, it would not be possible to evacuate all schoolchildren to private homes, and the Camps Act of April 1939 prompted the creation of the National Camps Corporation. The aim was to build fifty camps in attractive, wooded country, but in the event only thirty-six were completed, thirty-one of them in England and Wales, five in Scotland. Designed by the distinguished Scottish architect T. S. Tait, each could accommodate 350 children in huts made of Canadian red cedar.
One of the first was at Colomendy, near Mold in North Wales, where construction began on two sites, upper and lower, in April 1939, on the side of a lovely valley. Known to its inmates as ‘Collo’, the camp was created as a safe refuge for 170 boys and 125 girls from schools in Liverpool, some twenty miles to the north. Many of the inmates were scared by tales of Peg-Leg, the resident lame ghost said to haunt a particular bed in one of the huts; but agreeable recreations included exploration of the local caves and ascents of Moel Famau, the highest hill in the area, whose bare slopes were alleged to be alive with snakes, and from whose summit the fires raging in Liverpool after big air raids were clearly visible, lighting up clouds all over the sky. One girl remembered the peace and quiet of Colomendy as ‘absolute bliss’, but she was terrified for her family who had remained in the city, and she kept writing letters home without knowing if the house was still standing.
Another successful camp, in a less dramatic setting, was Kennylands, near Reading in Berkshire, which took in the 300 boys of Beal Grammar School from Ilford. The camp’s setting, in twenty acres of land, gave scope for gardening, pig-rearing, potato-picking and bee-keeping, as well as for adventures in the surrounding woods, which the boys loved. At school many of them were inspired by the teaching of William Finch, a talented artist and writer who came from Lowestoft and created a unique pictorial record of the east coast fishing industry. On 30 September 1940 good reports of Kennylands attracted a visit from King George and Queen Elizabeth, during which the King startled his retinue by scratching a pig’s back.
Many schools moved out en bloc, among them the girls of the Royal School in Bath, who were welcomed to the grandeur of Longleat by the owner, Lord Bath, and given the run of the Elizabethan house, including the library, with its priceless collection of books and manuscripts. The boys and staff of Malvern College, whose buildings were requisitioned in September 1940, also landed on their feet, for the Duke of Marlborough offered them the use of his vast home, Blenheim Palace, on the edge of Woodstock, in Oxfordshire. Indoors, screens were built round the walls to protect precious tapestries, and the state rooms, together with the 180-foot-long library, became dormitories. In a splendidly sustained burst of energy, the masters dug a half-mile trench to accommodate a new gas main from Oxford.
Did any prep school have worse luck than St Peter’s at Broadstairs? When Kent became too dangerous, the boys were evacuated to the relative safety of Shobrooke House, near Crediton in Devon; but during the night of 23 January 1945 the building caught fire, and pupils and staff alike, trapped on balconies, were forced to abseil down makeshift ropes made from torn-up sheets and blankets into six inches of snow. One of the boys, Peter de la Billière, then eight, never forgot that nightmare:
The sheets were so old that the strips kept tearing through. As every third or fourth boy went over the edge, there would come a yell, followed by a dull thud – and another rope was needed … As we waited on the balcony, the sound of the blaze rose from a muted crackling to a roar, and suddenly the whole [central] dome, with its little bell cupola above it, collapsed downwards into the well of the stairs, sending a fantastic eruption of sparks into the sky.
One matron and three boys were killed, and another, who lived, fell onto an iron spike which speared his throat. Peter survived physically unscathed, but was left with a horror of fires, and for the rest of his life has made it his first priority, on arriving at a hotel, to check the escape facilities.
Altogether the evacuation from cities and towns displaced nearly four million people. In the first three days of the official exodus one and a half million left London – 827,000 schoolchildren, 524,000 mothers and children under five, 103,000 teachers and other helpers, 13,000 pregnant women and 7000 disabled persons. It is thought that another two million people made their own arrangements: some settled with relatives or in safely situated hotels, and thousands emigrated (or at least sent their children) to the United States, Canada, South Africa or Australia. Under ‘Plan Yellow’ more than 20,000 civil servants were moved to hotels in seaside resorts and spa towns.
When the expected massed air attacks failed to materialize, foster-families complained vociferously that they were giving sanctuary to people whose houses or flats were standing intact and empty. Thousands of city-dwellers returned to their homes – and none were keener to go back than the mothers who had accompanied their children into the sticks but had been disgusted by the lack of facilities (mainly shops and picture houses) that the countryside offered. During the relatively calm period that became known as the Phoney War, which lasted into the spring of 1940, it seemed that the whole upheaval had been unnecessary – a huge waste of time and effort, and the cause of untold anxiety. Yet many evacuees took root where they had landed, and grew up to be country people. Martin Wainwright, later Northern Editor of the Guardian, reckoned that ‘for all the initial scares about vermin, disease and incomprehensible Cockney or Geordie, the close-knit world of Britain’s villages benefited from this fresh blood’. Others agreed that the great migration brought positive social benefits. A leader in Country Life entitled ‘Converting the Townsman’ declared:
The old drift to the cities has not only been stemmed but reversed … It is a vital matter that we should make it impossible, when the immediate crisis of the war is past, either to relapse again into indifference or to resume the old antipathy between town and country.
The least fortunate victims of the mass evacuation were domestic pets. Alarm about the possibility of immediate air attack gripped people so fiercely that during the four days after 3 September 1939 a colossal number of pets were put down. Some were killed by their owners, who brought them to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for burial; others were destroyed by vets or welfare organizations such as the Canine Defence League and the PDSA, the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals. The slaughter – by captive bolt, gas, electricity or lethal injection – was appallingly rapid; corpses of dogs and cats were soon piled high in and around the killing premises. Thousands of carcasses were incinerated, others dumped and buried on wasteland. The RSPCA gave the total as 200,000, but one later estimate was 750,000, and another 2.5 million – a vastly greater number than that of British civilians (60,000) killed in the whole of the war.
The panic seems to have had multiple causes. A rumour had gone round that it was compulsory to get rid of all domestic animals; but this was officially denied – and the idea was refuted by many newspapers, including The Times. Another rumour suggested that Hitler would try to introduce rabies into England, in the hope that the disease would spread from domestic animals to farm stock – but even at the time this must have seemed far-fetched. The immediate trigger was a notice, Advice to Animal Owners, given out by the National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee (a unit of the Home Office), which recommended that, ‘if at all possible’, animals should be taken out into the country ‘in advance of an emergency’, but if they could not be placed in the care of neighbours, ‘it really is kindest to have them destroyed’. Memorial notices, feline and canine, began to appear in newspapers. Bereaved cat-lovers immediately predicted a disastrous increase in the rat and mouse population.
Determined