Did anyone catch the Countryfile Evacuees Special on BBC2 on Sunday? Worth finding on 'catch-up', if you can. It was eighty years to the day that the first large-scale evacuation of children from English cities began on 1 September 1939. I was talking to a friend about it yesterday over coffee. Her mother and uncle were evacuated from the Kensington area of Liverpool to Caernarfon. Her grandmother could only visit them, at most, once a month but was saving enough money to send clothes and food parcels to her children. She arrived in North Wales unannounced one day to find her kids dressed in rags and the guardians' own offspring wearing the new clothing she had worked so hard to afford. Fearing reprisals, she said nothing. By coincidence I have just found two little evacuees listed with one of my Welsh cousins on the 1939 register.
That is horrible.... so sad. To think she felt that she couldn't say anything is even worse. Hopefully karma struck.
The Archive in St Ives, Cornwall has four booklets of interviews with people evacuated to the town. A fantastic piece of research by one of their volunteers.
