Evacuation of children during the war- Research

During the War it was decided that children should be sent away from their parents to places with less risk of getting attacked and bombed. The children would stay with people that lived in the place that they were sent to, the 'host families' would take them in and look after them as their own. About 800,000 children left their homes many returned home after a few weeks but the rest stayed until the end of the war. The children would go to school as normal and they would be evacuated by their school teachers and taken to trains off to different locations such as Devon, Cornwall and Wales and a few other locations. 

The children would be sad waving goodbye to their mothers but they would have also felt exited as their mothers and teachers would have been preparing them and re assuring them about going away. Each evacuee would have a gas mask, food for the journey and a bag for washing things and clothes. Every child had a label pinned to their coat  with their personal details and where they were going on it. The journey would often take several hours on a train. 

Many of the children, although they missed home, enjoyed the countryside as it was all new and exiting to them some children would have never seen a cow or vegetables growing in a field before and they would have been amazed at things like this. A lot of the children became friends the locals and the 'townies' even amalgamated and became good friends. 

Most of the children returned home after the war unless they had reasons for not returning for example, if they had no parents to go back to. A lot of the children were happy about returning home but others preferred the country life a lot more as they were more privileged there. 

Here are some old photos of children being evacuated from the cities during world war world war 2.