The Truth about the London Evacuation Program
by contributing guest author, Alison DeLuca

My father and his sister grew up in London in the late thirties. They lived in a small row home with their parents, an Irish laborer and a countrywoman from the North. The family was desperately poor, but they were happy enough, and my dad won a scholarship to go to a real school, in order to learn a “proper” English accent. In those days, no one with a Cockney accent got a banker’s job or became a gentleman.

All of that changed when the bombings and air raids started. Houses were turned to rubble overnight. Families were wiped out.

In order to prevent the worst atrocities, the government came up with a program to get children out of the city and into the country during summer of 1938, away from the worst of the air raids. In their defense, the people who came up with the evacuation program were acting in good faith. And for some children, perhaps the great evacuation was fine.

But the program was put into place so quickly, and for so many people, that at times it was very disorganized. Nearly a million and a half people were “displaced.”

Children were put onto trains by parents who had no idea where their kids would end up. Brothers and sisters were split up. Country towns that were told to expect two hundred children received nearly a thousand.

For my father, being an evac was disastrous. The people who took him in considered him to be a “dirty Cockney.” He was put out of the house each morning and not allowed back in until the evening.

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