Operation Pied Piper (1939): Evacuating Britain's Children

Operation Pied Piper was the mass evacuation of children and other vulnerable people from British cities at the outbreak of the Second World War, beginning on 1 September 1939. In just a few days about 1.5 million people, mostly schoolchildren and mothers with young children, travelled by train to the countryside to escape the bombing that everyone expected. It was the largest movement of people in British history and left lasting memories for a whole generation.

Background: fear of the bomber

Between the wars, politicians and military experts were convinced that air attack would devastate cities in any future war. In 1932 Stanley Baldwin had told Parliament that “the bomber will always get through”. Government planners predicted many thousands of casualties in the first weeks of bombing, and the Spanish Civil War seemed to confirm these fears.

In 1938 a committee chaired by Sir John Anderson drew up the Government Evacuation Scheme. Britain was divided into evacuation areas, mainly large industrial cities and ports; neutral areas; and reception areas in the countryside and small towns. Evacuation would be voluntary, but householders in reception areas could be required to take in evacuees. During the Munich crisis of September 1938 some evacuation had already begun, mainly of London schoolchildren and nursery children.

The evacuation begins

The order to evacuate was given on 31 August 1939, and the movement began on Friday 1 September, the day Germany began its invasion of Poland. Children assembled at their schools with a small suitcase or bundle, a gas mask in a cardboard box and a label bearing their name. Teachers led them in groups to railway stations, where special trains carried them away, often without the children or their parents knowing the destination.

Over about four days the railways moved hundreds of thousands of people from London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and other cities. Britain declared war on 3 September, while the evacuation was still under way. The official categories included unaccompanied schoolchildren, mothers with children under five, expectant mothers, blind and disabled people, and the teachers and helpers who accompanied the children.

Participation was lower than planners had expected. Roughly half of the eligible schoolchildren in the evacuation areas took part; many parents could not bear to send their children away. In addition, about two million better-off people made private arrangements to leave the cities.

Life as an evacuee

On arrival, evacuees were taken to village halls or schools where local people chose whom to take in, a process that many children remembered as humiliating, with the strongest or tidiest-looking picked first. Billeting officers placed the rest. Hosts received an allowance from the government, at first 10 shillings and sixpence for one child.

Experiences varied enormously. Some children enjoyed fields, animals and fresh air for the first time, and formed lifelong bonds with their hosts. Others suffered homesickness, bed-wetting, neglect or cruelty, and siblings were sometimes separated. Schools had to share buildings, often teaching in shifts. Local children sometimes resented the newcomers, and fights and name-calling between “vackies” and village children were common.

Mothers with young children found the adjustment especially hard. Sharing a stranger’s kitchen, with little to do and no familiar neighbours, many of them returned to the cities within weeks. Hosts, too, complained of strain, and some households did everything possible to avoid being allocated evacuees. Letters, occasional visits by parents and the work of teachers and volunteers, such as the Women’s Voluntary Service, helped hold the system together.

The evacuation also brought social classes into direct contact. Many rural and middle-class hosts were shocked by children with head lice, poor clothing, skin complaints and undernourishment. Reports such as Our Towns, published by the Women’s Group on Public Welfare in 1943, used these experiences to argue for better welfare, an argument that fed into post-war reforms.

The “phoney war” and later waves

The heavy bombing did not come in 1939. During the quiet months known as the Phoney War, parents brought their children home in large numbers, and by January 1940 a majority of the first evacuees had returned, despite government poster campaigns urging them to stay away. Officials learned from the problems of the first wave. Hostels were opened for children who were hard to place, medical inspections became more common, and residential camp schools built under the Camps Act of 1939 by the National Camps Corporation housed some evacuated schools in the countryside. Later evacuations were generally better organised, although many of the same tensions between hosts and evacuees remained.

New evacuations followed after the fall of France in June 1940, when coastal towns in the south and east were also cleared, and during the Blitz of 1940 to 1941. A final significant wave came in 1944, when V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets hit London. A separate Children’s Overseas Reception Board sent about 2,600 children to the Dominions in 1940, but the scheme was abandoned after the City of Benares was torpedoed in September 1940 with the loss of 77 evacuee children.

Myths and facts

Myth: all British children were evacuated. Evacuation was voluntary, and only about half of eligible children in the danger areas left in 1939. Millions of children spent the whole war at home in the cities, including through the Blitz.

Myth: evacuees were always working-class Londoners sent to the country. London was the largest source, but evacuees also came from cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Many went to small towns rather than farms, and some reception areas were later bombed themselves.

Myth: “Operation Pied Piper” was the official name. The scheme’s formal title was the Government Evacuation Scheme. The name Pied Piper, after the folk tale of a piper who led away the children of Hamelin, became popular later and is now widely used by historians and the public.

Legacy

Evacuation became one of the defining shared experiences of the British home front. It has been retold in many novels and films, including C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), in which four evacuated children find a magic wardrobe; Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War (1973); and Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mister Tom (1981). Later research and oral history projects have recorded both the happy and the traumatic memories of former evacuees.

By the numbers

Figures are those given by the official historian Richard Titmuss and are rounded.

Timeline

• 1938: The Anderson Committee draws up the Government Evacuation Scheme.
• 1939, 31 August: The government orders evacuation to begin the next day.
• 1939, 1 September: The official evacuation of schoolchildren and others begins.
• 1939, 3 September: Britain declares war on Germany while evacuation is still in progress.
• 1940, January: A majority of the first evacuees have returned home.
• 1940, June: New evacuations follow the fall of France.
• 1940, 17 September: The City of Benares is sunk, ending overseas evacuation.
• 1944, June–September: Flying bomb attacks on London trigger another wave of evacuation.

Why it matters

Operation Pied Piper was an unprecedented attempt by a state to protect its children from modern air war. It separated families, changed many young lives and exposed the depth of urban poverty to a wider public, helping to build support for the welfare state created after 1945.