A Child's War (6 page)

More schools were reopened, or teachers and pupils shared a school’s premises with the emergency services, but because children were allowed back only when air-raid shelters had been provided, the process took time. Margaret Woodrow started her first teaching post a few days before the outbreak of war. ‘The air-raid shelters were not finished so we teachers were employed at the Town Hall preparing ration books. Later, half the pupils came for lessons in the morning and half in the afternoon. Teachers set homework to be done in the off part of the day.’

Margery Neave taught in Middlesex, she remembers the shelters:

We had two air-raid shelters in the school, they were narrow tunnels under the earth running at right angles to each other, so the Headmistress could stand at the corner and shout instructions both ways at once! There were roughly made wooden benches on each side and just enough room to walk down the middle. You can imagine the lessons! One thing we could do was sing.

Whenever the air-raid warning was sounded, we picked up our gas masks in their cardboard boxes and filed down into the shelter in an orderly way, each teacher with her own class, and there we had to stay, sometimes for many hours – past lunch time and sometimes past end of school time – until the all clear sounded.

Carol Smith remembers sheltering in her school at Dunstable:

Once when my little brother and I were on our way to school, the warning went. We had an argument, I said we were three-quarters of the way there and should go on. He wouldn’t come and went up the chalk cutting to watch – there was a hut there. A German plane came up the A5, by then I was in the air-raid shelter at school. When the plane dropped his load, I remember the headmaster, a very nice man, Mr Underwood, he said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only a lorry dumped his load of bricks.’ I thought, ‘What sort of fools does he take us for?’ I was 13 years old at the time.

As school buildings once again became available, they were re-opened as ‘emergency schools’, responding to the needs of the neighbourhood – thus a building that had been a secondary school might be re-opened as an emergency primary school. In 1940 emergency schools were organised as all-age schools; during the following year they became more specialist, until by the end of 1942, in London there were 43 emergency central, 96 emergency senior and 109 emergency junior schools.

As the Blitz progressed, however, a growing number of schools fell victim to bombs. In London 150 were destroyed and over 200 damaged, and the shortage was never fully resolved. Joyce Somerville from Brockley remembers her school:

I attended Wallbutton Road School in 1942 aged 9. When I joined the school we only used part of it; the hall upstairs was about half the size it should have been as it had been bombed and had been bricked up, with a curtain across to cover the rough bricks. We used three classrooms on that floor and one on the ground floor which had windows which had been bricked up to make it into a shelter against air raids. One part of the school was taken over by the ambulance service and another was given over to the heavy rescue service.

Iris Smith describes her schooling:

Once we couldn’t go our usual way to school because there was an unexploded bomb. We only went for half a day during the bombing. We had to share the school with other children, half went in the morning and the other half went in the afternoon – I went in the morning. Once an incendiary bomb came through the ceiling of the biology lab, and another time a bomb went off in the playground – luckily it was at night or who knows how many of us might have been killed.

In the Reception areas the task of finding appropriate buildings to make into temporary schools proved most difficult. At first much work was done outside, but slowly accommodation was found. In 1939 it had been decided to build a series of camp boarding schools, outside the danger areas. Thirty-one were started, and by early 1940 many were ready to take what we would now call secondary age children. This is a description of the camps from 1941:

The Camps are all in rural areas, standing on large sites of 20–40 acres, carefully selected with regard to drainage and water supply. The buildings, constructed of cedar wood on concrete foundations and roofed with shingles, have a pleasing appearance. They generally include four classrooms; two other rooms to be used as practical rooms; a hall, which can also be used for teaching purposes, complete with stage; a large dining-room, together with a kitchen, staff rooms, a store, and, not least important, a tuck shop. As a rule, five dormitories are provided, each equipped with two-tier iron bedsteads, with a small room for a teacher at each end. A lavatory block with baths, showers and a drying room; a hospital block for about seven patients and a nurse; quarters for the Camp School staff and self-contained flats for the Headmaster and the Camp Manager, complete with equipment. Central heating by radiators and electric lighting make it possible to use the Camps continuously throughout the year.

Early in the war the use of hand-bells and whistles, standard for teachers on playground duty, was banned (hand-bells were part of the poison gas warning system, and whistles to warn of falling incendiary bombs). Another big change was in holidays. It was quite normal for schools to work through to mid-August and then have just two weeks’s summer holidays, but to get ten weeks’s holiday at Christmas! This was to save fuel needed for lighting and heating. June Fidler from Peckham tells of other shortages:

With all the shortages the exercise books were cut in half with a guillotine or whatever and we had half of one each, they did the same with the pencils. We normally had to write with a dip pen using ink which a class monitor mixed up from powder, it was horrible stuff, but it ran out so we had to do all our writing with our half-pencils. And the textbooks, what there were of them, four or five of us had to share, but I hear it’s the same today, so some things don’t change.

Schools with cellars put them to use as air-raid shelters. Others either had purpose-built air-raid shelters in the grounds, or converted a ground-floor room to a shelter by having all its windows bricked up. Air-raid practices were common, as were gas mask practices. Here is a report from 1941: ‘ “Run, rabbits, run,” calls the teacher, and instantly some 20 or 30 little people disappear, leaving no signs of their presence but an odd foot or two sticking out from beneath the desks. No, it is not a new game for the infants’s school: at least, it may be a game for the children, but it is something more than that – it is practice in taking cover against sudden air attack.’

Most raids were at night, but there were also many in daylight, especially during the first year of the war, and lessons would be disrupted as everyone filed down to the shelter. At first it was thought that the raids would be over very quickly, but in fact warnings often lasted for several hours, so teachers had to think up ways to stop the children becoming bored and restless. Community singing was the most obvious distraction, to which were added story-telling, guessing games such as ‘I Spy’, charades and recitations. Sometimes a school would put on a show with each class taking its turn in entertaining the others: scenes from plays, music solos. As the war went on, shelters became better equipped with lights and heating and some lessons could be carried on there.

Schools were often hit, although with most of the bombing happening at night there were few casualties. The results of daytime raids, however, could be awful: at lunchtime on Wednesday 20 January 1943 a Focke Wulf 190 fighter-bomber, one of a group carrying out a tip-and-run raid, dropped its 1,100-pound (500 kg) bomb on Sandhurst Road School in Catford. No sirens were sounded. Teachers, hearing the plane circling overhead, had begun to lead the children down into the shelters. The bomb went through the wall of the school and exploded about a minute later in the dining hall, demolishing the centre of the building. Being lunchtime, many children were in the hall, and it was here that the casualties were at their highest – in all, thirty-eight children and six teachers were killed. The headteacher, Margaret Clarke, later said: ‘The only question the children were asking was “How can I help, Miss?” They took home the younger ones, tore up their clothing to bind the injuries and even helped in the rescue work – a grim job for youngsters of 14 and 15.’

When an LCC nursery school was destroyed by an incendiary bomb, the children were luckily not there at the time. The school was later evacuated to the village of Crockham Hill in Kent where, on the morning of Friday 30 June 1944, it received a direct hit from a flying bomb. Twenty-two of the thirty children and eight of the eleven members of staff were killed. It is a chilling example of the devastation caused by these weapons that the last bodies were not recovered until two days after the incident.

Overall, the effects on children’s education cannot be understated. D.J. Ryall’s experience was typical: ‘Due to the war my year did not complete their education past 16 although we all intended to stay on ’til 18. I left from Lingfield aged 15½ in 1940.’ The disruption was not always unwelcome, Iris Smith explains: ‘I did my school certificate during the war. We had done our mock certificates before and I had done quite well – I kept hoping the sirens would go – if they went while we were taking it they would have accepted our mock marks and I would have passed – but there wasn’t a sound.’

One of Britain’s great advantages in time of war is that the British Isles are exactly that – islands. This makes invasion far more difficult. But it also has a drawback: most of the food and raw materials that Britain consumes have to be imported by sea from other countries. In 1939, like an army laying siege to a castle in a medieval war, Germany put Britain under siege, using U-boats to sink merchant ships bringing in food, oil, petrol, wood, and many other vital materials. Losses were huge – over half of all the British merchant ships at the beginning of the war had been sunk by the end of it, and Britain came closer to losing the war to the U-boats than in any other way.

The situation was made worse by the need for vast amounts of material for the war effort. Thousands of aircraft, tanks, ships and guns had to be manufactured and millions of tons of steel were required, as well as rubber, oil and petrol. And the soldiers, sailors and airmen needed hundreds of thousands of uniforms, stitched from miles of cloth.

Scarce materials had to be conserved, so the government introduced a series of special measures. Petrol was a particular problem and the use of private cars was drastically cut back. Ration coupons for petrol were available solely to those using their cars for war work. Other materials soon followed: rationing was introduced first for food, later for clothes, and even for furniture. Besides rationing, the government introduced other methods of saving scarce materials, campaigning to cut down on the unnecessary use of goods. Slogans such as: ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ became catch-phrases. A cartoon character, the squanderbug – a kind of large beetle, with Hitler’s hair – was shown encouraging people to buy things they did not need.

Shortage signs were seen everywhere: ‘No sweets’, ‘No cigarettes’ and, outside pubs, ‘No beer’, were common sights. Another cartoon character appeared; answering to the name of Chad, he was drawn everywhere peering over a wall, with a question mark over his head and the question ‘Wot, no . . . ?’ The missing word could be any one of a thousand things.

Mike Bree from Cornwall:

The whole thing started slowly (our first Christmas we hardly saw a difference – they did allow us that!), then gathered momentum until the ‘darkest days’ – and then the ‘shortages’ went from bad to worse as the things we had started the war with – clothes, household goods, etc. – wore out, were broken or lost, or were taken from us by the Luftwaffe, or by our own government, by regulation or by appealing for ‘the war effort’. Waste of all kinds was strongly discouraged, every bit of metal, glass, cardboard, wood, rubber, wool, everything, was vital. Even our town hall had to lose its courtyard railings, as did so many public and private buildings – there was hell to pay when they were found years later, rusting and forgotten in railway sidings.

People had to make things last, but the longer the war went on the more worn out things became. Vivien Hatton remembers a trip to an ice-rink near the end of the war: ‘We had to borrow the skates from the rink. They had holes in!’

To cut down on the need for imports every inch of space was used to grow food, even the moat around the Tower of London; some tennis courts and even cricket pitches were ploughed up. People were encouraged to ‘Dig for Victory’, and this was an activity in which children could be particularly useful. Often children would take over some part of their garden for vegetable growing; even the earth covering the Anderson shelter was used for growing food.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries issued a series of ‘Dig for Victory’ leaflets, giving tips not only on growing vegetables, but also on preserving food, making jam, etc.

The pre-war government had created a Food Department in 1939, with the threat of war in mind, and in September of that year the National Register was set up to keep track of the population. Using this information, the government supplied everyone with a ration book. Because it was felt that different groups of people needed different types or amounts of food – for instance, children received orange juice and cod liver oil, and younger children got extra milk – there were several different ration books. The main types were the Adult book, which was a buff colour, the Baby’s book, which was green, and the Junior book, which was blue. On 1 November 1939, it was announced that butter and bacon (or ham) were to become the first goods to be put ‘on the ration’: 4 ounces of each per person per week, beginning on 8 January 1940. At the end of December 1939 the government further announced that sugar was also to be rationed – 12 ounces a week. In March 1940 meat became rationed, not by amount, but by value: 1
s
10
d
(9p) worth per person per week. In May the production of non-essential consumer goods was restricted. By now the Food Department had become the Ministry of Food (the MoF), under Lord Woolton, who gave his name to the Woolton Pie (p. 50).