The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
![The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State - Nicholas Timmins](limg_read341088.jpg "The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State - Nicholas Timmins")
As if to underline that not all social progress halted in the 1930s, the school leaving age had been due to rise to from fourteen to fifteen on 1 September 1939. But in the early hours of that morning German tanks rolled into Poland and the mass evacuation of schoolchildren and mothers from Britain’s cities, planned since the time of Munich, began.
In three days – war was finally declared on Sunday the third – an incredible one and a half million people were decanted into the countryside, including 827,000 schoolchildren, 524,000 mothers and their children under school age, and 103,000 teachers and helpers.59 It was the start of the massive movements of population that were to stretch and bend the old class system as never before, one of the effects of a war which impinged on the civilian population in a way that 1914–18, for all its carnage on foreign fields, never did. While it slew the flower of a generation, from whole families of yeomen recorded on village war memorials to the gilded contemporaries of Robert Graves, the First World War did not throw people together as the Second did. It did not force one half of England to see how the other half lived. The Second World War, Paul Addison says, in The Road to 1945:
hurled together people of different social backgrounds in a series of massive upheavals caused by bombing, conscription, and the migration of workers to new centres of war industry. Over the war as a whole there were 60 million changes of address in a civilian population of about 38 million, while more than five million men and women were drawn into the three armed services. There were one and a half millions in the Home Guard, and about the same number in the various Civil Defence services, by the end of 1940. More than one and a quarter million evacuees, over half of them children, were billeted on families in the reception areas in February 1941. The number of women working in industry increased by 1,800,000 between 1939 and 1943. In air-raid shelters, air raid warden’s posts, Home Guard units, and overcrowded trains where soldiers barged into first class compartments, class barriers could no longer be sustained. ‘It is quite common now,’ Lord Marley was reported as saying in 1941, ‘to see Englishmen speaking to each other in public, although they have never been formally introduced.’60
Many of the first evacuees soon returned home. But the impact of incomers who were mostly (though not entirely) from poorer inner city areas on the more comfortable countryside was remarkable. Ben Wicks in No Time to Wave Goodbye, his remarkable compilation of evacuees’ experiences (he was one himself), records children brought up in the days before mass television who, having watched cows being milked, were convinced they were being offered urine to drink; some who had never slept in a bed and preferred the floor; while Richard Titmuss told of the child who said to his visiting mother: ‘They call this spring, Mum, and they have one down here every year.’61
Mabel Louvain Manning took in two boys.
The first morning I was awoken about 6 am by such a noise, it was the boys fighting in bed! One had a bloody nose which had splattered all over the wall. I cleaned them up and got them ready for breakfast. They had no idea how to use a knife and fork and picked up a fried egg by their fingers. They didn’t like stew or pies, only beans in tomato, which they wanted to eat out of a tin, and chips.
When they came to me, one was wearing wellingtons, the other plimsolls, and no coats or extra shirts or underclothes. I cadged what I could from friends, and then decided to write to the parents for more. The mother wrote back saying she would have to get their suits and shoes out of pawn, which she did, and sent them down.62
There were horrified tales of nits, lice and scabies, taken up by a press amazed by stories of children sewn into their only clothes. In Dorset a couple took in a mother and three children.
It was very hot weather when war broke out, but those older children went all round my house urinating against the walls.
Although we had two toilets, one being outside with very easy access for them, they never used them. Although my husband and I told the children and the mother off about this filthy habit they took absolutely no notice and our house stank to high heaven.63
A more revealing tale of life in the under-toileted Glasgow slums came from the Scottish mother who told her six-year-old: ‘You dirty thing, messing up the lady’s carpet. Go and do it in the corner.’ The evacuation produced happier humour, too. Jean Chartrand recorded two boys billeted on a cousin’s farm asking to help with the milking. ‘One boy had put the pail under the cow’s udders and was holding it there while the other boy was the using the cow’s tail like a pump-handle. They were both very disgusted when there was no milk forthcoming.’64
Some made lifelong friends from the experience, other children found themselves abused and exploited, emotionally, physically and even sexually, and never recovered. The lesser shocks were not all one way. Eileen Stoddart recalled coming from a ‘very respectable home. Some of the girls ended up in tiny cottages, three to a single bed, with bedbugs which they had never seen before in their lives. I wasn’t allowed to wash my hair for four months since we had to bring the water up the hill from the village pump.’65 The overall impact of the whole experience, however, is summed up by one child’s memory of her family taking in three sisters. ‘We had never seen the like before and seriously learned how the other half lived.’66 Or as Rab Butler, the creator of the 1944 Education Act, was to put it: ‘It was realized with deepening awareness that the “two nations” still existed in England a century after Disraeli had used the phrase.’67
By the time Beveridge was appointed, the war had progressed through Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain to the Battle of the Atlantic as the convoys from America worked to save Britain from potential starvation and defeat. Food was rationed, with the Board of Trade, not the Labour Government of 1945, coining the phrase ‘fair shares for all’ as clothes rationing came in. And there had been the Blitz. By June 1941, the month Beveridge took on his task, more than two million homes had been damaged or destroyed by bombing, 60 per cent of them in London.68 Bombs respected neither class nor income. The Luftwaffe may have effected a slum clearance programme around Britain’s docks that it would take years of post-war housing programmes to equal, but they also took out homes in Mayfair and Belgravia and the comfortable suburbs of towns when targets were missed or bombs jettisoned on the way home. Not just cities and big towns up and down the land were hit, but eastern and southern coastal areas in ‘tip and run’ raids. Some 100,000 people had been killed or seriously injured and the Emergency Medical Service was already running an embryo national health service by providing free treatment to ‘casualties’ – a definition which included evacuees.
Civil defence brought social classes together as much as the armed forces. My mother, a slip of an eighteen-year-old who worked as an ambulance attendant when the bombs began to fall on Bristol, recalls giggling with her middle-class friends at the shy approaches of dustmen too old and too young for call-up when they first sat at opposite ends of the canteen waiting for the siren’s call. ‘We just didn’t know people like them, or they people like us,’ she recalls. ‘We had never heard such language. But when you saw the risks they’d take to pull people out of bombed buildings, there couldn’t any longer be any sense of them and us.’
Claims of social cohesion can be overdone. The prison population almost doubled to more than 21,000, much of the increase owing to sentences for looting. Anélitestill lived better than the rest and black markets flourished. Nicholas Davenport, the highly successful and socialist City journalist wrote in the spring of 1941: ‘Not a week passes without the Ministry of Food prosecuting hundreds of food offenders and the Board of Trade dozens of offenders against clothes rationing and quota laws.’69 But that same rationing was to change dramatically the nutritional status of the British people during the course of the war. Richard Titmuss, who told the official tale of the war’s social effects, recorded that ‘the families in that third of the population of Britain who in 1938 were chronically undernourished had their first adequate diet in 1940 and 1941 … [after which] the incidence of deficiency diseases, and notably infant mortality, dropped dramatically.’70 It became known early on that the Royal Family too had ration books and ate Spam, while the King posed for a publicity photograph as he joined a ‘Pig Club’ – just about anything that was left over