The evacuation of civilians in the United Kingdom, during the Second World War, was arranged by the government and private individuals. It was intended to protect vulnerable groups of people, mainly children and mothers of young children, from the dangers of aerial bombing.

The idea of evacuation in the event of war had been considered throughout the interwar period. In the late 1930s, the government had begun planning for a state-organised evacuation programme. The groups eligible for government evacuation were children under the age of fourteen, mothers of children under five and pregnant women. Evacuation was organised by the Ministry of Health in England and Wales and the Scottish Office. Evacuation took place throughout the Second World War and the numbers of evacuees varied depending on levels of concern about air raids. Most evacuees were billeted in private homes; some were placed in institutions. Many remembered evacuation favourably but some were mistreated. Evacuation in Northern Ireland was controlled by the Parliament of Northern Ireland, few evacuees participated in the government scheme there.

Other people privately evacuated themselves, often following air raids; mothers with children sometimes received government subsidies to help with this. Around 13,000 children were privately evacuated abroad to British dominions, the United States or the Republic of Ireland. A short lived public evacuation scheme to the British dominions removed more than 2,000 children in 1940 until it was cancelled after the sinking of SS City of Benares killed most of the evacuees on board. The media and government propaganda promoted evacuation. Evacuation has remained prominent in British collective memory and some historians have argued that it contributed to the development of the postwar welfare state.

Background Steve Humphries, a historian who has written about family life in the first half of the 20th century, estimated that up to 10 per cent of children in the UK were fully or partially raised by people other than their biological parents. Wealthy households often employed domestic servants to help care for their children and sent them to boarding schools. Impoverished parents or women who gave birth out of wedlock sometimes gave up custody of their children. Adoptions were often arranged informally, while adoption agencies rarely conducted any checks on potential parents. The UK admitted child refugees in the late 1930s, unaccompanied by their parents, 4,000 from war-torn Spain and 10,000 from the territories controlled by Nazi Germany. From the interwar period to the 1960s, charities, churches and local officials arranged for over 130,000 British children living in orphanages to immigrate to Commonwealth countries. This was seen as a way to give them a better quality of life, but many were used as cheap labour and abused in their new countries. Most children in the UK were cared for mainly by their mothers in the first half of the 20th century and most mothers were housewives. Charities and government agencies increasingly tried to assist impoverished mothers and improve the welfare of their children.

During the First World War, roughly 1,500 civilians were killed in German air raids on England and Scotland. Maggie Andrews, a cultural historian, argues that aerial bombing was a new form of warfare that frightened people and became part of collective memory in the areas affected. Contemporary newspapers described these attacks as "murder" directed against those who could not defend themselves. Many contemporaries believed that the death toll from similar raids in the next war would be large or that London would need to be evacuated. Aviation developed significantly during the interwar period. There was much public discussion of the dangers of aerial warfare, especially in the 1930s, when a new war was felt to be increasingly likely. For instance, Theodore Savage (1922) a dystopian novel by Cicely Hamilton depicts a war leading to societal collapse and a return to a tribal way of life. Government officials also feared that large numbers of bombs would quickly be dropped. The Committee of Imperial Defence calculated, in 1937, that 600,000 people could be killed and 1,200,000 injured within sixty days of such attacks. The government also expected that aerial bombing would lead to mass panic among civilians. A committee which investigated evacuation in 1931 commented that its responsibility was to prevent "a disorderly general flight" of civilians from London.

During the Spanish Civil War, German and Italian forces conducted a campaign of aerial bombing to assist the supporters of Francisco Franco. The newsreels about these events shown in British cinemas added to public anxiety about the prospect of air raids. An edition of the Picture Post from early 1939 included an image of bombed buildings in the centre of Barcelona with the caption; "Could this happen to Piccadilly Circus?" Brett Holman, a historian of aviation, comments that contemporaries tended to consider three strategies to respond to the threat posed by aerial bombing. One approach, favoured by the Royal Air Force and supporters of rearmament, was to resist the enemy by attacking its aircraft and bombing territories under its control. An alternative strategy was to minimise the damage bombing could cause through civil defence, evacuation and providing air raid shelters. Another option was for an international agreement to be reached to prohibit aerial bombing. There were some attempts to achieve this in the interwar period. For instance, Morgan Jones, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Caerphilly, lobbied the government about the issue in 1938. He argued that aerial bombing was an immoral attack on civilians and would worsen in the event of another World War but such efforts as his were unsuccessful.

Government scheme

Planning

The Air Raid Precaution (ARP) Committee was established in 1924. The ARP took the view that evacuation would need to be planned prior to the outbreak of war. By 1934, the Home Office believed that air raids would affect other cities as well as London. The government began to place more focus on preparing for air raids in the second half of the 1930s. An evacuation planning group led by Sir John Anderson was established within the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1938. Anderson's committee published a report in July of that year. The report argued that industries located in urban areas should be kept going in order to support the war effort, but that people who were not useful to those industries could be evacuated. Groups of schoolchildren would be evacuated in the care of their teachers. Evacuees would be accommodated in private homes and householders could be forced to offer accommodation. Evacuation would be paid for by the government but evacuees who could contribute financially would be expected to do so. Evacuation would be mostly voluntary with a few exceptions; for instance, people might be compelled to vacate an area for military reasons. These recommendations were accepted by the government.

The Ministry of Health decided that the groups who would be eligible for evacuation were: children under the age of fourteen, mothers of children under five, pregnant women and disabled people whose removal was considered practicable. Officials categorised localities as "danger", "neutral" and "reception" areas; evacuees would be removed from the danger areas and accommodated in the reception areas. The reasoning for these categorisations could be unclear and they sometimes caused controversy. For instance, a local official in Stone, Staffordshire felt that the decision to send evacuees to the area was unwise as it was in his view "fast becoming a vulnerable zone, as it is bounded on the north by potteries, aerodromes, aerodrome factories, on north-east by another aircraft factory, on the west by an ammunition depot, on the south by further aircraft factories, and also on the north-west in the centre of the district, it is proposed to erect a super power station". It had been assumed earlier in the 1930s that evacuation would not be necessary in Scotland, but in the later months of 1938 the Scottish Office began planning for evacuation to take place there. Scottish localities were grouped into the same three categories.

Anderson's committee requested a survey of housing in reception areas during January and February 1939, which was conducted by the Women's Voluntary Service (WVS). It was assumed that a residential building would be able to accommodate as many people as it had rooms, including rooms other than bedrooms. In Scotland, where there was a particular shortage of housing, the ratio for adults was the same as elsewhere but two to a room for children under fourteen. Homes that were considered to be of a poor quality (e.g. lacking tap-water) or too close to militarily important buildings were assumed to be unable to take evacuees. Some individuals were exempted due to their physical characteristics; for instance, elderly or sick people were sometimes considered unable to care for unaccompanied children. After these exclusions, the survey concluded that there was excess accommodation for 3.7 million people in reception areas of England and Wales; half a million more than the number the government expected to be evacuated. The survey did not make any judgements about whether the householders had personality traits necessary to look after children.

The German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 reinforced a feeling that war was inevitable. In May, parents who wanted their children evacuated were asked to register at their school; mothers of children under five were also eligible. Although a promotional campaign was conducted to convince families to participate, registration rates were relatively low. This surprised the government; which instructed local authorities to promote the scheme further in July, leading to an increase in registrations. The government decided that evacuation would be conducted shortly before the outbreak of war. It believed that starting too early would create a negative public reaction but that air raids would begin as soon as war began. Schools conducted practice attempts at evacuation during the summer of 1939, a boy in Portsmouth remembered: ... marching along the road in orderly fashion, singing 'Ten Green Bottles' and other songs, to board lines of buses which transported us to Clarence Pier at Southsea. There we dismounted and walked to the ferry terminal for the Isle of Wight ... No boats were waiting to receive us on the rehearsal day, so we did the whole thing in reverse and returned to school on a bus. Lessons on why we mustn't cry and how to wave goodbye clean hanky please were seriously taught to us. 'Think of it as going on holiday' must have been one of the first pieces of propaganda of the war ...

First wave