Front page of Daily Sketch, Wednesday June 19 1940. Dad and other children from Southwark (Walworth). Dad is right in center. Caption reads - The six day evacuation from London has ended. These boys and girls have been sent by their parents to the West Country, but about 340,000 remain in Greater London......
Wouldn't it be lovely if others who are in this photo popped in to identify themselves? I hope they all had friendly [nice] people who took them in.
Not sure what town these were sent to. My mum and her sister were sent to Kingsbridge on the Devon coast. She's no longer around but she remembered the address and names of the people she stayed with, apparently an 'old' couple who were strict. Sister Betty stayed with a young couple and had an easy life - think mum had to do the chores.
A family who were bombed out of their home on Tyneside became near neighbours in Birmingham. Thanks to their accents we couldn't understand what they were saying, so we decided they must be German spies. Luckily for us, when the father learned why we would have nothing to do with his 2 lads his Geordie sense of humour made him fall about laughing, and we were soon his sons' best friends.
That front page appears in an old book called 'War Papers' by Ludovic Kennedy. My sister was looking through it with my dad and when this page came up he casually said, "oh, that's me". Next time I went to see her she had the actual paper which he had given her.
My mum was evacuated from Walworth in 1940 too. My grandfather had a fish and chip shop on the Albany Road. Mum went by train to Kingsbridge and then on to Bigbury where she stayed with a Miss Steer. Perhaps she was in the crowd in the photograph. She was must upset because she was made to have another bath on arrival. More than one bath in a week was unheard of! Mum only stayed a year as my grandmother, fearful of the bombs falling on Plymouth, went to get her. Mum visited Bigbury several times in subsequent years. In 1975 she even met a man called Harry whom she had been at school with , he remembered her saying, "Is that you Nancy?" We took her to see The Imperial War Museum's 60th anniversary evacuee exhibit. She was delighted to meet several fellow evacuees and be a live piece of history for young visitors. She died in November aged 85.
