On 10 May, Chamberlain asked Clement Attlee and the Liberals whether they would be prepared to join a coalition government. Attlee’s polite but firm response was that the party’s National Executive Committee must be consulted before any decision was made; they confirmed that Labour would not serve with Chamberlain as prime minister. The jibe ‘If at first you don’t concede, fly, fly, fly again’ had been thrown at him for months, but now he could concede with honour. That evening he resigned. Lord Halifax was regarded as more reliable than Churchill, but he knew that he was not the man to lead the nation at such a time; Churchill immediately assembled a war cabinet of all parties and persuasions.
On the day of Chamberlain’s resignation, German forces invaded Belgium and France. Churchill promised the House ‘only blood, toil, tears and sweat’. These all soon poured out as the British Expeditionary Force – sent to France in September 1939 – fled to the coast. Britain was isolated and seemed likely to be crushed, but Halifax believed peace could be salvaged from the wreckage of honour. On 25 May, he proposed to the war cabinet that Italy be approached as mediator between Britain and Germany. Many in the cabinet had expressed admiration for Mussolini, Churchill among them; surely the Duce could be persuaded to soften the demands of the German enemy? In the following days, Churchill left the Italian option open, but at the last, seeing his war cabinet inclined to a dishonourable peace, he suddenly recalled both duty and panache. On 28 May, he appealed to the twentyfive members of the outer cabinet: ‘If this long island story of ours is to end,’ he declared, ‘let it end when each of us lies choking in his own blood on the ground.’
On 10 July 1940 came the first attacks from the air; the Germans had come at last. Bombers like the feared Junkers Ju 88 pounded the cities and ports of Britain, while the nimble Messerschmitt Bf 109 engaged the Hawker Hurricanes and Spitfires. Many commentators wondered how Britain could survive such an assault. Hundreds of thousands of civilians would die, the radar would prove useless, and the Royal Air Force was surely no match for the invincible Luftwaffe. Yet by the end of the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe, overstretched, outgunned and outfought, was forced to abandon its attacks on the country beyond the metropolis. Now it was the turn of London.
‘The spirit of the Blitz’ was at the time seen by foreigners as a miracle of the communal soul. From 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941, by night and day, the German air force sought to destroy London. Aside from the obvious target of the East End Docks, St Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, Lambeth Palace and the House of Commons were hit. Pubs also seemed to attract their due share of attention from the Luftwaffe. After one such attack, an observer remembered alcohol pouring into the street and ‘an old man with a cup, scooping it up out of the gutter’. In such straitened times, the sight must have evoked less disgust than rueful admiration.
The populace as a whole was not always responsive to government appeals. It is characteristic of Londoners to shrug off a summons to vigilance; in spite of the deaths and the burnt-out homes, the misery and the fear, they showed themselves unbowed. Dance halls still opened, pubs were busy and the children who were left still played. Since no one knew when bombs might strike, after a while there seemed little point in worrying about them. In time the city came to regard ‘blitzing’ as only another instance of bad weather. Nevertheless, while the Nazis made typically malevolent provision for the weak and helpless, Britain made a very different kind of provision for its own. Tales of what might happen under aerial attack had been circulating for years; at all costs, the defenceless must be moved to safety. ‘Operation Pied Piper’ was the fanciful name given to the mass evacuation of the young from Britain’s cities.
Plans for the evacuation of children had been drawn up long before the declaration of war; Baldwin himself had warned the nation about the horrors of aerial bombardment. The Spanish Civil War had shown how much destruction could be wreaked on cities from the air. The bombing could also break hearts – nothing destroys morale like the death of children. This was made plain in a public information leaflet thrust through every letter box in the country in July 1939:
We must see to it that the enemy does not secure his chief objectives – the creation of anything like panic, or the crippling dislocation of our civil life. One of the first measures we can take to prevent this is the removal of the children from the more dangerous areas. The scheme is entirely a voluntary one, but clearly the children will be much safer and happier away from the big cities where the dangers will be greatest.
For the purposes of evacuation, the country was divided into three regions: ‘danger zones’, ‘neutral areas’ and ‘reception areas’. Danger zones were areas of obvious importance to the nation and therefore to the enemy, including big cities, docks, factories and industrial complexes. Neutral areas comprised the smaller towns, larger villages and the suburbs, while reception areas were exclusively rural. Parents and children were enjoined to keep gas masks at the ready in small boxes hung about the children’s necks. In the event, no gas attacks came, but that they were expected at all is telling.
On 31 August 1939, the order came from the ministry of health: ‘Evacuate Forthwith’. War had not even been declared, but one evacuee, Irene Weller, remembered mothers standing on their doorsteps ‘crying as we walked to the station … I said to my brothers as we walked past our house, “Don’t look round whatever you do,” because I knew my mum would be there waving.’ They all looked straight ahead, weeping. It had been anticipated that 3.5 million children would need to be withdrawn in the three days scheduled for the evacuation; in the event the number was nearer to 1.9 million.
Many children turned up where they were not expected. Anglesey had been expecting 625 children and found itself host to 2,468. Cultural clashes were frequent – an English child billeted in rural Wales, for example, could find herself having to learn an alien tongue. As the social scientist Richard L. Titmuss observed: ‘Town and country met each other in critical mood.’
Yet practical inconveniences were inconsiderable beside the uneasy awareness that you were yourself considered an inconvenience. That this might be overlooked if you were personable cannot have proved very much of a solace. Susan Waters, a twenty-one-year-old teacher, arriving in Bedford from Walthamstow, remembered a scene ‘more akin to a cattle or slave market than anything else’. Some women would specify ‘two fair-haired, blue-eyed little girls’, while farmers might size up boys to see if they were strong enough to work. John Wills from Battersea noted that ‘if you were similar to Shirley Temple you were grabbed right away’. A woman appeared to be checking the evacuees’ hair and inspecting their mouths. A helper suddenly intervened to save the children from further indignity. ‘They might come from the East End,’ she said, ‘but they’re human beings. They’re children, not animals.’ And the evacuees could scarcely be expected to have the necessary clothing. Few had serviceable boots, for example. Indeed, Liverpool quickly became known as ‘plimsoll city’ – the children’s parents could afford nothing hardier, and plimsolls were worthless as protection against countryside mud.
‘Verminous heads’ were reported in Weymouth, and the response of some foster parents and ‘aunties’ was to shave them bald. A Lancashire chemist mentioned one particularly resourceful, or cash-strapped, woman who used sheep dip on her charges. Impetigo, a particularly virulent skin disease, was rampant among almost a quarter of the evacuees sent to Wrexham. There had been no time to medically examine them prior to departure. Yet in the universal cliché applied to every precarious situation, no one was to blame.