GREAT BRITAIN: War Babies

In the decade after World War I London’s East Enders had a pat apology for any thin-cheeked, jittery, neurotic child: “You’ll have to excuse her. She’s a war baby—was born the night a bomb fell two streets away.” Last week 120,000 young Londoners were growing up on the firing line of another and worse war.

For 80,000 of them, between the ages of 5 and 14, there were even worse dangers than falling bombs. London’s compulsory education system, had practically broken down. Though the London County Council sent truant officers after parents and children alike, the average daily school attendance was only 26,000. Half of London’s grade schools had been battered into rubble or commandeered for other uses. The 365 still open carried on with fewer hours of schooling, in crowded classrooms, their lessons punctuated by air-raid warnings.

Many parents kept their children away, some for safety’s sake. But teachers told of young boys put to work hawking firewood to bolster family earnings, of girls taught to beg money on street corners. Some children simply ran wild.

Most common parental excuse for hooky-playing was the need to secure shelter space. By 9 every morning swarms of ferret-eyed, wax-skinned youngsters lined up with piles of bedding outside the tube shelters, waiting to go underground to hold the family “pitch” till nightfall. Inside they played on the long platforms of the subway stations, kept an eye open for the chance to steal a better sleeping space. Said one experienced moppet: “School? I got to get the seats ain’t I? … Ma goes home to do her work and sends me back to keep her place. Sometimes the women try to rush you. But they can’t put it across me. I’ve got ’em beat.”

Problems of health mounted with the hours spent in the rank, fetid air underground. Few shelters had adequate heat, light or latrines; most were dank and unventilated at best. Children slept with their parents under blankets left underground for weeks on end. Milk for babies could not be heated if it was brought in. Nightly inspection trips were made by doctors and Red Cross nurses, but medical attention was still makeshift. One shelter doctor, who worked at a children’s hospital by day, was responsible for 5,000 men, women and children at night.

Efforts of Government and press had failed to speed the evacuation of London’s remaining children. The mass transplantation reached a peak in October, when 10,000 women & children registered in a single day, but then it stalled. In a final attempt, London’s big dailies wrote long, persuasive feature stories. The Ministry of Health fired a barrage of publicity. Leaflets explained “Why You Should Let Your School Children Go.” Its advertisements asked: “Mothers, Are Your Children Still in the Danger Areas?” Six hundred door-to-door canvassers drank thousands of cups of tea in thousands of kitchens, patiently explained reasons for evacuation. All told, about 40,000 more children were sent away, but the rest would not go. President of the Board of Education Herwald Ramsbotham threw up his hands, admitted: “Compulsory evacuation of school children is politically and socially impossible.”

To the children themselves none of this was as important as the prospect of a blacked-out Christmas. They planned to trim the bare steel girders of the big underground shelters and to set up Christmas trees, to have carols and mince pie. But the youngest moppets were afraid that London’s anti-aircraft crews might shoot at Santa Claus.