Memories from the Home Front Stibbington, Wansford, Sutton Water Newton & Thornhaugh 2 MEMORIES FROM THE HOME FRONT C O N T E N T S Preface 4 Acknowledgements 4 Operation Pied Piper and the evacuees 5 The first arrivals 6 A home from home 8 Drifting home 10 Off to school 12 Settling down 12 Teachers and lessons 14 Keep smiling through 16 Entertaining the children 16 The school presents 20 The Rector directs and inspires 21 Business as usual 23 “Put out that light!” 23 Challenges at home 23 On the move 25 Emergency planning 25 The war in the air 27 Rationing and recycling 28 Help with the harvest 29 Waste not, want not 30 Jobs for the girls 32 The last “all clear” 34 Victory in Europe 35 Meet the young people of 1939 — 45 36 Interviewees photo gallery 38 Cover photos: Stibbington Board School was opened in 1872. During the second World War most local children went to the school there until the age of 14. From 1939 when the evacuees arrived the school roll more than doubled. Following the closure of the school in 1982 the old school building was converted into an environmental education centre. Today children find out what life was like during the war by re-enacting a day in the life of an evacuee, including lessons in the re-created 1940s classroom. 3 PREFACE This booklet has been produced as part of a Heritage Lottery-funded “Memories from the Home Front” project. The project is led by Stibbington Centre’s Charitable Trust, working in partnership with Cambridgeshire Environmental Education Service (CEES) at Stibbington Centre, and Living Villages magazine. Wartime lifestyles have been very well researched and documented both nationally and locally. This project focuses on research using local newspapers from the war years, records from Stibbington School and material contributed by local people who agreed to being interviewed about their memories of the war on the Home Front. Brief quotes from the interviewees are interspersed through the booklet, and there is an opportunity to “meet the young people of 1939 to 45” on pages 36 to 39. This booklet comprises brief edited highlights from the research. Readers who are interested in finding out more should visit CEES’ website at www.cees.org.uk. Here full details may be found about all of the children who were evacuated to the Stibbington area from London, along with recently recorded audio clips of interviews with local people, and a more extensive record of local newspaper reports. This recent research, along with previously researched information, forms the basis of Stibbington Centre’s most popular educational day visit for school groups, the “Evacuation Day”. Our modern day evacuees take on the role of the real children who were evacuated from London to Stibbington in 1939 to 40. They find out about life in the countryside, they have lessons in the period classroom, there’s gas mask drill and an air raid, and at playtime there’s an Anderson Shelter to explore and sand bag filling and digging for victory. At the end of their first day in the countryside the evacuees prepare to meet the guardians who will look after them and take them into their homes in Stibbington for the duration of the war. Fortunately for today’s evacuees, they then return to their own homes! Acknowledgements The local newspapers that have been used in this research are Peterborough Advertiser (PA), Peterborough Standard (PS) and Stamford Mercury (SM). Thanks are due to Johnston Press for permission to reproduce news clips. Special thanks are due to retired Head Teacher and Stibbington Centre Trustee, Peter Kemp who spent many hours poring through six years of local newspaper articles on microfiche to assemble the full report which appears on the website. Other Trustees, volunteers and members of CEES staff have also made significant contributions to this project. Sincere thanks also go to the many local people in the Stibbington and Wansford area who have helped with the project, especially those who, 70 years on, very kindly offered to share their fascinating memories of the war years. Information about them appears on pages 36 to 39. 4 OPERATION PIED PIPER AND THE EVACUEES For the rural communities around Stibbington and Wansford in the Norman Cross District to the west of Peterborough, the reality of war in 1939 arrived in the form of hundreds of evacuees. From January 1939, as tensions grew in Europe, plans were formalised for the mass evacuation of children from major cities to less vulnerable locations such as the Peterborough area. “Operation Pied Piper” was meticulously planned. Peterborough was officially designated to receive 14,000 children, roughly equal to one for each inhabited home. The villages of Norman Cross district were to receive 1,600 of these. The Government required each council to compile a register of all houses and accommodation. 250 volunteers were needed to visit homes in the Peterborough area. The basis of this accommodation ‘census’ was that one room should be allowed for each person, sitting rooms included. Any surplus rooms were deemed available for use by an evacuee. Details of payments for providing billets were published: 10 shillings and 6 pence (52½p) for the first child, 8s 6d (42½p) thereafter. Mrs A Mellows (wife of Councillor Arthur Mellows) was charged with overseeing the census. She was soon able to report a very favourable response. Detailed statistics for each village were published, and for Stibbington, 188 rooms were available, 98 were offered and 5 were reserved for the family’s own private arrangements. The various district councils had time to discuss issues and resolve the many practical problems. For example, in the days when few homes had flush toilets, the collection of “night soil” was an issue, ‘Another result of the influx, an additional night-soil collection will be needed. Twenty five pounds a week to be allocated for an additional weekly collection. Contractor to be paid at £4 . 5s to provide a horse and a man. The Council to provide a cart.’ On the education front there was the problem of more children being evacuated than there were already in the city – split shifts in schools were anticipated, partly due to space restraints, partly to enable visiting schools to retain their identities. By mid August, Peterborough’s arrangements were complete. Mr W Hankins had been appointed as Reception Officer, and the stage was set. Evacuees were expected to come from London, probably 6,000 from Elementary schools and 850 from Secondary for the City alone. All arrivals at the railway station were to be met by Mr Hankins and taken to Bishop’s Road School (now Bishop Creighton Primary) – from there, rural children would be taken by bus to the appropriate district or rural council. 5 The first arrivals The first group of evacuees arrived in Stibbington on Friday September 1st 1939. They had arrived at Peterborough North Station at about 11am, most of the 900 teachers and children on board originating from the Tottenham area. The Peterborough Standard describes them as: ‘having nothing frail about them. They looked well fed and sturdy and as clean as one could expect children to be who had just finished a two hour train journey, packed, sometimes 16 to a compartment and that on a hot day. In dress they were up to the average of elementary school children, and the girls looked natty and bright’. The evacuees were clearly in good spirits, and arrangements for their dispersal ‘were better than we had a right to expect’. ‘The party marched off, and the boys started up some of the old marching songs, including “Tipperary”. They swung their respirators and bags of small belongings and their labels fluttered in the breeze. Their first march was to Bishop’s Road. Here they were loaded up on ‘buses. Asked “Have you got your fare ready?” a boy replied, “No, the King is paying the fare for us.” They all went amid cheers and laughter in the course of half-an-hour or so.’ [PS 8/9/39—see photo opposite] At the station, trains continued to arrive: at 2 o’clock, from Islington, when ‘again there was a hearty welcome’. On Saturday 2nd September, arrivals continued, starting at 11am with a ‘big load’ from Stoke Newington, two large schools with many secondary children. ‘These London boys were intensely interested in the country they were coming to, especially the really rural parts. They rather hoped they would not have to go to school, but they swallowed that and wanted to know “what else?”. We suggested that they would help with the harvest. That sounded good, especially the prospect of rabbits. One boy hoped there would be fishing. We assured him that the fish in the fen dykes simply came to the surface begging to be caught.’ At 11am on Sunday 3rd September, just as Hitler was throwing away the last chance of peace, the last train arrived. ‘This was a very heavy train, loaded in London in an immense rush and a large proportion were of the Jewish race. Faces, speech and the names on the luggage proclaimed it, even if the chief man of the Salvation Army in charge had not told us the same. “They were loaded in a panic,” he said, “and many have not yet had their names and addresses registered. It was a trying sight,” he adds,” when they left and said goodbye to their menfolk.” 6 When noon came, not one of the great party was left on the dock. Buses and private cars, streams of them, had taken them to their depots.