“A Very British Revolution” : The Evacuation of City Children to the English Countryside, 1939-1945

Résumé 0

Throughout the Second World War, the British home front was wracked by controversy over the mass evacuation of children from urban districts, often quite poor, and their dispersion among the generally better-off families that populated the British countryside. The debate set off by this unaccustomed encounter between the children of the urban poor and the rural middle and upper classes led a first generation of historians and policy-makers to speak of an‘Awakening of the nation’s conscience? which allowed the architects of the nascent welfare state to construct an entire social policy around the health and well-being of poor children. Fifty years later, a new generation of historians revealed another history, not so favourable, of the evacuation based on the memories of those who had been evacuated. Historians can hardly construct a coherent analysis of the impact of the evacuation from two such divergent narratives. The article proposes in conclusion that scholars broaden the analysis outward to examine the British experience in comparison with the various continental experiences of displaced children during the war; a comparison that might well reveal certain specificities of British social policy in the first half of the 20th century.