On 1 September 1939, children at Myrdle School in Stepney assembled at five in the morning with suitcases and gas-mask boxes while volunteer marshals kept the line moving. Two days later Britain declared war on Germany. The children had already learned that a school could become a departure point and that a family might have to make decisions before it knew what the danger would look like.

Leaving home, returning home

Operation Pied Piper sent schoolchildren, teachers, some mothers with young children and other priority groups from industrial and urban districts to “reception areas” in the countryside. Government planners had expected about 3.5 million people to use the official scheme. About 1.5 million did, according to the UK National Archives, and the figures exclude families who made their own arrangements with relatives. Children usually traveled with their schools, then were billeted with strangers who were paid a small allowance. Some found kindness and a new world of farms and fields; others met neglect, exploitation or open hostility, and many hosts were shocked by the poverty of the city children who arrived on their doorsteps.

When the expected bombing did not come in the “Phoney War” of 1939–40, most evacuees drifted home. Kitty Baxter and her two older sisters left Camberwell just before the declaration of war and came back when the air attacks did not materialize. The Blitz sent Kitty away again, and she returned after her baby brother died following an illness. A third evacuation took her to Blackpool. Her oral history, used in an Imperial War Museums learning resource, follows one child through three decisions as circumstances changed. Schools in the reception areas taught local and evacuated pupils in shifts, borrowed village halls and moved lessons outdoors.

Feeding a household on the ration

Food rationing began on 8 January 1940 with bacon or ham, butter and sugar. Every person registered with a particular shop for rationed goods, and a coupon still had to be accompanied by payment. Meat was rationed by price from March 1940, so that a family could choose between cheaper cuts in larger quantity or less of a better one. Tea, margarine, cooking fats, cheese and preserves followed. From December 1941 a separate points scheme let shoppers spend a monthly allowance of points on tinned goods, dried fruit, cereals and biscuits, choosing among whatever the shop had. Bread and potatoes were never rationed during the war.

The ration was not a fixed diet. Allowances rose and fell with shipping losses and supplies, and special groups received more: underground miners, agricultural workers and vegetarians could get 8 ounces of cheese a week instead of 3 in 1941, and children and expectant mothers received priority milk, orange juice and cod liver oil. The Ministry of Food circulated recipes for carrots, potatoes and dried egg, and its “Dig for Victory” campaign turned lawns, parks and railway embankments into allotments. A garden plot and the time to work it were advantages that the posters easily left out. British Restaurants, communal canteens run by local councils, served cheap meals off the ration.

Clothing was rationed from June 1941. In the first year an adult received 66 coupons, and every garment, from a coat to a pair of stockings, carried a coupon price as well as a cash price. The government’s Utility scheme standardized cheaper clothing and furniture, and the “Make Do and Mend” campaign taught families to repair, alter and remake. Soap was rationed from February 1942. Rationing grew stricter after the war, not looser. Bread, never rationed in wartime, was rationed from 21 July 1946 to 1948, and bacon fell to 2 ounces a week in January 1947. Sweets came off the ration in 1953 and food rationing ended in July 1954.

Living where the bombs fell

The Blitz began on 7 September 1940, when the Luftwaffe shifted from attacking airfields during the Battle of Britain to bombing London. For 57 consecutive nights the capital was raided, and the campaign widened to industrial cities and ports until May 1941. More than 40,000 civilians were killed. On the night of 14–15 November 1940 a single raid on Coventry killed 568 people and flattened almost a third of the city; the engineering and armaments factories that made it a target stood among streets of terraced houses. Liverpool, Britain’s main Atlantic port, suffered its worst week in early May 1941. Over the whole war, Richard Overy counts 60,595 British civilian deaths from bombing, including the V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets of 1944–45.

The blackout changed every evening. Windows were covered, streetlights darkened, and car headlamps masked, and road deaths rose sharply in the first months of the war. Households sheltered where they could. More than two million families received Anderson shelters, curved steel huts dug into back gardens; the Morrison shelter, a steel table cage for indoor use, followed in 1941. People without gardens used public brick shelters, trench shelters, church crypts and railway arches. Tens of thousands went down into the London Underground, which the government at first discouraged and then organized with bunks, first aid and refreshment trains.

No shelter was entirely safe. On 3 March 1943 a crush at the entrance to Bethnal Green Underground station killed 173 people as a crowd pressed down the stairs during an air-raid alert. Official records allow readers to reconstruct the approach to the station, the crowd and the investigation, whose findings were kept quiet during the war. Read beside the better-known photographs of Tube platforms lined with bedding and coats, the Bethnal Green files show that the same shelter could protect thousands on one night and kill on another.

Civil defense was a mass civilian organization. Air raid wardens, firewatchers, the Auxiliary Fire Service, rescue squads and first-aid posts were staffed by paid and volunteer workers, many of them women and older men. The Women’s Voluntary Service ran canteens and rest centers for the bombed-out. The Local Defence Volunteers, raised in May 1940 and soon renamed the Home Guard, gave men too old or too young for the forces, or in reserved occupations, a part-time military role; by 1943 Home Guard detachments were also manning antiaircraft guns. The Royal Observer Corps watched the skies from posts along the coast.

Women’s war work and the factory town

Britain mobilized women further than the other Western Allies. From early 1941 women aged 18 to 60 had to register for war work, and in December 1941 Britain began conscripting unmarried women aged 20 to 30, who could choose between the auxiliary services (the ATS, WAAF and WRNS), civil defense and industry. Women with children under 14 could not be compelled. “Immobile” women, such as those with husbands at home, were directed into local war work. By 1944, according to the Imperial War Museums, a third of the civilian population was in war work, including more than seven million women.

Women worked on machine tools and aircraft assembly, drove buses and ambulances, and staffed farms in the Women’s Land Army, whose members plowed, harvested, thatched and caught rats. Aircraft production depended on “shadow factories” built by the government and run by motor firms. At Castle Bromwich near Birmingham, a plant run first by the Nuffield organization and then by Vickers built 11,939 Spitfires by 1945, according to the RAF Museum. Equal pay remained out of reach: women in engineering usually earned well below men’s rates, and nurseries for working mothers were never sufficient.

In Barrow-in-Furness, housewife Nella Last recorded what mobilization felt like inside a household. Her younger son went into the army, and she threw herself into the Women’s Voluntary Service, running a canteen and a shop for the Red Cross. Her diaries for Mass Observation follow both the pride and the fatigue of that work, and her own sense that the war had shown her capacities her family had never recognized. Government records can tell us how many aircraft left a plant; Last’s diary tells us what one woman fitted around the demands of home.

Strangers in the village

Britain was also a host country. Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Free French and Dutch forces were based there, and Canadian troops spent years in southern England before Dieppe and Normandy. From 1942 American servicemen arrived in large numbers, building airfields for the Eighth Air Force and preparing for D-Day. They brought higher pay, nylons, chewing gum and dances, and also the U.S. Army’s segregation. Black GIs, used largely in labor and supply units, often found British civilians more welcoming than their own officers, and clashes between white American soldiers and Black troops in British towns troubled both governments.

The arrival of so many strangers changed courtship and family life. Tens of thousands of British women married American, Canadian and other Allied servicemen; many of them traveled across the Atlantic as war brides after 1945. Absence also took its toll. Men in the forces could be away for years, and divorce petitions rose sharply after the war, as couples who had married in haste or spent years apart found they could not resume their lives together.

What unity sounded like

The Crown Film Unit’s Listen to Britain (1942), by Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister, brings factory work, music and public life into a single soundscape: a dance hall in Blackpool, a lunchtime concert by the pianist Myra Hess at the National Gallery, a canteen concert for factory workers and a production line working to music from the radio. It uses no narrator to tell the viewer what to feel. It records real places and performances, and its editing puts them in the service of a national argument about a shared culture worth defending. The BBC’s wartime programs, from the news to Music While You Work and It’s That Man Again, gave the same households a common daily rhythm.

Disagreement left other records. Conscientious objectors, religious and secular, could apply to tribunals, which granted unconditional exemption, set conditions such as farm or hospital work, or refused; refusal could lead to prison for those who would not accept call-up. Strikes did not stop: coal miners walked out repeatedly, notably in 1944. Tribunal files, strike reports and Home Intelligence summaries are valuable precisely because they record what the film had little reason to show.

Planning the peace

Wartime Britain also planned a different country. In December 1942 Sir William Beveridge’s report on social insurance proposed a national system of social insurance aimed at what he called the five giants of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. R. A. Butler’s Education Act of 1944 provided free secondary education for all pupils in England and Wales, and Scotland followed with its own act in 1945. In the middle of a war that had scattered children and disrupted lessons, Parliament was planning what those classrooms should offer afterward. The 1945 general election, held after victory in Europe, returned a Labour government that created the National Health Service in 1948.

The previous chapter follows Canada, whose servicemen filled British camps; the next chapter turns to Germany, where the bombers that struck London were based and where, from 1942, British bombers struck back on a far larger scale.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

Shelters, raids and canteens

Gallery · 6 photographs · select to enlarge

Evacuees, land girls and the Home Guard

Sources and further reading

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