[peterchall]

Thanks Ted H.
I can’t see the point of a medical for schoolchildren who were obviously fit enough to attend school, but the article (reproduced in today’s Telegraph), definitely states “Registration and medical inspection are {required} for schoolchildren, as in the early days of the war. Evacuated children who {returned home} must …..pass another medical” (my bolding).

Could the paper have mis-reported, and a medical was required to distinguish the ‘infirm’?

John38, could your evacuation from Wales to Kent have been a private arrangement by your parents?

[John38]

 As I mentioned on countless occasions, my parents evacuated me from Wales to Kent in the mid 1940s. The hypothesis was based on sound data, but their application was abysmal 

[Ted H]

I was evacuated, together with most of Chatham Tech., from the Medway Towns to Faversham in 1939, we certainly did NOT have a medical. Came home at the end of '39 when the schools re-opend in the Medway Towns. We shared what was then the Arts College at Rochester (by the museum). Attendance was "as and when" they could find someone to teach us - a lot of the younger men had been drafted into the armed forces. Later they got some retired teachers to take on the job and full time schooling restarted.

[peterchall]

Adapted from the Daily Telegraph of Friday 7th July 1944:

It ws announced by Mr Churchill in the House of Commons yesterday that the evacuation from London of vulnerable people has begun. Notices were served to schools on Saturday (1st July) and the first parties began leaving on Monday (3rd July).

The Ministry of Health announced yesterday that the scheme was being extended to those other areas most vulnerable to attack (Kent, Surrey, Sussex, etc)

As well as schoolchildren the scheme applies to children under five and their mothers, expectant mothers, and the aged and infirm. The facilities available are being made known through information centres, schools and official posters. Most of the evacuees are going to the North Midlands and the North, with extra trains being run where necessary.

Registration and a medical examination are required for schoolchildren, as in the early days of the war, and evacuated children who have seeped back home since then must re-register and pass another medical.

Facilities for mothers and children in London who wish to go to friends or relatives in safer areas have been available since the start of the flying-bomb attacks, and facilites are now being extended to the new areas.

I was never evacuated, so cannot comment from first hand experience, but this is the first I remember of hearing of the need for a medical. My wife, who was evacuated in 1940, can’t remember having one. Has anyone any further details? - PC

[peterchall]

So it was 70 years ago the night before last that I was kept awake all night by that first major V1 attack, as this article shows:


It seems that the common name ‘Doodle-bug’ had not then been coined, but interestingly 5 different names for the V1 was used in one article:
‘Raiders’, implying that they made an attack then went home: ‘Pilotless Planes’ and ‘Robot Planes’, implying that they could manoeuvre and carried a weapon rather than being the weapon: ‘Flying Bomb’, the description of what it actually was. The name ‘Bumble Bomb’ is new to me and I don’t recall seeing or hearing of it before.

Also interesting is the statement that it was believed that ‘much larger types', were in production. I remember an Aircraft Identification Poster produced soon after their advent showing several different types – I’m not sure about sizes, but the main difference seemed to be in their wing shape, varying from the actual parallel one with square-cut tips, to tapered ones, and even a crescent shaped one. In reality, of course, there was only one V! – the Fieseler Fi103.

[Barry 5X]

Doodlebugs V1s and V2s.

The following information I noted on the internet whilst carrying out a non-related search.

At a presentation for the Wadhurst History Society, Bob Ogley stated that:

The first doodlebug landed at Swanscombe in Kent, on open farmland in the early morning of June 13th 1944.

The last V2 fell in Orpington on March 27th 1945 and the last V1 landed at Iwade in Kent on March 29th of that year.

http://www.wadhurst.info/whs/newsletters/whs10/page3.htm

“Doodlebugs and Rockets” a book by Bob Ogley.

Note 1: Wadhurst is a market town in East Sussex, England.
Note 2: Reply 47 refers to the V1 event at Swanscombe on 13 June 1944

[peterchall]

For my part I am pleased when a reply is posted in a thread I'm interested in - it could mean the start of another line of discussion. Please share with us any particular points of interest.

[YonderYomper]

Well, thank you,

...It's just that it feels like walking into someone else's conversation, but glad you like them.

Been thumbing through (gently- very fragile now), real detail on growing things on shoestring budget and wartime conditions.

Re-prints are available on Amazon I see.

[peterchall]

Sorry for intruding on your thread,.....

Why? Anything relevant is not intrusion and is welcome.
Thanks for the post

[YonderYomper]

Sorry for intruding on your thread, but found these in the shed.  They were my grandad's from the 1943, and the second from 44, and part of the "Dig for Victory" campaign, and, as he told it, everyone in his neighbourhood had them... thought they might be of interest to you:

[peterchall]

I understood enough to know that some obscure MP named Churchill had been speaking in Parliament about the dangers of Nazism, and that there had been fights in Chatham High Street between the Fascist and Socialist Parties, and that Socialist = good, and Fascist = bad. I knew about the Spanish Civil War and had seen enough newsreels to know that war was something to be avoided. We had heard of concentration camps but thought they were merely places were they kept people who disagreed with the government. We knew of the Hitler Youth and believed that German kids were encouraged to report on their parents' political views. We knew about the Jewish refugees (as I've said earlier, one came to work in Chatham Gun Wharf) and had heard of 'Kristalnacht' in Germany, when Jewish businesses were wrecked. Yep, Fascism/Nazism was bad but, apart from a few extremists led by Sir Oswald Moseley, it was nothing to do with us.

That was the post in full from which I based my previous entry, and I think we are both saying the same thing. The point I was making is that we as a nation did as much, if not more, than any other to recognise the situation and give such help as we could without actually going to war, which we did in the end, of course. I don’t know how many other nations did so, but we also gave refuge to victims of the Spanish Civil War.

We were probably in the position of the guy that knows the man next door is knocking his kids about but, because he is bigger, not much can be done about it. There was no ‘police’ (United Nations) to report it to.

[seafordpete]

The Time regulary reported from 1933 on of various politicos being imprisoned and then committing suicide or dying by unknown causes and the ashes being returned to the families.. In his 1936 visit Christopher Sidgwick asked outright if executions took place and was told "not now, but in the early days torture and death happened".  By 1936 The Times is talking of trains from Austria carrying 700 Jews at a time to Dachau. Probably a number of causes why little concern - it was only 15 years after WW1 an feelings were that a German was a german even if a Communist or Jew. It's overseas and nothing to do with us. The class system being what it was the ordinary man only had what the papers & BBC radio chose to tell him (if he was interested) and it wasn't his place to query it

[peterchall]

We certainly knew of the existence of concentration camps – which at that time were not ‘death camps’ - and of the pre-war persecution of the Jews, and gave refuge to thousands of them. It was one of the factors in the decision to go to war, and ignored by everyone else except the UK (and Commonwealth) and France.

In 1943 I was only 13 so didn’t really have adult interests and that’s probably why I can’t remember the general reaction to that report, which was about a vast escalation from general persecution to genocide. However, I think there was later criticism that, while there was little of a practical nature we could do, we could have made more of it from an international propaganda point of view.

The Duke of Windsor (ex Edward VIII) was accused of having Nazi sympathies and, whether true or not, he was definitely kept out of the way during the war, by being made Governor of the Bahamas.

[seafordpete]

Chose to ignore is probably more accurate. Searching "Dachau" in The Times for 1933 onwards gives numerous references to Jews being ill treated and sent there, references to Juliuis Striecher as "Jew Baiter" etc
I have read elsewhere that Edward V111 had no particular liking of or sympathy for the Jews
At least 2 Britons wrote of visits there in 1933 &36 and of the conditions. By 1934 there were 65 camps holding some 45k prisoners under "protective custody"
A Catholic Priest Fr Muhler was arrested Nov 1933 for spreading stories about atrocities and conditions in Dachau, Imprisoned there by the following November he was reported dead , killed during "clean up operation" After the Battle 27 has an article about Dachau and its history.

[peterchall]

Today being Holocaust Memorial Day has set me thinking of what we knew of such things during the war.
After D-Day we got news of French villages being destroyed by the SS, and the inhabitants slaughtered, because the French resistance had been active in the area. Then we heard of conditions in the occupied countries generally, and the ultimate horror was the discovery of the real conditions in the concentration camps, as seen on TV in today's news. We now finally had confirmation that all we had been through over the past six years had been for a very good reason.

An article in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ of 25 June 1942 gave details of a report that had just been smuggled out of Poland to the Polish National Council in London. It gave details for the first time of the systematic extermination of Jews that had begun in November 1941, with figures and locations, and gruesome details.

So it seems that we did have some idea of what was happening, well before the war ended, although I don’t remember it, nor what the national reaction was.