Return to site

Children properly

Also it made the people in Britain more aware of what living conditions were like in the cities, foster parents were appalled at the state of the children they were looking after. This quote from source E shows how the foster parents were shocked at the children's behaviour. "The children went round the house urinating on the walls, they stank the place to high heaven". Evacuation could also be seen as a success as some of the children had a positive experience in the countryside, they saw it as an adventure. Source D shows evacuees at bath time, and although the baths are crowded, all the children are smiling and look as though they are enjoying themselves.

From my own knowledge I know that Eric Buchanan enjoyed his stay with his foster family, the quote "It was marvellous" shows how he thought it was wonderful being in the countryside. Another advantage of evacuation was that it freed women up so they could help with the war work. Evacuation can also be seen as a failure for the following reasons. The organisation wasn't very good as parents didn't know where their children were and the quote "we hadn't the slightest idea where we was going" from source C shows how the children didn't know themselves where they were going.

Many of the children had a bad experience during their evacuation. One example is Michael Cane. The quote "we came out of the cupboard and the woman hit us with a tennis racket" shows how some children were abused by their foster parents. Also some of the foster parents just did it for the money and didn't bother to look after the children properly. Another example of pore organisation was the fact that the children were split from their families, their siblings would often be on the other side of the countryside and the children may have never seen their families again.

Some of the foster parents had not been prepared for the state in which the evacuees were. They were shocked at the state they were in and didn't know how to cope. Two examples of this are source E and source F. The quote from source E "filthy habit of the children" and the quote from source F "common view of evacuees" show how the children were perceived as filthy, dirty and horrid children. As a conclusion to this, I don't think evacuation was a great success as they did not achieve a lot of what they wanted to achieve, a lot of the children had bad experiences, it was poorly organised and many of the foster parents didn't care about how they treated their children.