Blitz Kids (32 page)

It was easy to see why so many children had neglected their studies. War had engulfed their lives: the youngest schoolchildren had known nothing except war; the next group had experienced the disruption of bombing; and the teenagers realized their destiny was conscription.
With war raging, maths and geography hardly seemed to matter any more.

For those at public schools, the changes were not as drastic. There was no need to evacuate many of the schools since they were already in the countryside. Where boys boarded, the schools continued as before. The big difference was that many schools increased the level of military training given to the boys. Most gave training for boys from the age of fourteen to sixteen, followed by progress to the school’s own Home Guard unit. Cadets were given tests, earning ‘War Certificate A’ in recognition of the military skills they had learned. At Stowe School, boys aged fourteen were trained in ‘intelligence scouting’ and taught how to gather intelligence. The headmaster of Winchester College wrote to the War Office to request that training in schools be more closely integrated with official training regimes in order to prepare cadets to the standard the Army required. He noted the enthusiasm shown by the boys: ‘The rifle and uniform, to say nothing of the Bren gun etc, makes the 15 year old feel that he is a real soldier.’
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He also requested assistance in teaching ‘fieldcraft’ to his boys on the grounds that officers often found such skills difficult to pick up.

A potential source of fieldcraft training came from another youth organization. In 1941 the Boy Scout Association wrote to the War Office to offer its assistance in three areas: teaching fieldcraft to members of cadet units; by offering fully trained Boy Scouts to the War Office to help training in fieldcraft; and by encouraging Scouts to remain members of the Organisation even if they joined an Army Cadet unit. The concentration on moving cadet units away from the parade ground and on to more practical skills was noted by the leader of a school cadet unit: ‘the difficulty of holding a rifle is considerable for boys of this size’.
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In north London there was even a ‘Junior Commando Unit’ organized to train enthusiastic boys in commando skills, in anticipation of their conscription.

At Winchester College, Patrick Delaforce was active in the Officer Training Corps (OTC) where membership was compulsory for the pupils:

The vigorous training was encouraged by Patrick’s housemaster who had been gassed in the Great War and had no love for the ‘Boche’.

In 1940 Winchester College established a Home Guard unit for the senior boys:

It was an experience Patrick later found to be of immense benefit when he was called up into the Army. At Eton College the Home Guard unit paraded in school uniform, complete with top hat and Lee Enfield rifles. At Whitgift School in Croydon, the OTC developed a specialist intelligence training course for its senior pupils.

Apart from preparing the boys for war, Winchester College was also at the forefront of the movement to encourage youngsters to work on the land. Patrick Delaforce remembered the summer months in the fields of Hampshire: ‘The school ran several agricultural camps, living under canvas, to bring in the harvest. We were “stooking” corn, driving tractors, building haystacks, drinking cider and ogling the Land Girls – a truly marvellous time.’ As early as 1939 Winchester pupils took part in summer harvest camps, prompted in part by the recruitment of thousands of young men into the militia, leaving many farms short handed.

To cope with the restrictions on imports vast tracts of idle land were utilized for raising crops. By 1941, two million acres of grassland had been converted into arable land, including an additional 43,000 acres planted with wheat and 128,000 extra acres of potatoes. With farm labourers called up into the Army, and a fall in numbers of Irish
labourers coming to the UK, 1940 saw the need for 100,000 extra labourers in the countryside. With fewer than 12,000 girls serving in the Land Army, children were employed to meet the shortfall. By 1942 some 300,000 children were needed for agricultural duties.

During 1940 some 8,000 children – predominantly boys – took part in nearly 250 harvest camps. The children had to pay their own transport costs and contribute towards their keep, often meaning there was little left from their weekly pay. Schemes were also established in which children bombed out of their homes were sent to live in the countryside where they combined agricultural work with classroom education. In many ways, the schemes were like a legally sanctioned version of the selection process by which farmers chose the biggest evacuees to live with them in order to help out on the farm.

Children across the nation soon gained a taste of rural life. They rose early in the morning, had breakfast and then headed off to the fields. The hours were long and the work didn’t stop in bad weather. Many found themselves at the limit of their endurance after eight full hours of heavy work. They ate their meals in barns that were swarming with rats. The children ate basic food, often cooked outdoors on improvised stoves, and endured a lack of privacy in the camps. Most were housed in tented camps, usually of no more than thirty children, although some slept in huts and barns. In addition to volunteers organized via schools, Girl Guide troops also assisted on farms, offering their services to farmers whose labourers had been conscripted. The arrival of girls was a welcome sight. Some 4,000 of the older boys were given instruction in tractor driving, meaning regular tractor drivers were freed for other work. Elsewhere, children plucked poultry, caught rats and threshed corn. Schools used spare land to grow crops or raise pigs. Teachers took children into woods to collect nuts and berries; some even established beehives and produced their own honey.

To meet the demands of the farms, school holidays were shifted to allow the children to be available when they were most needed. In some areas local authorities granted extra holiday time to pupils who volunteered to assist with picking the potato harvest. The use of children on farms was also formalized for term time, allowing them to work a maximum of twenty half-day shifts in the course of a year. What had been an unofficial pre-war practice for village children became a
way of life for children from towns and cities. This scheme was believed to have resulted in around one million extra acres of potatoes being grown between 1941 and 1944.

Other youngsters volunteered to help in the countryside. In summer 1941 a group of twenty Liverpudlian Boy Scouts went to Scotland to do forestry work. They took saws and axes with them and imagined themselves as lumberjacks. When they arrived, the Forestry Commission explained their duties: they spent the entire two weeks weeding between rows of saplings. Though disappointed by the work, they were pleased to receive their ‘National Service’ badge.

These types of activities were an ideal tool for those in authority who believed that ‘boys will be boys’ and thought they needed to be given ‘some outlet for their love of adventure, gang loyalty and so on’.
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In East Suffolk a Youth Service Corps had been established in July 1940, an idea that soon spread to fifty other areas. The youths were engaged in tasks directly useful to war effort and were centred on work, but increased to include physical training, technical and general education, and social recreation. By 1941 the Home Office had recognized the success of the Youth Service Corps. It noted that the groups had reacted to the local situation and sprang from a natural desire of children, both boys and girls, to assist the war effort. In Suffolk between 64 and 77 per cent of the members were kids who had never previously joined youth organizations. In one area, a group was established deliberately to attract the local ‘tough guys’. The policy was a success, with youths being attracted to the lack of regimentation within the organization. The only problem with this success was that it actually bred a sense of respectability for the groups. Having attracted one group of the ‘rougher type of boy and girl’ who then became respectable, the scheme no longer attracted the next age group of ‘undisciplined youth of the streets’.
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In Suffolk the scheme was credited with cutting juvenile crime. The most widely perceived reason for the success of the scheme was that youths were attracted by the lack of outside control, preferring these freedoms to the regular supervision of most youth clubs. It was in keeping with the feeling that war had increased their freedom and they wanted to expand their horizons and enjoy their independence without the influence of adults. Despite the genuine success of the scheme, it
was believed such organizations would be difficult to replicate in urban areas. In particular, whilst in rural areas youths could be employed on manual tasks, in the big cities the main work available was on bombsites and the Home Office did not want to see younger boys working in demolition squads, for fear of the horrors they might encounter.

Nonetheless, children threw themselves into a myriad of tasks to support the war effort. Scrap collection and recycling were particularly appealing to boys who liked nothing better than scrabbling over waste ground and rifling through long forgotten hidey-holes. The task was sold to them with interesting facts. Government publicity highlighted how twenty-four rusty old keys would give enough metal to make a hand grenade, whilst forty-two would be enough to make a steel helmet. They were fascinated to hear how, if every household in the UK gave one key in to be recycled, it would be enough to build twelve tanks. Such details allowed youngsters to realize that they, in their own small way, were making a genuine contribution to the war effort. The only downside was that they were encouraged to hand over their own precious collections of shrapnel. The enthusiasm of some children was misplaced. One eager child arrived at a collection point with ‘scrap’ brass and lead he had found in a church. It turned out he had simply taken all the church vases.

Another favourite activity was taking part in savings campaigns. Many youth organizations arranged their own savings clubs. Organized and encouraged by the National Savings Committee, which had been established during the Great War to raise funds for the war effort, schools encouraged their pupils to pay into the savings schemes. In one case in northern England, a headmaster was asked how much his pupils could raise for a ‘War Weapons Week’ savings drive. He replied that they would raise £50. The organizer told him this was not very much and then asked the children what they could raise. The children fixed a target of £500. In the end they raised the staggering total of £5,000.

As the time approached for Patrick Delaforce to leave school and go into the Army, he made a conscious decision that he felt would help keep him alive. Winchester College had an established connection with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Already, Patrick had heard the sad
news of boys he knew from the years above him at school who had been killed in action whilst serving in the regiment: ‘By chance I made my odds of survival better. My loyalty was to the Royal Horse Artillery – dashing, dangerous and smart, but not as dangerous as the “Greenjackets” which had, for officers, a very high death rate.’

As regiments that considered themselves to be the finest in the British Army, the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and the Rifle Brigade actively recruited from some of the country’s top public schools. Officers of the regiments toured the schools, attempting to find boys willing to sign up to eventually become the next generation of subalterns. Ken Hardy, a former secondary school boy who served with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and was believed to be a suitable officer candidate, recalled: ‘they were a snobby lot. They made it quite clear I wasn’t going to be commissioned into them.’

In his final year at Charterhouse, John Bendit recalled a visit by officers of the regiments:

A pupil at Rugby School, Michael Howard was also inspired by the visit of a Rifle Brigade officer:

He cycled from school into Coventry to volunteer on his seventeenth birthday. During training, he noticed the result of the regiment’s careful selection policy: ‘All the others were people like yourself – who came from the same background: the finest public schools in the country. You felt you might end up marrying one of their sisters.’