Belmont’s Evacuee Children

Geor

ge S

kinne

r

1

Belmont’s Evacuee Children

The story of how Belmont Villagers and their

Primary School gave a home to war-time

Evacuee Children.

George Skinner

November 2019

2

Contents

Introduction 3

1. The National Evacuation Programme 5

2. Belmont’s Evacuee Children 9

3. School must go on 29

4. Stories from the War Years 33

5. Belmont Primary School Remembers 51

6. Acknowledgements & Further Information 55

Notes & References 57 (Linked to “footnote” numbers in the main text)

3

Introduction

On the 25th August 1939, the small elementary school1 in the Lancashire

village of Belmont closed for its usual late summer works holidays. The

Headteacher, Mr Vincent Hill, wrote up the school Log Book2 before

leaving for home, noting the closure and adding on the next line, “Sept

11 Re-open”. But during the holiday Britain declared war on Germany

and on his return to school Mr Hill had to amend the ‘re-open’ entry by

adding, “- not done because war broke out on Sunday September 3rd at

11 o’clock”. The cause of what turned out to be a three-day delay in

starting the new term is given simply as “for War Emergency,” popular

code for the mass evacuation of children from British cities. What it

meant in practice for the village was the arrival of 80 new children, more

than doubling the number of pupils already in its tiny school.

The events which followed this unusual start to the new school year may

be traced from two official Belmont Primary School record books. The

school Admissions Register, which lists all arrivals and departures of

children, reveals the unusual comings and goings of many children,

mainly from Salford and Manchester, over the next five years. The

School Log Book, a diary of significant events in the life of the school

kept by the Headteacher (Mr Vincent Hill in 1939 and Mr Edward

Hodson from October 1943), provides clues as to what took place as the

school faced the changing circumstances brought about by the war.

Entries are spasmodic and frustratingly short on detail but the main

pattern can be deduced.

Our story draws mainly on these official records but is supplemented with

information from external reports, public information sheets, records of

Temple School in North Manchester (from which many of the evacuee

children came), contemporary newspapers and stories recounted by

villagers and evacuees. It describes the ambitious national campaign to

evacuate children from vulnerable cities to the relative safety of the

countryside and Belmont School’s part in this project, and provides a

picture of how the war impacted on the day-to-day running of the school.

Finally, it records how in 2018, Belmont Primary School took steps to

learn more about these events and to create a lasting memorial for future

generations of pupils and the wider village community.

4

5

1

The National Evacuation Programme

Long before Britain’s declaration of war against Germany in September

1939, the Government had been working on plans to evacuate children and

vulnerable adults from cities and towns thought to be at risk from enemy

bombing attacks. In World War I, bombing raids on Britain had resulted in

1,400 civilian deaths and since the 1920s, precautions against air raids had

been foremost in the defence plans for the country.1 The tactic of bombing

civilians used in the Spanish Civil War, especially the infamous attack on

Guernica in 1937, convinced the British government that evacuation would

be necessary should hostilities with Germany come to a head. During the

year preceding the declaration of war, the Government surveyed available

housing in safe areas and appointed billeting officers to administer an

ambitious programme to house the evacuees.2

The evacuation project was code-named Operation Pied Piper, perhaps an

unfortunate choice bearing in mind that in the original story the piper leads

the children of Hamelin away from the town, never to return! The exodus

of children began just before the declaration of war on 3rd September 1939.

In three days, 1,473,000 people from the cities of Britain were transferred,

often with teachers and escorts, to safer areas, mainly in the countryside.

In Manchester it had been estimated that there were 190,000 children and

priority adults that might be at risk from air raids.3 By April 1939, meetings

had already taken place between teachers and parents resulting in 71,000

schoolchildren, 58,000 pre-school children and 4,000 expectant mothers in

the area being registered to be evacuated should the need arise.

Manchester schools were sent regular memos by the Education Office

describing the steps they should take to make evacuation as successful as

possible. With limited space available on trains and buses the amount of

luggage children could take was a central issue and detailed instructions

about what could be taken were sent to parents. Rehearsals for evacuation

were ordered during the summer holidays. Teachers who might be involved

had been required to give details of their holiday address to their

Headteacher and on Wednesday 23rd of August they received telegrams

informing them that they must return to Manchester.4

6

On August 31st 1939, evacuation was officially announced by the Ministry

for Health. The Telegraph for 2nd September reported that over 100 trains

had left Manchester and Salford with 120,000 schoolchildren to be

evacuated to areas in Lancashire, Cheshire and Derbyshire. Special

ambulance trains took children on stretchers from Manchester hospitals to

the countryside. Evacuated schools were closed and many of their buildings

allocated for other war-related uses.

Turton Urban District Belmont was part of Turton Urban District which was confirmed as a

reception area and given an allocation of 1,600 women and children to billet.

The process was directed from County Office in Preston but overseen

locally by John William Rostron, a well-known businessman and politician

who was Chairman of Turton Urban District Council. Although parents in

vulnerable areas were not obliged to evacuate their children, designated safe

areas were required to provide billets for evacuees and fines could be

imposed on any household which refused.5 In 1938, Billeting Officers were

formally appointed and, having been empowered to require householders to

provide information about their homes, went out to survey the Turton

District. Belmont Village returned a total of 829 “habitable rooms”. The

Billeting Officer was asked to endeavour to find accommodation with

households who were willing6, but “in the event of failure to provide in this way for those under his charge should use the compulsory powers conferred

upon him, leaving the question of appeal to be dealt with subsequently.”

The initial evacuation plan was to move pupils in school groups

accompanied, where possible, by their teachers. Following this, mothers

with under five-year-olds would be transported. In addition to this carefully

planned project, the Government provided support for other groups and

individuals who made private arrangements to evacuate children to safe

places, resulting in the movement of many thousands more children at

various times during the war.

In 1939 the Government had expected widespread bombing of towns,

especially London, the Midlands and Manchester. In the event, no bombs

fell on England until the summer of 1940 and not until September, a whole

year into the war, did the systematic bombing of London begin. As a result

of this “phoney war” many parents decided to bring their evacuated children

home and schools in evacuated areas began to re-open. But when the war

7

escalated and the threat of bombing increased in late 1940, many children

were returned and were joined by new, private evacuees. This privately

organised exodus was mainly composed of individuals and family groups

who left vulnerable areas, often moving into the same districts used for the

initial evacuation. Over the whole period of the war, about thirty such

private evacuees registered at Belmont School in addition to school groups.7

Accounts by evacuees of how well the national scheme worked and what

emotional reaction it evoked reveal a complex picture. The following story

from the BBC’s People’s War Project8, was told by someone who, as a

child, was moved from Manchester to nearby Tockholes.

I was 11 years old when the war started. I had been at the

Crumpsall Lane Junior School in Manchester but had just started

at Elementary school. We had only been there three days when the

war began. We were given gas masks and labels and loaded onto

double decker buses outside the school and driven to the station.

No one knew where we were going but my dad worked for the

railway and he found out that we were going to Darwen. We all

landed up at St George's Hall in Blackburn and then everyone from

our school was put on another bus and taken out to the village of

Tockholes where we were delivered to the schoolroom. I sat there

with three of my friends - we were determined that we were going

to stick together.

We were told we would be sent to stay with Mrs Whittle. Her house

turned out to be a little cottage and we had to walk through three

fields to get there. There was no bed for us when we got there but

she found us some mattresses and we slept in her front room.

We used to go the village school - it was very small compared with

what we were used to - there was only one classroom. We collected

eggs every morning and went to bed early. There was no bath - but

we managed.

Mum found out where we were and all the mums came to see us.

Mine said, "You're not stopping here. You'll go up to Newcastle to

your Grandma's." So I was only there for six or eight weeks.

8

Evacuees Remembered Many other accounts of evacuee experiences have been shared during the

years since the war, and much research has been conducted to try to

understand the impact of the evacuee programme on the country’s children and families. The BBC’s WW2 People's War Project, which ran from June

2003 to January 2006, published more than

fourteen thousand such stories.

Wartime evacuation appears as a motif in many

children’s story books and films, including C.S.

Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and

Michelle Magorian’s Good-night Mr Tom. The

labels which were given to evacuee children to

wear were Michael Bond’s inspiration for

Paddington Bear’s name tag which he was wearing

when discovered lost on Paddington Station.9

In 1996 the British Evacuees Association10 was

formed to make the story of the great evacuation

better known. It recruited high profile ex-evacuees, including Michael

Aspel, Bruce Forsyth and Roger Moore as its Patrons. A memorial to all

those involved in the evacuation process, including train drivers, teachers,

nurses, billeting officers, children and parents, designed by sculptor Maurice

Blik, was unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire on

25th July 2017.

9

2

Belmont’s Evacuee Children

The 1939 Evacuation When war was declared in 1939, Belmont School was on holiday. The re-

opening of the school for the autumn term was delayed. No explicit reason

is given for this but it seems likely that the building was being used to settle

in evacuee children. The Log Book entry for September 14th, 1939 reads,

“School reopened after being closed for War Emergency. Jewish section of

the 80 evacuated children did not turn up because of the Jewish New Year,

which is a holiday. Misses Bolton, Downes and Isaacs are the 3 teachers,

who came with the children.”

The group of 80 evacuated children was from Temple Infant School in

Cheetham, Manchester. Temple School was housed in a large two-storey

Victorian building, the Infants on the ground floor and the Juniors above - a

total of 275 children. It is not known what proportion of the group was

Jewish but a 2012 report about the history of Jews in Bolton1 discusses those

who came as evacuees to the

town and observes that Temple

School was “mainly Jewish and

had some Jewish teachers”. In

1939, the movable New Year

festival of Rosh Hashanah was

celebrated from the 13th to the

15th September and children

from Jewish homes had clearly

been kept off school to celebrate.

On Monday 18th September the

Headteacher reports, “All Jewish

children turned in.”

Miss Elsie Downes was one of three Temple School teachers chosen to

accompany the pupils to Belmont. Elsie was only twenty-one years old at

the time with just one year’s experience of teaching, having completed her

two-year teaching certificate training at Bingley College in 1938. She

remained with the children in the village, her 1939 National Register2 entry

indicating that she was billeted at Ryecroft House with the Musgrove family.

Temple School before the war

10

Many years later, when married but still living in Manchester as Mrs

Mullineux, Elsie told the story of how they travelled from her school to

Belmont.3

Well, we all piled on to the buses ... not as many little ones, not whole

classes of little ones, but the bigger ones from the school above were

coming too. And there were two double-deck buses and they went

down to the back of Victoria Station and we went on at platform 14.

So we never went through the big front of the station we went

virtually on to the platform we were leaving from at the back of

Victoria Station. And when we went on to the platform there was a

train on each platform edge (island platforms) and they walked

along with their teacher and went into the compartments as they

filled up.

The organisation was really outstandingly smooth and the station

staff were very helpful both for the teachers and for the children.

Sort of where you go - here – six into there, six into there with the

teacher, six into there. The organisation was quite amazing. On an

adjacent platform was another train carrying pregnant women, and

women with very young children: And all of a sudden this lady, a

very big fat lady she was, she puts her hand out of the window waving

a little baby’s potty and shouted to the guard ‘And what the blazes do you think I’m going to do with this?’ We had no access to toilets

on our compartment trains.

Eventually the train set off and much to everyone’s surprise, they hardly seemed to have got underway when it stopped at Bromley

Cross Station near Bolton from where they were transferred by bus

to their ‘new temporary homes’ in the village of Belmont.

Miss Cissie Isaacs, also mentioned in Belmont School’s Log Book account,

was a much more experienced teacher who had been working at Temple

School for 24 years. The third teacher who arrived with the evacuees was

Miss Mary Bolton. She had learnt to teach as a pupil teacher in North

Manchester and had spent 12 years working in Manchester Jews’ School

before joining Temple School in 1937. As the war continued she played an

important link role between the school and their evacuee pupils, moving

11

between Manchester and the various reception areas to which evacuee

children were sent at different stages of the war. Manchester Authority had

agreed a scheme which allowed teachers to work alternately in reception and

evacuated areas.4 Temple School Log Book5 tells us that in September 1941

she was back at Temple School and responsible for overseeing the

evacuation of several pupils, including Betty and Lilly Ham to the Turton

area, while Miss Downes was in charge of escorting “children from the

Junior Department who were being evacuated to Nelson.”

The children evacuated to the Turton district were at least fortunate that the

distance they had to travel was not very far, although this did lead later to

some tensions between billeting families and visiting parents.6 Other

children spent many hours getting to their destinations. A Liverpool teacher,

travelling with ninety children who had assembled at 10 o’clock in the morning did not reach their safe town, Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire,

until 7.30 that night.7

Unlike Belmont School, most other schools across the country were not on

holiday in early September. In the days leading up to the evacuation,

teachers and parents in Manchester were given precise instructions about

how they should get ready. Guidelines on what children should take with

them were issued. These mentioned mainly appropriate clothing but also

Children from Temple Infant School being evacuated

12

included an identity card, a luggage-label type name tag, a boxed gas-mask

and a stamped postcard to reassure nervous parents that all had gone well

(see the inside back cover for examples of evacuee postcards).

Schools practised the evacuation procedures and parents were told that on

any day the practice might turn into the real thing without any warning. The

Headmistress at Temple School, Alice Richmond, had received an official

notice to expect to evacuate in July 1939 and made sure that pupils and staff

were well-prepared for their move. According to Temple School’s Log

Book, the school was one of those chosen “to go as far as the Entraining

Station,” (Manchester Victoria) during practices, so on the 28th August, “a

complete Try-out of Evacuation Plans took place.”

On August 31st the Temple School Log Book records, “School closed this afternoon preparatory to evacuation tomorrow morning.” On the next day

the pupils and their teachers set off by bus and train for the Lancashire

countryside. In line with Government policy, Temple School was then

closed, leaving parents who had chosen not to evacuate their children with

no organised opportunities for their continuing schooling.8

The evacuees seemed to have arrived to a very warm welcome. The weekly

Bolton Journal reported on September 8th that factory workers had

exchanged waves with the pupils as their train passed by. A reporter from

the newspaper spoke with the pupils and wrote, “These children, all from

Temple School Cheetham, must have rehearsed what they were to do for

their behaviour was perfect.” Clearly, all the practising had been worth it!

The paper, referring light-heartedly if a bit tactlessly to “Turton’s invading army”, pointed out that all this was purely a “precautionary measure and

that the decision does not mean that war is regarded as inevitable.”

When schools in the Turton Urban District re-opened on September 14th

1939, after the late summer works holidays, the distribution of the pupils to

their receiving schools had already taken place. Alice Richmond noted in

Temple School Log Book that their pupils had been “divided among six

schools in the Turton Urban District, Walmsley C of E in Egerton, Eagley

Mills Council School, Bradshaw C of E, Turton C of E, Longsight Methodist

in Harwood and Belmont Council School”. There were no further entries in

the Log Book until April 1st 1940 when the school “reopened in Manchester

for full time attendance”.

13

Billeting the Evacuees The distribution of evacuees was organised from Turton. Schools were

closed for the “wakes” holidays but all was ready for the arrival of the pupils.

The Bolton Evening News reported on September 1st that many residents had

even cancelled their holidays so they could take children into their homes.

A survey conducted earlier in the year had identified 175 possible billeting

places in the Belmont Ward.9 In large towns it was usual to make a local

government official the Billeting Officer but in rural areas it tended to be a

volunteer who did the job, without pay. In Belmont, Mr Alfred Hutchinson

offered to oversee preparations for the arrival of the evacuees and was

appointed Billeting Officer for the ward. Alfred was born in Belmont in

1887 and worked as a cashier in Belmont Bleach Works. He had also been

Chair of Turton UDI Council the previous year so he understood the

responsibilities and knew the people of Belmont well.

Alfred met with other Billeting Officers from the Turton District in June

1939 when they were invited to appoint their own assistants. They were no

doubt much encouraged to hear at the meeting that the Women’s Voluntary Service had agreed to find people willing to use their cars to help the

billeting officer to take children to their designated homes.10 It was also

suggested that they made use of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides to escort

children.

The Board of Trade wrote to Turton explaining that emergency supplies for

the expected evacuee children would be sent to the “de-training station” in

July to avoid congestion if an “emergency” occurred. Turton Station took

delivery of 66 cases of tinned meat, 53 cases of Nestlé Sweetened Milk and

53 cases of Ideal Unsweetened Milk in August

and stored them securely. Blankets and

“Mackintosh overlays” to protect beds were also sent by the ministry of Health in London. The

Ministry had decided that it was important to

recognise the national service that hosts were

providing by giving those who had volunteered

to take unaccompanied children a special card to display in their window.

Alfred was sent a quantity of these, with letters from the Minister for Health

thanking householders for their “readiness to undertake this service” and

host guidelines, to distribute to homes where unaccompanied evacuee

14

children were billeted. In March, it had been confirmed that 62 households

in the ward had volunteered, though it is not known how many of these

offers were taken up. Turton officials had planned to send 110 children to

Belmont but as fewer children than expected arrived on the trains all the

final destination areas received a proportionally smaller number. The

explanation given in the Bolton Journal for the shortfall in numbers was that

some parents wished to wait until the Saturday to bring their children

themselves and other parents had decided at the last moment not to let their

children be evacuated at all.

How well the national evacuation programme went appears to have varied

from area to area. An evacuee who came with his school from a different

part of Manchester to nearby Egerton reports that all the evacuees stood in

the local church hall where they were greeted by a billeting officer, and the

local vicar greeted the people who then chose one or more children.11

“It was like being in a cattle market. My brother Eric and I were left,

no one chose us. Finally the vicar took us to the vicarage where we

were stripped and bathed in the hottest water I have ever

experienced. We were put in a large double bed and fed with pobs,

(bread and hot milk sprinkled with sugar).

I spent a year in Egerton, moving from one house to another. I was

finally lodged with a Mrs Barnes who treated me like a prince. A

huge change from the previous billets.

However, the general perception of the Turton Urban District response to

the evacuation appears to have been that it went well. The Bolton Evening

News reported that “the first phase of the evacuation of school children went

through splendidly.” And when in the afternoon 352 more children arrived

at Turton Station from Manchester, “all the arrangements again worked

perfectly and the children as they alighted were very cheerful and obviously

thrilled with their new surroundings.” Newspaper reports in Bolton were

initially upbeat, if a bit naïve,12 but later the smoothness of the process of

evacuating pupils with their teachers in well-organised groups was

contrasted with the arrival into the district on the following Saturday of

1,000 mothers and pre-school children. “Many of them had sent their older

children to Turton yesterday and their chief concern was getting billeted as

near as possible to them.” Other parents had come to realise the seriousness

15

of the situation and now travelled independently with them. On September

8th under a headline “The Grim Truth”, the Journal described the “pathetic sight” as mothers with children and some expectant mothers struggled to

transfer from trains to buses and to discover where they might be billeted.

In Turton town itself, some tensions developed between hosts and parents

who had accompanied pre-school children. On September 15th, in an article

titled “Not So Welcome Now,” the Bolton Journal published reports of

“children who seemed to have never had a bath, mothers who refused to

raise a finger to help, unhealthy and verminous evacuees, children visited

by a score of relatives who expected to be fed for nothing.”

It is hardly surprising that people from very different backgrounds thrown

together by the war might struggle at times to get on. The Journal was quick

to balance the tensions with examples of caring. “One mother, when she saw

the state of her two little visitors’ clothing immediately made two dresses so

that her little charges could be clothed respectably.” Later the paper

reported how steps had been taken to help hosts and evacuee parents to work

together and that centres were being set up for parents to meet with their

children. Gradually the difficulties and irritations were removed.13 Even so,

in 1941 when Manchester was eager to evacuate more children to the area,

the Turton Head Teachers’ Association14 felt the need to pass a resolution

that “previous to putting into operation any further evacuation plans some

consultation should be held with the heads of school and billeting officers

to try to obviate some of the difficulties of the first evacuation.”

The evacuees would certainly have found Belmont, set in rolling hills and

wild moors, quite different from Manchester’s Cheetham district with its hundreds of businesses, shops and religious organisations.15

Cheetham Hill Road in the 1930s

16

Not that Belmont was some sleepy, rustic backwater. The village had been

created at the start of the 19th century to house workers in the cotton industry

and 130 years later the 1939 National Register still presented a profile of

mainly skilled factory workers rather than farmers and land-workers. Half

of the jobs reported to the interviewers who conducted the survey were

associated with the local bleach and dye works or nearby cotton and paper

mills. Many other villagers were employed in services to their neighbours

such as publicans, shopkeepers, plumbers, craftsmen and teachers. Only

about 10% of the population lived or worked on farms.

Much of village life revolved

around its two churches. The

Anglican parish church of St Peter

at the south end of the village was

built, along with its Sunday school,

in 1849 from locally-mined Ousel

Nest Grit stone to the design of the

talented young Scottish architect

John Gregan. A long tradition of

non-conformist worship in the

village was kept alive through the

Congregational Church on the

High Street, built at the end of the

19th century in an elaborate style

from stone and brick to replace the

earlier and simpler Bethel Chapel.

Both buildings were home to active and gifted communities and centres for

the development of education and music. Belmont had a history of fine

musicians especially organists, pianists and entertainers. In the 1930s, the

Belmont Village Prize Brass Band16, created in Victorian times, was still

going strong and in great

demand for concerts of

popular music although,

according to the school

Log Book, it still made

time to support a highly

successful fund-raising

event at the school in

March 1937.

Belmont in 1938. Note the

Congregational Church on the

right and the old school sign on

the left.

17

It was the Minister of the Congregational Church, Rev Isaac Bithell who,

after discussions with church officers, volunteered the church Sunday

School building on the corner of Maria Square (now a private home) for use

as the reception centre for the village’s share of the evacuees. Eileen

Edwards, who lived in Belmont at the time, remembers the children arriving

on two single-deck coaches. They looked lost and frightened and many were

disappointed. Apparently, they had been told by organisers, who weren’t quite sure where Belmont was, that they were going near to Blackpool and

the evacuee children were expecting to see the sea and golden beaches!

Parents had been asked to ensure that their children had sufficient food for

the day of evacuation. On arrival at their destination each child was given a

bag of emergency rations to tide them over the first 48 hours. In April, the

Board of Trade had written to the council asking them to distribute the food

supplies very precisely. The maximum a child should receive was a can of

meat, a can each of sweetened and unsweetened milk, two packets or one

pound of biscuits and a quarter of a pound of chocolate or “two two-penny

chocolate crisps” (forerunner of the KitKat bar). The children also received

a note from the Food (Defence Plans) Department17 explaining that the food

bag was provided as an emergency ration “until local shops received

sufficient supplies to meet the requirements

of the additional population.” There was a

widespread fear that there would be a

shortage of food in areas where hundreds of

newly-arrived children needed to be fed.

Newspapers, including the Bolton Journal

for 1st September 1939, carried appeals to

householders not to make a run on the

supplies of local shopkeepers.

A reporter for the Bolton Journal met up with some of the evacuees and later

wrote, “All the mothers have given the children plenty of food for the day

and many of them spent a lot of the journey eating it!” But when the children

received their emergency rations they began eating again, until told to wait

until they were on the next stage of their journey at one of the subsidiary

distribution centres.

Villagers in Belmont and nearby farmers provided billets for the children

who then continued their education for a few days, weeks or even years in

Evacuee children at Turton Station

18

the village school. If the approach to billeting this large group of pupils was

similar to that of placing the later private evacuees in Belmont it is likely

that Mr Hutchinson and his assistants tried to billet children from the same

family together. In the one example for which we have clear evidence in

the 1939 National Register, three Temple School pupils, brothers Brian,

Robert and Eric Royle, were all placed with the Belmont Primary School

Manager, Rev William Thwaites and his wife, in St. Peter’s Church

vicarage.

Families who billeted evacuees received 10 shillings and 6 pence a week

(about 50p but equivalent to about £25 in real terms today) from the

government for taking one child. Another 8

shillings and 6 pence per child was paid if they took

more than one. Mr Hutchinson was provided with

books of tickets to distribute to householders with

unaccompanied evacuee children which allowed

them to collect appropriate payments from the Post

Office. After the war, host families also received

a certificate of appreciation from Queen Elizabeth

(the wife of King George VI). Soon after the

evacuation the Government started to ask the

parents of evacuated children to contribute to this

cost of billeting them.18 This was one reason why

some parents later decided to bring their children

back home.

Although Lancashire's evacuation scheme went according to plan, little had

been done to prepare schools and host families in the reception areas to care

for their guests. Details of evacuation plans had been kept secret by the

Government, even from local councils whose requests to allocate funds for

preparation schemes were refused. Children who arrived in school groups

did have their classmates. They were also accompanied by their teachers

who, in many places, took advantage of the unusually mild September

weather to take pupils out on long walks to familiarise them with their new

surroundings. Voluntary organisations such as the WI and the newly-

created WVS did their best to meet practical and emotional needs.

Nationally, the BBC was busy creating a range of reassuring and advisory

radio programmes and each evening it broadcast Vera Lynn singing the

specially written song “Goodnight Children Everywhere” to comfort

19

homesick children, though many ex-evacuees report that hearing it made

them feel even more sad.19 In October 1940, the 14 year-old Princess

Elizabeth gave a talk20 during Children’s Hour to encourage evacuee

children.

How Belmont School coped with the practical matters of hosting the

evacuees is not easy to glean from the school Log Book. At least initially,

the school experienced some problems with the sheer number of pupils and

received visits on October 6th from the “county organiser W. Dowse re

accommodation” and on the 11th from “HMI W Lamplugh in the afternoon

re numbers etc.” A further visit was made on January 10th 1941 by HMI

Miss Smiley to assess the impact of new evacuees on accommodation.

At the time, the school building consisted of just two classrooms, a hall and

a kitchen. The evacuee children were taught by their own teachers and local

ex-pupils recall this taking place in the hall. The national Board of Education

had not made specific plans for the education of evacuated pupils but now

suggested that schools might resort to a double shift system.21 This solution

was adopted in Bolton town schools but there is no indication that it was

chosen in Belmont. We know from the Belmont School Log Book that the

evacuee pupils certainly did join with local children for the school Christmas

celebrations on 22nd December 1939 when the Headteacher reported that,

“Gifts of apples, oranges, nuts, toffee and 2nd bar of chocolate made to all

the children, both evacuees & locals.”

The register of evacuee pupils was kept separately by the teachers who

travelled with them and no details of individual children in this first party of

evacuees appear in the Belmont School Admissions Register. Later, private

evacuees, who did join in lessons with the local pupils, had their details,

including the address where they were billeted, recorded in the village

school Admissions Register. Their evacuee status was always indicated,

usually with the letters “p.e.” (private evacuee) beside their name.

Many of the children from Temple School were Jewish and those from

practising homes faced particular problems concerning diet and maintaining

their faith and culture. The Manchester and Salford Council of Jews was

very concerned about the education of evacuees, many of whom were placed

in schools in and around Bolton, and made arrangements for a Jewish

teacher to visit them. A total of 55 children in the Bolton district were

supported in this way. In Belmont, Rev Isaac Bithell made the

20

Congregational school rooms available for such teaching. One Jewish

evacuee, Malka Cohen, who lived with her family in the village, also recalls

having lessons with a Jewish teacher at her home22. Attending Jewish

worship was extremely difficult for the Jewish evacuees but again the

Congregational Church helped out by offering the use of church rooms for

Sabbath services.

This positive response by Belmont

to its Jewish evacuees did not go

unnoticed and was reported in the

national Jewish Chronicle

newspaper. In one article23 it was

noted that, “Mr Bithell in his

sermons to his congregants had

urged them to show the fullest

respect towards Jewish religious

observance and to ensure that the

village was not unduly noisy on

Saturdays so that the Jewish

residents may properly observe the

Sabbath.”

To show their appreciation of Mr Bithell’s action, and of similar acts of

friendship shown to Jewish evacuees, the Manchester Jewish Authorities

issued an appeal to parents of Jewish evacuees to reduce Sunday visits to

reception areas to a minimum in order that “the peace of the Christian

Sabbath, in its turn, may be duly maintained”.

Apparently, much interest in Jewish faith, culture and politics was generated

in Belmont by the presence of evacuees. When a showing of a “talkie film” about Palestine called Homeland in the Making was organised by a Jewish

Zionist group a large audience, including many locals, filled the

Congregational Church Hall.24

Dietary rules could be a particular challenge for Jewish children. Joe Flacks

and his two sisters were later evacuated from Temple School to central

Bolton. They reported that, “The people we stayed with were kindly but the

food offered was often ‘treif’” (not according to Jewish dietary laws).25 As a

result, after a few weeks they returned home. It is not known how the city

evacuees got on with the food offered to them in rural Belmont, though

21

Eileen Edwards, who lived in the village at the time, does recall that a boy

and a girl who stayed in her home on evacuation day until collected by their

hosts were confused by two dishes containing salt and pepper on the dining

table. They didn’t know what salt and pepper were.

No detailed records were kept by Belmont School of the children who

arrived in school groups, or what happened to them. It may be that some

moved to other schools or, more likely, returned to Manchester during the

Phoney War period when the threat of large-scale bombing seemed

unfounded. Nationally, only thirteen per cent of children who were

evacuated in the 1939 project were still in their reception areas in the

following January. Hansard for the 8th January 1940 records that 41,000 of

the 66,300 children evacuated from Manchester and 9,500 of the 18,043

evacuated from Salford had already returned home. As early as the 24th November, the Bolton Journal reported that although

700 children were now “comfortably settled in” the Turton District, these represented only about half of the original number, the remainder having

gone back to Manchester. So many children returned to Cheetham that

Temple School was able to re-open after the Easter holiday on April 1st

1940. Most of its pupils and staff, including those evacuated to the Turton

District, appear to have returned to Manchester but two teachers still

remained in the reception area and other teachers visited from time to time.

According to the Temple School Log

Book, teacher Miss Hobson spent a whole

day in April in the Turton Reception Area

and Miss Crosby, another teacher

“having been on duty in the Reception

Area during the normal Easter Holiday

period began a corresponding period of

absence” on April 12th. Clearly some

children had remained in their evacuation

districts. Perhaps this was due in part to

the extensive efforts of the Government

through poster and newspaper campaigns

to persuade parents not to remove

children from the safety of the

countryside. Despite the war, Temple

School was able to provide a relatively

22

normal educational experience for its pupils after they returned in 1940,

though there were frequent air-raid alarms and the Temple School Log Book

often mentions that pupils were “in the shelters”. Towards the end of the

year, the Headteacher reported that 78% of its pupils were now present and

on December 17th, after celebrating the end of term with a Christmas party,

the school closed for the Christmas holidays.

The Christmas Blitz The destructive bombing of London late in 1940, known as the “Blitz” (from

the German blitzkrieg meaning “lightning war”), was extended to Britain's

other major towns and cities at the end of December. It was often

commercial centres and residential areas rather than arms factories that were

most badly affected. In the summer and autumn there had been scattered and

relatively minor attacks in the Manchester and Salford areas but in

December 1940 they were hit by two nights of raids. This 'Christmas Blitz'

resulted in an estimated 820 civilians being killed and more than 2,000

injured.26 Many children had by now returned home to Manchester and

Salford. Alan Woodford had been evacuated from Salford at the start of the

war with his younger sister Betty. Like many others, they had come to

believe that there was no longer a threat from air-raids.27

After three months we came home, because nothing really seemed to be

happening. It was the phoney war at the start. Months later my sister

came home for Christmas. It was December 23, 1940, and the timing

couldn’t have been worse. I was upstairs doing my homework, the air

raid had gone off but we had taken no notice – because sometimes you

didn’t. Suddenly there were flames coming through the loft. I ran

downstairs shouting to my mother “The house is on fire…” There were

bombs dropping everywhere. We were bundled out. Somehow I got

separated from my mother and sister. I think I was looking for shrapnel,

which we used to collect and swap at school, different shapes and so

on… An air raid warden stopped and shouted “what are you doing?” He pushed me into an air raid shelter which was full of people I didn’t know. I was in the shelter for 12 hours listening to bombs dropping all

around… When we got back to the house all that was left was a table.

All the houses had disappeared. After that we went to stay with an aunt

and shortly after that we were rehoused.

23

As early as May 1940 the Government had anticipated that the savage air

attacks experienced by towns in

other European countries would

eventually happen in Britain. In a

radio broadcast28, the Minister for

Health warned listeners not to

ignore the plans to protect the

nation’s children. “The risk of

bombing is so real that it is right

to make as complete as possible

now the plans for this

evacuation.” The Christmas air-

raids persuaded Manchester to

renew its offer to have children

evacuated to relative safety.29 On

December 30th 1940, when the re-

opened Temple School was on

Christmas holiday, the Headteacher wrote in the school Log Book, “Owing

to a bad Air Raid in Manchester the schools re-opened this morning in order

to facilitate the registration of children for evacuation.” Miss Elsie Downes was brought back from Belmont to help. The fear for the safety of children

had been rekindled and a second evacuation, including 29 children to nearby

Harwood, went ahead on 2nd January 1941.

When Belmont School re-opened after the Christmas holiday on 6th January,

1941 it faced a new influx of evacuees. The Log Book records “33 evacuees

from Manchester and district admitted, and 3 teachers”. This was a second

official evacuation and, as in the case of the first group, the visiting teachers

kept a separate pupil register. Although some of the evacuees at this time

were from Temple School, it is not certain where precisely the rest of the

second large group of official evacuees came from. Local historian Jack

Peet in his Souvenir Centenary History of the school suggested that many

were “probably from St Philips School in Manchester,” presumably based

on a note in the school Log Book for December 1941 recording a visit by

“Miss Young, Headmistress of St Philips m/c about the evacuees”.

Belmont’s Private Evacuees The Blitz drove other groups and families to make private arrangements to

move children to Belmont. Private evacuations were allowed and supported

24

by the government and tended to make up a higher proportion of evacuee

children as the war progressed. Belmont School Admissions Register

contains the details of fourteen such children who were formally registered

on January 6th, 1941.

The names of another twelve private evacuees

were added to the register in the following

months. Most were from the Manchester area

although pupils from further afield included

Doreen and Florence Matthews living in

Romford and John Kohorn whose “previous school” is just described in the Register as “Prague.”30 There were also other evacuee

children in the village who were too young to

register at the school. The picture shows, from

left to right, evacuee Roy Jardine with locals

Joyce and Doreen Wood.

The two main schools from which these new privately-evacuated children

came were Temple School, Manchester (presumably individuals whose

parents had chosen not to send them with the original group) and West

Liverpool Street Primary School, Salford. No record was kept of the religion

of privately-registered pupils but family names such as Moscovitch,

Shekeloff and Cohen suggest that many belonged to north Manchester’s Jewish community. The age range of the evacuees was wide. There were

several four and five year-olds and one or two twelve and thirteen year-olds

(who in other circumstances may have been at secondary school) and all

ages in between.

School records of the homes where privately-evacuated children stayed in

the village suggest that care was taken to try to keep families and school

friends together. Gordon, Roy, Brian and Audrey Blackshaw, who were

evacuated from West Liverpool Street School, Salford in May 1941, were

all housed in 28 South View. Irene and Brian Shekeloff and Mildred

Moscovitch, all from Temple School in Manchester, arrived (or possibly

returned if they were in the 1939 cohort from that school) in January 1941

and were housed at number one Ward Street. In September Mildred was

joined by her four-year-old sister Phyllis. Higher Fold Farm was home for

12 months from March 1941 for Ronnie, Eric and Marjorie Dodd who had

been evacuated from Pendleton in Salford.

25

Where Registered Private

Evacuees stayed 2 Deakins Terrace(5)

4 Deakins Terrace

1 Ward Street (4)

3 Ward Street

36 High Street (4)

70 High Street

77 High Street

91 High Street (2)

96 High Street 22 South View

28 South View (4)

34 South View

17 Maria Square

31 Maria Square

Higher Fold Farm (3)

Schools from which Private

Evacuee Children came

Bernay’s Thornton Cleveleys

St Matthew’s School Stretford

Derby Street School Manchester

Stowell Memorial School Salford

West Liverpool St School

Salford (3)

Broughton High School (2)

Pendleton Salford (3) Junior School Romford

Marley School Dagenham (2)

Grecian St School, Salford

Stowes Memorial School Salford

Temple School Manchester (8)

26

The number of pupils attending the school had risen dramatically again after

this second influx of evacuees and the Log Book records that on January

10th there was a “visit from HMI Miss Smiley re number of children,

accommodation etc.”

Privately-evacuated children joined in with the Belmont pupils. Planning the

teaching could not have been easy with new pupils arriving every month and

others leaving whenever parents decided it was safe to return home. Only

fifteen of the private evacuee children stayed for twelve months or more,

although Esther and Israel Cohen from Broughton, who were

accommodated at 36 High Street, stayed for three years. Their sister Malka,

who was nearly twelve when she arrived with the evacuees, stayed until

April 1941 when she left to go to Bolton School. Many other children were

present for just a few weeks.

Returning Home

For people living in Manchester and Salford, the horrors of the 1940

Christmas Blitz were followed by more attacks early in the New Year, re-

inforcing the need to move or return children to safety.

But air-raids soon became infrequent. There was a devastating attack in the

early hours of Whit Monday, June 2nd 1941, and two others in October

(which hit mainly the outskirts of Manchester, including Bolton) but apart

from a short flurry in July 1942, air activity over Manchester ceased for the

next two-and-a-half years. Many evacuee children began to move back to

their homes where blackout restrictions were eventually reduced to

“dimout” and gas streetlights re-lit. And although the Manchester area was

unexpectedly attacked over Christmas 1944 by V1 flying bombs, killing

more than 20 people, life had become more relaxed and services, including

education, were returning to normal.

Although many of the Manchester and Salford evacuees returned to their

homes early in the war, those who arrived later, or from further away, were

less likely to leave. Turton Urban District received many evacuees from as

far away as London. In September 1944 the local WVS remarked in their

monthly report to HQ that only a small number of these London evacuees

had gone home. “They all seem to have settled in very comfortably and are

in no hurry to return.” The WVS was still running two clubs for evacuees

in Eagley and Turton Village and in December they held a Grand Christmas

Party for all of them. “Only a few who were ill did not come in spite of the

27

dreadful Weather; an excellent and enjoyable time was had by all.”

No detailed records were kept by Belmont School of the period the official

evacuee groups remained in the village but the Log Book records that on

23rd and 31st October 1941 “official evacuees” Kenneth Marsh and

Raymond Blower respectively “returned to Manchester”.

Neither is it clear how long the teachers who came with the groups of

evacuees remained in school. Miss Downes appears to have moved

frequently between Manchester and Belmont and then, on November 1st

1940, she was transferred to Walmsley, one of the other schools in the

Turton district used by the original Temple School evacuees. When a

member of the permanent Belmont School staff resigned in December 1941

the Log Book records that her class was taken over by Miss Coe, “a

Manchester evacuated teacher” and her own group of children split up. On December 19th 1941 the Head noted, “Miss P. M. Coe, the Manchester

evacuated teacher, terminates her work here and returns to Manchester.”

The final entry in Belmont school Log Book concerning the Manchester

official evacuees was written on 4th December 1944 and reads, “Lilly White

(evacuee) returned to Manchester today. There are now no Manchester

children left in the school.”

Eleven days after Lilly’s return, private evacuee Doris Harwood went back to London. But it wasn’t until 1945 that the final private evacuees left the

school. Esther and Israel Cohen returned to Salford on 9th February and

Rose Baker to London on February 23rd, the Log Book entry for that day

noting “There are now no evacuees in attendance.”

Throughout the war years the Government had actively discouraged

evacuees from going back home but in April 1945 timetables and

arrangements were being made for their return. Nearly 3,000,000 had been

displaced and by August, 76,000 children still remained in reception areas.

March 1946 marked the official end of the civilian evacuation and yet 5,200

evacuees still remained in their wartime billets.31

It is impossible to know how easily the Belmont evacuee children settled

back into their home towns and schools. Those returning early may have

found their school buildings being used for other government purposes.

Others from bombed areas faced the possibility of having no home or school

to return to. For Agnes Platt, a kind of itinerant evacuee from Manchester

28

to Belmont, the uncertainty of returning home was a daily one.32

My Dad was a lorry driver for Stott's Motors in Higher Broughton.

The manager thought it better if the drivers took the vehicles home at

night in case the depot was bombed. Usually after tea we would all

get into the back of Dad's lorry with the blankets, eiderdowns, a couple

of suitcases and off we went. Our destination was Belmont near

Bolton. We went to the Weight (Wrights?) Arms, a public house that

opened its doors to anyone who wanted refuge from the blitz. It was a

great adventure for me jogging along in Dad's lorry and sleeping on

the floor of a pub! We could hear the German bombers going over to

Liverpool and Manchester. As they crossed the Pennines, the anti-

aircraft guns would open fire to try to stop them. Some people would

shout "give itto 'em lads". Thankfully our house, 6 Albert Street, was

still standing and not damaged whenever we returned.

Most evacuees living in Belmont were near enough to Manchester or Salford

to have visited, or had visits from, family members but they still must have

found the cultural and social impact of being away from home and friends a

life-changing experience.33 Even when practical matters went well, many

children were placed in homes where the culture was quite different from

home. Some testify to this being a positive and enhancing experience. For

others it was quite traumatic and left them scarred. Margaret Lambie, on

hearing about our project, wrote to the school about being evacuated from

Broughton to nearby Egerton. She was separated from her brother and sisters

and told us, “the whole experience ruined our family”.

Fifty years after Operation Pied Piper, Ben Wicks produced the first

collection of evacuee experiences to be published. Many contributors wrote

positively about being with caring hosts and enjoying a creative time in their

young lives. Others spoke of experiencing deep sadness and even prejudice

and awful abuse34. Billeting Inspectors had been issued with forms to

complete for each household but although the form included questions about

the fitness of the property and provided a section for general comments, no

detailed assessment was made of the suitability of the hosts. For some

evacuees, the return home was equally traumatic.

29

3

School must go on

During the war years, Belmont School’s Log Book reveals an intriguing

blend of normality and disruption in school. Compared to the experience of

Temple School in north Manchester, where in 1940 and 1941 three major

air-raids disrupted school life, Belmont village children and evacuees alike

had a much quieter time. The dentist was in school to inspect all the

children’s teeth and doctors paid regular visits to check their general health.

On one occasion this was in response to a “diphtheria scare”. Fortunately

the fears were proved groundless and several days later the test results from

swabs taken by the doctor were reported in the Log Book as negative.

At least once a month the parish priest and School Manager (equivalent to a

Governor today), Reverend William Thwaites, called in and recorded in a

neat hand in the Log Book that he had “listened to opening prayers etc and

Scripture lessons in the classes,” and checked the school registers for

attendance. School Inspectors visited, police gave their regular talks on

road safety (it was an issue even then!) and the Horticultural Organiser, PT

Organiser, Temperance Teaching Scheme lecturer, Domestic Science

Organiser (“to see the girls at cookery”) all came as usual. And when in

February 1940 some typically bad Belmont winter weather arrived it must

have seemed like any other year. The Log Book reads “Deep snow and

drifts. Very poor attendance. Buses not running. Received permission to

close school in the afternoon.” According to His Majesty’s Inspectors, who

had visited and reported on the school in 1938, Mr Hill was an able

Headteacher who directed the school in a “thorough and capable manner.” He would have guided the school well through the early years of the war. In

fact, serious disruptions were more often due to weather or health problems

than the war itself. In March 1944, for example, attendance was down to

61% due to outbreaks of chicken pox and German measles in the village.

The war did cause some disruption to the school’s holiday pattern. In 1940 it had planned to close for its usual two-day Whitsuntide break in May but

this was reduced to one day because “of National Emergency and by order”. In the same year, the planned June summer holiday was cancelled altogether

“because of the war”. The school eventually took its holiday at the end of

July.

30

And even though Belmont was well away from the big towns and cities, and

not really at risk from bombing, an air-raid warning system was introduced

to the village. In August 1940 the Log Book records that the school didn’t open until 9.45am (“as instructed”) on two days because air-raid alarms had

gone off in the early hours of the morning. Starting school at a later time

after such events became the pattern and from October the school changed

its permanent winter starting time to 9.30am “irrespective of whether there

is an alert or not.” In 1942, the school hours were adapted again so that

during the dark months of November through to January the school day

didn’t begin until 9.30am because of the war blackout requirements.

Air-raid alarms sometimes sounded during the day and disrupted teaching.

A planned road safety talk by the police in January 1941 had to be postponed

“because of alert”. The school was well-prepared for the possibility of

attacks during the day and children were drilled in what to do.

On November 1st 1939 the Headteacher was able to report that an inspection

had taken place of the school’s “nearly completed” air-raid shelters.

According to local recollections the shelters were of simple brick

construction with two rows of slatted seats and a concrete bench for children

to sit on. There was no electricity installed and during drills candles were

used. At the time, the playground was divided by a brick wall into two areas,

one for boys and the other for girls. Separate shelters were therefore

constructed for boys and girls in their own sections of the playground. Local

girl Nancy Taylor remembers having air-raid drills in school and has vivid

recollections of the bare brick air-raid shelter in the girls’ playground. “It

was dark and damp and smelled. There were forms arranged to sit on but

A reconstructed photograph showing how the shelters probably looked.

31

no lights.” At home, Nancy’s family didn’t have a shelter but would hide under the table. They knew there was a shelter of some kind in the nearby

bleach works but never went to it.

From the beginning of the war, children were expected to carry gas masks

(probably manufactured in nearby Blackburn) at all times in case bombs

containing poisonous gas were dropped.1 In June 1943 the Headteacher

recorded that “Mr W Farnworth, air-raid warden, examined all the

children’s gas masks and is seeing to any replacements and wrong sizes”

and on 9th February 1944 the Log Book records that the air-raid wardens

inspected the children’s respirators again. Ex-pupil Nancy Taylor recalls

that at first the children had their gas masks with them at all times but as

time went on they tended to bring them only when an air-raid practice had

been arranged. In 1941, “anti-splinter netting” was attached to all school

windows and not removed until October 1944.

Despite the precautions taken by the school, some parents clearly preferred

to have their children at home if there was any chance of a raid. In

September 1940 the Log Book reports “during playtime an air warning

sounded. Mrs Ainsworth forced herself into the school and took 2 children

home without permission, as we were getting them to their places under

cover. She had previously kept them at home for the morning when the

school opened at 9.45am.” And two days later, “Mrs J Speak took her 3

children home during air raid alarm without permission. They came back

when ‘all clear’ sounded.”

As the war continued the pupils did their bit to back

Britain. In October 1941 the school won first prize

in the Turton Council’s salvage drive to collect the most newspapers. The Log Book records that they

managed to gather an average of 123.59 pounds (56

kilos) per head, and proudly points out that the

school which came second, Hob Lane, only managed

70lbs per head. In addition, Belmont sent three lorry

loads of scrap iron, probably including the original

school railings. Appropriately, the following month

the school received a deputation, including the

Chairman of Turton UDC, to present the children

with a trophy of an inscribed barometer when “an

interesting ceremony was performed and the children sang songs.”

32

Nancy Taylor remembers not only collecting paper for the war effort as a

child but also gathering pieces of chaff dropped by enemy aircraft. “We

used to go up on Rabbit Warren to look for tinfoil (chaff) which was used

by the air people after the development of RADAR as a decoy”. All kinds

of waste was collected in the war years and in one case it led to a novel

pastime for the children. Nancy recalls that at the top of Maria Square there

were bins for collecting household scraps where “we used to lift the lids so

we could watch the maggots!” It is perhaps not surprising that in April 1944,

Police Sergeant Taylor and Lt. Whittle of the Home Guard were in school

to speak to the children on “Safety First and the Danger of Handling

Unknown Objects”.

The children also raised money for other war causes. Perhaps, with modern

medical understanding, the Headteacher’s note for May 27 1943, “sent 25/-

subscribed by children to Overseas Tobacco Fund, London as our Empire

Day Effort to provide cigarettes for soldiers, sailors and airman,” might seem a little less praiseworthy!

It is difficult to imagine what continuing impacts the war had on school life

but we do know that at Easter 1943 it was decided to replace woodwork with

cardboard modelling “because of the shortage of boys and the difficulty of

getting wood.”

As the war started to draw to a close the school shared in the growing mood

of pride and optimism. By now, all the evacuees had left the school which

was back to the more manageable number of 75 pupils. They took a day off

on March 8th 1945 for the visit of the King and Queen to Lancashire. And

when peace eventually came, the school celebrated by closing on May 8th

1945 for two days for Victory in Europe and for two days again on August

15th “for the National V. J. holiday.”

Over the war years almost 150 evacuee children spent some time in the

village school. As with the initial Operation Pied Piper, it is difficult to

assess how effective the continuing evacuation of children was. Nearly one-

and-a-half thousand civilians were killed in Manchester during the main

period of bombing in 1940 and 1941. Of these, 184 were children below the

age of 14. If all had gone exactly to plan, these children would certainly have

been living safely outside the city.2

33

4

Stories from the War Years We know little about the names and backgrounds of the original group of

children who came from Temple School because no records were kept in

Belmont. A limited amount of information can be found in the 1939

National Register, though the entries for most evacuee children have been

redacted. The details of later private evacuees are included in the school

Admissions Register and it has been possible, in some cases, to discover

more about their lives. In this next section we share the stories of some of

the children who spent time as evacuees in Belmont during the war years or

who were living here as young villagers.

It is clear from these few accounts that, despite the careful planning and

goodwill of hosts in reception areas, the experience of individual evacuees

varied enormously. It would be easy, like some of the contemporary

newspaper reports, to romanticise the events. In truth, like so much of what

occurred during the war years, it was often a matter of ordinary people trying

to find ways to mitigate the impact of unimaginable and horrific

circumstances in order to help each other to survive. It is good to know that

the people of Belmont played some part in this.

A Land Mine destroyed our School Doris Breeton lived with her parents Leonard and Ada in South Ann Street,

Salford. She attended Stowell Memorial School situated in School Street

and closely linked to the famous Stowell Memorial Church on Eccles New

Road, built by public subscription in 1867 to honour the life and work of

The Reverend Canon Hugh Stowell. She arrived at Belmont school as a

private evacuee on January 6th, 1941 having just celebrated her 12th birthday

on Christmas Day in the middle of the Salford “Christmas Blitz”.

A pupil from nearby Trafford Road School, writing 75 years later in the

Salford Lifetime Links magazine, recalls,

“After Christmas we found that our school had not been hit by the night

raids but a neighbouring school, the Stowell Memorial School was

destroyed when a landmine exploded. Pupils from there joined us at

Trafford Road School. Sitting down on the first day back after Christmas,

one of the new boys from Stowell Memorial sat beside me. He told me he

34

had gone to look at his school and the only thing that was left was a big

crater.”

Another pupil from Stowell Memorial School, Frank Lomas, who was

evacuated to Wheelton near Chorley, remembered, “Explosions went out

because a land mine fell on the school. In the morning we saw an enormous

crater in its place. As children, we were obviously happy because this meant

there would be no lessons for some time. This was Stowell Memorial School,

which was situated in School Street.”

In fact, the girls’ department of the school had been destroyed completely

and the boys’ department badly damaged. Many people died in the Stowell

School area during the raid.1

Billeted in Belmont

Perhaps in the light of this enemy action, Doris’ parents felt that moving their daughter to the nearby Trafford Road School was still a bit of a risk so

brought her to Belmont and enrolled her as a private evacuee. She lived here

at 2 Deakins Terrace, the home of retired cotton dyer Thomas Ainsworth

and his wife Emily, and their two grown-up children. She only stayed for

two weeks, then the School Log Book reports that she returned to Salford.

Eleven-year-old Barbara Walmsley also attended Stowell Memorial School

and was registered at Belmont school on the same day as Doris. She stayed

at 34 South View with Dennis and Annie Ainsworth and their two school-

age children. They had already billeted Jean Cockshoot and her sister,

evacuees with the original Temple School

group. Barbara returned even earlier than

Doris, after only 3 days.

Records show that Doris Breeton survived

the war and married local Salford boy Eric

Price in 1950. The ceremony took place in

Stowell Memorial Church which, unlike the

school, had been able to survive the blitz -

though not the early 1980s road network

development around Salford which left just

the tower standing. It remains there today at

the start of the M602 motorway as a

memorial to the church’s impressive history.

35

A Fine Romance

In September 1956, in nearby Horwich, Bolton-born 32 year-old Victor

Hornby married Florence Matthews. Florence, seven years his junior, was

also born in Bolton, although at the outbreak of the war she was living with

her family in Romford. Victor met Florence when she and her sister Doreen

were sent to Belmont as private evacuees from Romford in September 1939.

Romford was identified as a vulnerable area during the war, although the

formal evacuation of children did not take place until 1944. So, like many

other parents in such areas, the Matthews must have decided to evacuate

Florence and her sister Doreen privately.

Florence’s mother, whose maiden name was Lee, had very close links with Belmont through her family, so it was an obvious safe place to choose.

Victor Hornby’s family also had links with the village, especially through

the Congregational Church. The Rev Joseph Hornby had been the first

minister of Bethel Chapel which was built on the east side of Belmont’s High Street in the 19th century. When it was replaced by the new

Congregational church on the opposite side of the road he became the

minister.

Victor Hornby’s family lived in the village during the war, first at 33 High

Street then later at 3 Ward Street. When the Matthews girls first registered

at Belmont Primary School, Victor had already left, having reached the age

of fourteen the year before Florence and Doreen arrived. But Victor’s eight-year-old sister, Olga, was still at school and one of Florence’s classmates.

Florence and her sister, like many evacuee children, had a disrupted

education, moving back home to the Romford area twice, only to return to

Belmont School when the situation in Romford became more dangerous.

They finally left the village in October 1940 but no doubt had got to know

the Hornby children well during their visits here, possibly even staying with

them early in 1940. How this eventually led to the marriage of Florence and

Victor is not known but it seems very likely that the first steps towards their

married life together can be traced back to Florence being evacuated to

Belmont in 1939.

36

From an Art Deco Apartment to a

Victorian Terraced House

Jean Cockshoot was eight years old and in the Junior section of Temple

School when the order to evacuate was given in September 1939. Her sister

Joyce was in the Infants section and, as the policy when children of different

ages in the same family were evacuated was to keep them together, Jean

joined the group from Temple Infant School which came to Belmont. She

must have missed the company of her school friends but at least she had her

younger sister with her. The girls were billeted with Dennis Ainsworth, who

is described in the 1939 Register as a “Stenter,” working in the cloth-

stretching process at the bleach works, and his wife, at 34 South View.

When Jean was born on 24th July 1931 the family was living in Collyhurst

one of the more run-down areas of North Manchester. In the 1930s, as part

of a national scheme of slum clearance, the area was designated for

demolition. Manchester Council decided to clear as many as possible of

these poor back-to-back terraced houses and move the families into modern

multi-storey blocks of council flats. Although these new high-rise buildings

eventually proved to be inappropriate and many of them were knocked down

in the 1960s and 70s, at the time they were state-of-the-art and their designs

were often groundbreaking.

In the Cheetham Hill area, not far from Temple School, a piece of land was

given over to the building of Kennet House. This huge block of 180 flats,

popularly known as Queen Mary or “the ship”, had its own community hall,

laundry and office to pay

your rent and report any

repairs. There was a

lawned area and there was

even the possibility of

families having their own

allotment. It was a very

striking Art Deco design

by Bolton-born architect

and First World War hero

Leonard Heywood, opened

in 1935. With a green-

grocers, hardware shop,

37

newsagents, butchers, a youth club and even its own church, the estate was

seen as its own self-contained community. When their house in Collyhurst

was selected for demolition, the Cockshoot family were offered flat number

41 Kennet House and the family went to live there.

We don’t know how the girls felt about moving out as evacuees but after

five years living in their highly sought-after modern and spacious flat, with

its light and airy rooms, inside bathroom and modern plumbing, the living

conditions of their temporary Victorian home on South View must have

seemed very cramped and old-fashioned, and the village quite quaint

compared to their grand, modern building close to the lively Cheetham Hill

Road.

Jean returned to Manchester and Temple School at some point later during

the war and remained there until the end of the school year 1942, when she

moved on to St. Malachy’s Roman Catholic school to continue her

education. She survived the war and eventually died in 2005 aged 74. The

flats were demolished in 1979.

38

In Search of America.

Three of the evacuees who found temporary refuge in Belmont were Irene,

Brian and Delyse Shekeloff, children of Myer and Beatrice, both from

Jewish immigrant families.

In the 1930s, Cheetham Hill was a complex community of many cultures

and nationalities. Jewish migrants in particular had found a home there,

many after arriving in Britain on route from Europe to America but settling

instead in cities like Manchester.

The children’s maternal grandfather, Bernard Belerab, came from the

Russian town of Crakinova, now part of Lithuania, where he was born in

1892. It was a poor district where the Jewish community was often

oppressed. To escape, Bernard had followed the route taken by many

Russian Jewish migrants to Britain, arriving on the East coast of England,

probably intending to cross the country and take a ship from Liverpool for

the USA or Canada. Like others he

did not complete the journey and

eventually settled in Yorkshire. By

1911 he was living in Sheffield,

safe from the expulsion of Jews

from his home town and its

destruction by the Russians in 1915.

He describes himself as a glazier

and clothes dealer and was living

with his wife Silva and their 4-year-

old daughter Beatrice. In 1913 he

committed himself to a life in

Britain by becoming a naturalised

British citizen, swearing allegiance

to the crown and settling down to

develop his clothing business in

Button Lane, Sheffield.

Their daughter Beatrice was married in Manchester to Myer Shekeloff in the

summer of 1928. Myer’s father, Isaac, was a cabinet-maker working from

89 Pimblett Street in Cheetham Hill. Isaac’s parents had also been refugees,

from the Jewish settlement of Navaran in Lithuania. When his father died

in 1931, Myer continued in his father’s tradition of cabinet-making. He and

39

Beatrice had a son Brian, and two daughters, Irene and Delyse. The two

older children were at Temple School when war broke out. It is not clear if

they were among the children who arrived in Belmont with the first official

group of evacuees but after the terrifying Christmas Blitz in Manchester the

children were privately evacuated, or re-evacuated, to the village. Irene and

Brian were registered in the school on Jan 6th 1941 and billeted at 1 Ward

Street. Irene was just seven years old and Brian two years younger. Delyse

was registered in September when she was old enough to attend school and

stayed, perhaps with her mother, at 31 Maria Square. They remained safe in

the village until the end of the year when they returned home until the war

was over.

It is likely that the children had been told many stories by their parents about

their family’s long history of moving on and making new beginnings. If so,

it wouldn’t have been much of a surprise to them when, after the war, their

parents announced that they were going to follow the family pattern and set

out for somewhere new – this time

America. On 22nd May 1948 the whole

family, along with 1500 other

passengers, boarded the Cunard White

Star shipping company’s ship Britannica for her first post-War

sailing from Liverpool to New York.

They arrived safely after 5 days and set

off for their final destination of Denver, Colorado.

The family settled into life in America

and Brian started to explore his love of

the arts. In fact, he went on to become

a highly influential expert in art and

anthropology, especially in Japanese

folk art for which, until his death in

2014, he was an international

authority. But he always remembered

his days living in the north of England

and the day they set off for America

when he was just 13 years old.2

40

From Farmyard to Academia

Gerald Margolis was a six-year-old Jewish boy living in the Jewish Quarter

of Cheetham Hill and a pupil at Temple School when it moved its pupils to

Belmont in 1939. This is his own account of the experience.

“With war came evacuation. In September 1939, city children became

‘evacuees’ and were sent to the country to save us from air raids – each with

a gas mask and a name label. Children from my school were sent to farms

around Belmont – not too far from Manchester. But my evacuation lasted

only a week – though it was a wonderful week. I was billeted with my best

friend Harold Harris in the charge of an elderly, kind but ineffectual

farming couple with no children, Mr and Mrs Reece.

The Reece’s farm was a boyhood paradise. We were introduced to a whole

range of new knowledge and experiences – finding that milk for instance,

came from cows. And the Reeces, who had never had children of their own,

with kindness, and completely out of their depth, fed us every day on hoarded

tinned fruit – a rare luxury – and, as an added bonus, did not require us to

wash. We mucked out the pigs and were taught how to milk the cows.

But then my Auntie Dora, who had somehow wrangled a job with a car and

petrol, came to see how I was getting on. She found me covered in pig dung

with Harold alongside trying to milk a cow. She needed only to glance at

our filthy clothes and happy unwashed faces to be appalled. She stormed at

the Reeces and I was snatched up and brought home. Then she contacted

the Harris’s who arranged a similar rescue for Harold. Mam, who had been doubtful about evacuation from the start, pronounced: ‘If we’re going to die, then we’ll all die together.’”

Gerald’s family later moved to Blackpool when he was a young teenager. They changed their name to

Mars and opened a boarding house. Gerald

continued his education, then went on to study

Anthropology at University. He eventually became

a distinguished University professor and author,

often drawing on his contrasting community

experiences as a child in his work. It was in an introduction to one of his

books on Anthropology that he described his short stay in Belmont.3

41

A Note from New Zealand

When Margaret Lambie (nee Mammen) read about the Belmont School

Evacuees Project in her copy of the British Evacuee Association Newsletter

she wrote from New Zealand where she has lived for 59 years.

I was sent from Manchester to Egerton after the Christmas Blitz of 1940.

The whole experience ruined our family. We were split up and didn't see

each other for many months and in the case of my big sister, for years. My

sister, Rosemary, was six years older than me. She was sent to Cleveleys

where she stayed for nearly five years. We had little contact during that time.

She had at least two moves and didn’t find the experience a happy one. John, the next eldest, went to Fleetwood which he enjoyed. Peter and I were sent

to Egerton. The husband was in the RAF, stationed at Blackpool. We visited

him there and I saw the sea for the first time.

I lived in Egerton for nearly two years. I went back home to Manchester for

Christmas and my mother found I had nits in my waist length hair. She was

horrified and wouldn’t let me return, preferring me to dodge bombs rather than have head lice! My time there was happy and Mrs Sankey was kind.

She gave me a doll with beautiful clothes that she had made. I loved it and

called it Jill.

My brother, Peter, had a dreadful couple of weeks when he was billeted with

an old couple. He had to share a bed with the man who wet the bed. His

teacher found out and so he was moved to live with Mrs Kay. She was lovely

and took great care of him. We met each other occasionally in the village or

at school and I was always closest to him in later life. I recall that Belmont

was nearby but as a seven year old did not know just where. I remember

there was a reservoir called The Belmont Lodge. I learnt to skim stones on

one of the reservoirs and we had great competitions after school. The

skimming skill hasn’t left me and I still enjoy challenging people. I think my best is seven but I am sure many people have beaten that over the years. I

think we shared the school with the local children so every day was a half

day. I’m sure the pupils would love that!

So memories of being evacuated are very varied and it’s lovely to share them. It was so long ago but they are still very real for me. I am delighted

that the children of Belmont are researching the evacuation.

42

Adventures of a Five-Year-Old Evacuee

Les Croft was five years old when he was evacuated with his seven year-old

sister Greta from Cheetham Hill to Belmont with the Temple School group

in 1939. They were placed with a family in Belmont but it turned out to be

an unhappy experience. Although some family members were kind to them

they felt unfairly treated by the mother. When their own mother discovered

this during a visit, she quickly took them back to Manchester. Les contacted

us from Canada, where he now lives, to tell us what happened next.

I’m not sure how long we were at Belmont before my mother brought us

home but we were in Manchester during quite a bit of the bombing. There

was a second evacuation from Temple School to Harwood in 1941 so we

must have gone then. I remember the lady with whom we were placed in

Harwood as being extremely kind and affectionate but we were not with her

long as she went to help the war effort, working in a munitions factory.

So we were sent to Mr & Mrs Gregson, a kindly elderly couple who lived in

a lovely house called “Raven Wood”. We were right next to a farm. They

had a very nice cook and maid who joked with us a lot. Sometimes when we

got fish and parsley sauce, which we both hated, I waited for the cook to go

away and snook out and tipped it over the fence on to the farmer's field!

Down the road was a tourist spot called the Jumbles with a lovely stream

where we spent many happy hours picking and eating black-berries.

Wonderful memories spring to mind of rabbits, pretty birds and squirrels. I

was too young to know fear – it was lovely to be a child in those days. I

found lots of friendly playmates. Some of the first words they said to us were

“eeh don’t thee talk posh”. By the time we came home, we had broad

Lancashire accents! I was not a bad child but I did possess a bit of a temper,

mainly expressed in brother and sister squabbles. My sister was just trying

to look after me and I did not like being told what to do. So I threw tantrums.

Once on the way to school I threw one in the middle of the road. I threw my

gas mask on the floor and held up the traffic. I was too much for the nice

elderly couple. We were separated and sent to different houses. I lived with

the Harrison family in Ruins Lane where I was well-treated. There were lots

of nice places to play. But I soon became a problem again. When they sat

43

down to dinner I was sent up to bed as I was younger. I don’t think I was scared of the dark before but I was imagining all sorts of things so I would

jump out of bed, stamp my feet for attention then pretend to be asleep. One

night the door opened and in came Mrs Harrison. Apparently, I had scared

the whole household out of their wits - and I was on the move again.

This time I was put with the Barlow Family in Church Street, just behind

Leagate Lane where my sister was staying. It was a pretty stone walled

cottage with beautiful white swans on the pond behind us. Across the road

was a quaint English pub called “House Without a Name”. I was happy

there but Greta started having trouble with an older girl in her home. She

ran away and somehow got back to Manchester, and I was alone.

The family took me for my first-ever holiday

to Blackpool. When we returned I was tucked

into bed with some night treats. They were so

kind and always kissed me goodnight. But I

started to pine for my sister Greta. So I got

out of bed, dressed myself and set off walking

to Manchester. On the way I was hungry and

stopped a man and woman to ask for money.

They gave me some coppers but I think they

recognized me as an evacuee and knew the

people I was staying with. It was close to 10pm when I was approached by

a policeman. He knelt down and said, “Where do you think you're going at

this time of the night my young man?” I said, “I’m going to Manchester” and he said, “Come on I’ll take you to Manchester”. I thought, what a nice

man. He took me to the police station and stood me on a chair to get details

from me! They put me on a bus or a tramcar and gave instructions to the

driver where to put me off. I was brought back home just in time to go back

to Temple School where I was greeted by teacher Miss Vitovsky. These

people must have been so distraught. I was not their child but they treated

me as such. I went to see them a couple of years later when I understood

what I had done and they were pleased to see me.”

Les and his family survived the war and later he emigrated to Canada where

he now lives as a very active and supportive member of his community.

Les with his Mum on a visit

to Blackpool after the war.

44

War Refugees

Johann Kohorn registered at Belmont School in 1940. His family had just

moved into Hordern Cottage on Rivington Road. His brother Ernst was

eleven and too old for the primary school so joined Bolton School.

The brothers, known now by the English form of their names ‘John’ and

‘Ernest’, weren’t evacuees but members of a Jewish refugee family from the

German-speaking Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. In 1938 Germany

annexed Bohemia forcing the Kohorns to escape to Prague where John

continued his early-years education. Germany then invaded

Czechoslovakia. At the time, John’s father, Leo, was in Britain looking for

work and for sponsors to enable the family to join him. Having been warned

in a telegram from his wife Hilda he stayed here and arranged safe passage

for her and their two sons to Britain.

John’s father was an entrepreneur and before long he was running his own

book-cloth company at the bleach works in Belmont.4 The business

flourished but at the end of the war the owners of the building required the

space and Leo Kohorn moved his business to Deakin’s Bleach and Dye works at Egerton. Here, too, he was very successful and eventually became

a Director of Deakin’s Ltd. In the meantime, the family moved to Blackburn

Road and John continued his education, eventually joining his brother

Ernest at Bolton School.

Ernest, despite his disrupted

childhood, distinguished

himself in academic work and

went on to Cambridge

University, eventually

becoming a surgeon and a

professor at the prodigious

Yale University in the USA.

Ernest wrote to Belmont

School pupils from the USA

in February 2018, “We lived in Hordern Cottage, right opposite the Church

of England and the cemetery there in Belmont while the owner was on

military service. I well remember the winter of 1940 when there were several

feet of snow and my brother and I dug a path down to the main road. We

spoke Czech still but have now both forgotten this language completely!”

John and Ernest with their mother Hilda

45

John was at Bolton school from 1942 to

1951 and then Salford University and

followed his father as manager of the

factory. Kohorn Bookcloth made the

coverings for Oxford Bibles and the early

Phaidon Art Books throughout the 1950s.

With John’s arrival it gradually turned to the

manufacture of plastic-coated cloth and later

John established a new factory in Horwich

manufacturing PVC coated fabrics. He was

also very interested in sport and a keen

footballer at school. Later he had close links

with Bolton Wanderers FC.

In 2018 John visited Belmont Primary School to tell his fascinating story to

the pupils.

My father came to Belmont because there was a big bleaching and dyeing

works here. We shared our rented cottage with another family – all we had

was what fitted into our suitcases.

We were very lucky to get here. My mother had to queue every day for 6

months at the Czech embassy from 8 to 5 o’clock to try to get visas but it

was very difficult. Without a visa we couldn’t come to England. She managed to get the visas on the 23 August 1939 and we left the next day by

train from Prague station with 7 or 8 suitcases. We went through Germany,

then through Poland and managed to get to Holland, all by train. We

weren’t stopped because we had visas which meant you had the right to leave the country. We got to the Hook of Holland and got a boat and sailed

to England and we arrived there just a week before World War 2 started.

Once war was declared there were no trains from Prague or anywhere else

to England.

When I came to Belmont I couldn’t speak a word of English. I got very upset. I went to my bedroom and closed the door and locked it and cried. My father

couldn’t speak a word of English either. He had studied at Vienna University

and was a Doctor of Philosophy. He didn’t know anything about bleaching, dyeing and finishing, but he learnt about it from his uncles who had big

works in Czechoslovakia. When he came here there was no one to run

Belmont Bleaching & Dyeing works, which had something like 90 or 100

John aged 17 in his Bolton School

football strip.

46

people. So he took over the works and ran it for the whole of the 5 or 6 years

that World War 2 took place. He used to produce extra things like blackout

blinds and other things that were useful in the war.

When I lived in Sudetenland I first spoke German. Then I had to go to school

in Prague when I was aged 6 and couldn’t speak Czech so they all thought that I was not very good but it was because I couldn’t speak Czech! But I did learn it in about 6 months.

I was only at Belmont School for about 5 months and I couldn’t speak any English so it was very difficult for me. I can remember there was a Sunday

School where I was being taught English. This was now my third language!

They decided they would have a Sunday School concert. A lady took me in

hand and she taught me how say

the poem “Little Boy Blue”. They

put me in a blue uniform. I was just

about 8 and they pushed me onto

the stage and I gave them an

audition. I can still remember the

very happy moment when I

managed to do it.

We moved from Belmont in June 1940. The snow was very high that winter.

Belmont was completely cut off from Bolton. There were no buses or cars

and we somehow had to survive. But there were shops in Belmont in 1940.

It was the highest and most snow I have ever seen.

I went on to study textile chemistry. I wasn’t a brilliant academic but I set up a business in Horwich. There was nothing there but an old weaving shed

- no electricity, no gas, no nothing. We built our own machines and we made

coated fabrics, Nylon and polyester coated with PVC which made it very

strong and waterproof. Now all the bouncy castles have this material. We

used to make tens of thousands of metres every week.

It was a terrible war and we were so happy to come to Belmont and Bolton.

And I can say I have been 100% a Boltonian for the last 80 years! And I

have been very, very lucky to come to such a lovely place where people are

kind and helpful and affectionate and they made me feel good so I am always

very, very grateful to the people of Lancashire who took me in and made my

life happy.

47

Growing up during the War

Gordon Hurst was born in Belmont in April 1940. He lived with his parents

and brother Keith at 36 South View. In 2017 he visited Belmont Primary

School to share his memories of growing up in the village.

When Gordon lived in South View there were no gardens behind the houses.

“It was just common land behind but my father, who liked gardening at

weekends, fenced off a bit of the common land behind our house. Seven

years later he was told by the legal people that he would have to pay ground

rent on it! We used to grow things, and at the top we had some chickens”.

Gordon joined the village school on 11th September 1944. “The school was

much smaller then. There was just a main block with a girls’ entrance and a boys’ entrance with a big hall in-between. There were some smaller

buildings where we ate our dinner which was cooked for us by ladies from

the village. There was a playground. Boys were on one side and girls on the

other. There was a wall across the middle of the playground. The boys

couldn’t get to the girls’ side or the girls to the boys’ side. The only time we

48

climbed over the wall was at night. The school gates were never locked so

if we were playing football and the ball went over the other side we would

climb over and get it.”

There was an air-raid shelter but I didn’t go in when I was at school. When

I was seven or eight years old I used to go in after school. But they bricked

it up. It was bare brick, it was dark. There was no electricity in it. They used

to use candles. There were slotted benches round the sides to sit on. We

practised going out to the shelter but it didn’t mean a lot to me. It was just something you did.”

Gordon still remembers the food shortages. “I

had a Ration book. It allocated what food you

could have. There were also clothing books. The

lucky ones like us had hens so they didn’t have to use their ration book to get eggs. There were

certain foods you couldn’t get because the war

was on. And for years after the war as well.

I remember having a gasmask but I never wore

one. It was in a box in the house. My father

took it out and put it on but I never wore it. I

also remember we used to have a mat which

they gave us in the afternoon and we used to go

to sleep in our classrooms.”

The Evacuees

Gordon doesn’t remember a lot about the evacuees. “My brother Keith says

that we had two boys staying in with us. I can’t remember their names - I was only four years old! But I remember my father saying to me that the boy

in the house next door was an evacuee. I can remember that all the children

who came from Manchester were meant to go back but we did wonder if they

would be able to. Their houses may not be there because of the bombing.

That they might have to stay was something which went through your mind.”

He does remember that when the war finished there were many celebrations

in the village. “There were a lot of people dancing in the street and there

were cups of tea and cakes!”

Ration Book for 19535

49

Recalling the Evacuees

Eileen Edwards (nee Farnworth) was living as a child in Maria Square

during the war. She remembers the evacuees arriving in two single-decker

buses. When they were brought out of the coaches they were very

disappointed. “They looked lost and frightened because when they had asked

where they were going to be taken to they were simply told “to Belmont”. But no one knew exactly where the village was and the children were told it

was near to Blackpool, so when they arrived they were looking for the

seaside! Where’s the sand? But I am sure that after a few weeks of being

in this area and away from Manchester they were fine.”

Eileen recalls that there was a boy and a girl who came to stay briefly in

their home because the people they had been allocated to were not available

when they first arrived in the Square. They all sat down to a meal and on

the table were salt and pepper in saucers with a spoon - but the children

hadn’t seen this at home. They didn’t know what salt and pepper were.

In the afternoon they were allowed to play outside. They went in the gardens

in Maria Square and were looking at the flowers. They had never seen

anything like that in Manchester.

Although there were many air-raid warnings in the village Eileen only

remembers just one explosion. This was not in the village but in the Stones

Bank area and probably due to a German bomber off-loading bombs as it

returned home. There were two large craters made by the bombs.

Eileen also remembers meeting evacuee Lilly White. Lilly was born in

November 1932 and attended Temple School. She was among the evacuees

who came in January 1941 after the Manchester Blitz and was billeted at 7

Lake View with Tom Lawrence, worker at the local Bleach Works, and his

wife, WVS volunteer, Edith. Lilly kept in touch with the Lawrence family

and returned to Belmont for Edith’s funeral.

50

A Friend for Life

Nancy Taylor (nee Whittle) was born in Belmont in 1934. Her family lived

in a rented house on Belmont High Street. When she was approaching five

years of age the family moved from High Street to Ornamental Cottages,

just beyond Belmont Bleach Works and on the road to Egerton.

At the same time, Esther Cohen was living in the Broughton district of

Salford. Soon after the Christmas blitz of 1940 the Cohen children came

with their mother as evacuees from Broughton to Belmont and moved into

the house in High Street vacated by the Whittles. Malka (aged ten and a

half), Esther (aged six and a half) and Israel (just turning five) registered at

Belmont School on 6th January 1941. Malka moved on to Bolton School in

the April. Esther and Israel remained at Belmont school until the December

when they returned to Salford but were back in Belmont in March 1942 and

remained here until February 1945.

Nancy remembers getting to know Esther soon after her arrival. They

became “best friends” and remained so for years. Long after Esther returned

with her family to Salford they regularly wrote to each other (“nothing

special; just the usual rubbish!”).

When Esther was in Belmont they would walk home from school together

down the High Street, Nancy continuing her journey through Maria Square

and on to Ornamental Cottages. The Cohen family appears to have been

quite orthodox and Nancy recalls one Friday evening being asked to go into

Esther’s home to switch on the lights, an action seen as “work”, so that the

family wouldn’t have to break the Sabbath by doing work. Esther, like the

other Jewish children, did not join in school Christian assemblies and Nancy

recalls the time when she was leading a small reading-table group in school,

which involved a passage where Jesus was mentioned. Esther, like many

religious Jews, was unwilling to speak his name aloud. Nancy remembers

that there were several Jewish evacuees living in the village at the time.

The girls remained friends and kept in touch, even when Esther married and

moved to London. When many year later Nancy visited the Capital as part

of a Belmont Women’s Institute delegation, the two friends arranged to meet

up and immediately recognised each other.

51

5

Belmont Primary School Remembers

After re-discovering in 2017 that Belmont School had hosted a number of

evacuee children during the war it was decided to investigate the events in

more detail and to consider the possibility of working towards the

production of a permanent school and village memorial. At the time, the

school was in the process of work for the renewal of its ArtsMark award and

the evacuee experience was soon incorporated into the programme with

plans made for the introduction of a curriculum-based, long-term study

leading to the possibility of a variety of arts-focussed outcomes.

Initial study and analysis of the school records was made by the author,

School Governor and retired educational researcher George Skinner. A

report was presented to staff and Governors and formed the basis of a

possible bid for funding for a suitable project outcome.

In January 2018 a curriculum-based programme was started with a class of

Year 3 and Year 4 pupils. It was intended from the outset that the pupils

should be involved sufficiently early in the project to enable them to be part

of the research process as the school tried to understand the nature and

circumstances of this little-known period in the village’s history.1 Although

essentially a historical topic, the uniquely local dimension of the experience,

together with the mixed-faith nature of the evacuee group, suggested that

the project might sit well in a number of cross-curricular themes, especially

understanding about Britishness in the context of social, cultural and

religious diversity. Furthermore, the prospect of relating to, and working

with, the wider village community presented an opportunity to both learn

more from those in, or from, the village who could provide personal

recollections - and later, to share the school’s findings with the present wider community.

There were also potential opportunities for cooperating with village groups

such as the Belmont Local History Society and Belmont Village Residents’ Association and linking with one or more of the schools involved (supposing

they still existed) thus providing an inter-school relationship founded on a

common interest in a moment of shared history.

52

The Curriculum Project One session of about 45 minutes a week was allocated to the term-long

project. The materials and teaching were developed by George and the class

teacher, Mr Luke Ainsworth.

The pupils began by looking at the actual documents which had stimulated

the project. Through dramatized readings based on the Headteacher’s Log

Book account and the transcribed personal recollection of one of the teachers

who had brought the children from North Manchester to Belmont, the pupils

soon came to an understanding and anticipation of a “history mystery”

worthy of further exploration.

Some guided analysis in lessons of the information to be gleaned from the

school Admissions Register provided children with helpful insights into the

value, and the limitations, of historical records and discussion of different

kinds of evidence. While doing this analysis the class actually discovered

that one of the families who were thought to be evacuees were in fact

refugees from Czechoslovakia. This discovery led to the tracing of, and

correspondence with, one of the children from the family, now in his 80s

and living in the USA, and later a visit from his younger brother to speak

with the children (see Chapter 4).

The general background to the war-time

evacuee experience was explored through

case studies drawn from the excellent BBC

People’s War materials and led to pupils

thinking about their own reactions to such

a challenge. They grappled with the

almost impossible task of having to decide

what chosen belongings to pack in a small

evacuee’s suitcase and they designed and

wrote reassuring postcards, based on those

originally given to evacuees, to send home

to parents. Pupils worked with facsimiles

of documents produced for the evacuee

programme and other wartime artefacts,

and also some original family items

discovered and brought in by one of the children.

53

Eager to see if Temple School, the main school from which the original

evacuees came, was aware of the event or had records or local families

involved, a group of pupils wrote letters to the current Headteacher. As a

result, details of Temple School’s Log Book from the period were made

available to us.

Four ex-pupils who lived in Belmont at the time of the arrival of the

evacuees were also identified and provided a unique oral history experience

by sharing their experiences from the perspectives of being from a village

family and what they remembered of school life during the war.

Activities exploring the billeting process, based on the school register and

historic records held by Bolton Local History Centre, helped to create a

picture of the distribution of the many private evacuee children. A day spent

on the East Lancs Railway Evacuee experience brought home the reality of

the combined feelings of adventure and insecurity the original evacuee

children must have felt.

Class-teacher Mr Luke Ainsworth, Governor Mr George Skinner and Headteacher

Mrs Judith Peel with Year 3 and Year 4 pupils appropriately dressed for their

evacuee experience.2

54

The term-long study stimulated much lasting interest on the part of the

pupils. Nine months later, when they were no longer engaged in curriculum

work associated with the project, a review and updating lesson with the

group revealed substantial retention of stories and issues associated with

Belmont’s evacuee children. The children quickly engaged with new

findings about the village’s response to the Jewish section of the evacuees and reflected perceptively about issues to do with the value and degrees of

dependability of first-hand experience, newspaper reports and documentary

evidence. About the same time, two pupils played very effective roles as

evacuees in a presentation about the project to a meeting of a village society.

The idea of creating visual expressions of the ideas and issues arising from

the project (already achieved in a small way through such activities as

designing evacuee postcards to send home and creating outfits for the

evacuee experience trip) became a more specific focus. At this point, and

after discussions with the school Arts Council and villagers, it was decided

to move the project on to the very practical long-term objective of creating

a permanent memorial.

In the summer of 2019, children from the original group of Year Four

children, now in Year Five, explored the village through three guided visits

to discover how people and events had been remembered in the past.

Discussions with the children of their findings led to the exploration of a

variety of approaches to making an appropriate memorial for the evacuees.

Three particular ideas which emerged were a small memory garden, a bench

or seat of some kind and a memories/information board.

With the generous help of a local gardener and builder, the first step was

taken in creating a memories garden just inside the main entrance gate using

original local stone rescued from a recent school building project. At the

time of writing, pupils are working with a tiling company to design and

create mosaics for the garden using Gaudi’s Parc Güell as inspiration whilst

drawing on ideas and symbols associated with the Evacuation. Plans have

been made to share the findings of the project with the wider community

and other schools in the Spring of 2020.

55

6

Acknowledgements and Further

Information. It is impossible to mention all those who have helped with our project and

the production of this book. However, I would like to express particular

thanks to Nancy Taylor, Eileen Edwards, Margaret Lambie, Gordon and

Keith Hurst, Les Croft, John and Ernest Kohorn for sharing their stories with

us. It was Mrs Peel, Head of the School, who saw the potential from the

outset and provided full support and resources for the project. I am grateful

to Ms Shagufta Talib, Head of the present-day Temple School (now

Oasis Academy Temple) in Manchester, for giving us access to school

records and to Eileen Brookes for help with interpreting the 1939 Register.

For background resources our project, and this book, drew on WW2 People's

War, an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the

public and gathered by the BBC, which can be found at

bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar. The material is used here under 'fair dealing'

terms as part of a non-commercial project. A number of internet groups

associated with the history of north Manchester and Temple School allowed

us access to their sites which enabled us to make some valuable contacts,

and the British Evacuees’ Association publicised our project on-line and in

their newsletter.

A special and very personal thank you is due to all the Year Three and Year

Four pupils (2017/18) and their class teacher Mr Luke Ainsworth who

joined in the quest to understand this history-mystery with great interest and

creativity. And finally, to my wife Valerie for her enthusiasm and support

from the very outset of the project. This book has benefitted hugely from

her creative suggestions and meticulous checking of the text.

To Find out More There have been many books and articles written about evacuees (though

sadly few which mention Belmont!) so I have tried to suggest just a few key

books and websites. Specific references to sources I have used in telling the

story, linked to numbered references in the text, may be found in the Notes

and References section which follows, but the following publications and

56

sites are particularly useful for finding out more general information about

Operation Pied Piper and the experiences of those who were involved.

If you have any additional information or were an evacuee to Belmont, the

school would love to hear from you.

The People’s War: Britain 1939-45 by Angus Calder, first published in

1969, has become a classic record of the war written from the perspective of

ordinary people. It includes an excellent analytical section on evacuation.

Send them to Safety: a story of the Great Evacuation of the Second Wold

War by James Roffey was published in 2009 by the Evacuees Reunion

Association (later The British Evacuees Association). It is a very personal

account, fully illustrated and well-researched.

No Time to Wave Goodbye, by one time evacuee, Ben Wicks, is an edited

collection of many stories told in their own words by evacuees. Published

in 1988 when many evacuees were still alive, it was the first, and probably

the most thorough and honest, account of the range of experiences of

evacuee children.

The Memories of War project led by Dr June Balshaw and Malin Lundin

from the University of Greenwich has conducted and transcribed hundreds

of individual and group interviews which may be found at

www.memoriesofwar.org.uk/category/index.aspx.

Luftwaffe over Manchester – The Blitz Years 1940-1944 by Peter Smith,

(published by Neil Richardson, 2003) has full details of the impact of

bombing on Manchester and Salford.

The British Evacuees Association (http://www.evacuees.org.uk) was

formed in 1996 to ensure that the true story of the evacuation would become

better known and preserved for further generations. It publishes a bi-

monthly magazine and has a world-wide membership.

WW2: The People’s War (bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar.online) is an archived

but searchable source of wartime memories contributed by members of the

public and gathered by the BBC.

George Skinner, November 2019

57

Cover Illustration A stained glass window by Michael Stokes in All Saints Church, Sudbury, Derbyshire,

dedicated on 3rd June 2001. Presented by

former evacuees from the inner-city of Manchester to the community of Sudbury who looked after them. The words are those of Jesus in The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25.

Introduction 1. What today we call Primary Schools were

known as Elementary School before the 1944 Education Act. 2. Quotes from the School Log book are from the original, unpublished copy, currently held by the school.

Ch 1 The National Evacuation Programme 1. Churchill's Children: The Evacuee

Experience in Wartime Britain by John Welshman OUP Oxford, 2010, has a good summary of the history of defence planning. 2. Turton Urban District Council received a

“confidential and very urgent” request from the Ministry of Health to conduct a survey dated 16th September 1938 (Bolton Archives) 3. Manchester Arrangements for Evacuation, Manchester Museum Archives, https://manchesterarchiveplus.wordpress.com/

2016/02/16/the-lead-up-to-1939-evacuation/ 4. Manchester Education Authority Circular EV/14 from W. O. Lester Smith, Director of

Education, 18th July 1939 5. As early as 4th September 1939 a householder in Caernarvon was fined £25 for “not

complying with the requirements of the

Billeting Order” (Manchester Evening News, 4.9.1939) 6. Instructions for Billeting Officers, County Office, Preston, March 1939

7. Evidence concerning the evacuation status of

pupils and their dates in school are based on Belmont Primary School’s original Admissions Register, currently held by the school.

8. WW2: The People’s War online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC, accessed

at bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar.

9. “Paddington Bear 'inspired by evacuees'

says author Bond”, Emma Midgley, BBC News 13 February 2012. 10. British Evacuees Association

www.evacuees.org.uk.

Ch 2 Belmont’s Evacuee Children 1. An Industrious Minority: A history of the

Bolton Jewish Community, Hilary Thomas and John Cowell, 2012 (private publication available at Bolton Library). 2. On the 29th September 1939 65,000 enumerators were employed to visit every

house in England and Wales to take stock of the civil population and create a National Register. The information they recorded was used to issue Identity Cards, plan mass evacuations, establish rationing and coordinate other war-time provisions. Each record includes the

names of inhabitants at each address, their date of birth, marital status and occupation. We have been able to draw on some information from the

Register but because of data protection, entries of people born less than 100 years ago are redacted unless they are known to have died.

3. Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Elsie Mullineux. Oral History GB124.OH/3404

NB All the archive records and newspaper reports identify Turton as the de-training venue

for the evacuee children. In November 1938,

Turton UDC suggested using Bromley Cross and Turton stations but were told by County Office in Preston that the Railway Company would not agree to using more than one detraining station - but offered to bring the matter up with the Railway Company. The

outcome of the discussion is not recorded. It

could be that coaches were booked to collect the

Notes & References

These endnotes, which are linked to numbers in the text, have been added to

help readers who might like to know more about the sources of information

or to carry out further research.

58

small group of Belmont bound pupils from

Bromley Cross, the station before Turton, perhaps to enable a much simpler journey to the village. 4. “Staffing, Reception and Evacuation Areas”,

Letter of instructions to Manchester headteachers from W.O.Lester Smith, 15th

April 1940, manchesterhistory.net. 5. Information and quotations about Temple School are based on the Log Book and other unpublished records held by Temple School, (now Oasis Academy Temple), Manchester. 6. The placing of evacuees in such close

proximity to Manchester was described as short-sighted in a Bolton Journal (15.9.1939) article because it proved to be one of the causes of tension between parents and Turton residents. The paper reported evacuees being visited by “a score of relatives who expected to

be fed for nothing”, and illustrated this by noting that “two carloads of people came to a

house in Bromley Cross and asked for tea to be

provided at the house where one of their

relatives was staying” - and the hosts weren’t offered a penny.

The general issue was raised by the MP for Kincardine and Western in the House of Commons Debate on the Evacuation on Sept 14 1939. “I think one mistake has been that in

some cases we have placed the evacuees too

near the cities from which they have been sent.

Just as it is unwise to send a boy to a boarding

school which is too near his own home, so it is

unwise to send evacuees to places within a bus

ride of the cities which they have left. The

temptation to return is too great. Even if they

are only making a return in order to pick up

some extra garments or to see how the old man

is getting on, still it is costing money which they

can ill afford, and it has an unsettling effect

upon them.”

7. Norman Longmate: How we Lived Then - A

history of everyday life during the Second

World War (1971), Pimlico

8. Initially, at least, no provision was made for children who had not been evacuated, or had returned, resulting in much criticism in the press. The Bolton Evening News for 27th October 1939 reported how in the Burnage

district of Manchester a vicar, helped by volunteer teachers, was using his church hall as a temporary school for 80 6-11 year-old pupils.

9. Specific details of the part played by Turton

District Council are taken from the TDC original correspondence and records held by Bolton Library Archives. 10. The WVS, founded in 1938, was originally

set up to train women to help with air raid precautions. This soon expanded into running

emergency rest centres, feeding stations, first aid posts, and assisting with the evacuation and billeting of children. By 1941, one million women belonged to the WVS. At the start of the war there were at least five members in the village: Annie Farnworth, Edith Lawrence, Eva

Hutchinson, Kathleen O’Toole and Lily Robinson (who ran a First Aid Point at Lower Lodge). Belmont was part of the Turton Urban District branch which was led by Kathleen Freeman. Its members engaged in a range of activities from raising money for battleships,

knitting socks for soldiers and prisoners of war and running a mobile canteen in support of the

home guard. They took an active interest in the evacuees and reported in June 1944 that they had surveyed, as requested, the area for further billeting and the response was slightly better

than expected. “In the event of another

evacuation it would be possible to meet our

billet quota without resorting to compulsion”. www.royalvoluntaryservice.org.uk

11. Robert Fuller WW2 People’s War.

12. On September 8th the Journal reported the

arrival of children under the headline “Happy

Little Exiles” recording “the carriage doors opened and from each emerged a dozen smiling

faces…”

13. How War Came To Bolton, 1938-1940 G. J. Bryant. According to the author of this paper,

published in the Journal of the Historic Society

of Lancashire and Cheshire (vol 146, 1996), at Turton, “an initial open welcome turned sour as

hosts and evacuees did not get on, and a

tribunal had to be set up to adjudicate disputes.

There was growing relief in Turton when the

evacuees steadily drifted home as the skies

stayed quiet.”

14. Minutes of the meeting held on April 18th

1941 recorded by the Head of Belmont School. 15. In his Tales of Manchester Jewry and

Manchester in the Thirties (Neil Richardson

Publications, 1986) Monty Dobkin lists more than 250 shops, small businesses and manufacturers on Cheetham Hill Road alone!

59

16. Bolton News, Looking Back 24.9.2003.

17. “Instructions for Billeting Officers” letter from the Ministry of Health, 27th April 1939, held in Bolton Library Archives. 18. A letter from the Minister of Health was

sent to Local Authorities in October 1939 for distribution to parents explaining that the whole

cost of the evacuation scheme, including billeting, had been borne by public funds and commented “I am sure that no parent would

wish this to continue indefinitely where it can

be avoided”. The maintenance cost had been calculated at nine shillings (45p) a week but

recognised that the saving of expense to families in keeping children away from home was considerably less. They therefore proposed a charge of six shillings a week, though reduced for poorer families. 19. By Gaby Rogers and Harry Phillips.

Goodnight Children Everywhere

Your mummy thinks of you tonight.

Lay your head upon your pillow,

Don’t be a kid or a weeping willow. Close your eyes and say a prayer,

And surely you can find a kiss to spare.

Though you are far away, she’s with you night and day,

Goodnight children everywhere

Sleepy little eyes in a sleepy little head,

Sleepy time is drawing near.

In a little while you’ll be tucked up in your bed,

Here’s a song for baby dear.

Soon the moon will rise, and caress you with

its beams,

While the shadows softly creep.

With a happy smile you will be wrapped up

in your dreams,

Baby will be fast asleep

20. “Thousands of you in this country have had

to leave your homes and be separated from your

fathers and mothers. My sister Margaret Rose

and I feel so much for you as we know from

experience what it means to be away from those

we love most of all. To you, living in new

surroundings, we send a message of true

sympathy and at the same time we would like to

thank the kind people who have welcomed you

to their homes in the country.” 21. A letter from the UDC in March 1939 to the

Bolton Post Office concerning the proposed

placement of evacuees implies that there would be sufficient space in schools without using a shift system. Bolton Library Archives. 22. An Industrious Minority: A history of the

Bolton Jewish Community, p104 23. Jewish Chronicle, 1939.22.09, p14

24. Jewish Chronicle, 1941.04.07, p14 25. An Industrious Minority: A history of the

Bolton Jewish Community, p104 26. Paul Gallagher “How many people were killed in the 1940 Christmas Blitz across

Greater Manchester?” Manchester Evening News, 17 Feb 2016. 27. Alan Woodford, WW2 People’s War. 28. Malcolm MacDonald in a BBC Radio Broadcast, 30 May 1940. 29. In total, it is estimated some 1,250,000 people were helped by the Government to leave

the bombed cities in the period between September 1940 and the end of 1941. By

February 1941, the number of evacuees officially billeted in the reception areas had reached 1,370,000 – only about a hundred thousand short of the first phase of evacuation.

The last major phase of evacuation commenced as Germany in 1944 began a new wave of bombing British towns and cities using V1 flying bombs and, later, the V2 rocket.

30. There are issues to do with privacy and protection when considering the details of

individual children who came as evacuees. Where accounts or interviews have been published by a person (as in the case of Gerald Mars) or used publically with permission, they are safe to draw on. The status of data in school Log Books and registers is less clear.

31. Evacuees UK, 26,08.2016,

https://www.facebook.com/EvacueesWW2/ 32. ID:A5723363 WW2 People’s War. For details of the full impact of bombing on Manchester and Salford see Luftwaffe over

Manchester – The Blitz Years 1940-1944 by

Peter Smith, (Neil Richardson publication, 2003).

33. The intention to survey reception areas was

announced in a radio broadcast to the nation (later published as a leaflet by the Government) by MP Walter Elliot on January 6th 1939, during

which he explained, “We have to see not only

that the houses for instance are suitable for the

children, but that the children are suitable for

60

the homes. We want this to be a matter of real

human relationship and affection – a willing

host and a willing guest”. Visitors completed Record Form EV2 for each house. It asked for the number of rooms, residents and potential

billets plus willingness to take unaccompanied children. It also asked if any aspects of the

house made it unsuitable and gave the inspector space to add comments (eg about old age, infirmity or if help was needed). Many examples of mixed experiences of evacuees may be found on the University of Greenwich Memories of War project website.

www.memoriesofwar.org.uk. 34. Ben Wicks, No Time to Wave Goodbye, Bloomsbury, 1988.

CH 3 School Must Go On 1. In 1936, a disused mill in nearby Blackburn

became a national gas mask assembly-plant where, by the time of the Munich Crisis of 1938, more than 30 million gas masks had been manufactured, requiring, amongst other components, 90 million safety-pins. 2. Casualty numbers are from the

Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It has been argued that the initial evacuee project was essentially a failure. Insufficient

awareness of the social and psychological impact on families, inadequate planning for education and social support in reception areas

and the premature start to the campaign resulting in the sense of a “Phoney War”, all combined to promote the premature return of many evacuee children and the reluctance of parents to evacuate children later when the blitz

became a reality. However, if the Luftwaffe had

chosen at the start of the war to adopt the strategic bombing of towns and cities in Britain as they had in Spain, Poland and the Netherlands the number of civilian casualties, including children, might have been enormous.

CH 4 Stories from the War Years 1. Our Blitz - Red Sky Over Manchester, Jan 5, 1941. Digitised version accessed at https://issuu.com/cyberbadger/docs/ 2. www.lafayettemorehouse.com/brian_

meets_vic.html 3. Gerald Mars, Becoming an Anthropologist: A

Memoir and a Guide to Anthropology, 2015, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 4. Charles Trevor, in his anecdotal account of the history of Belmont, explains how during the war Leo had been sub-let part of the Belmont Bleach and Dye Works building. There he

established a book-cloth industry called Belmont Bookcloth Ltd, later Kohorn Bookcloth. See C M Trevor A History of

Belmont, 1956, privately distributed manuscript, later edited and privately reprinted by Jennifer Rhodes in 2010.

5. One of several family ration and clothing books donated to the project by Mr and Mrs

Phillips.

CH 5 Belmont Primary School Remembers 1. In “Enquiry Skills in History: the Blitz and

evacuation” (Journal of Citizenship, Social and Economics Education, Volume 9 Number 1 2010), historian Francis O’Hagan argues for the

inclusion in the school curriculum of this important time in British history and provides useful information about drawing on the varied

experiences of evacuees “with a view to developing enquiry skills in History.” “One of the main aims of any history course is

to develop pupils’ imagination and empathy with people living in other periods. By working

with sources pupils are able to develop an

understanding of the nature of evidence in its

various forms and come to appreciate that the

value of evidence depends on the reasons for

which it was created in the first place and the

time and circumstances of its origin. 2. Photograph by Mr Chris Hoddle.

When Headteacher Vincent Hill closed his school in the

Lancashire village of Belmont for the late summer holiday in

August 1939 he anticipated re-opening it in two weeks’ time. But a national emergency delayed the start of the new term.

Operation Pied Piper had begun and the school, and village,

were now host to 80 additional children, evacuees from North

Manchester.

Drawing on historical records and personal accounts this book

tells the story of the ambitious war-time campaign to save

the country’s next generation from the anticipated bombing

of British cities and Belmont Village’s role in this project.

George Skinner is a retired University of Manchester researcher and

teacher who lives in Belmont Village where he is a Governor of Belmont

Community Primary School.