Children who faced the terrors of the wartime blitz

Nov 13 2009 by William Leece, Liverpool Daily Post

What happened to the youngsters who stayed behind in wartime Britain while others were evacuated? Author Pamela Russell tells William Leece

THE popular image is of the cities as a child-free zone while the bombs rained down in the darkest days of the blitz, the little ones safe out in the country as evacuees.

Children from Liverpool dispersed across the North West and North Wales, and their memories of places like Colomendy camp near Mold have become part of Liverpool folklore.

But for every child who left the city, there was another who stayed, who saw the danger, the horrors and the heroism at first hand. Yet so far their voices have hardly been heard.

It was something that puzzled historian Pamela Russell when she was a lecturer at Edge Hill University, near Ormskirk.

“I had students doing dissertations in oral history, and they would turn to their own grandparents,” recalls Pamela, from Lydiate in West Lancashire.

“And I noticed that if the grandparents had been evacuated, the students would do them. But if their grandparents hadn’t been evacuated, the students thought there was no story there.

“Well, of course there was a story there, and when retired I thought this was a story that needed to be told.”

A few tentative feelers were put out through local papers, with remarkable results.

“I started off with the notion of telling the story for future generations, and also aware that children were doing this at school.

“But when I appealed for stories, the letters came flooding in. They made it quite clear that this was a story that needed to be told from the narrator’s point of view – and so many of them said ‘I’ve never told anyone of this before’.”

Many of the children had the experience of both being evacuated from Liverpool and then returning, only to find themselves in the thick of the blitz.

Eileen Sweeney was typical. A small child at the outbreak of war, she was evacuated up the coast to Southport along with her mother, bother and baby sister early in 1940.

Her father was in a reserved occupation in Bootle. “One weekend, he came to visit and asked to stay to spend some time with his family; he was told it was not allowed.

“Dad was quite upset and said if he couldn't stay, we would all have to leave. We were dressed, and got a bus back to Bootle.”

It turned out to be for the best, as the house they were staying in collected a direct hit from one of the few bombs dropped on Southport, with everyone there killed.

Others travelled only a few miles. Maghull nowadays is a dormitory town barely half an hour from the centre of Liverpool by MerseyRail. But when Jean Greenhalgh, formerly Hopewood, was sent out aged 11, she admits she had little idea how far away she was.

“Some children thought we were in Scotland, it seemed so far.”

Jean and her sister, Margaret, from Granby Street in Toxteth, struck lucky with their hosts. “They were the kindest people and looked after us very well,” she recalls.

She was about to go to Deyes Lane School alongside local children and other evacuees, including a young Leonard Rossiter, another Toxteth boy who went on to become an actor.

But although Maghull was felt to be relatively safe, the war nevertheless came to them.