Evacuation, Second World War Coursework Essay

Source B shows the negative sides and is more personal that the first source. Extracted from an interview with a teacher in 1988, the teacher remembers being evacuated with the school children. The interview was made in 1988 many years after the war so the lady would be of old age. Her memories may be woolly and not of great accuracy, and as it will have been written up by the interviewer it is secondary information. She may be influenced on her views of evacuation after the war; and so be biased against it, even though it saved so many lives at the time. She describes the children as being ‘too afraid to talk’, which I feel may have been true. Children were being taken away from their families and boarding a train where neither themselves or the teachers knew where they were going, as the teacher quotes ‘we hadn’t the slightest idea where we were going and we put the children on the train and the gates closed behind us’. The worry and anxiety affected the parents above all, and from this source it suggests that the mothers ‘pressed against the iron gates calling ‘good-bye darling’. Even though they were told not to come they trailed behind desperate to spend the last moments with their children. Mothers were persuaded into letting their children go by the government and the propaganda around at the time and were even considered selfish if they did not allow their children We do not know who the source is written by, just that it is from an interview. There does not seem to be a real purpose to this interview, but just to perhaps contribute the information gathered to a history book or other merely informative purposes, as the interview took place so long after the war was over. There would be no need therefore for the lady to lie or twist the truth purposefully. And no purpose of the interviewer to convert her information into propaganda or such, so I thin the interview is fairly trustworthy to that extent Source C was written in 1973 and was published a long time after the end of the war. This makes it a secondary source, as it has not come directly from the mouths of the children or the foster parent. Written by a lady presumably for the purpose of educating children on evacuation, language and content is dulled slightly to be more appropriate for children. If it had been a book for adults it would have been described differently. The children would not have ‘giggled’ but would have been offended by the automatic presumption of poverty. They may have even explained that their slippers would not fit in the case. Written for children, no bad points would have been inserted and simple language will have been used. The source may lose reliability due to being edited for children as children are not to be exposed to the negative side of evacuation. This is not a source, which shows the failure or success or evacuation, but if it was to highlight one over the other I would say it shows the successes mostly. I know from other information that one of the main products of evacuation was the sudden realisation from the middle class of the poverty and poor education of children and adults living in the slums. Shown here in the source the woman does presume they are too poor to have slippers, and is embarrassed that she presumed they would own some. Even though the children giggle about it, it is very serious that some children evacuated were too poor to have slippers and some too poor to form the necessary kit of items required. The kindness of the foster parent towards the children and the understanding of her taking them both acknowledging they were siblings show other successes of evacuation. However this was not always the case. Another foster parent may have been negative towards the child or children, and some foster -parents only had room for one.