A Companion to Contemporary Britain 1939–2000

Abstract

In September 1939, on the outbreak of the Second World War, some three-quarters of a million children were moved from the evacuation areas in Britain, which were predominantly urban centres, to the reception areas, which were mainly rural counties. Working-class children for the most part, they arrived disorientated, tired, and hungry, and their experiences with their middle-class host families subsequently led to a storm of debate about their health and welfare. In this way, the movement of children and the evacuation experience shocked rural, middle-class Britain into acknowledging that poverty remained a major problem in urban areas. In demonstrating geographical differences in what would now be called health inequalities, the evacuation led to a reassessment of the scope of the health services available in the 1930s. And it created an atmosphere in which, particularly after the publication of the Beveridge Report (1942), planners began to think about how health services might be restructured in the post-war period. Traditionally, then, the evacuation has been seen as an event that strengthened the wartime mood for universal welfare rather than residual services – the theme of Richard Titmuss's famous official history, Problems of Social Policy (1950). But subsequently, historians have been more sceptical about the extent to which the evacuation changed official attitudes to state intervention, noting that there was little evidence of a change of mood in the key government departments. The picture now is a more nuanced one, with more recent examinations of individual surveys, such as the Our Towns report (1943) indicating that these had both a ‘reactionary’ and a ‘progressive’ tone. These reports anticipated the ideas that would shape the welfare state in the post-war period, but also endorsed an emphasis on a residuum of ‘problem families’, or socially inadequate people.