American generosity remembered

By Michael Henderson - 01/02/2011

When President Obama met Prime Minister Cameron in June the American leader stressed the continuing significance of the so-called special relationship between our two countries. There is one group of people who have never doubted that fact. They are the more than three thousand ‘sea-vacs’, Brits who spent anything from two to six years in the United States during World War II. They will never forget the generous way American homes were thrown open to British children in 1940.

 

 

Most readers will be very familiar with Operation Pied Piper, the September 1939 evacuation of more than a million children to the countryside to protect them from German bombs. Many will have been evacuated themselves or have taken evacuees into their homes. It is not so well known that thousands of children were sent to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and the United States.

 

Most of this overseas evacuation in the first months of the war was of children whose parents could afford it or had perhaps school or university or company links with the United States. However, following a public outcry, in May 1940 the government set up a scheme, the Children’s Overseas Reception Board, to make this option available to all. Within a week more than 200,000 children were signed up to go. In the event fewer than 20,000 actually went because in September 1940 a ship carrying evacuees, the City of Benares was torpedoed and sunk, 77 children died, and the government ended the scheme.

 

Those of us who went had many unusual adventures. Whether it was playing American sports, eating American food, then unknown to us in Britain, and canoeing and camping in the woods, or, after American entry into the war in 1941, spotting for planes and hearing Prime Minister Churchill speak at Harvard. My father came on a mission to Washington, DC, and phoned us. When I put down the phone I said, ‘Gee, he talks just like in the movies.’ Then came the return to Britain and what the New York Herald Tribune described as the hard task of learning to be British again.

 

I was in touch with more than a hundred evacuees to North America for my book on the subject See You After the Duration. It is clear that those years, difficult as they were at times with education and family relationships disrupted, meant a widening of horizons. One evacuee wrote me that it had given her a sense of space and purpose that everything is possible and another that to experience a second culture is to learn early in life that there is more than just the best British way of doing things. A committee responsible for arranging for evacuees to go the United States summarized the experience as ‘an applied lesson in international understanding’. So it probably had a part in my decision and that of my brother to devote ourselves to creating international understanding and for me to write books in that vein.

 

 

 

 

Michael Henderson is the author of eleven books including See You After the Duration and No Enemy to Conquer: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World.