This History unit is aimed at Year 5 and 6 children.  Some of the themes are not appropriate for younger children.  If you wish to read more there are lots of sources for the Second World War online, but please be careful - there are likely to be some very unpleasant images unless you search carefully.  These sites give some good background information to the causes of the War:

BBC Bitesize KS3

Ducksters

I'm very grateful to Ray Dunn, the husband of Patricia Dunn who wrote the book that we will be using for this unit for allowing us to share the story of Patricia's war time experiences in our learning.  Patricia was born in London in 1929 as Patricia Hiles.  The following information about Patricia comes from the preface (explanatory page at the start) of a book that she wrote to share her experiences.

[Patricia] was ten years old when the Second World War broke out in 1939.  With her elder sister Barbara and younger sister Phyllis, she was among the many children moved away from London to be safe from the expected air raids.  Patricia was always the leader and the one to make decisions in any group.

Her father owned two shops, dealing in radios and bicycles.  During the war he closed one shop and served as a volunteer ambulance driver in the city, his wife helping out at home and in the remaining shop.

This booklet records Pat's memories of her adventures and misadventures in a number of 'billets' and is a reminder of what life was like in days that now seem a long time ago.

It has been said a number of times recently that we are living in times that are unlike anything that the country has experienced since World War II.  There are certainly more similarities than usual - I like eggs for breakfast and they have been harder to get hold of than usual this week.  However, there are many differences and I thought that this would be a great time to read through and consider the emotions and experiences that Patricia lived through.  I've split the learning into sessions but stop and start where you wish in one go.

Session 1: An unexpected journey

Here are the first three pages of the book:

    

Questions to consider:

• What is a billet?  Look it up.
• Did this only happen to poor families?  What evidence do you have so far for your answer?
• What would you pack if you only had a small case?
• Patricia's parents didn't tell her what was happening until she reached the school: how does that compare to the relationship that you have with your parents and what we would expect today.

Session 2: Billet 1, Hallaton in Leicestershire

      

      

Questions to consider:

• Why did the government think that it was a good idea to send children to the countryside away from their families?
• Some people had good experiences, other children did not.  Why do you think that children had different experiences to each other?  What might have happened when they ended up staying with a family they did not know?
• Patricia may have ended up not getting a billet with her siblings.  How would that make her feel?
• Which children do you feel would have been picked last?  It's a bit like having to stand in line for picking teams in a football match, but with much bigger consequences isn't it.
• What was different to the life she had at home and the new life she was starting?  Give examples.

According to Wikipedia, Hallaton is still a very small village with a current population of 523.  It has two pubs and is famous for its Hare Pie Scramble at Easter.

The BBC Bitesize site (see the link below) gives a number of pieces of information about the war but the one I'd like to focus on is the idea that the war divided into five different phases when different things were happening.  When Patricia was in Hallaton, the country was going through Phase 1:

Phase 1	Phoney War Sept 1939 - April 1940	Poland was invaded, but the rest of Europe was largely left alone and prepared for war.
Phase 2	Blitzkrieg April 1940 - June 1940	Germany quickly invaded and conquered Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France.  The British troops in France had to run for their lives at Dunkirk.  The war had started for Britain.
Phase 3	Britain stands alone July 1940 - June 1941	The Luftwaffe (the German airforce) bombed Britain night after night but did not manage to destroy the British airforce, losing the Battle of Britain.
Phase 4	The tide turns 1941 - 1943	Germany suddenly turned against its ally Russia (the two countries were completely opposed to each other but had formed an alliance to gain time) and invaded Russia.  This proved a mistake as millions of troops were diverted to fight Russia and they eventually lost this battle.  Recent documents however have shown that Russia was also planning to invade Germany, so there was no easy solution here for either side.
Phase 5	Victory 1943 - May 1945 (Europe) August 1945 (Japan)	German missiles (V1 rockets known as Doodlebugs) fell on Britain, killing many people.  Eventually America joined the war on the side of Britain and the allies (Britain, the British Empire and America) and the combined might of these countries meant that they overcame Germany in 1945 and then Japan in August 1945 after America dropped the world's first nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.

Session 3: Evacuees in Worle

Below are two pages from the Worle Primary School logbook.  At the start of the entry I've shown you in 1939, this was the only Junior School in Worle and in 1939 it was based on the site of what is now Worle Village Primary School.

Page 390 starts with the end of a summary of 1938 and then the first whole entry is from January 24th 1939 describing the visit to the school of the Inspectress of Needlework.  Most girls who attended the school in 1939 were either expected to take on domestic work jobs (for example working as maids in wealthier local households, or in the hotels in Weston) or were being prepared for looking after their own homes.  Needlework was therefore seen as a key skill.  Expectations for girls were very low at the time.  This has changed hugely - we are sending you out into the world hoping to push you as high as we can.

At the very bottom of the page, is an entry with a slightly unclear date - it could be September 1st 1939 or September 10th 1939.  Either way, it is a really significant entry.  Britain declared war on Germany on September 1st 1939.   Patricia Hiles describes how she and her sisters were immediately evacuated to the countryside.  Worle was considered to be in the countryside (it didn't join to Weston-Super-Mare until the 1960s) and so children were evacuated to Worle.  The final entry on page 390, which continues on to p391 reads "School closed for receiving evacuated children from London."  The next entry on September 15th 1939 decsribes how the school then manages to operate (if you've ever visited Worle Village Primary School you will know that it is on a small site and would have struggled to receive additional children).

"September 15th [1939].  Reopened school.  The school is being worked on a Double Shift

8am - 12 noon Worle School    [remember that this is the Primary School]

12.15pm - 4.15pm  Lancaster Rd School."

Presumably this proved a problem for the teachers who needed a bit more time to have lunch, so by September 18th 1939, the times had changed to give a longer lunch time.  It presumably meant that not all of the children were in the school grounds at the same time as well.
    

Questions to consider:

• Where did the children from Lancaster Road School stay in Worle?
• Did the local and London children meet?
• Did they get on?  How did each side feel about the others?  What would it be like knowing that other children were in your school?  What would it be like knowing that you had had to leave your parents and home but the local kids were still in their own houses?
• What was it like for the teachers to have two different sets of classes?  Many adults were called up to become soldiers - who stayed behind as teachers?

Session 4: War is declared

So, we are living exactly eighty years after the phoney war came to an end.  All of the information we are looking at are called sources.  There are two principal types of source:

Primary Sources: Real evidence from the time or written by people who actually experienced the events and are giving their first hand view.

Secondary Sources: People writing about what happened later but did not experience it themselves.

So, history books are usually Secondary Sources.  In this case we are looking at two types of primary source: Patricia Hiles memories and the Worle CE School log book.  Of course primary sources are not always correct: people see things from their point of view and maybe are unaware of other things happening around them.  Plus, different people often remember the same situation differently.  But that is also true of history books where people explain events from the past from their own viewpoint (we call this idea bias).

So, here are the next six pages of Patricia's story:

        

        

Questions to consider

• So, on page 18 we understand that it is only when they are already in the village that war is declared on Germany.  So, from your knowledge of when the war started, what month do pages 7-17 cover?
• Why were children sent to the countryside so soon?
• Looking at the information in the Worle CE School log book, were the children from Lancaster Road School, London sent to Worle before Patricia was sent to Hallaton, or later?
• On page 19, the story confirms that we are only on 4th September 1939.  What are ration cards?  What are identity cards?

Tomorrow we'll look at rationing and see how our current issues with not being able to get the food we want in the way that we are used to, compare with World War II rationing.

Session 5: Rationing

So, in the section that we have just read, Patricia talks about the introduction of rationing.  Rationing is when the government restricts the amount of food or other items that people can have at any one time so that there is enough for everyone.  In our current situation back in 2020, there are restrictions that we are not used to.  If I have one egg left and I drop it, normally I can say something rude and then go to the garage around the corner and buy another one.  At the moment, even if I go the garage, I might not be able to get eggs which is a situation that I haven't experienced in my 48 years.  Even though Patricia describes her ration book arriving in September 1939, rationing didn't start until January 1940.  This might be her remembering something at the wrong time (perhaps just her ID card arrived in September 1939) or it may be that the system did not all start at the same time across Britain.

So, why did we need to ration food in 1939?  The same reason as we would today if all trade stopped between countries: we import a lot of our food.  According to Wikipedia:

At the start of the Second World War in 1939, the United Kingdom was importing 20 million long tons of food per year, including about 70% of its cheese and sugar, almost 80% of fruit and about 70% of cereals and fats. The UK also imported more than half of its meat, and relied on imported feed to support its domestic meat production. The civilian population of the country was about 50 million.^[3] It was one of the principal strategies of the Germans in the Battle of the Atlantic to attack shipping bound for Britain, restricting British industry and potentially starving the nation into submission.

To deal with sometimes extreme shortages, the Ministry of Food instituted a system of rationing. To buy most rationed items each person had to register at chosen shops, and was provided with a ration book containing coupons. The shopkeeper was provided with enough food for registered customers. Purchasers had to present ration books with them when shopping so that the coupon or coupons could be cancelled as these pertained to rationed items.

Today, I'd like you look at the quantity of food each person was entitled to under the rationing system.  Compare it to what you usually eat today.  I've shown the expected rations in April 1945 at the very end of the war.  These were about half the amount that it was possible to get at the start of the war.  These rations are for one person for one week, so a family would add their rations together to get a larger total.  The one exception is sweets.  What difference would it make to your life (I suspect I'd need to buy some smaller clothes after a few weeks)?

Bacon and ham	4oz (110g)
Sugar	8oz (230g)
Loose tea	2oz (55g)
Meat	1 shilling and 2d (£2.31 in today's money)
Cheese	2oz (55g) unless you were vegetarian in which case 3oz
Preserves	2lb (0.9kg) marmalade or equivalent
Butter	2oz (55g)
Margarine	4oz (130g)
Lard	2oz (55g)
Sweets	12oz (340g) per month

Information from Wikipedia

Session 6: Neville Chamberlain announces that war has started

We talked a little but above about the difference between primary and secondary sources of information.  Primary sources are evidence that comes from the time or peoples memories from the time.  Today I wanted to look at another primary source.  This is a radio clip from the BBC in which the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain and Germany were at war.  Listen to the way that he sounds.  Famously, for most of the war Winston Churchill was the prime minister, but he did not take the lead until a few weeks after the war had started.  Chamberlain was blamed for a policy that had failed.  He had tried to reason with Hitler and had hoped that by handing over Czechoslovakia (today two independent countries: The Czech Republic and Slovakia) to the Germans, Hitler would not declare a wider war.  This policy was called appeasement and proved unsuccessful.  Churchill had been a leading figure arguing against appeasement and therefore was trusted by the public as someone to make the right decisions in a crisis.

Questions to think about:

• Does Chamberlain inspire confidence in you as a leader?
• Was it his fault that appeasement did not work?
• Why did he not appear on TV to make the announcement?
• Last week, Boris Johnson made the announcement on TV that the country was going into lockdown.  More people watched this announcement on TV than any other TV event since the Olympic Closing Ceremony in 2012, eight years ago.  In what ways were the announcements by Johnson and Chamberlain the same and how were they different?

Session 7: Going home for Christmas

In this section of the book, Patricia describes the remainder of her time at Hallaton, until Christmas 1939.  At this time she returned home to London to her parents as the war was still in its first stage: Germany had not invaded countries beyond Poland and Britain had sent troops to France and Belgium but they did not have anyone to fight: everyone was waiting at this stage.  People started to go back to work and their usual way of life because it was not clear what was going to happen.

Questions are below the pages.

        

      

      

   

Questions to consider:

• How do you think Patricia and her younger sister felt when her older sister Barbara moved to the Rectory (a Rectory is the house where a vicar, or Rector who lead a church, lives)?
• The Rectory had electricity and inside running water.  The house where Patricia stayed didn't.  Is it because the couple that they were staying with were poor?  If not, why was there a difference?  What evidence do you have to support your answer?
• Why did Patricia want to leave the house she was staying in?
• Mr. and Mrs. Pearce had no children of their own and allowed three strangers into their house as evacuees.  Why did they do that?  How do you think that they felt when Patricia's family contacted them at Christmas to say that Patricia would not be returning?
• How do you think Patricia's parents felt, knowing that their children were far away (at a time when there were no mobile phones or Internet to maintain contact) in different houses?

Session 8: Air raids begin

Back in session 2, we looked at this table from the BBC Bitesize site which explained that the war was divided into five different phases when different things were happening.  When Patricia was in Hallaton, the country was going through Phase 1.  This lasted for almost 8 months, although she returned to London at Christmas 1939, four months after the war started on 1st September 1939.  Phase 2, when the war started, was then very fast - the name Blitzkrieg means 'lightning war' to emphasise a fast battle.

The next section of the war diary refers to Phase 3, when Britain was being bombed.  My mum's family lived in the East End of London at this stage and decided to stay.  London was initially badly hit by the bombing so many people were evacuated.  My nan had a young baby who was too young to be evacuated (my Aunt was born on the first day of the war); my mum wasn't born until May 1945, days after the war ended.

Phase 1	Phoney War Sept 1939 - April 1940	Poland was invaded, but the rest of Europe was largely left alone and prepared for war.
Phase 2	Blitzkrieg April 1940 - June 1940	Germany quickly invaded and conquered Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France.  The British troops in France had to run for their lives at Dunkirk.  The war had started for Britain.
Phase 3	Britain stands alone July 1940 - June 1941	The Luftwaffe (the German airforce) bombed Britain night after night but did not manage to destroy the British airforce, losing the Battle of Britain.
Phase 4	The tide turns 1941 - 1943	Germany suddenly turned against its ally Russia (the two countries were completely opposed to each other but had formed an alliance to gain time) and invaded Russia.  This proved a mistake as millions of troops were diverted to fight Russia and they eventually lost this battle.  Recent documents however have shown that Russia was also planning to invade Germany, so there was no easy solution here for either side.
Phase 5	Victory 1943 - May 1945 (Europe) August 1945 (Japan)	German missiles (V1 rockets known as Doodlebugs) fell on Britain, killing many people.  Eventually America joined the war on the side of Britain and the allies (Britain, the British Empire and America) and the combined might of these countries meant that they overcame Germany in 1945 and then Japan in August 1945 after America dropped the world's first nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.

Patricia was evacuated to Cardiff which was soon attacked by the bombers.  Cardiff is over an hour away from Weston-Super-Mare by car, but in a straight line is only seconds away in an airplane.  The bombing that she describes in the diary was also occurring in Weston and will be the focus of Session 9.

         

      

   

Questions to consider:

• When the children arrived in Wales they spent two nights sleeping on the floor.  Would this have been an adventure?
• How do you think that the Jones' older children would have felt about two young children from London arriving in their house?
• On page 37, Patricia had to walk to the new, unknown school on her own.  How do you think that this made her feel?  How would you feel in this position?
• Who had a better time in this billet: Patricia or Billy?  Why - what is the evidence that you have for this?

Session 9: Air raids in and around Worle

Map made by children at St, Martin's CE Primary School when I taught in Year 5 there.

Worle was a village during the Second World War, separated from Milton and Weston-Super-Mare by fields.  Patricia Hiles' diary is a primary source of evidence - she was there and she is talking directly about her experiences.  The map above is a secondary source of evidence - it explains what happened based on what other people have said and written.

Weston suffered several raids.  As well as being a reasonably large town, there were a number of military targets in the town:

• RAF Locking, now the site of Weston Village and many new houses, was an RAF base
• Oldmixon was the site of a factory making airplanes for the war
• The trees of Worlebury Woods were used as camoflage to hide lots of army vehicles
• Birnbeck Pier was a weapons test station (renamed HMS Birnbeck during the war) and various bombs were tested at the pier and at Sand Point.

There were two significant incidents involving bombing in Worle.  They are shown on the map. 

Raid 1: 3rd and 4th September 1939

The blue line shows the direction that a plane travelled on the night of 3rd September 1940.  At the bottom of the picture, a house called Westonia was destroyed in Worle High Street; David (age 38), Janet (38) and their daughter Valery (3) were killed.  Their eleven year-old son Melville, was blown across the street by the force of the blast, landing in the front of the Golden Lion pub.  Bombs landed in nearby Greenwood Road but did not explode.  The residents were evacuated to the Church Hall, which still stands next to the Health Centre in the centre of Worle High Street, below the Church.  The following night, another plane made an almost identical run and dropped a bomb which exploded in the garden of the house next door to the Church Hall which was full of the evacuated families from Greenwood Road.  Miraculously, no one was killed.  In the house itself, the explosion made the fire jump in the chimney and the daughter of the family was lightly injured by a pot falling on to her from the mantlepiece.

Raid 2: 27th June 1942

The biggest raids on nearby Weston-Super-Mare took place on the evenings of 27th and 28th June 1942.  102 people were killed in the town and 500 were injured by several German planes flying from bases near Paris and Brittany.  During the raid on the first night, one plane flew over Worle - it is shown by the red line.  It dropped a bomb on the New Inn (now called The Woodspring) at the end of Worle High Street, killing Basil James (67) and William Wheeler (75).  Because of their ages, these men were not fighting at the front but were in the ARP, the Air Raid Patrol unit, ready to put out fires and dig people out of their houses after bombing raids.  The New Inn was where they were stationed.

The plane flew on and dropped a bomb that landed in Mr. Weadon's house in The Scaurs that did not go off, then flew on to East Lynch farm.  All of this would have happened in a few seconds.  As it flew over the farm, the family inside ran to shelter under the stairs.  The children made it to safety, but the plane turned and started shooting its machine gun, killing Charles Drury, the father of the children.  The plane carried on firing its machine gun down at the ground as it passed back the way it had come, leaving a large bullet hole in the finger post (signpost) opposite the Nut Tree pub: it's still there today.

Questions to consider:

• Why was Weston bombed more than Worle?
• Which places do you think were bombed the most?
• What would it have felt like to be sat in a house as you heard a bomb falling nearby?

Section 10: Billet No. 3 at Thrapston

     

      

Questions to consider:

• All of the road signs and railway station names were removed 'in case the Germans invaded so they would not be able to read their maps to discover where they were' (page 42).  What problems would that have meant for people living in Britain?  Who needed to travel around the country apart from evacuees like Patricia?
• Food was scarce during the war.  Why?  Do you think it was ok to eat rabbit?
• Do you think it was ok for Auntie to smack Patricia?  What would it have been like for the adults who took in evacuees to maintain discipline?

Section 11: Billet 4, living with the Marts

      

      

   

Questions to consider:

• On page 48, Patricia discusses the problems that she had with French because she had missed lots of the learning that other children had completed.  Thinking about what is happening at the moment with people learning at home on their own, what will happen if some people do complete learning and others don't?
• Every house that Patricia lived in was different.  This house seems to have advantages and disadvantages compared to the others.  Can you rank the billets so far in terms of how 'nice' they are and explain why you think that?
• At the end of page 53, Patricia discovers that her parents don't like the Marts but haven't told her.  Why do you think they didn't tell her whilst she was living with them?

Section 12: House to house to home

      

   

Further reading:

There are lots of sources for the Second World War online, but please be careful - there are likely to be some very unpleasant images unless you search carefully.  These sites give some good background information to the causes of the War:

BBC Bitesize KS3

Ducksters