Line #55 Main/BlitzEvacuees


1	%%
2	%%
3	%%
4	%% This list of examples has been alphabetized. Please add your example in the proper place. Thanks!
5	%%
6	%%
7	%%
8	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/evacs.png]]
9	[[caption-width-right:350:Child evacuees with their iconic labels.]]
10
11	During the [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII Second World War]], the British government made a sustained effort to remove civilians, especially [[ChildrenAreInnocent children]], from areas of the country that were likely to be bombed by UsefulNotes/NaziGermany. The result was that large numbers of children (over a million at some points during the war; at least one writer claims that more than 3.5 million people were evacuated in total) were sent from urban areas into the countryside or to Canada, to live with distant relatives or complete strangers.
12
13	Fictionally, a standard way to achieve ParentalAbandonment (especially in British works) is to use some of these evacuees as protagonists. This is a gold mine for writers; some standard plots that can result are:
14
15	# The [[CityMouse child who's known nothing but the city]] suddenly has the opportunity to experience the [[{{Arcadia}} beauties of nature]], with little adult involvement.
16	# The protagonist is taken from a happy family to a wretched or even abusive home.
17	# The inverse: the protagonist is originally from an abusive home, and finds happiness for the first time with their hosts.
18	# The protagonist is sent to work on a farm and is forced to grow up early, but is neither violently abused nor loved.
19	# The evacuee's host family or their surroundings are in some way magical, and the plot consists of their discovery and exploration of this magic.
20
21	One that almost never crops up in fiction is the evacuee who returns home to find that their parents have been killed in air raids or have just upped and left. 40,000 children went unclaimed at the end of the war. Also rarely mentioned are the ''children'' who, having reached adulthood overseas, never returned themselves.
22
23	The limitation of the plot device is that you're tied to a [=WWII=]-era setting, although similar stories can be written about refugees from later wars and political skirmishes in Europe, Asia, and Africa, especially children sent without parents. A variation occurs when the evacuees are sent out of the country, allowing for a FishOutOfWater story when they arrive ([[StrangerInAFamiliarLand or return]]). In fictional depictions they'll often be [[CreatorProvincialism shown going to America or Australia]], but in RealLife most overseas evacuees were sent to Canada (America not being in the war yet and [[TeamSwitzerland taking pains to appear neutral]], and Australia being too far away and not in danger itself... [[UsefulNotes/ImperialJapan yet.]])
24
25	Evacuees, at least at the early stages, will be seen with labels around their necks. These were to allow for identification if the trains were bombed. At the time, everyone was told it was to stop them getting lost.
26
27	Subtrope of WarRefugees. Compare TakeCareOfTheKids.
28
29	Although the common wisdom is that the government "overestimated" the potential number of casualties, later research suggested that the mass evacuations saved enough lives to make the original estimates ''seem'' inaccurate. However there remains debate over whether the dislocation and emotional suffering was really necessary.
30
31	For RealLife stories of the evacuees, see ''No Time to Wave Goodbye'' and ''The Day They Took the Children'' by Canadian author Ben Wicks, an evacuee himself.
32	----
33	!!Examples
34
35	[[foldercontrol]]
36
37	[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
38	* Japanese works set during World War II often use a related trope of children being evacuated to avoid American bombing raids. As with Blitz evacuees in British works, this frequently shows up as a backstory in anime and manga.
39	** In ''Manga/BarefootGen'', Japanese children are sent off to the countryside so they won't be threatened by bombing. Akira, the only one of the Nakaoka children selected for evacuation, decides to sneak back to Hiroshima, and his family has trouble persuading him to return to where the food is no better and other irritations are worse. For all their hardships, at least the children sent away survive the war; many of their relatives don't.
40	** ''Anime/GraveOfTheFireflies'' is about two Japanese children who lose their home and family in an American air raid and have to move in with an aunt, who resents having two extra mouths to feed during strict wartime rationing.
41	** In ''Anime/WhosLeftBehindKayokosDiary'', the titular child protagonist leaves her family in Tokyo to go to live with her aunt in Numazu for her own safety. This ultimately saves her life as the rest of her family (save for her immediate older brother) are killed in an American air raid.
42	[[/folder]]
43
44	[[folder:Film — Live-Action]]
45	* [[DiscussedTrope Discussed]] in ''Film/BattleOfBritain'', where one pilot, reading mail from home, is irritated to learn that, after going though considerable trouble to get his family moved into the country, his wife is writing to complain that she's ''bored,'' and wishes to return to London.
46	* ''Film/BedknobsAndBroomsticks'' uses the "[[MagicalNanny host family is magic]]" example to start the plot. Three kids orphaned in the Blitz are sent to the country, and find out they're living with a witch in training. Incidentally, the movie's star, Creator/AngelaLansbury, was a Blitz evacuee herself (the LimeyGoesToHollywood version).
47	* ''Film/MemoirsOfAGeisha'' Sayuri was evacuated to the country side from Tokyo due to the American bombings.
48	* In ''Film/NannyMcPheeAndTheBigBang'', the cousins sent to live on the farm are refugees from London during World War II.
49	* ''Film/Summerland2020'': Frank is from London, and has been sent out to a small Kent village to escape the Blitz. This is why he's placed in the care of Alice. Many other children have been too, with another girl later coming in from Belfast.
50	* The 2015 horror film ''Film/WomanInBlackAngelOfDeath'' features a group of children evacuated to an {{Old Dark House}} where they encounter the titular Woman in Black, a vengeful spirit from the late 1800s who [[DisproportionateRetribution kills]] children whenever she is seen. In retrospect, they really should have taken their chances with the Luftwaffe.
51	[[/folder]]
52
53	[[folder:Literature]]
54	* The ''Molly'' line of [[Literature/AmericanGirlsCollection American Girl]] books features Emily Bennet, an evacuee sent to live with Molly's family in the U.S. They bonded over their mutual admiration of the English princesses and Emily helped Molly put on a proper tea for her birthday party. In TheFilmOfTheBook she is given a much more prominent role.
55	* In ''[[Literature/AuntDimity Aunt Dimity Digs In]]'', several of the current residents of Finch are revealed to have first come to the village as these during WWII, and they return there to live later in their lives because of the pleasant memories and the feeling of sanctuary the place gave them.
56	* Also by Michelle Magorian is ''Literature/BackHome,'' about an evacuee girl's experiences when she returns to her family. (This one was made into a movie too.) As she was evacuated to America, to a very 'modern' family, she experiences a ''lot'' of fish out of water on her return, having to adjust to a very different, and much poorer culture.
57	%%* The protagonists of Mary Norton's ''Literature/BedknobAndBroomstick''.
58	* One of the time-traveling protagonists of Creator/ConnieWillis' novel ''Literature/{{Blackout}}'' goes to the past in order to study evacuees.
59	* In the short story ''[[Literature/NumberSevenQueerStreet The Case of the White Snake]]'', little Collette survives an air raid that destroys a London bomb shelter but her mother perishes in the blast. After she's rescued from the rubble Collette is sent to an orphanage in the countryside, where she's far from the only child to have lost a parent to the war.
60	* ''Literature/CarriesWar'' by Nina Bawden is about two children evacuated to Wales.
61	* Averted in the ''Series/DoctorWho'' Literature/EighthDoctorAdventures, with Fitz Kreiner. He was four years old at the beginning of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, but, well, note the surname - his father was German. His parents sensibly realized the second variant of this trope was almost inevitable, so he stayed in London. Unfortunately, there were still [[KidsAreCruel more than enough other kids left in London to see to it he still got a pretty awful time of it.]]
62	* The children's fantasy novel ''Literature/DriftHouse'' gives this a modern upgrade; instead of being sent from London during WWII, the {{Kid Hero}}es come from New York City directly post 9/11. Their parents sent them to live in the countryside with their uncle after fearing that NYC is no longer safe.
63	* In Creator/JosephineTey's ''Literature/TheFranchiseAffair'', evacuee Betty Kane was orphaned during the Blitz and remained with the family who took her in, who were [[DotingParent Doting Fosterparents]]. Unfortunately she turned out to be a case of [[LikeFatherLikeSon Like Mother Like Daughter]], and eventually slandered the lawyer protagonist's clients to cover up some of her activities.
64	* The novel (by Michelle Magorian) and TV film ''Literature/GoodnightMisterTom'' is a type 3; crusty old geezer Tom Oakley is forced to look after a shy boy evacuated from London, and gradually grows to like him. Then the boy is called back home by his abusive mother, but Tom goes to London to rescue him.
65	* ''Literature/{{Insupu}}'' tells the tale of 11 evacuees whose ship to the US sinks. They are stranded on an island where they establish an independent society.
66	* Creator/TerryPratchett's ''Literature/JohnnyAndTheBomb'' features one, who's having trouble adapting to small-town life and complains (erroneously, of course) about the fact that the milk there seems to "come out of a cow's bum."
67	** That's TruthInTelevision, based on real stories about London evacuees knowing nothing about where meat and milk come from (so unlike now, obviously).
68	** Johnny was able to effectively disguise himself as one; [[ChangedMyJumper the others]], [[TimeTravelersAreSpies not so much...]]
69	* Creator/ConnieWillis' SF novel ''Literature/LightRaid'' stars an evacuee protagonist. Running away from her evacuee home, dodging evac wardens and [[spoiler:rescuing her fellow evacuees from a spy]] are big parts of the plot. Oh, and finding something to wear.
70	* The Pevensie children in Creator/CSLewis's ''Literature/TheLionTheWitchAndTheWardrobe'' go to live with a professor they've never met; his mansion contains the wardrobe that they discover leads to Narnia.
71	* Michelle Magorian's [[RuleOfThree third]] drawing from this well is ''Literature/ALittleLoveSong'', also titled ''Not a Swan'', which is about 17-year-old Rose and her big sister Diana. They are sent to the English countryside in 1943, and end up living alone in a cottage outside a village.
72	* ''Literature/LordOfTheFlies'' very cruelly combines the first two types. While being evacuated from WorldWarThree, the kids' plane crashes and the pilot dies, leaving them to explore an island paradise without adults. Most of them learn to like the island so much they don't care about being rescued, but by the end of the book, they've done a lot of damage to the island anyway--not to mention [[KidsAreCruel each]] [[HumansAreBastards other]].
73	* In "Literature/TheManWhoGotOffTheGhostTrain", Danny Myles was one of the unfortunates who was placed in the care of an abusive adult. As an adult himself, trapped on the haunted train, he is forced to relive the worst of his childhood memories.
74	* ''Literature/MyFamilyForTheWar'' has an odd version. Fransiska Mangold was already an evacuee, escaping from Germany on a Kindertransport. Her first foster family was a wonderful family, though surprised at having accidentally taken in a Christian child (both sets of grandparents had converted long before she was born, but she counts as Jewish to the Reich), but the second set was awful and got on her case for being German. Happily, she is able to return to her first foster family before too long. Unhappily, her actual father dies and she is never really able to reconcile with her mother after the war.
75	* In Creator/EvelynWaugh's novel ''Literature/PutOutMoreFlags'', the protagonist makes money off of an abominable group of urchins by leaving them with different families and then blackmailing the families into removing them from their home.
76	* ''Literature/TheSecretOfCrickleyHall'': The titular Devonshire house, which seems to be haunted, is revealed to have housed several evacuated children, all of whom, apparently, died in a 1943 flood.
77	* Kit Pearson's ''Literature/TheGuestsOfWar'' trilogy (''The Sky is Falling'', ''Looking at the Moon'', and ''The Lights Go On Again'') deals with the fish out of water concept as 10-year-old Norah and her 5-year-old brother Gavin are shipped from Kent (in the southeast of England) to Toronto, Canada. The first book features Norah's homesickness and resentment of Canada (the second is her adjustment to adolescence), while the third is Gavin's unwillingness to go home [[spoiler:especially after their parents are killed in a V-2 raid. This is one of those 'very rare fictional examples'.]]
78	* In ''Literature/ATaleOfTimeCity'' by Creator/DianaWynneJones, Vivian is sent to the country to live with her cousin, but is abducted by {{time travel}}ers after she gets off the train.
79	* ''Literature/ThirteenNeverChanges'' by Budge Wilson deals with this trope. However the story is told from the point of view of a Canadian girl who has to adjust to an English girl living with her family as well as the many other children who have also arrived (including a rich girl her best friend immediately bonds with, the rich girl's handsome cousin and a snotty younger girl).
80	* in ''Literature/TheWarThatSavedMyLife'', Ada joins her brother on one of these trains to escape an abusive mother, which leads to them being taken in by an older woman in the English countryside.
81	[[/folder]]
82
83	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
84	* Mrs. Slocumbe of ''Series/AreYouBeingServed'' continually mentions having been a "Land Girl" during the war. However, she's always very vague about exactly how old she was when it happened. Her experience is elaborated upon when the cast retire to the country in ''Grace And Favour''.
85	** That's somewhat different, though. The Land Girls were members of the Women's Land Army, a form of war service in which women worked in agriculture, forestry and the like in order to free up more men for the armed forces. It's one of many hints (of varying subtlety) that the outwardly prim Mrs Slocombe is one tough old bird underneath. Town mouse/country mouse aspects will often be common to both groups, but a major difference is that the Land Girls are adults.
86	* ''Series/CallTheMidwife'' references this from time to time. Since it's set in the mid-1950s in East London, it's never directly shown, but some Poplar residents reference being evacuated.
87	* ''Series/DoctorWho'' has used this a few times.
88	** In the original series, the Seventh Doctor story [[Recap/DoctorWhoS26E3TheCurseOfFenric "The Curse of Fenric"]] features several evacuees actually in the countryside.
89	** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E9TheEmptyChild "The Empty Child"]]/[[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E10TheDoctorDances "The Doctor Dances"]] features a gang of homeless children living in London during the Blitz. At least some of them are evacuees who then ran away from their host families (though others may be orphans). Abuse is implied.
90	** "[[Recap/DoctorWho2011CSTheDoctorTheWidowAndTheWardrobe The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe]]" features a mum and her two kids getting sent out to an old mansion, where the Doctor plays caretaker.
91	* The BBC HistoricalReCreation reality television programme ''Series/{{Evacuation}}'' was all about this, taking a group of modern-day children and putting them into the situation the evacuees faced.
92	* Also seen on ''Series/FoylesWar''. One episode plays with version two; the young evacuee is unhappy, but more because he's been separated from his family and the life he's known and familiar, and not because of any abuse; the mother and father of the family who have taken him in aren't exactly welcoming, but they aren't actually abusive either, and the daughter tries hard to make him feel welcome and cared for without success (partly because she herself is lonely, trapped and miserable in this family, and thought -- erroneously -- that the experience would be something like version three). [[spoiler: Then the father blows the evacuee up so that he won't tell anyone that the father, a judge, has been accepting bribes to exempt people from military service. Ouch.]]
93	* In ''Film/FrankieHowerdRatherYouThanMe'', Dennis was evacuated as a kid, during which time he thought his mother had died. It wasn't until after the war that he found out that she was alive and that she wanted him to believe she was dead because she ran off with another man.
94	* ''Series/HorribleHistories'' has a sketch that recounts the RealLife descriptions that evacuees gave of things they encountered in the country, like cows, as if it were a trailer for a horror movie.
95	* The BBC Schools programme ''Series/LookAndRead'' had a storyline called ''Spywatch'' about a group of evacuees who suspect there's a Nazi spy in the village. The FramingStory was about one of the evacuees returning to the village in ThePresentDay and helping create a World War II display for the local library.
96	* ''Series/{{Mulberry}}'', a BBC fantasy series, featured Bert and Alice Finch who had come to the manor that is the setting decades ago as a pair of evacuated cockney children and ended up settling in for life and marrying each other.
97	* ''Series/{{Torchwood}}'' has an elderly man with a London accent living in Wales: he was sent there during the Second World War and when his family died his Welsh foster home adopted him.
98	[[/folder]]
99
100	[[folder:Music]]
101	* In the World War II song "(There'll Be [[BluebirdOfHappiness Bluebirds]] Over) The White Cliffs of Dover", one of the promises about tomorrow is the return of one such evacuee: "Jimmy will go to sleep in his own little room again."
102	[[/folder]]
103
104	[[folder:Radio]]
105	* In one of Denis Norden's humorous monologues on ''Radio/MyWord'', he reminisced about his own time as an evacuee (in 1935 for [[RuleOfFunny some reason]]), with the daughter of the couple he was billeted with teaching him the ways of the country. Although just ''how'' clueless the young Norden was about nature was taken to extremes:
106	-->"Oh look, Annie!" I'd cry joyously, "Is that what they call wild honeysuckle?"\
107	"Nay," she'd answer.\
108	"Is it a climbing convolvulus?"\
109	"Nay, lad."\
110	"What is it then?"\
111	"It's a goat."
112	[[/folder]]
113
114	[[folder:Theatre]]
115	* The {{backstory}} to Creator/AgathaChristie's ''Theatre/TheMousetrap'' has an evacuee billeted with an abusive rural family.
116	[[/folder]]
117
118	[[folder:Video Games]]
119	* In ''VideoGame/TheLostCrown'', two of the ghosts Nigel encounters are brother and sister evacuees, who died young and can't rest because they're still waiting for their father to return from the war.
120	[[/folder]]
121
122	[[folder:Web Comics]]
123	* ''Webcomic/GunnerkriggCourt'': Mort's flashback to the day of his death shows him standing next to a poster urging parents to send their children away. Doesn't happen to him though, since he's killed by an air raid soon after.
124	[[/folder]]
125
126	[[folder:Web Video]]
127	* ''WebVideo/WorldWarTwo'': In their coverage of the events of 1939, they report that Britain--fearing the German Luftwaffe--evacuated some people, particularly children, from some of her cities shortly after declaring war on Germany, but as the inactivity of the "Phoney War" set in they returned to their regular lives, only for the Blitz and Battle of Britain to take hold starting in 1940.
128	[[/folder]]
129
130	[[folder:Real Life]]
131	* Averted by the [[UsefulNotes/TheHouseOfWindsor British Royal Family]]. Despite constant pleas from UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill's cabinet to send her daughters to Canada to escape the Blitz, Queen Elizabeth (the consort of George VI) stoically replied "The children won't go without me. I won't leave the King. [[BadassBoast And the King will never leave.]]"
132	* Overlapped with LimeyGoesToHollywood for Roddy [=McDowall=], Liz Taylor (who was born in England to American parents) and some other British child actors of the era.
133	* The town of [[OopNorth Stockport]] in Cheshire has an association with the Channel Islands: refugees who escaped the Islands, especially of Jersey, just before the German occupation, were relocated here for the duration of the war. Many of the evacuees were children sent off the Island rather than allow them to fall into German hands. At least one remained there after the war, and several generations of boys were taught (Channel Island) French by him at a local grammar school.
134	* So long as the Blitz and a sustained government effort are required, the UsefulNotes/{{Soviet\|Russia Ukraine And So On}}s would have the British trumped, at 25 million evacuees; fictional examples alone have not been fully accounted for. The focus, however, was not on the civilian population: [[IDidWhatIHadToDo the priority was to evacuate thousands of manufacturing plants]], with tens of thousands of trains' worth of industrial equipment shipped east of the Ural mountains, put back into use and the new factories built around them (sometimes InThatOrder). The UsefulNotes/RedsWithRockets had [[WeHaveReserves reserves]] because by 1942 the Soviet industrial production took the lead from Germany, and kept it throughout the war.
135	* It was done by UsefulNotes/NaziGermany too, with the KLV (Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung, or "Extended Relocation of Children to the Countryside") during the worst of the Allied bombing of German cities. Close to half a million German children, mostly from Hamburg and UsefulNotes/{{Berlin}} but also from Cologne, Dresden and Düsseldorf, were relocated by 1941, with a estimated total of nearly 3 million by the end of the war. Children were moved either to host families or government-sponsored KLV camps.
136	* Similiar thing happened in UsefulNotes/{{Finland}} during the Winter War and Continuity War, when parents sent their children to foster families in the neutral UsefulNotes/{{Sweden}}. Some of the children returned to Finland after the war was over, some never did.
137	* The refugees from the war UsefulNotes/{{Russia}} is waging in UsefulNotes/{{Ukraine}} (both the displacements inside and outside the country) since February 2022 are essentially women and children (men between age 18 and 60 are forbidden to leave Ukraine to be available for conscription). A number of the children [[https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unaccompanied-and-separated-children-fleeing-escalating-conflict-ukraine-must-be are not accompanied]].
138	[[/folder]]

Context Main / BlitzEvacuees