... And the Policeman Smiled (23 page)

It was wonderful in Cornwall. For me it was freedom – I was back in the countryside I loved. The school was small – only about thirty-five children. In London there was discipline with uniforms; down there there was no discipline and we didn't have to wear uniforms. I adopted one of Mr Crombie's dogs, a black cairn terrier – he more or less became my dog. There was no electricity in the building and no running water. We spent a lot of time cutting up wood for the fires. We developed an ingenious system for making light. We trickled water over trays of carbide which then gave off gas. This was collected in a container like a miniature gasometer and fed through narrow pipes into the downstairs room to produce a naked flame. Upstairs we had paraffin lamps. It was fantastic.

I joined the Boy Scout troop and soon became patrol leader, and that gave me a lot of responsibility for the first time. I took my patrol camping and I organised the salvage collections of waste paper, tins and boxes. At the end I had the whole of West Cornwall under my control …

In spite of evacuation to an apparently safe area, Peter Morgan has vivid memories of a more frightening side of wartime activity:

In 1939, we were evacuated to the Isle of Wight. I can't think of a worse place to have sent children. Whatever the Germans had left after bombing London, we got the lot. We were actually machine-gunned one Saturday afternoon walking along the front at Ventnor. The plane just came in and shot at us as if the pilot had nothing better to do.

Peter went next to the Latymer School which had been evacuated from Hammersmith to High Wycombe.

… standing at the top of the church at West Wycombe, on a clear night you could see St Paul's and you could see London burning.

He was still in the way of stray bombs. One landed in the middle of the school playing fields.

The disruption caused by the evacuation extended through to
Bloomsbury House. It was clear that the records department could not remain in London. The files not only contained the family details of each child but also their Home Office permits, passports and other certificates. A country house, The Grange, was rented at Hindhead and the aftercare department was transferred there, together with the records and a staff of fifteen. Three girls and two boys from Germany helped in the house and the office and another boy worked in the garden.

Refugee children under the age of sixteen were liable to be evacuated; refugee children over sixteen risked being interned.

From the first day of the war the security forces went in fear of the unseen enemy: agents and provocateurs smuggled into the country under the guise of fugitives from Nazi persecution. Voices were raised in support of rounding up all foreigners, but the government was unwilling to go the way of its predecessor in the first world war and order a general internment. Public opinion, it was argued, would react unfavourably to such an extreme measure. Instead, a nationwide network of 120 investigative tribunals was set up, headed by lawyers who were empowered to call before them all adult foreigners living within their jurisdiction. The plan was to categorise aliens under one of three headings. A small number were assessed as category A – German and Austrians with specialised military knowledge which could be used to hinder the British war effort. They were immediately interned. Category B covered those who had lived in Britain for some time and showed no obvious signs of hostility. They kept their basic freedom but were not allowed to own a car, a camera or any large-scale maps, and were forbidden to travel more than five miles from home. Those who could produce evidence of ‘character, associations and loyalty' were placed in category C and were left to their own devices, at least for the time being. Home Office guidelines suggested that refugees from religious, racial or political persecution had the strongest case for a C registration.

The tribunals began their work in October 1939. Since they met behind closed doors and no provision was made for legal representation, decisions were heavily dependent on the sensitivity of individual chairmen. Not surprisingly, their deliberations
revealed wild inconsistencies. In Leeds, aliens of whatever background were given a B label, whereas in Manchester they were designated grade C. Several tribunals put the unemployed into B category, telling them to apply for a transfer to C when they found jobs. One tribunal decided that all women qualified for a B rating on the entirely erroneous assumption that domestic servants were a prime source of disaffection. It was not until the Home Office called the tribunal chairmen together to clarify the guidelines that the ratio of Bs to Cs began to fall. Even so, the RCM had to accept that some 300 of its boys were stuck with a B rating. Protests were made on their behalf but, as Henry Toch discovered, self-help was the only effective recourse.

When the war broke out my brother and I went to a tribunal at King's Cross Police Station. My brother went one morning and I went the next. My brother was classed as ‘B' (dangerous enemy alien). I thought this was unfair. I went on my own to the police with our registration books and told them they had got it wrong. They asked me what I wanted and I said: ''m the dangerous one and he's the friendly.' The police sergeant, seeing an unusually small boy of sixteen, laughed and said: ‘I'll see what I can do.' He went to the judge, took both books in and he came back and said, ‘You're both friendly now.'

After a few weeks of relative calm – the ‘phoney war' – chauvinism was revived by the German invasion of Norway. The bad news persisted. With the fall of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, anti-alien feelings mounted to near paranoia. Addled by the speed of events which sent him scurrying from The Hague, the erstwhile British ambassador, Sir Neville Bland warned that:

Every German or Austrian servant, however superficially charming and devoted, is a real and grave menace … when the signal is given, as it will scarcely fail to be when Hitler so decides, there will be satellites of the monster
all over the country
who will at once embark on widespread sabotage and attacks on civilians and the military indiscriminately.

In fact, the Germans experienced limited success with their Fifth Column in Holland. They did install agents in The Hague with instructions to guide paratroopers to the Dutch seat of government.
But they were not successful (Queen Wilhelmina and the government escaped) and they were certainly not disguised as servant girls. However, Bland's nightmare vision had a powerful effect on the government's thinking and on public opinion. Anyone with a foreign accent, including refugee children, were labelled as potential saboteurs.

One of our girls was reported for sketching a village green (an unlikely military target) and a boy who was overheard describing his home in Vienna was branded as a spy, though presumably not a very intelligent one.

The light-hearted tone of Elaine Blond characterised Bloomsbury House policy of not taking minor problems too seriously. There was a war on; inconvenience could be expected and not only for youngsters. Travelling the country, Lola Hahn-Warburg found that her pronounced German accent caused a lot of trouble.

On a tour of inspection in North Wales, an innocent request for directions attracted a police escort which followed her, at a safe distance, for several miles.

But as the war intensified, the jokes wore thin. It is still with a sense of amazement at the flights of human inanity that Ruth Michaelis relates the experience of her brother Martin, who found himself in serious trouble with his foster family:

They discovered he had built himself a crystal set and he was listening in German in the night when he thought nobody was about – he wanted to hear his mother tongue. They accused him of being a spy (he was eleven) and they called the police in. From that time both Martin and I were regularly interrogated by the police.

One of the first decisions of the Churchill government was to tighten security along the vulnerable south and east coasts. Starting on 10 May, all male category B and category C Germans and Austrians living in these areas were detained, among them boys just past the age of sixteen who were taken from foster parents or schools without explanation.

We found ourselves arriving at Seaton in South Devon and were taken to a holiday camp with chalets, dance-halls, swimming pools, etc. But the atmosphere was not pleasant. The whole camp was surrounded with barbed wire, electric fences, armed guards, screened with canvas and dotted with look-out towers. We were herded in; the officers had their revolvers drawn. Whenever the sirens went – which seemed to happen frequently – they drove us, blowing their whistles, into the chalets.

It was a brief stay at Seaton. The next stop was Bury in Lancashire, where home was a disused cotton mill.

It was empty; long halls supported on cast-iron pillars; there was oil and dirt everywhere and there were our ‘beds' – straw palliasses, meagre ones and blankets, laid out in rows along the pillars. When we arrived our suitcases were searched thoroughly – this had already happened in Seaton but here they were more thorough. Everything was emptied on to the floor; a few essentials were returned to us; the rest was heaped in two piles, one for the officers and one for the men; they seemed especially keen on toilet articles and stationery. This was a symptom of that time but was not legal: a year later the commandant of that camp was sentenced to a term of imprisonment for these thefts.

A warning against a panic reaction to the Bland report came from the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson. He pointed out the enormous differences between the Netherlands and Britain, starting with the absence of a common frontier with Germany. Britain had exercised tight control over the entry of aliens for as long as anyone could remember and, anyway, there had been little contact between Germany and Britain for at least nine months. Moreover, the vast majority of the 73,000 Germans and Austrians in Britain were refugees from Nazi oppression. It was ludicrous to see them as a threat to security.

But prejudice triumphed. The order to intern all male category B aliens was posted on 16 May. A week later the order was extended to women and their children. Then a start was made on rounding up the C grade, those who were known incongruously as ‘friendly enemy aliens'. By July, more than 30,000 men and women were interned, among them some 1000 refugee children registered with the RCM.

Elaine Blond joined the chorus of protest from Bloomsbury House:

They were sent to hastily constructed camps, the biggest of which were at Huyton, near Liverpool, and on the Isle of Man. Life there was miserable. Young and old were thrown together, sharing rooms and beds. A Jewish adolescent who had every reason to hate Nazism could find in his closest companion a devotee of fascism who counted Hitler among the saints. And nobody knew what was going on.

Our complaints, though vigorous, were not at first taken seriously. I was not the only one at the RCM to be told by a Home Office official that refugees wanted to be interned; how else could they be protected from the angry natives who blamed them for causing the war? Making the best of a bad job, we sent in books, recruited volunteer teachers (there were internees preparing for their school certificates) and explained to the supervisors the intricacies of the kosher diet. One group of
Youth Aliyah
boys were allowed to grow and prepare their own food, a form of self-help which did something to alleviate the tedium.

The refugee organisations now found themselves in a difficult position. Once again they were besieged by applicants – desperate relatives of the interned – seeking information and reassurance. But little information was available from official sources such as the Home Office bureau at St Stephen's House in Westminster. Eventually, a central department set up jointly by the refugee committees helped to alleviate major problems like the treatment of refugees as Nazis, refugees and Nazis being kept in close proximity, inadequate accommodation, lack of adequate medical care and the separation of families.

Most of the RCM internees were packed off to the Isle of Man, a late addition to the list of camps drawn up by the War Office in 1939. In fact, it came as a complete surprise to the hoteliers of Ramsey when they were given notice to quit their premises within six days, leaving behind ‘all furniture, bedding, linen, cutlery, crockery and utensils'. In Port Erin, where a women's camp was set up, landladies were asked if they would accept internees at 3/- a day. As the summer tourist trade was looking gloomy, the offer was taken up enthusiastically.

For one early arrival in Ramsey, where the internees were cordoned off from the rest of the town by barbed wire:

Those first few days were the most depressing of my life. It was my first – and so far only – experience of being imprisoned. For the first time I became conscious of how utterly alone I was in the world. The few friends I had made were either in the same position or could not help me anyway. This was the only time when I strongly felt that emotion which is usually called ‘homesickness', but the emotion turned sour since there was no home for which to be sickening.