Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Imagine being torn from your home and sent to live with strangers. To escape the threat of bombing in British cities,

thousands of people were sent to the countryside and they weren't just children. Historian Joshua

Levine joins Lauren Good to revisit the experiences of evacuees in today's episode, including those of his own

father. Josh, thanks so much for joining me for an episode of our Everything You Wanted to Know series.

Today we'll be talking all about the history of evacuees in Britain.

First of all, during which period of the Second World War were children evacuated?

Evacuations actually started two days before the war. That's how much it was anticipated.

The bombing of Britain had taken place during the First World War on a much bigger scale than

people sometimes realised. So if you walk through London, you'll see damage to buildings and

damage to Cleopatra's Needle, for example, on the Thames, which people often assume is Second World War Blitz damage. It isn't. It's First World War damage. And people were sheltering in the tubes in the First World War. So people already knew that what it was like to be bombed. And it was anticipated between the wars that bombing would end the war almost immediately. As soon as war was declared,

the bombers would come over. It was said by the 1930s Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that the

bomber will always get through, which reflected common thinking. So that in 1938, very soon before the war broke out, the air staff were predicting in the very

first weeks of the war, something like 2 million casualties, half a million dead,

and it was believed that this would be a kind of knockout blow or an effect at a knockout

blow.

It's why Britain didn't really bother with building

fighters until relatively late, because it was thought there was no point that bombers were

going to get through. So the Spitfire and the hurricane were relatively late developments.

So bombing was absolutely expected, and the idea of evacuation would be to get, well, what were known as useless mouths out of the cities, out of London primarily.

And what this meant was people who would hamper the war effort just by their presence, or, you know, it was important, obviously, that lives were saved.

But it was also thought that if there were huge numbers of casualties, that would severely affect morale,

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