Abstract
This article examines the movement of British evacuee children and adolescents to Dominion countries during the Second World War. While these evacuees were spared from exposure to the violence of war, such as the bombing of major British cities, their move to safety came with certain demands on their behaviour. These young evacuees were expected to act with ‘ambassadorial dignity’ in all ways; they were to be polite, courteous, chaste, law-abiding and, above all, grateful to their host family and the country that took them in. But acting with ambassadorial dignity was a task beyond what many evacuees were willing or able to carry out. Their failure – or refusal – to act as expected was often interpreted as a form of disobedience. This article uses case studies of evacuee children and adolescents to illuminate the many ways that disobedience was conceptualized by adults in charge of these evacuees. Specifically, this article focusses on sexual disobedience, evacuees who rejected the standards of chaste heterosexuality expected of them, and bodily disobedience, where overweight bodies of pubescent girls were seen to pose a threat to the future of the ‘British race’ as envisioned by adult administrators of this evacuation.
In February of 1942, 15-year-old British evacuee, Cecily Wade, was ejected from her placement in a Canadian house due to the ill health of her hostess, Emily Devlin. This deterioration in Devlin's health was directly linked, it was claimed, to Cecily's unruly behaviour. Although Devlin had pledged to care for Cecily ‘for the duration’ of the Second World War, she nonetheless reneged on this commitment when she found out that Cecily was sexually active. 1 In the archival collection of documents produced by adults about the evacuation of British children and youth overseas during the Second World War, Cecily's case exemplifies some of the problems raised by the unruly behaviour of young migrants. Her case invites us to consider what the acceptable parameters for British child behaviour during this evacuation were, and to ask what was at stake when this boundary for behaviour was transgressed or bypassed by adolescents like Cecily? 2
In the period from 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, to its conclusion in 1945, approximately 20,000 British children were evacuated overseas to various Dominion countries, including Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. 3 This movement is part of a larger history of British children being sent to the Dominions. As Ellen Boucher examines in Empire's Children, more than 95,000 British children were sent overseas from 1869 to 1967 to work as agricultural laborers and apprentices. 4 While the wartime overseas evacuation is often eclipsed in historical memory by the much larger simultaneous domestic evacuation of more than 3.5 million children and adults to the British countryside, 5 this smaller overseas migration provides fertile ground for investigating the character of the British imperial enterprise in the mid-twentieth century, and the ways in which children and youth were perceived to play a crucial role in the success of the Empire's future. 6 Children were evacuated overseas in one of three ways: privately, with their migration being paid for by their family; through a government sponsored evacuation program, the Children Overseas Reception Board (CORB); or, through the auspices of private corporations and institutions that organized their own migration schemes. 7
This study examines cases of four different evacuee children who were sent overseas during the Second World War, and who displayed different types of disobedience, in an attempt to understand what types of behaviour were unacceptable, what mechanisms adults used to amend them, and what was at stake in failing to bring these disobedient young people to heel. The four children discussed in this study were, of course, not the only evacuees who disobeyed adult instructions and ideals, but they are unique in the volume of material preserved in the archive relating to their transgressions. Generally, the disobedient acts of evacuee children are difficult to access. A suggestive line or two may appear in an evacuee's case file stating that they had been moved from their placement due to misbehaviour, but no details are provided. This lack of evidence stems in part from the March 1959 destruction of most of the files pertaining to overseas evacuation. 8 The four case studies that comprise this chapter are based on archival material that, through luck or oversight, escaped the official purge of documents. In these four cases, rather than having only a few lines that hint at disobedient behaviour, we have thorough records detailing the transgressions that took place, and we are able to see the large apparatus of adult caretakers that were involved in defining the boundaries of the disobedient behaviour and then seeking to rectify it. While the four case studies detailed here are by no means the only cases of disobedient evacuee behaviour, the detailed records reveal the types of concerns that adult caretakers had about their young charges. Claire Halstead notes the limitations of the case study approach to examining the experience of evacuee children, stating that it is ‘problematic as it … is preferential and privileges the experiences of a small group of evacuees over the mass’. 9 However, as the recent collection Small Stories of War, edited by Lorenzkowski, Alexander and Burtch, argues, using diverse case studies ‘opens up new possibilities for interpretation that only become possible when we listen to them together’. 10 This article claims that the case-study approach demonstrates how abstract ideals like obedience were negotiated and enforced on the ground, in diverse ways, in the real lives of children.
The category or concept of disobedience was and is a broad and shifting target. For example, a Scottish social worker writing in 1933 provides a long list of childhood ‘abnormal behaviour[s]’ that includes: Truancy, thieving, moodiness, violent temper, outbursts, backwardness with average intelligence, persistent fantasy formation, unmanageableness, and anything that would suggest that the child is not adapting himself in a satisfactory way to his environments; also children suffering from nervous instability showing by stammering and speech defects.
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This study will focus on two distinct types of disobedience: one that is as displayed through seemingly ‘inappropriate’ sexual behaviours in children and youth, and another that is located in unruly growing bodies, particularly in the seemingly abnormal weight gain of pubescent girls. Examining these case studies invites us to consider the several factors that went into demarcating acceptable migrant behaviour, including the category of childhood itself (who was included and when one stopped being a child), as well as gender, and how disobedience could be differently conceived of for boys and girls. Another consideration is what methods were considered appropriate for dealing with unruly charges, as some parents, teachers and Children's Aid Society (CAS) authorities advocated for corporal punishment or institutionalization at reform locations like convents and boarding schools to help discipline the aberrant behaviours noted above.
The ideological context for these definitions and modes of discipline was also crucial. Due to the uncertain future of Britain in the early stages of the Second World War, when many still believed a landed German invasion would take place, these young evacuees bore the heavy burden of being ideal imperial children, carrying the weight of war-time expectations and of a prosperous British future. 12 If Britain was to fall to the Nazi threat, these children were expected to continue the British line, and propagate more British stock in the Dominion countries. 13 Writing of worries about child ‘maladjustment’ disorders in Great Britain after the First World War, John Stewart states: ‘Failure to address maladjustment's fundamental causes would result in continuing distress and instability to the child, the child's family and society as a whole, immediately and in the longer term’. 14 When the ramifications of even ordinary childhood disobedience are so broad, it is not surprising that cultural anxieties regarding childhood disobedience in the context of war, displacement, separation from family and expectations of a nation and a national future, are extreme. Children's disobedience, their failure to live up to standards imposed on them by adult politicians and caretakers – and the letters, official inquiries, committees and negotiation about these behaviours – highlights the fragility of this idealized future.
Before CORB children embarked on the journey to their new homes in the Dominion countries, Geoffrey Shakespeare, the administrator of the government sponsored evacuation program, addressed them. 15 Shakespeare's address was meant in part to improve the morale of anxious or sad children and to prepare them for life away from their parents; but his speeches had a second rhetorical purpose: to outline the behaviour expected of these children during their stay in the Dominions.
Shakespeare informed the groups that they ‘did not represent themselves when they were sent overseas and therefore they could not behave as they liked’. Instead, they were expected to be ‘little British ambassadors’. 16 Expanding upon his reasoning, Shakespeare stated that if evacuee children ‘behaved badly people would say: “What frightful children! Their parents in Britain cannot be worth fighting for”’. 17 It was consistently impressed upon these evacuees from the very outset of their journey that their conduct must be nothing but perfect; they were to be polite, fearless, helpful, chaste, courteous, strong, kind and, above all, they were to display the highly prized ‘stiff-upper lip’ thought to be emblematic of the British people. But acting with ambassadorial dignity was a task beyond what many children were willing or able to carry out. Their failure – or refusal – to act as expected was often interpreted as a form of disobedience.
Defining disobedience, what acts were considered disobedient or inappropriate, and who had the right to decide, are all questions of great importance in understanding this child migration movement. Broadly speaking, to be obedient necessitates ‘submission to the rule or authority of another; compliance with or performance of a command, law, etc.,’ so that disobedience implies a failure to act with due submission or compliance. 18 The idea that children should obey their parents, teachers, and adult family, community and religious leaders, is something still taken for granted today. Obedience is expected in the realm of sexuality, of deference to elders, of law, and more general expectations regarding ‘satisfactory’ adaptation to an ‘environment’.
Disobedient, unbecoming or inappropriate behaviour presented a troubling issue for organizers of this evacuation. Various adults acting in loco parentis – including teachers, foster parents, CORB administrators, CAS authorities and government bureaucrats – sought to punish misbehaviour, but they were not able to reprimand evacuee children in any way they liked. Legacies of the poor treatment of previous groups of British migrant children going to Dominion countries, especially the ‘Home Children’ sent to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, meant that there was heightened scrutiny of these adult guardians and of the treatment of British children placed in their care. 19 If these children were abused, or punished unduly, it would be seen to undermine the mutual trust and support needed for the imperial enterprise generally, for the unity needed for the war effort, and potentially for the future of Britain itself. 20 But at the same time, it was believed that disobedient children needed correction. How these disobedient children were conceived of, how correction and discipline were applied, what the effects of disobedience were, and what institutional remedies were used, are all subjects that bear on the larger question of how young migrant bodies were understood and controlled in Dominion countries in the Second World War. Disobedience is thus construed not only as the failure of these children to follow certain rules of conduct but also a failure to live up to contemporaneous expectations about bodies, health and physical condition.
Of all the forms of disobedience, sexual promiscuity of evacuee children was especially troubling for adults. Colin Heywood notes that we ‘associate childhood with such characteristics as innocence, vulnerability and asexuality’. 21 When children and youth deviate from this expectation of asexual behaviour and display sexual desire or engage in premarital and underage sex acts, they are seen as exiting the proper bounds of childhood and straying into the realm of adulthood. Steven Angelides calls sexuality ‘the most highly cherished marker delineating the boundaries between childhood and adulthood’. 22 To be a child is to be sexually innocent. One possible adult response to migrant children who were sexually active was to view them as no longer children and thus to understand their promises to care for children to be void, or, at the very least, in question.
This transformation of a child (or, in this case, adolescent) into someone understood to be an adult due to sexual disobedience can be seen in the case of Cecily Wade, whose story opens this study. Cecily arrived as a private evacuee to Ottawa, Canada, in 1940 at age 13. Cecily's case file contains very little information, except for the facts of her sexual misbehaviour. It contains no writings or testimony from Cecily, only adult impressions and judgements on her behaviour. Cecily was originally sent to board with a relative of her father, Emily Devlin; however, in February 1942 Cecily was ejected from Devlin's house on account of her ‘sex misbehaviour’. 23 The paucity of contextualizing information and the emphasis on sexual deviance in this case form an example of the way that sexually agential children are ‘endlessly spoken about and endlessly rendered mute’. 24 Sexual children fascinate, repulse and frustrate adult caretakers as they trouble the construction of childhood and reject the chastity expected of them.
What did ‘sex misbehaviour’ entail in Devlin's mind? And why was it reason enough to expel a 15-year-old war evacuee from her house? Devlin's declaration from 9 February 1942, provides some insight. She states: ‘That a letter written by the said child to one, Private Walter Osborne … made clear the fact that the said child had sexual relations with him prior to coming to Canada’. Further, Devlin claims that ‘the child was promiscuous in England’, based apparently on Devlin's reading of Cecily's diary from 1940. 25 Cecily was thus not allowed privacy in either her letters or diary while living in Devlin's home.
Cecily's character now established, Devlin continued that, since moving to Ottawa, ‘the said child … has made definite sex advances to men, and during the holidays, Christmas 1940, she stated she had intercourse and an examination and test to ascertain her condition was completed’. Although the file does not go into specific detail about this test, we can assume it was likely to verify that she was no longer ‘intact’ by an examination of her hymen. The stress of having a sexually active, disobedient girl was evidently too much for Devlin, who states that ‘the said child has a most serious effect on my health and heart condition, and I cannot and will not continue to accept responsibility for the said child’. As a result, Cecily was sent (‘with difficulty’) from Devlin's home to the Convent of Mary Immaculate where, Devlin hoped, her behaviour would improve. However, the file shows no improvement and ‘many letters of complaint were received about the said child and her adjustment there’. The record does not show if these letters of complaint were due to sexual behaviours or if some other offenses were committed.
Cecily's behaviour not only caused Devlin to revoke housing and support, but also it led to CORB and the CAS in Canada to be wary of supporting her as well. Although the CAS stated they were prepared to accept Cecily for placement in the absence of the planned support from Devlin, the report warned that the CAS ‘can assume no responsibility for what may happen to her if this sex misbehaviour continues’. 26 The term ‘responsibility’ here is vague, and open to interpretation. Perhaps it alludes to the financial burden of caring for Cecily, but very likely the main worry of the CAS was pregnancy. It is during this period that Cecily arguably ceases to be understood as a child in need of care and instead starts to be perceived as an adult, responsible for her own welfare. Devlin and the child welfare authorities link Cecily's age and her sexual behaviours to her adult-adjacent status. At the time of the declarations, February 1942, Cecily was 15, but the reports on this matter mention – more than once – that she was ‘nearly 16 years of age’. 27 As Angelides argues, ‘the category or axis of age increasingly operates in the west as the definitive, primary marker shaping notions of childhood sexuality and sexual capacity’. 28 In Cecily's case, being ‘nearly 16 years of age’ was made indicative of her proximity to adulthood, which allowed adult authorities to distance her from childhood, and therefore to legitimate withdrawing their support and financial aid.
The rhetoric of youth and adulthood used in Cecily's case, and in the overseas evacuation movement in general, is worth briefly discussing. Although Cecily was already a teenager at the initial time of her migration – 13 years old – she was nonetheless consistently referred to by all adults in charge of her case as a child, or, less occasionally, as a girl. 29 Only once in the 46 pages dealing with her case is the term ‘adolescence’ used to refer to a stage of life although she herself is not referred to as an adolescent. Emphasis is consistently placed on her status as a child, and the protection she was due as a result of that categorization. Indeed, in the overseas movement, evacuees as old as 18 years of age could be categorized as ‘a child’, partly, it seems, to emphasize their innocence and validate their removal from Britain. As Penny Starns has shown, the inclusion of teenagers in the CORB group of evacuees was met with criticism, with many politicians arguing that young people aged 14 years old and above, far from needing special protection, should stay behind in Britain and provide manpower to help with the war effort. 30
Initially emphasizing Cecily's youth, and consistently referring to her as a child, is thus a reflection on the strategic terminology used by adults in charge of this evacuation. Cecily was an individual in need of care, but as importantly, it seems, she was representative of all British young people evacuated abroad who benefitted from the idea that children were innocent victims of war, and thus had to be protected. But then, as Mary Louise Adams writes: ‘girls who were labelled delinquent were not just violating the expectations that were attached to their gender, they were also threatening notions of the adolescent as not yet sexually mature, [and] notions of sex as something to be experienced only by adults’. 31 By shifting Cecily out of childhood, out of adolescence, and into adulthood, her sexual behaviours could be cast in their ‘proper’ context, as adult actions. This does not mean, of course, that beginning to cast Cecily as an adult signalled a tacit acceptance of child or youth sexuality as normal, but rather it allowed various authorities to maintain the reputation of evacuee children as chaste and obedient. If Cecily was not a child, then her behaviour would not reflect on the larger group of British evacuees.
CAS authorities dealing with Cecily's case therefore walked the uneasy line of emphasizing her childhood in as much as she belonged to a group that needed the category of a certain age to confine and protect it, while also demonstrating that her sexual behaviours were constituting a break from childhood innocence, an entrance into adult behaviour and therefore legitimated withdrawing support from her as an individual, but not from all young evacuees who approached their 16th birthday. Britain was worth fighting for if its children behaved well, Shakespeare indicated. Cecily's case shows what could happen when evacuee children began to behave badly and stopped modelling ideal childhood behaviour. They ceased being worthy of support as children.
As Adams's comment on delinquent girls suggests, early or premature sexual activity was seen to stunt the natural transition from child to adult, which was necessary for producing normal or ideal citizens. 32 The extraordinary weight of meaning given to these children's futures, and the strict course of development they were expected to undergo, meant that any deviation from this path could be troubling not just for the individual children, but also for the civic body they represented. This is why, in a letter written from CAS worker Helen Horton to Cecily's father, Alexander Wade, Horton emphasizes the need to reform Cecily's inappropriate sexuality and instead foster ‘her interest in academic accomplishments’ in order to ‘assist her to develop into a more dependable citizen’. 33
This view of children as not merely individuals in need of protection, but as citizens and representations of the British imperial future, ensured that children who fell outside of the realm of acceptable behaviour would be viewed as a threat. Shakespeare had initially hoped the CORB movement would democratize overseas evacuation, making it available to any British children wishing to migrate; however, the reality was that other administrators were very selective regarding which children were deserving of protection. An April 1942 letter from CORB director Marjorie Maxse states that Cecily could not be retroactively accepted for care under CORB as ‘the reputation of children under the government scheme as a whole might have suffered owing to the behaviour of this particular girl’. 34 In this way, disobedience was treated like an infectious illness. Cecily, due to her behaviour, could not be envisioned as part of the ideal British future CORB administrators were working hard to create. Her behaviour might spread, be contagious. To this end, Frank Kohl argues that people perceive child sexual behaviour as scarring, as ‘a warping mark’. 35 As a sexually agential, unwed teenage girl, Cecily was marked as deviant, dangerous and undesirable in the eyes of adults in charge of her care.
Girls were not the only ones deemed disobedient for engaging in sexual activities. Derek Bertram Lowe, an evacuee from Manchester, who was sent at age 13 to Christchurch, New Zealand in 1940 to stay with friends of his parents, was also deemed unchaste.
His hosts, Mr and Mrs Miller, were originally happy to have a war evacuee in their home.
However, less than six months after he arrived in New Zealand, Derek – like Cecily – was ejected from his placement. The CORB liaison to New Zealand, Cyril Bavin, reported that ‘the boy [Derek] has made no attempt to fit into the home life and has been not only disobedient but very dirty in his habits’. Derek was accused of ‘pilfering goods from Mr Miller's store’, being ‘most untruthful’ and being ‘an incessant smoker’. Most importantly, perhaps, he was said to be ‘suffering from a perverted sex complex’, although the details of what ‘a perverted sex complex’ is are not explained in this file. 36 Was he merely having sex, as Cecily was, and writing about it in a diary or a letter? Was he homosexual? Or was there actually a shocking and bizarre transgression taking place? What did ‘perverted’ signify to the Millers, or to the CORB worker who wrote about this in Derek's file?
The vague term suggests that a broad range of unspecified behaviours could fall under the umbrella of ‘perverted’, and so be used as a reason to expel the child from his home. This lack of specific information seems to flatten youthful sexuality to a singular plane, casting all early sexual explorations and behaviours as interchangeable with one another, and all as equally inappropriate. To this end, Angelides argues that ‘young people's sexual subjectivities are routinely leeched of specificity, complexity, depth and dynamism in the process of being assimilated to the generic category of the child’. 37
Derek and Cecily were not unique in their experience of being re-homed during their stay overseas. According to Michael Fethney, ‘between 10 and 15 per cent of all CORB evacuees had a change of foster home within the first six months after arriving in their dominion’. 38 For a select few children, Derek and Cecily among them, we have some detail that provides insight as to why these relocations took place. For many others we have only hints, such as Winifred Dale who was moved from her second placement in Canada because she ‘did not get on well in [her] aunt's home’, or Bernard Conn whom the hosts ‘found difficult to handle’. 39 At times, the details are spare but slightly more suggestive, such as another evacuee to Canada, Deidre Parsons, where the report notes: ‘First foster parent complained [of] girl's habits and attitudes with sex’. As with Derek, we are left to speculate what exactly these ‘habits and attitudes’ were that were so objectionable. It seems likely, however, that to certain foster parents, any indication that their young charges were sexually active was reason enough to expel them from their home. Many volunteer foster parents in the Dominion countries wanted to care and provide for babies and toddlers, innocent and mouldable beings, not sexually agential teenagers. 40
Indeed, children could be relocated from their foster homes for virtually any reason. Some relocations were due to personality difference, and are summarized as rehoming owing to ‘incompatibility’, or because the ‘child did not fit in easily’. Other rehomings were due to fairly standard child development issues, such as enuresis, which some foster parents found difficult. At other times the reports make clear that the ‘frequent moves [were] no fault of child or hosts’. The placement simply did not work out. 41
However, in a few cases the relocations can be attributed to more serious misbehaviours, as was the case with Derek and Cecily, and these more severe transgressions were likely to lead to institutionalization rather than rehoming. Shakespeare advised at the outset of the movement that ‘the use of “institutions” should be avoided, except for … the very occasional “problem” child’. 42 Roy Whitehead, an evacuee to Canada, was moved from his first placement due to accusations of stealing. He was sent, like Derek and Cecily, to an institution – in this case the Knowles school – and his file summarized that ‘Roy is a decided problem’. 43 Jack Russell, an evacuee to Australia, was another ‘problem’ for CORB organizers. He is listed as having at least seven foster homes while in Australia, including being sent to a state ward in November 1941 from which the record states that he ‘absconded’. 44 In a few very rare cases, these acts of disobedience led to evacuee children facing legal repercussions. William Coring, for example, was imprisoned for three months in Canada for driving without a license. 45 It is worth noting that although boys and girls both could be seen as disobedient, and thus be rehomed, more serious criminal offenses – such as stealing, vandalizing and exhibiting violent behaviour – are most often attributed to boys. 46
These relocations seem, in large part, to have been requested by the foster parents, rather than by the evacuee children. Foster parents seemingly had a threshold for what type of behaviour they would tolerate, whether bed wetting, sexual promiscuity, stealing or lying. Our understanding of these relocations is hampered by the limited sources available, and the perspective of the author who recorded the events. We are sorely lacking in evacuee-child produced narratives that might tell us more about the issues with acclimation in these foster homes. While not all of these relocations can be attributed to acts of disobedience, the archival material suggests that disobedient or unbecoming behaviours were seemingly more common than Shakespeare had initially hoped, as was the use of institutions as a remedy. 47 Institutions may have been used because they were perceived to be ‘experts’ on child rearing in the 1940s; deferring to the views of such ‘experts’ when dealing with aberrant youthful behaviour was common. Cynthia Comacchio, writing about children in early twentieth-century Canada, explains how parents and ‘experts’ were expected to work together to resolve child developmental problems. However, ‘the balance of power was steeply inclined toward the experts’. 48 Part of the role of these experts was to distinguish the ‘normal’ from the ‘deviant’, and then to suggest treatments for abnormality. Institutionalization was a common technique for such reform, not only for evacuee children, but for all youth living in Dominion countries. 49
As was the case with Cecily Wade, Derek Lowe's bad behaviour in his new home, his ‘perverted sex complex’, worried Mrs Miller so much that she was ‘falling into ill health’. A general report on Derek's behaviour stated that within a matter of months of Derek moving in, the ‘Millers [were] unwilling to have him in their home’. 50 Rather than move Derek to another foster home, expert help was sought. He was sent to St. Andrew's College as a boarder where he was under strict supervision from the headmaster and the school doctor. 51 Because reports on his time at St. Andrew's are also quite vague, we cannot be certain about how school authorities addressed or punished Derek's disobedience. Although a report from December 1941 stated that Derek's ‘conduct was better’, the school master added that Derek ‘had to be kept under supervision and was not altogether to be trusted’. 52 He was still subject, then, to the heightened level of surveillance and punishment characteristic, perhaps, of disobedient evacuee children.
Both case studies demonstrate an institutional remedy to sexual and bodily misbehaviour: a convent and a boarding school. Not only were these institutions presumed to have expertise in dealing with difficult children, but they also freed individual foster parents from the responsibility of caring for disobedient children and for consulting the child's parents. But disobedience, as this article asserts, is a broad category. It includes sexually precious behaviour and a quite different kind of disobedience – ‘abnormal’ bodily development.
Before analysing the next two case studies, a brief digression is needed to elaborate on the mandatory medical screening CORB evacuees had to undergo prior to departure and upon arrival in the Dominions, another version of expert analysis and evaluation. As Starns explains, any children with ‘medical defects … or behavioural problems were automatically excluded from the scheme’. 53 The medical testing included screening for tuberculosis, diphtheria, smallpox and heart, lung and teeth problems. Children were also subjected to IQ tests that divided them by mental capacity into the three categories of: ‘Normal’, ‘Borderline’ or ‘Retarded’. 54 The children were screened once again upon reaching their destinations. According to Starns, 11 per cent of children who had passed the initial round of screening in Britain failed the medical screening conducted by Dominion physicians. 55 The strict medical screenings were part of a larger trend in the Dominion countries of assessing – and rejecting – potential new young immigrants based on their behaviours and bodies. As Boucher elaborates, whereas the Dominion countries were in the late nineteenth century accepting of virtually all young British migrants, the situation had changed by the interwar period: ‘while a double-digit IQ score, a tendency to stutter or a curiosity about sex might have been cause for concern among parents and reformers back in the UK, overseas they were reasons for a child's exclusion from the national community’. 56 The last of these criteria helps explain some of the concern about Cecily's and Derek's behaviour.
The effect of the medical screenings on evacuees was to exclude children who were seen as physically or intellectually abnormal, since such children would require more specialized care than the Dominions could provide or wish to pay for. Questions of financial responsibility and jurisdiction dogged the overseas evacuation scheme for its entire duration. Equally as important, however, was how these children were seen to represent the British Empire abroad and how they would embody ideals of the British race. Starns and Parsons describe compellingly how ‘overseas evacuation was also considered to be a means of preserving the British race’. 57 The logic of this migration, which was predicted on the feared decimation of the British populace, dictated that only ideal, healthy, ‘normal’ children were to be evacuated. These were the children who would procreate and continue the spread of the British people and ideals across the globe. In this sense, the bodies of these evacuee children belonged to the Empire as much as they belonged to themselves. This reproductive and imperial logic provides some context for the two case studies that follow, in which children are generally obedient in their behaviour – unlike Cecily and Derek – but are nonetheless disobedient – and therefore dangerous – in their bodily development.
Eileen Stubbington, age nine, and her brother Edward, age six, were evacuated as part of the CORB program to Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada.
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The Stubbington children settled well into their placements. A CORB report dated 19 February 1941 states that Edward and Eileen: … are progressing favorably in their foster home and are gaining in weight. … These children … have accommodated themselves to the foster home in an excellent fashion. … This is an excellent placement – it could not be better.
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Yet, despite the generally positive outlook on food and weight, there are several cases where weight gain was seen as problematic, particularly for pubescent girls. Eileen's bodily development and growth led to her being the subject of much surveillance and discipline, much as sexual preciousness led to surveillance and discipline for Cecily and Derek. In 1942, at age 11, she weighed 125 lbs (we are not told her height) and was described as ‘not very active physically’. Her weight was given as explanation for any other physical discomfort she felt. The reports note, for example, that Eileen ‘sometimes complains of her feet hurting … even in spite of the fact that her foster parents buy special shoes for her’. 61 Her foot pain is seen as directly attributable to her weight. Further reports call Eileen ‘so large’ that at age 12 she was sent to a specialist in Vancouver who diagnosed her with ‘a glandular disturbance’. Thanks to specialist treatment for this ‘disturbance’ she was later reported as being ‘down to a normal weight’ and was described as ‘a very attractive young lady’. 62 The disciplining of her body worked, at least for a time; she had achieved the desired status of ‘normal’ with which adults in charge of evacuee children were so concerned with. As Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska has shown, concerns around the increasing corpulence of the population were popularized in Britain in the 1860s. This culture of ‘reducing’ was part of ‘a transnational phenomenon in response to the rise of modern, urban industrial society’. 63 Wendy Mitchinson argues that, in Canada during the Second World War, fat bodies – which were understood to be necessarily unhealthy – were seen as concerning because they undermined the health of the nation as a whole: ‘The war effort needed healthy people both at home and overseas, and public health experts linked health with citizenship and winning the war’. 64 Controlling the abnormally large bodies of children was therefore understood as crucial to the health of the nation, the Empire, and success in the war. Such bodies were thus evidence of a kind of disobedience.
Eileen's weight continued to be a topic of concern through the duration of her stay in Canada. On 15 August 1946, we learn that ‘Eileen is still on a diet but is now a graceful young girl’. 65 After what, by this point, is years of medical intervention and dieting, Eileen had finally managed to attain the body which was expected of her. But while she had through dieting lost enough weight to be considered ‘normal’, it was clear that her body still needed to be controlled and surveilled, and that gaining weight again would lead to her be re-classified as abnormal. Thus, young female evacuees were at once celebrated for their ability to gain weight and condemned if they gained too much, especially if this was seen to take away from a ‘graceful’ femininity and their development into ideal, delicate British womanhood. As Mary Poovey notes about nineteenth-century British ‘assumptions’ of gender ideals, ‘a woman's reproductive capacity is her most salient feature’, as is the expectation of ‘her more delicate nervous and physiological constitution’. 66 Eileen is one of several young female evacuees whose bodily development was surveilled, and who was kept under strict control by her foster family, in order to supress the behaviour that led to the supposedly excessive growth of her body.
A similar level of surveillance and concern over the development of the young female body is displayed in the records of Barbara Godfrey, who was evacuated at age 12 from Ilkeston in Derbyshire, to Benoni, South Africa. 67 On the whole, the records about Barbara are glowing. They describe her as ‘particularly bright and happy’, and enjoying cycling, swimming, tennis and other sports. Early in her stay in South Africa, she was examined by a physician, Dr Shapiro, who stated that Barbara was ‘in good health, of sound constitution, and well-nourished and well cared for’. 68 In 1943, she was made a prefect at school and was described as ‘very popular’. Overall, she was ‘an extremely jolly, merry girl’. 69 All these reports indicate that Barbara was a successful, well-integrated evacuee. Unlike Cecily and Derek, she displayed no conduct that would necessitate her removal from her foster placement. From the very outset of her time in South Africa she was, in every way, the ideal of the ‘little British ambassador’ – in every way, that is, except for her growing body.
Adults in charge of Barbara expressed increasing concerns over her weight, regardless of her many athletic pastimes. The same 1943 report that remarks upon her happiness and success in school, also states that: ‘She is getting rather fat but I was assured by the parent hosts that she is being “treated” for this’. 70 A fat body was unhealthy and so anathema to the archetypal ideal of the British evacuee child. Hence Barbara needed to be ‘treated’.
From summer 1943 onwards, Barbara started to complain of experiencing a myriad of physical ailments, including sinus issues, headache and pain. As was the case with Eileen, adults in charge of Barbara were inclined to dismiss her complaints and attribute them to her weight, her increasingly sedentary lifestyle and her anxiety. A report from 29 June 1944 states that Barbara was ‘ill again’ and it was the belief of some CORB workers that Barbara was ‘being allowed to let pains and aches become too prominent in her life’. 71 Dr Shapiro, who performed the original assessment on Barbara, agreed that in ‘his candid opinion’ Barbara was making too much of her physical discomfort. Barbara's hostess, Mrs Prankherd, also agreed and was ‘seeing to it that this girl has a proper diet’, despite the fact that none of Barbara's complaints seemed to be gastrointestinal in nature. A CORB representative in Benoni worried that Barbara's complaints were evidence that she was ‘developing into a neurotic’, which was considered ‘equally as serious’ as having something wrong physically. 72 Interestingly, when Barbara's body was disobedient early on, it was due to its relationship to gender performance; she was becoming too large, too unfeminine. In comparison, the internal, unseen issues that Barbara later complained of – aches and pains, headaches, sinus problems – were dismissed as neuroses. In the opinion of Mrs Prankherd, it was ‘a waste of money’ to have Barbara tested for any ailments. 73
It came as a surprise, then, when Barbara in late August 1944 was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer, which explained, at the very least, the pains in her side she described while trying to participate in activities she had initially enjoyed, such as tennis. Mrs Prankherd ‘had a shock to find that there was something physically wrong with the girl’, despite the fact that Barbara had complained to Prankherd and CORB workers about pain for more than a year prior to the diagnosis. Barbara was thus seemingly seen as disobedient in her fatness, in her falling short of ideal gender performance, but her pain as such was dismissed. It is also very suggestive that, when the ulcer was diagnosed, experts advised that her illness be concealed; one of the CORB administrators wrote: ‘It would be appreciated if no mention of this child's illness is made to her mother’. 74 Overall then, Barbara's body, unruly or ill, necessitated a complex network of communication among adult intermediaries; some vital information was kept from evacuee parents if, seemingly, that information might threaten the trust in the overseas evacuation project.
The cases of Eileen and Barbara suggest that the body could be perceived as disobedient and in need of surveillance even if the subjects who inhabited them seemed consciously to behave perfectly in all other ways. Medical screenings prior to migrating represented an early attempt to weed out any undesirable or aberrant bodies from the group of evacuee children. In Eileen's and Barbara's cases, although they had passed this initial round of medical screening, their natural pubescent bodily development was nonetheless medicalized, leading to attempts to discipline and control their bodies, to mould them into the ideal of the ‘graceful young girl’, but not a sexual woman. Barbara's case also demonstrates that an actual medical ailment was downplayed or denied in a context of expert criteria and norms about bodies and gender. Cecily's case demonstrates what happens when the sexually active migrant child threatens to grow up and even procreate. The logic of wartime overseas migration was sexually reproductive in nature, as administrators worried about the end of the British race and worked to preserve it. But children who might mature and procreate on their own terms were in need of management and punishment.
The eventual maturity of these four adolescents provides retrospective insight into the mechanisms of control and surveillance to which they were subject. With regard specifically to Cecily's and Derek's sexual disobedience and the attendant adult strategies of containing these behaviours, there is no archival material that details how these two evacuees conceived of themselves and their circumstances, at the time or later. However, the adults in charge of their care seem to consider that the use of the institution to control and discipline youthful sexual expression was successful in Derek's case, and unsuccessful in Cecily's. After attending St. Andrew's boarding school for many years, Derek repaired his relationship with the Millers enough that he was once again welcome in their home, although only for holidays. Derek even began working for Mr Miller, and after he finished his education, he expressed a desire to join the Royal Air Force. His father had been in the military, and his choice to continue in his father's footsteps seems to indicate a kind of obedience to adult authority, and perhaps a negation of some of his earlier traits that worried the Millers.
Derek's case shows that adult tactics of control and discipline could be successful, at least to an extent – although of course without hearing from Derek himself it is impossible to know what became of his ‘perverted sex complex’ that so troubled the Millers when he was 13. Did he outgrow his ‘perversions’? Or did he simply sublimate them? Perhaps he learned to control and hide them around adults in order to avoid further punishment. Outwardly, at least, Derek is an example of a successfully reformed disobedient child.
Cecily originally appeared, like Derek, to be successfully reformed, giving up her previous ‘sex misbehaviour’ and becoming the ideal chaste and obedient teenage girl. She began to split her time between the Covent of Mary Immaculate and the home of her new foster parent Mrs Skinner, who reportedly kept her busy ‘doing things about the house’ so that she would ‘have very little time to get into mischief’. 75 As of July 1942, Cecily was living with Skinner full time and had started employment at the United Kingdom Technical Mission. 76 By September of that year, Cecily had moved foster families yet again – although it is unclear why – and she was now living with a Mrs Johnson, where she was ‘allowed out two nights a week’. Amidst the multiple displacements and multiple adults in charge of Cecily, her behaviour was still closely monitored and restricted. She was not trusted enough to be in charge of her own time and schedule, and by extension her own body and sexuality.
Yet, despite these restrictions, Cecily still found ways to control her experience and her sexuality. Cecily's father reported on 10 October 1943 that she was married and pregnant. The ‘consequences’ of Cecily's ‘mischief’ had finally materialized. A letter from December 1943 displays CORB's ongoing preoccupation with Cecily's sexual behaviour. It states: We are still a little vague as to whether Cecily is really married. … She apparently wrote home stating that she was pregnant and therefore must get married at once. We do not know whether this was true or whether Cecily said this to force her parents to consent to her marriage.
77
One may ask if these British evacuee children were subject to a heightened level of punishment and surveillance compared with their peers who stayed behind in Britain, or those born in the Dominion countries of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It is hard to say for certain. What we can be relatively sure of is that the absence of birth parents meant that there was a more extensive network of adults involved in surveillance; they collectively acted to establish what the bounds of unacceptable behaviour were and what the acceptable responses to such disobedience would be. British evacuee children were tasked with a potentially reproductive agenda, as they were expected to continue the propagation of the British race abroad in the event that Britain was invaded. However, underage, pre-martial and ‘perverted’ sex acts were all understood by adults to be unacceptable behaviours. The sexual and reproductive capacity of children was therefore something of great concern to adults, as they categorized the various sexual expressions of young people into obedient and disobedient categories. Normative physical bodies of children was also a realm in which ideas of disobedience were worked out. Because the genetic future of the British Empire rested in these young ‘ambassadors’, physical impairments or differences, and in particular fatness, was cast as unacceptable, as it threatened the future strength of the empire. Whether it was through dieting, medication, exercise, corporal punishment, institutionalization or incarceration, adult actors controlled the bodies and behaviours of young evacuees as a means of ensuring success in the future of the Empire.
The dense, complex web of adult-produced documents we have access to (and also, very rarely, testimony from the children themselves) shows that the issue of children not acting with perfect ambassadorial dignity was a real and pressing problem in the late 1930s and 1940s. It was imperative not simply to save British children from the threat of war, but also to save the British character, virtues and ideal body as things that would be recreated and reproduced anew in the Dominions. Young people who were well behaved, or who adjusted well to what was expected of them have much less detailed files in the archive in comparison with disobedient children. Obedient behaviour meant that they were not a threat to the future being envisioned for postwar Britain, and thus they warranted less adult scrutiny and concern.
In wanting to appear strong to the Dominion countries, in wanting to only preserve the finest ‘British stock’ from the destruction of Second World War violence, Britain used migrant children to present a particular image of the British future to those who took them in. Children who failed to be perfect in this way thus needed to be disciplined, institutionalized, controlled and, in some cases, excluded from the category of childhood altogether in order for this image of strength and ideal behaviour to be maintained.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Emma Wyse's research was supported in part by doctoral funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
