1900s-1945
Among the memories preserved by the village's local history society is the evacuation story of Gladys Hale, then Gladys Edwards, a London schoolgirl whose wartime years in the village left a lasting impression. Her account offers a vivid picture of what it meant to be a young evacuee, both in the capital she left behind and in the Surrey countryside that received her.
Gladys was born in 1932 in Westminster, in the heart of London. She was the fourth of six children in her family, with three older sisters above her and two younger brothers below. The girls of the family were educated at St Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic school, which stood in Carlisle Place, just off Victoria Street and close to the Roman Catholic Cathedral. There the children were taught by nuns of The Sisters of Charity, whose orders and routines shaped the youngsters' daily lives in the crowded streets of the capital.
It was from this world that Gladys, aged seven, was evacuated in September 1939, as war with Germany became inevitable and the government moved children out of London's likely bombing targets. In the weeks beforehand, families received instructions about what the children could take with them. The official list of required items was notably incomplete: it made no mention of a toothbrush, and Wellingtons were absent too. Perhaps most heartbreakingly of all for young children, toys were forbidden. Each evacuee was given a small sack in which to carry their belongings, a humble container for everything a child owned on the journey into the unknown.
The gas mask was another essential piece of equipment, and the masks issued to the children were smelly things that many found unpleasant to wear. Before evacuation, the youngsters were taken to Chadwick Street in Victoria, where their masks were tested. The testing method was memorable, to say the least: the children had to walk through a container of tear gas to prove that the masks offered proper protection. Any child who lost a mask was given practical, if uncomfortable, advice — a wet cloth held over the face would serve in an emergency.
On the day of departure, each child wore a label bearing their name, and in addition to the evacuation sack they carried a carrier bag of iron rations. These emergency supplies consisted of biscuits, chocolate and condensed milk — enough to sustain a youngster until a new household could feed them. Gladys's own evacuation sack has survived the decades and is now held in the Imperial War Museum, a small but poignant relic of one child's wartime journey.
The parting was tightly controlled. Parents were not permitted to come to the station, and so the goodbyes were said earlier, away from the platform. Instead, the school marched to Victoria Station accompanied by its teachers, though the nuns themselves did not make the journey with the children. The train carried the youngsters only as far as Redhill, where they transferred to coaches for the remainder of the trip to a destination that was kept secret from them. The journey was not without incident: at one point a boy was stung by a wasp, a small mishap amid the strangeness and anxiety of the day.
On arrival in the village, the evacuees were gathered at the Leigh school, where local households came to select the children who would stay with them. Gladys and her siblings — five of the six children were evacuated together — stood among the youngsters waiting to be chosen. Two of the middle sisters were picked by Mrs Sands, who lived in a farm cottage on Miss Goodwin's farm. The cottage stood opposite Paul's Hill Farm, and Mrs Sands' husband worked for Miss Goodwin. The household also included the Sands' grown-up children, Fred and Florrie. Life at the cottage was simple by London standards: water had to be carried from a well, a daily chore far removed from the taps of Westminster.
The children who were not chosen that day were taken elsewhere. First they were brought to a big house for food — a property that was almost certainly Park House, the home of Mrs Twitchell. It was Mrs Twitchell who made the arrangements for the evacuees, playing a key part in the village's reception of the London children. From there, the unchosen youngsters were taken to a derelict cottage at Home Farm, known as Home Farm Cottage. Its furnishings were minimal in the extreme: the only piece of furniture inside was a bench. The children slept on sacks of straw, making the best of rough lodgings until more permanent arrangements could be found.
For children raised amid the noise and bustle of the capital, the Leigh countryside was another world. Walking around the village fields, the youngsters saw wild flowers growing freely, plants they had never encountered in the city streets. The roads themselves were quiet in a way that would be unimaginable today — there were no cars in the village roads in those days, and the children could roam in peace and safety.
Gladys's recollections, preserved through the village's local history society, capture both the hardship and the wonder of the evacuation experience. A seven-year-old saying goodbye to her parents at a distance, carrying a sack and a bag of iron rations, could not have known what awaited her. What she found was a village of farm cottages and wells, of straw beds and flower-filled fields — a place that, for all its austerity, kept her and her brothers and sisters safe through the dangerous years that followed. Her story, and the small sack now held by the Imperial War Museum, stand as reminders of the part Leigh played in one of the largest movements of civilian population in British history.