I have often said that Bowlby’s early thinking about attachment theory took place against the backdrop of Britain’s involvement in WWII, which started in 1939. During the war Britain engaged in a far-reaching and complex program to evacuate children (and some adults) from city centers to not only the countryside but also to other countries such as Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the U.S. Bowlby did not approve of this massive evacuation program that was run mainly by organizations such as the Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB). Writing in a 2021 article entitled Operation Pied Piper: Britain’s Forgotten War Children[1], Marilyn Johnston makes the following observation:
The external crisis of impending war drove the government to create evacuation as a solution. Yet, this ultimately generated another type of individual trauma which, if not wholly unforeseen, was not regarded as a pressing issue. The evacuation was by no means the perfect solution to the threats brought on by war. In 1987, separation anxiety expert John Bowlby told the Sunday Times “Evacuation was a bad mistake.” The scheme did however, remove children out of harm’s way, who might otherwise have been seriously injured during the blitzkrieg in 1940 or V-1 and V-2 rocket launch attacks in 1944.
Frankly, I know very little about Britain’s evacuation program and policies; only that Bowlby so objected to it that he actively campaigned against it. I thought I would do a bit of research and see if I could find more information on Britain’s evacuation program such as Johnston’s article mentioned above (which provides a great summary). I happened upon a 1985 book by Carlton Jackson entitled Who Will Take Our Children?—The Story of the Evacuation in Britain 1939–1945. I can honestly say that I found the Evacuation story to be enthralling, the makings of a grand movie. In this brief post I’d like to just touch on a few points that Jackson makes that I think are key and probably influenced Bowlby’s thinking on attachment.
Jackson starts off by telling us that “[t]o a large extent the evacuation programmes were based on pragmatism rather than sociological theories.” Here’s how Jackson describes the situation:
Evacuations of British children during World War II did not ‘revolutionize’ the science of child welfare programmes. Most of the people involved in the evacuation schemes were not professional social workers. On the contrary, they were teachers, parents, wives whose husbands had gone off to war, nurses, etc. – in other words, people who had been around children all their lives, and knew their ways. But they had no degrees in social work or child welfare, and were therefore deemed ‘unscientific’ by their educated colleagues.
That these programs were pragmatic rather than informed by sound theories of sociology or psychology probably troubled Bowlby. Even though Bowlby’s theory of attachment was still in the early stages of development during the war, Bowlby’s intuitions told him that prolonged separations between mother and child could produce psychological trauma that rivaled the traumas of war. But what to do? Keep families together and risk death by bombings, or evacuate and risk psychological trauma later in life? It was a delicate balance for sure. Jackson makes it clear that the British government never made evacuation mandatory. They feared a backlash on the part of parents that would ultimately thwart their plans. So, as thousands were sent abroad and tens of thousands were sent to the countryside or reception areas deemed less risky, an equal number decided to stay where they were. These kinds of “stay or leave” decisions played a large role in what Jackson calls a decidedly British social experiment, an experiment that ultimately shaped Britain’s decision to socialize much of its national care system such as healthcare. Let me explain how this happened.
According to Jackson’s research, conditions in many parts of cities like London bordered on squalor. Often children from the slums were sent to the countryside where life was almost idyllic. They had plenty of food to eat, places to play safely, schools, medical care, and more. Groups like CORB reported that many children gained weight, had rosy cheeks, and otherwise were improving in health. All was not rosy though. Some of the rural farm families looked down on the city children and their parents. Another area of contention was religion. Apparently the Catholic church protested children being sent to rural areas where Catholic churchs or educational opportunities were not close by. Then there was the matter of acculturation. British families worried that if their children stayed too long in countries like America or Canada, they would adopt new ways of life that would make it difficult for them to return to British life. Education became an issue. As the war continued on, children who were thirteen or fourteen when evacuated were now getting close to taking their exams for graduation. And on the different problems of evacuation went. There were significant problems concerning how and when to return to Britain and who would pay for what. As you might expect there were immigration issues. However, Jackson points out that all of these problems resulted in a huge mixing of British life: the poor encountering the rich and vice versa; city folk encountering rural folk; British children encountering different countries and cultures;[2] and on the mixing went. Jackson suggests that it was this mixing that ultimately led to Britain deciding to socialize much of its national care system, to address some of the issues that came up in the mixing of evacuation like poor nutrition and poverty in general. Jackson tells us that those changes were still around by the time his book was released in 1985.
Was there the trauma that Bowlby probably contemplated? Yes. As Jackson touches on, it was not uncommon for children to be sent to families and organizations that ultimately abused the children. In some cases, receiving families and organizations considered the children to be servants. And it was not uncommon for train stations where children ended their journey to the country to be refereed to as being not unlike “slave markets.” Some children died. Ships being used for transport to other countries were torpedoed by German submarines. And it was not uncommon for receiving areas in Britain once considered to be at low risk to be bombed.
I’ll leave you to read Johnston’s summary article or Jackson’s full treatment of evacuation programs. I don’t think there is any right or wrong answer when it comes to Britain’s evacuation programs. It clearly was a “damn if we do, damn if we don’t” situation. One thing that did surprise me was how much morale played in evacuation decisions. As an example, foreign ships being used for transport often asked the British government to request safe passage agreements from the Germans. These requests were largely ignored because the British thought that if the British government was beholden to Germany, it would increase German morale. I have written in earlier posts that in all likelihood the British government thought that the sight of dead women and children in the cities as a result of bombings would adversely affect morale. Jackson’s research tends to support this idea. And in truth, morale is a form of collectively experienced attachment. As Grossman point out in his book On Killing, when morale drops below a certain point, the integrity of a fighting unit falls apart. So, while Bowlby was probably looking at attachment at an individual or family level, the British government was looking at attachment at the collective level. Ideally all levels should be considered, and from reading Jackson’s book, I’m amazed the lengths to which the British government went to do just that even to the point of listening to and addressing evacuation issues on an individual level, especially concerning payments and reimbursements. British evacuations truly were an unexpected and unplanned social experiment. However, it resulted in a large reconfiguring of British life and government that remained at least until the mid-1980s according to Jackson.[3] Again, we cannot underestimate the influence this great mixing had on Bowlby and his theory of attachment. The question then becomes, Would have Bowlby’s theory influenced British life as much as it did (does) had it not been for the evacuations? Or another question might be, Is Bowlby’s theory little received here in the U.S. because we simply have not gone through a similar mixing event like the excavations of Britain?
Notes:
[1] – You can find this article at this link:
https://booksandideas.net/Operation-Pied-Piper-Britain-s-Forgotten-War-Children
[2] – Jackson reveals that often children sent to other countries were referred to as ambassadors for Britain.
[3] – As Brexit points out, Britain has taken on a more isolationist position these days.
