The School Air-Raid Shelter: Rethinking Wartime Pedagogies

The School Air-Raid Shelter: Rethinking Wartime Pedagogies

Stephen Hussey

At the outbreak of World War I1 on the 3rd of September 1939, the British government feared that Britain’s cities would soon be targeted by the Ger- man Lujbaffe, and within three days in early September it enacted a mass evacuation scheme tha t had been prepared the year before. That scheme entailed a huge movement of population, relocating 1.5 million of Britain’s city children, their teachers, mothers with preschool children, and pregnant women from their homes to the safety of small towns and villages in designated “reception” areas.’ Evacuation would empty the threatened inner cities of the most vulnerable, keeping them safe from civilian bombing.

That plan would have a swift, total, and lasting impact on formal school education. Indeed, in April 1939 a circular from the Board of Education had stated unequivocally that in the evacuated areas “schools will be closed for the whole period during which the emergency may continue. . . .”’ Recep- tion areas would house and school city chldren for as long as any aerial threat remained. In practice, however, the course taken by the war in its earliest stages mitigated against the evacuation’s effectiveness. Crucially, and despite regular false alarms, the first months of war proved quiet on the home Front. Few enemy planes materialized, and the public perception of their threat began to weaken. As a consequence, the intervening months of the conflict came quickly to be known as the “phoney war.” While this proved a relief, not least because it allowed time for the building of what had up to then been poorly prepared civilian air-raid precautions, its impact upon the mass evacuation scheme of September 1939 was damagmg. Despite the efforts of

Stephen Hussey was Research Associate at the School of Education, University of Cambridge, between 2000 and 2002. He now writes and edits a wildlife magazine. He would like to thank Richard Altenbaugh, Peter Cunningham, Philip Gardner, and three anonymous referees for their coniments on various drafts of this paper. The Economic and Social Research Council funded the project upon which this work is based. “The Impact of Wartime Evacuation Upon Teacher Attitude and Practice,” ESRC Award no. R000-23-7211, project directors: Peter Cunningham and Philip Gardner. The Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge provided additional support.

‘Richard Titmus, Problem ofsociul Poliq (London: Longman, 1950), 103. The 1.5 million figure included 826,959 school children, 523,670 mothers with preschool children, 12,705 pregnant women and 173,000 priority classes including teachers.

‘Board of Education, Ah- Raid Precuutiom in Schools circular 1467, 27 April 1939 [no pagination], London Metropolitan Archive [hereafter LMA], EO/WAR/3/7.

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government to “talk-up7’ the success of evacuation and its benefits for children and the hard work of teachers and the evacuation authorities in trying to keep children in the reception areas, cracks began to appear in the plan- ning as many children soon began to trickle back. The phoney war, home- sickness, and growing reports of a mixed welcome and treatment received by evacuees persuaded many parents that they wanted their children back. By January 1940 nearly half of all evacuee schoolchldren had returned home. In some cities the picture was even worse. London, for example, had just 34 percent of its evacuee children remaining in reception areas, while in the cities of Sheffield and Coventry, both heavily bombed in the coming months, the figure stood at less than 10 percent.’ German raids and heavy bombing on British cities finally commenced during the summer of 1940.

Throughout the first winter of the war growing numbers of city children were therefore returning to their homes. They found a barely functioning educational system. Their schools were closed and most had already been put to alternative uses by emergency and armed services. For the children themselves this may have presented opportunities, giving many free- dom without the control of the school day. But it exacted growing concern by many who perceived the situation as a threat not only to the safety of the children but to their moral and educational well-being and to the order of city streets. Initially the responses of both local and national govern- ments were ones of confusion, a denial that problems existed, and a reiter- ation in the belief that wholesale evacuation was the answer. Gradually, however, there came a pragmatic recognition that sizeable numbers of children would continue to reside in Britain’s vulnerable cities throughout the war and that some land of formal education had to be provided for them..’

The school air-raid shelter came out of this predicament. Without adequate shelter no school was to be reopened. Although a combination of official intransigence and arguments over money may have led to what has been called the “long sad story’’ of provision, by the beginning of the first- significant German air raids in April 1940 the situation had greatly improved, allowing a functioning school system to be in place in Britain’s cities.’ Inevitably, given the speed of their construction and restrictions on bud- get and materials in place, most school shelters were very basic. Some took the form of reinforced rooms within school buildings, often an internal corridor or a basement. However, this was not the preferred method of

’P.H.J.H. Gosden, Edzication in the Second World War: A Stndy in Policy and Adminis- tration (London: Methuen & Co., 1976), 19.

‘For a fuller exploration of the failures of evacuation and policy responses to these see, Gosden, Education, chapters 1 & 2; H.C. Dent, Edzrcation in Transition: a Sociological Study of the Impact of War on English Education, 1939-1943 (London: Routledge, 1944), chapters 1 & 2 .

’Dent, Education in Transition, 67.

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precaution advised by the Board of Education’s April 1939 circular “Air Raid Precautions in Schools.” It advised that “School buildings are so planned and constructed as not to lend themselves to effective precautions of this kind” and that “in times of danger children should not be assembled in groups of more than fifty in any one protected room or compartment.” As an alternative, the board recommended shelters be separated from, but within easy reach of, school buildings and be constructed in the form of trenches. This advice, which was formed on the lessons learned from heavy bombardment of frontline troops in World War I, proved to be the most common blueprint for school shelters throughout the country. The board’s guidelines recommended that the trenches should have secure roofs giving them “immunity from splinters, anti-aircraft shell fragments and machine gun fire,” although no comment was made of their anticipated effectiveness against a direct bomb hit.

Many schools followed this blueprint and dug trenches in school playing fields, but for many others, particularly inner-city schools, space remained more limited. Many had no playing fields and so were forced to erect free- standing shelters, trench-like in shape, on the tarmac surfaces of their small playgrounds.6 Construction of all types of shelter was frequently crude. Walls of soil and sandbags were most common; elsewhere, if resources per- mitted, brick and concrete might be used. The Board of Education was careful to lay down strict requirements for shelter interiors. Its advice gives some impression of what teachers and children faced as they took cover. Fearing that the shelters may fill with water the board advised that their floors should slope, with a sump being located at one end of the trench, and that “provision must be made for pumping or bailing out this sump.” Floor- ing should be of wooden duckboards or of cinders or ballast. Seating was to be arranged so that children sat along one or both the walls of the shelter on wooden benches, each child allowed 28 inches. Gangways should be a minimum of 24 inches for a double row of seating and 18 for a single row. The height of the shelter was to be at least 72 inches. Finally, each shelter was to possess a gas curtain over its entrance mahng the interiors “rea- sonably gas proof’ but presumably also allowing children and teachers time to put on the gas masks that all civilians carried. The board made no strict provisions for either sanitation or lighting; a t no time did it begin to address the problems of what teachers did with children and how school functioned in such conditions.-

School shelters arrived just in time. German bombing of Britain’s cities began in earnest in the summer of 1940. In the months that followed the country underwent the Blitz, the heaviest and most sustained period of

‘Board of Education, Air Raid. Tbid.

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bombing. In the years that have passed since then the term “Blitz” has often come to mean a London experience; however Sheffield, Manchester, Mersey- side, and Hull in the north of England, Portsmouth, Southampton, and Plymouth in the south, Clydeside in Scotland, Belfast in Northern Ireland, and Cardiff and Swansea in Wales all suffered heavy raids during 1940- 1941.8 Outside these centers innumerable smaller towns and even villages received bombardments. Sometimes these were isolated attacks, often the result of faulty German navigation, but others felt the effects of more sustained bombing of munitions factories, airfields, railheads, and the like. While the cessation of the Blitz did lead to a period of comparative calm throughout 1942 and 1943, heavy and frequent air raids returned during the months of the fall and winter of 1944 as the pilotless Vl, or “doodle- bugs,” and then the V2 explosive rockets began to fall.9

Throughout these years the school air-raid shelter allowed inner-city schools to function, even if the degree of protection they actually offered remained a moot point. Fortunately the overwhelming number of air raids took place at night when darkness made defense of the slues more difficult. However, daytime bombing was far from unknown and became a cause of concern. Most daylight raids took the form of what soon came to be known as “tip-and-run” attacks, involving single or small numbers of enemy aircraft in brief sorties. Many of these raids evaded early detection and antiaircraft defenses so that advance warning for those in the target areas proved minimal. Raids like these accounted for two of the heaviest losses of life associat- ed with bombed schools. In September 1942 three bombs destroyed a Church of England boys’ school at Petworth in West Sussex lulling the headmaster, an assistant mistress, and 29 of the 80 children. No air-raid warning had been received. The same was true on 20 January 1943, when a single bomb fell on Sandhurst Road School, Lewisham, south London. Here children and staff enjoyed their lunch break with large numbers either eating together indoors or out in the playground. A third group of “senior girls” was reported to have been “in a classroom on an upper floor eating sandwiches” waiting to leave for an “educational visit to attend the film ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’” at a local cinema. This group was nearest the explosion. Altogether the school lost 6 teachers and 37 children, with a further 50 hospitalized.’”

‘The Blitz of 1940-1941 killed 43,000 British civilians, while a further 17,000 lives were lost to bombing in the remaining pears of the war. Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939-45 1969, (London: Jonathan Cape, this edition 1986), 226.

‘yane Waller and Michael Vaughan-Rees, Blitz: The Civilian W a r I940-4f (London: Optima Books, 1990), 188-189.

“Letter from ‘The Education Officer’ to London County Council, 21 January 1943, EO/WAR/3/28, LMA. Gosden, Education, 58. Teachers World, 7 January 1943, 2, placed the number of children killed a t Sandhurst School at 42, while Philip Ziegler, London at W a r 1939- 45 (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), 237, has quoted a figure of 38. In total around one in five schools in Britain suffered damage from aerial bombing during the war. Much of this was inflicted by night-time raids. Calder, The People’s W a r , 225.

The School Air-Raid Sheltei- 52 1

These tragedies were isolated occurrences, but the fear of the terri- ble potential held by daytime attack meant that schools took seriously the sound of warning sirens and set in motion the decampment of classes to the school shelters often for an hour or more. False alarms proved exceed- ingly common, particularly during the heaviest times of bombing in 1940-41 and 1944. Recalling life in a north London elementary school, one teacher remembered the excitement of a late August day in 1940 when teachers raced to beat their practice times, managing to get all their children “under cover in less than three minutes” during what was the “first occasion the schools shelters were used in earnest.” But this novelty soon faded as the school underwent 197 repeat alarms over the next few months. By the fall of that year “air raid warnings had become so commonplace that ‘a morning without a warning’ was thought worthy of a note in the [school’s] logs.”l’ An- raids were unpredictable and of irregular length, characteristics that present difficulties in estimating their precise part in the daily pattern of wartime inner-city schools. Nevertheless the Board of Education made an effort during December 1940 to estimate the time being spent in shelters. Its findings show that some schools passed between a quarter and a half of each day in shelters, suggesting that the raids exerted a significant impact on the daily routine.’!

Reconstructing the shelter experience

For contemporary observers and for historians of education, air raids have been cast as a disruptive influence upon the proper practice of education and as a sign of the general dislocation brought to the classroom by war. When the siren sounded, school and education seemingly stopped.” For example, during the summer of 1944 the London County Council’s (LCC) District Inspectors of Schools reported on the impact of the heavy V1 bomb- ings of the capitol and its effects on normal schooling. They reported that children and teachers spent long hours in air-raid shelters, and although they reported children faced the situation “cheerfully and resolutely,” the impact on the children’s education was judged to be crippling. “Shelters merely give protection,” wrote one; “The normal curriculum has, of course, been tem- porarily ruined.” The LCC’s Chief Inspector summarized: “Generally it must be assumed that the normal curriculum has been seriously disturbed. ’”’ Depicted in this way it is possible to see the school shelter just as a means

“Arthur Dark, Vaiighan Schools: A Pumait, 1908-1982 (London: published privately,

“Cosden, Education, 48. ”See for example C.S. Segal, Backward Children in the .%laking (London: Muller, 1949),

“LMA EO/WAIU3/18, ‘‘Reports by Inspectors on conditions in London schools as

1983), 4.5.

6.

the result of enemy attacks by ‘flying bombs,’ launched from 15/16 June, 1944 onwards.”

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of securing children a measure of safety-one that sacrificed any notion of educating them and helped add to the process of disruption and dislocation that one historian has claimed created the war’s many “uncounted educational casual tie^."'^ Yet this assessment has been presented from a position in which little is known about what took place between teachers and children in the shelters. The research presented here represents a step towards reconstructing that experience. It takes as its starting point the assumption that entering a shelter did not signal the cessation of school and of classroom life but, instead, saw the embarkation upon a different and unusual one. Not all was changed in the shelter; the traditional order of the classroom continued through teacher-student interactions with the former attempt- ing to teach and to exert a measure of control over the latter. What is of interest, however, is that the shelter reconfigured these activities and also remodeled the relationships played out within it.

Teachers’ journals afford important evidence of the influence of raids on school life. The topic attracted significant comment. Articles were written about life in the shelter and regular columns appeared on how to teach during raids. But questions remain as to the limitations of these sources in telling us what went on between teachers and children as they sat in the shelter and waited for each raid to pass. The school held a powerful position in local communities during the times of heavy bombing. It offered continuity from the past, a familiar custom in an otherwise chaotic and uncertain existence for families and the wider community. It also offered a commitment to the future, representing a physical sign of faith that normality would one day return. The Board of Education recognized this power and spoke of it directly to its teachers. In November 1940, in one of its many wartime circulars, the board told teachers that the “stabilising effect of a well-ordered routine is the most valuable contribution whch the schools can make to the welfare of the community at large and to the children in their care during a time of tension and emergen~y.”’~ The teachers’ press adopted this message. During the first weeks of the Blitz, Teachers World, the largest single circulation teaching journal of the time, carried a “wit- ness” report on one air raid:

Yesterday I happened to be on the premises of a school when the sirens sounded. Whistles were blown and in less than a minute every child was seated in a shelter. There seemed to be no suspicion of panic. The children joked freely amongst themselves and in some cases competitions and general knowledge tests were in progress. After the “All Clear” had been sounded the children immediately left the shelters and dispersed into the playground. Within a minute of the time of dispersal, to my amusement, I saw a child climb to the top of a

”Eric Hopkins, “Elementary Education in Birmingham During the Second World

“‘Board of Education Circular 1535, Nov. 1940. War,” Histoiy ofEducation 18:3 (1989):246, 255


“Jungle-Gym” and from his position of eminence survey the scene around. The thought which pervaded my mind was that whilst such children exist, Hitler stands a very poor chance of defeating us.’. [original emphasis]

Here and elsewhere the impression given was one of minimal disruption to the normality of the school day. The two references to time-“less than a minute” and “within a minute”--convey speed and efficiency. Of the period in the shelter, be it minutes or hours, we learn almost nothing except that the children settled speedily and easily. Other portrayals did dwell on experiences inside the shelter, but here again care was often taken to present a picture of easy adaptation by teacher and child.’* The carefully constructed message to emerge was that orthodox classroom conditions persisted even in the most unorthodox surroundings.

Two vivid examples of this came in separate front-page stories carried by Teachers’ World in October and November 1940, both were illus- trated by photographs of shelter classrooms.’y In one an art lesson for senior boys is in progress with the children seated in narrow lines behind desks. A male teacher, gas-mask box slung over his shoulder, teaches from a chalkboard even though this is placed for the benefit of the camera and out of the sight lines of almost all the boys. In the second picture a geography lesson is shown. Another male teacher, with gas-mask box once more, is standing before a board, this time with maps spread upon it. The boys sit before him in two rows with their atlases open. In each photograph the message conveyed is one of order and studious concentration from the boys, author- ity and formality from the teacher. Each scene is instantly recognizable as a classroom, not from the physical backdrops which show low ceilings, no windows, and corrugated metal walls, but through the atmosphere conveyed by teachers and children.’” In neither is the photographer and, therefore, our presence acknowledged. We are unseen voyeurs, gazing at the workaday life of the classroom made exceptional only by a few visible trap- pings of wartime life. The ordinariness of the activity before us conveys the impression that lessons are continuing and that teachers and children are not being deflected from their tasks. The text that accompanies each image confirms this impression. One reads “‘Lessons must go on’ is the rule in a school in the north-west London area, where the numerous air raids are allowed to interfere as little as possible with the work of the school.” The

‘-Teachers World, 4 Sept. 1940, 5. ‘‘See Ian Grosvenor, “On visualising past classrooms,” in Silences and Images: The Social

Histoiy of the Classroom eds. Ian Grosvenor, Martin Lawn and Kate Rousmaniere (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).

““An Art Lesson in the Ar-Raid Shelter,” Teachers World, 30 Oct. 1940, 1. “A Senior School in War-time,” Teachers World, 27 Nov. 1940, 1.

”Kate Rousmaniere, “Questioning the Visual in the History of Education,” Histoy of Education 30 (March 2001): 110.

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other provides an even more explicit appeal: “As teachers, we have to make the best of our opportunities, to concentrate on essentials, to keep cheer- ful and calm, to emphasise the importance of morals and character, in other words to fall in line with the rest of the nation, and ‘Carry on.”’

However these images of school life in the shelter contrast starkly with contemporary reports aimed not at public consumption but at the eyes of civil servants and government. Less concerned with the wider issues of public morale, they did not have to conceal conditions which were summarized by one local official as “most unsatisfactory.” Reports frequently commented on “dark, draughty and dirty shelters” with “nowhere to sit down except on a stone floor or on one or two benches.”” Children and teachers of this time also recalled a markedly different experience to that of the propagandist h e . For them air raids were not a fleeting incident with minimal impact but one repeated day after day, often over the course of several weary months. In this light the shelter can be seen to represent another form of school life-one that had little to do with normalcy. Chil- dren remembered these new school environments as places of fear-sometimes of excitement, even of fun-but never as a place of learning. I asked one woman who had spent many hours as a child in a Birmingham school shelter “Did they teach you in the shelter?” She answered, “No, no, we sang. Used to sing. So you couldn’t hear the bombs.”” Teachers shared a similar response but accompanied it with a powerful sense of frustration. In their eyes the shelter was not a space for “proper” learning. I asked a Liv- erpool teacher “Could you do any kind of teaching there?” “Oh no, that was quite impossible, you couldn’t teach.””

Nevertheless oral testimony might lead us to interpret the school shelter as a place of teaching, but in forms that were radically different and embracing a teacher-pupil relationship tha t departed from the established rules. Air-raid shelters offered children and teachers a complete break from the traditional school activity that they conceptualized as “teaching” and the “classroom.” The testimony also reveals that what went on in these new and unorthodox pedagogical spaces was teaching and learning; however the new circumstances meant that this frequently came in either adapted or

”LMA E O ~ ~ A F U 3 / 1 8 . ”Irene Dibden [pseudonyms are used for all respondents], born 1933, Birmingham.

Evacuated from Birmingham in 1939 to rural Worcestershire. Returned in early 1940. Attend- ed school in central Birmingham throughout the remainder of the war. All interview material is taken from the project “The Impact of Wartime Evacuation Upon Teacher Attitude and Practice.” Interviews and transcripts are held at the Faculty of Education, University of Cam- bridge, CB2 lQA, UK.

”Dorothy Bolton, b. 1915, Rock Ferry, Cheshire. Trained, Kings College, University of London. Taught in Liverpool 1938-42. 1942-1973 taught in elementary schools in Stoke- on-Trent, Staffordshire.


original forms. Shelters required new roles from teachers and pupils, a shift in the relationship between the two, and a different use of space and resources. T o judge the pedagogy of the air-raid shelter by the standards of previous and subsequent experience of the classroom, as respondents have done in their testimonies (and as historians of education have done by default through their neglect), runs the risk of missing the full implications of a time that demanded adaptation, improvisation, and innovation from teachers and children.

T h e research presented here is based primarily on interviews with eighty-five teachers who taught during World War 11.’’ The interviews, carried out between 1998 and 2001, and were undertaken as part of a wider study into the evacuation of children and teachers. Each interview con- formed to a life-history approach but with an emphasis aimed at gauging the immediate and longer term impact of evacuation upon the respondents’ later life and, in particular, on their professional attitudes and pedagogical practices.” However, as so often true in conducting oral history interviews, respondents routinely departed from the research agenda creating a dis- junction between the research questions and the areas of memory opened up. Although at times this proved disconcerting; the experience bore fruit too and helped to lead me away from the otherwise deafening effect of a strict adherence to what Alessandro Portelli has termed the “minute fideli- ty” of the formal research schema and into unexpected fields of inquiry.’6 The shelter experience turned out to be a powerful and rich example of this process.

Of course the memories of teachers do not represent a source from which the experience of time spent in the shelter can simply be reassem- bled.” In certain respects the memories of shelters come to mimic official representations. While they convey a strong sense of suffering, they are also often statements of triumph in adversity. I asked one woman who was recalling her wartime teaching in London, “Were you scared in the shelters?” “Yes,” she answered before adding, “But we sang as the bombs fell. That kept us going, kept our spirits up. Do you see?”?* Statements like this evoke

”The project also recorded the testimonies of 41 men and women who were evacuated as children.

”For a fuller explanation of the project’s hypothesis see Philip Gardner and Peter Cun- ningharn, “Oral History and Teachers’ Professional Practice: A Wartime Turning Point?” CambridgeJozmial ofEdmation 27:3 (1997): 33 1-342.

”Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Ltiigi Trmtiilli mid Othei- Stories: Fomz a7zd Meaning in O ~ a l Hi.rro7y (Albany: State University of h’ew York Press, 1991), ix.

”See for example Philip Gardner, “Reconstructing the Classroom Teacher, 1903- 1945,” in Silences aiid Images, eds, Grosvenor, Lawn and Rousmaniere, 127-128.

‘”Mildred Gresham, h. 19 10, County Durham. Trained Armstrong College, Newcas- tle-upon-Tyne. Taught in Bow, London 1932-43. Evacuated to Banhury, Oxfordshire 1939- 40. 1943-70 taught in north London.

526 History of Education Quarterly

the connection between individual memory, the pervasive influence of contemporary propaganda, and the process of myth-making that has sub- sequently worked to establish steadfastness and the stereotyped “stiff upper lip” as a defining characteristic of British civilian behavior during the war.’9 But if, as G a r y McCulloch has observed, “Historians of education have tended to concentrate their opinion upon administration and policy at a national level more than upon interactions within schools” and that “the classroom itself, at the interface of teaching and learning, has received least attention of all,” then consideration of the schools’ air-raid shelter is total- ly uncharted and the teachers’ testimony represents perhaps one of the only ways in which this history can begin to be investigated.”

The teacher-child relationship

One central theme of teachers’ shelter memories is that of shared experience with their pupils. The shelter is remembered as a radical depar- ture from the physical and emotional distance that had commonly defined the prewar elementary classroom. It provided a novel environment in which teacher and those taught were brought closer together both in body and in mind. Whether this shift existed in the eyes of children is another matter. One woman remembered her wartime schooling in Birmingham. She recalled her teachers: “They, they were in a different world to us. They looked different, they dressed different. And of course they weren’t in the bombing, was they? Well I found some of the teachers were . . . had no understanding, and I think that they should have known something was wrong with children, like children today; they should find out. But because of the wartime, they should have known we were getting blowed up sometimes. And I think they should have had an understanding of us. But they didn’t.”” Statements like these speak strongly of class, and the belief that different classes were experiencing “different” wars was a pervasive one during periods of heavy bombing. The spatial division of British cities along socioeconomic lines left many working-class neighborhoods with the conviction that they were suffering heavier bombardment with fewer options for escape and poorer protection in the shape of private air-raid shelters.” It was true too that, as professionals, many teachers could afford and did choose to live away from the localities in which they taught, particularly if these were

”Angus Calder, The M-yth of the Blitz (London: Jonathon Cape, 1991). ”Gary McCulloch, “Classroom Management in England: Theoretical and Historical

Approaches to Control and Discipline,” in Politics of Claswoom Life: Classroom Management in International Perspectine ed. Nobuo K. Shimahara (London: Garland Publishing, 1998), 89.

“Barbara Watson, b. 1935, Birmingham. Attended school in Birmingham throughout the war.

”On the differing impact of the Blitz upon London’s East and West Ends see Calder, The People’s War, 163-193.

The School Air-Raid Shelter 52 7

poorer urban districts. This spatial and socioeconomic separation may be seen to have contributed to the absence of understanding which commonly marked teachers’ recollections of teacher-child relationships before the war. For example, Michael Potter was born in 1915 in London. His family owned an engineering export business; “we were middle class no doubt about that.” After a private education he went on to teacher training at Lon- don’s prestigious College of St. Mark and St. John. In 1935 he secured his first post at a school in the strongly working-class town of Dagenham on the eastern outskirts of London. Immediately he became aware of the “gulf fixed between” teachers and children of that time: “When I was teaching in Dagenham, and these were up to eleven year olds, it was junior school and they wrote an essay on one occasion and one of the boys, I can remember to this day, wrote in it, a bottle of ink was spilled in Mr Potter’s house and servants rushed to wipe it up! That was their visual idea of a teacher.”” However, teachers who spent time in school air-raid shelters left them with a different set of memories of bombing, of shelters, and of the children. These center on the perception of a common emotional burden and a shared physical experience developing a t this time. For a few respondents this meant remembering feelings of fear within themselves and the children. Yet a more typical memory was that the air raids indicated a complete suspension of the shared certainties of normal classroom life and the world beyond. Often otherwise articulate and composed respondents frequently found the task of expressing this state to be difficult and confounding, a position that reflected the sense of unreality they seemed to feel at the time. Marjorie Powell, a young teacher in a south London elementary school a t the time of the “doodlebug” raids in the fall of 1944 tried to make sense of the period:

You were on the edge all the time, you didn’t know what was going to happen, you didn’t know whether the bomb was coming. Vt’hether you’d be dead!

Were yozi frightemxi?

No, I can’t put a name to what I felt at that time, it was just we were living to the minute not even to the day, I mean I’d left people at home, I’d left my moth- er at home, I’d left my future husband a t home and we didn’t, you didn’t know what to think about, you were living just that minute. I don’t think you realised that death was ’round the corner, the children didn’t but looking back now and there were six of those girls [her pupils] that still come and see me and we have a party. The girls and I had been in air raid shelters, we have a party at Christ- mas and they come and we talk about it sometimes. Sometimes we don’t but

”Michael Potter, b.1915, Upminster, Essex. Trained College of St Mark and St John, London. Taught 1935-46 elementary school, Dagenham, Essex. 1939 evacuated to Holbrook, Suffolk and then 1940 to Kenilworth, U’anvickshire. 1947-65 left teaching to pursue career in the clothing trade. 1965-80 returned to teaching at secondary school, Cambridge. 1973- 1980 headteacher of school.

528 Histoiy of Education Quarterly

when we do we try and remember what we felt like and we can’t remember, we can’t remember. So much has happened since, they’re grandmothers, we’ve all got older and we just have a good time, put it behind us. W e became friends then because we faced, we didn’t realize it but we were facing death. We do sometimes just mention that, we were facing death together. Oh well, it’s a long way, and we don’t think about it anymore, but when I look back and think, we were facing death.’‘

For this teacher the uncertainty about one’s own fate and those of one’s loved ones was a t the front of the minds of both teacher and child, creating a common bond beneath a common weight. For Mrs. Powell, this wartime relationship helped sustain a set of ongoing friendships with pupils that lasted for sixty years.

If teachers came to hold the perception of a shared experience with children, it did not mean that the school shelter became a democratic space, one in which teachers and pupils were in any sense “equals.” Teachers still valued order, and fear of losing control remained a preoccupation.3’ How- ever anxiety and uncertainty about the threat of attack from the air altered this notion of control from the traditional preoccupation with pupils’ attention, their standard of work, and their conduct to one that also came much more to encompass the children’s emotional state. Rather than centering their concerns on misbehavior amongst children, teachers in the shelter feared losing emotional control, distress, or even worse, panic talung hold of a class. Contemporary psychological investigations attempted to reas- sure teachers on this point. “Children are, of course, afraid of air raids, but their fear is neither as universal nor as overwhelming as has been expected” reported Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud in a 1942 article.’6 Nonetheless, alongside this sentiment ran warnings about the “contagion of panic” which could spread amongst children.’’ In order to combat this possibility teachers had to seek self-control and to suppress their own

”Marjorie Powell, b. 1907, London. Trained Avery Hill College, London. Taught 1927-9 elementary school, London. 1929-1943 all-age school, London (mostly teaching 9- 11 year olds). 1939-40 first evacuation to East Sussex. 1940-2 second evacuation to south Wales. 1944-49 taught junior school, London. 1949-50 unpaid leave to qualify for Diploma in Child Development, University of London. 1950-68 headteacher of a primary school, Lon- don. Retired from full-time teaching in 1968 hut still continues to teach music unpaid, part- time in schools.

”Philip Gardner, “The Giant at the Front: Young Teachers and Corporal Punishment in the Inter-War Elementary Schools,” Histoiy ofEducation 25 (2, 1996) 146.

“Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, “Five Types of Air Raid Anxiety,” The Nez Era, (April-May 1942), 67. For other contemporary reports see F. Bodman, “Child Psychia- try in Wartime Britain,”Jozmzal of Psychology 35 (1944): 293-301; F. Brown, “Civilian Psy- chiatric Air-raid Casualties,” Lancet 1 (1941): 686-691; H. Crichton-Miller, “Somatic Factors Conditioning Air-raid Reactions,” Loncet 2 (1941): 3 1-34. A useful survey of this literature is offered by Irving L. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress: Psychological Studies of Bombing and Civilian Defense (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 195 I), 92-97.

’yank, Air War, 93; Burlingham and Freud, “Five Types of Air Raid Anxiety,” 70-71.


anxieties while also rethinking the ways in which they sought to keep control of children. T o this end many began adopting new strategies.

Wartime teachers’ journals soon offered a good deal of instruction to their readers on maintaining control in school shelters. Much of this advice focused on the need to keep themselves and, more importantly, the children occupied at all times during air raids. For example, from the early weeks of the Blitz Teachers World carried a succession of articles with titles such as “What to do in the Air-Raid Shelter,” “Games for the Smaller Shel- ter,” and “A Shelter-Rug Made From Father’s Old Socks!” All were designed to help teachers take the minds of children off what might be happening outside.j8 Even if many were impractical, required too much space, good lighting, and often more equipment than shelters allowed, the message was clear: “Keep the children busy.” It was a broad message that seems to have been adopted by teachers. For example, Norah Galton age twenty-one and living in Birmingham, started her first teaching post when war broke out in September 1939. Over the next six years she had extensive teaching experience in air-raid shelters as well as being evacuated from the city twice. Trained to teach at Mason College, part of the University of Birmingham, she recalled, “Nothing prepared you for the war, nothing prepared you for air raids and evacuation.” I asked her:

Wordd lessons coiitiiiiie in there [the shelter]?

Oh yes, as much as you could. n’eell you’d got to mainly, you’d got fnghtened children so you’d got to keep them occupied and not thinking of what the noise is going on outside. The noises, but I mean even the sirens going, coming or going.

So mhnt woddyoir do to keep them occupied then?

U’ell try and continue with lessons and try and makc it more interesting because it’s, it’s very strange when you’ve got a mass of children, and you get your class or classes in, and you’ve got a mixture again, you’ve got your mixture of ages. I mean you could even go round to saying, doing, getting each child to talk to the rest in turn, ‘What did you do last night?’ or ‘What do you like doing most?’ or ‘Have you got a hobby?’ ‘What pets have you got at home?’ ‘Do you help your mummy and daddy in the garden?’ Something like that kept them occupied and they didn’t know who was going to be called on next, that’s the sort of thing you could do.’”

Descriptions like this represent a different kind of atmosphere from that of most prewar classrooms in which order, formality, and routine were de Yigzlezlr and which made the term “regimented” a favorite amongst

‘*Teachen World, 7 Aug. 1940, 1 8r 9; 21 Aug. 1940, 9; 11 Dec. 1940, 7. ‘“Norah Galton, b. 1918 Birmingham. Trained Mason College, Birmingham Univer-

sity. Taught senior girls school, Birmingham, 1939-41. First evacuation to Worcestershire, 1939-40. 1941 elementary school, Birmingham. Second evacuation to Staffordshire, three months in 1941. 1942-4 senior school, 1944-6 elementary school in Birmingham. 1946-1978 periods of supply teaching (all ages).

530 Histoly of Education Quarter+

teachers when asked to think back to their teaching of that time. By contrast, the informality of the shelter, combined with the shared emotions generated by air raids, called for a fresh approach to highly systematized classrooms and the strict discipline within them. Furthermore, the shelter made it impossible to maintain physical distance between teachers and children. Inadvertently the raids created a break from “conventions of classroom life which had been shaped by a tradition of confrontation.”M In their place emerged what many understood to be a more humane form of restraint. By the time Liverpool was bombed in 1940, for example, Monica Wood had six year’s experience as a teacher. All of this teaching had been con- ducted in what she termed a “traditional” elementary school with its own strong sense of rigid standards of behavior, in which she characterized her own teaching style as “Stand in front of the class and teach on the black- board.” However, this classroom world, in which silence from the children was the norm and the threat of punishment (including corporal punishment) was ever present, was suspended in the shelter:

You couldn’t leave them, they had to have supervision in the shelter and you’d get the naughty ones, you get them everywhere really, whispering in the corner and you’d say, ‘C’mon let us all hear it’ and it would be a really filthy joke or some sort o f . . .

Would yon discipline tbeiii if it mzs a filthy joke?

O h no, I’d just, you see the thing was, when you left them you might never see them again, they might be hlled overnight and that was always on our minds, we may never see them again because a bomb could drop on them, on their home, they could be injured or killed so you were very lenient because of that. Well I was, I always gave them very much more leniency than, er, in an ordi- nary situation because of the fact that you might never see them again.“

A lund of physical contact very different from corporal punishment became more common in the shelter. Several teachers reported that hug- ging, sitting a child on a knee, or even just placing oneself next to a fright- ened child became normal ways of controlling pupils’ emotional state, helping to calm and pacify them. Although this kind of contact remained undesirable or inappropriate within the terms of reference of other teachers, particularly men, inadvertent physical contact became a fact of life in the shelter. The formal use of space designed into normal classrooms, with fixed rows of desks facing forward and the raised prospect of the teacher’s own desk, was impossible to recreate in shelters-most of which were long and narrow, made of earth, sand bags, corrugated iron, brick or concrete, with wooden benches fixed to the walls. Within the shelters, teachers shared

MGardner, “The Giant,” 153. “Monica Wood, b. 191 3, Liverpool. Trained Liverpool. Taught 1934-73 elementary

and junior schools, Liverpool. Evacuated 1940-1 to Leek, Staffordshire. Retired 1973.

The School Air-Raid Shelter 53 1

these benches, sitting amongst their children, squeezed next to some and facing close to others. Teachers and children alike carried their gas masks, common reminders of a shared danger. At the end of many shelters stood a single chemical or bucket toilet, often partitioned by nothing more than a curtain, making difficult the preservation of any sense of the normal levels of privacy for both teachers and children. In other words, the wail of a siren heralded suspension of many classroom conventions and the formality, privacy, and distance lent by traditional school buildings fell away. Lit- tle wonder, then, that the air-raid shelter pushed some teachers towards unconventional ways of teaching and new teacher-pupil relationships.’’

Shelters as sites of pedagogy

The school shelter represented the strangest and most challenging teaching environment that most teachers would ever face. It was unlike any- thing any of them had ever encountered either in practice or in theoretical texts.+j It was also one tha t they had to adapt to quickly. The shelter contained none of the “familiar artifacts of education:” the class had no back and no front, often had neither chalkboard nor books and frequently little light in whch pupils might write, read, or even for teachers to clearly observe the pupils.* Under such circumstances teachers remembered shelter teaching in terms of “just making do” and as being “a matter of sheer survival.”+’ However, by the time of the heavy bombing raids of 1940 most teachers already had become masters at adaptation. Many, like the children with whom they sheltered, had undergone the evacuation of 1939 and the immense disruption it had brought to everyday school life. In the reception areas, many had found themselves sharing classrooms with other teachers and children. Others had coped with classrooms improvised from buildings such as village and church halls. For teachers, whether or not they had been

“For the ways in which classroom and school design have been “built to represent and shape” forms of “teaching behaviour” see Martin Lawn, “Designing teaching: the classroom as a technology,” in Silences and Images ed. Grosvenor, Lawn and Rousmaniere, 72-77.

“Comparable conditions may have been experienced by other teachers at other times. Kate Rousmaniere details the conditions under which teachers taught during the “school building crisis” in New York City schools of the 1920s. Here classes were routinely held in cellars, corridors and outhouses. Kate Rousmaniere, City Teachers: Teaching and School Refwn in Historical Perspectzve (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), chapter 4.

*Gary McCulloch and William Richardson, Histo7-ical Research in Educational Settings (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, ZOOO), 6. For the way in which accepted notions of the classroom structure affected perceptions of teaching and education see William A. Reid, “Strange Curricula: Origins and Development of the Institutional Categories of Schooling,” Joztrnal of Cnrrimlam Stndies 2 2 ( 3 , 1990): 203-216.

45Andy Hargreaves describes the ways in which teachers’ “strategies can become des- perate; a matter of sheer survival” in the context of the environmental pressures of the mod- ern classroom, in his “Curriculum Reform and the Teacher,” The Cztm’mbm~ournal2 (1991): 251.

5 3 2 History of Education Quarter4

evacuated, the war also signaled shortages in almost all of the routine tools of teaching, making even basics such as books, chalk, paper, and pencils rare commodities and demanding improvisation.%

Thus, wartime teachers’ own platitudes about their shelter experiences must not obscure more profound changes that were taking place in their pedagogical practices. Some teachers did try to continue classroom lessons much as before, a persistence that led to some novel versions of traditional teaching from the chalkboard. An elementary school teacher from New- castle-upon-Tyne told of how “we had to learn to write this way [writes with her finger in the air], backwards, so they would know, well I mean I had to do it [. . .]Just do it in the air, we had no material so we’d write lirtle letters in the air.”” However, most teachers relied on an improvised curriculum which signaled a wholesale shift from the written to the spoken word. At times this shelter practice simply meant the deployment of well-worn exer- cises of chanting tables or singing songs. Often, however, it required a level of creativity and individual pupil participation that had rarely been seen in the prewar classroom. London teacher Marjorie Powell responded to the interview question, “Could you teach in the school shelter? ”:

Well you couldn’t in the air raid shelters, you didn’t know how long it was going to go on. No, you chatted mostly, you talked about whatever came into your mind. You might talk about some books or something, or. . . . You couldn’t really organize you didn’t know how long you were going to be there.

Would you get the children to talk?

Yes, they did. They had ideas and talked about things, what they wanted to do when they left school and that sort of thing.+

For many teachers this kmd of exchange was “the stuff of Friday after- noon.” That is, they recognized it as a h n to the inconsequential period a t the end of peacetime school weeks, a time when the formality that typified routine teacher-pupil relationships briefly might be allowed to slip. Still, shelter teaching differed. During the months of the Blitz in 1940-41 and again during the V1 and V2 raids of 1944-45, this slippage, for many teachers and pupils, represented a constant and significant portion of the school day. Simply, air raids created a teaching space and style distinct from that

*Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor. “‘When in Doubt Preserve’: Exdoring? the Traces of Teaching and Material Culture in English Schools,” Hinoiy ofEducation 30 (March 2001): 123-124.

‘-Gladys Cotterall, b. 1914, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Trained Darlington. Taught 1935- 40 elementary school, Newcastle. First evacuation 1939-40 to Chilton, County Durham. 1940- 44 elementary school, Newcastle. Second evacuation 1941-2 to Wolsingham, County Durham. Career break to raise family 1944-1950. 1950-54 part-time teaching, secondary Fchool, Northumberland. 1954-62 secondary school, North Yorkshire. 1962-7 junior (private) school, North Yorhhire. 1967-1976 head of primary school, North Yorkshire. Retired 1976.

‘“Marjorie Powell, see foomote 35.

The School Air-Raid Shelter 5 3 3

of the normal classroom in terms of its methods and relationships. Shelter teaching often became a more cooperative exercise, one that involved the voices, thoughts, and experiences of children as well as their teachers. James Lewis commented on thls situation. He was nineteen, training to be a teacher in London during the 1944 “doodlebug” bombing. He spent much of his school teaching practice alone with thirty-five eight- and nine-year olds in a school whose teachers and pupils had become used to air raids:

You’d be half way through the English lesson and the sirens would go and it was ‘Right, everybody stand. Right, you lead on Jennifer, you know where you’re going, section four’, and they’d line up in the playground and you’d march into these rather damp and muggy sort o f shelters ’cause they were brick and the condensation off them . . . and always inside was just a few benches of course you’d always get one little beggar who’d pinch somebody’s bottom or tread on somebody’s toes so . . . it was a diversion you see, it got them out of normal lessons.

Could yon teach down there?

No, no.

So what wozildyoii do u i th them?

Well I mean there was probably. . . may only be one rather dim light, one light bulb so obviously you couldn’t take your lessons, ’cause the idea was to get you out there as quick as you could, so you just stood and went out. Used to tell stories or get the kids, you start on one. . . . My favourite one was to say “Right we’ll have a story. What’s it going to be? Elephants, right. You said elephants, you start off.”

“Once there was an elephant who lived in . . .”

“Where did he live?”

You know. And you’d go ’round the class in this way and you develop a story and forget all about it and then they get to the stage where they brought this elephant to England, and he was coming off the ship and they had to get him off on a crane ’cause he was too heavy for the gangplank, you h o w , exercising the imagination that way. The annoying thing was, you’d just get halfway through the story when the all-clear would go and you’d, “Right, we’ll save that for next time.”+’

The shelter seemed to encourage this kind of story-telling activity. It was an intimate space. The less rigd and exposed combination of informal seating and poor light helped children overcome the intimidation that they might otherwise have felt in a traditional classroom setting. During the height

IgJames Lewis, b. 1924, Brentford, Middlesex. Evacuated as schoolchild to High Wycombe, Buchghamshre from London 1939-1942. Trained Isleworth, London, 1943-4.1944-5 evacuated to teach in Whatton, Nottinghamshire. 1946-9 teaching secondary boys, Surrey. 1949- 1967 secondary boys in Gloucestershire. 1967-1981 headteacher at juvenile assessment centre, Worcester. Retired 1981.

534 Histoly of Education Quarter4

of London’s Blitz in the fall of 1940, an anonymous elementary school teacher from “somewhere in the south of England” wrote to Teachers’ World about the shelter’s novel atmosphere and its unanticipated benefits: “During the past weeks we have spent a total of several hours in an underground shelter lit by a hurricane lamp. The semi-darkness is encouraging to the original story-teller who might be inclined to diffidence in the class-room. The stories are often revealing. One child sent her heroine to school, where ‘the teacher grumbled.’ The half-light concealed my amusement at the thought that, according to the children, grumbling is my most strilung characteristic.” This teacher also observed a further development: “Present conditions noticeably influence the story-tellers. Their stories frequently contain pas- sages such as: ‘They had just got home when there was a warning’ and ‘When the man went back to his house, he found it was broken.’ ”jO

This type of informal exchange enabled teachers to learn more about the children seated around them. The stories children told and the news and gossip they brought forth drew teachers into a world of experience about which most had only been dimly aware. At a time when “parents of pupils were scarcely seen and the homes to which children returned at the end of each day were often as mysterious as if they were in a different land,” shelter stories provided a small but significant bridge across the social divide present in the c1assroom.j’ Moreover, at other times, the flow of information could be reversed. The home lives of teachers, even to the basic facts of where they lived and their marital status, were often unknown by their pupils, a teacher’s interests and other aspects of their life outside school had always been the target of childhood fascination. Kate Rousmaniere has written of the “special unity and spirit” between teachers and children engen- dered within some of the “broken, dangerous and filthy work spaces” whch passed as classrooms during the crisis in school building provision in New York City during the 1920s.” In Britain, a similar mood seems to have developed within many of the school shelter classrooms of World War 11. They provided a less formal atmosphere in which new levels and subjects of dis- course could be broached from both sides. Betty James, an elementary teacher who worked in one of the most deprived neighborhoods of Newcastle of this time told me with a raised eyebrow, “You got to know the children, you really did. And they got to know you too.””

’O“Some Six-year-olds and the War,” Teachem World, 2 Oct. 1940, 1 . ”Gardner, “The Giant”, 145. ”Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 92-93. ’JBetty James, b.1918, Stoke-on-Trent. Trained Bangor Normal College, north Wales.

1938-40 senior school in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. 1940-2 elementary school Newcastle. 1942- 4 all-age school Newcastle. 1942 evacuated to Belingham, Northumberland. 1944-46 all-age girls’ school Newcastle. 1946-54 career break to raise family. 1954-59 teaching primary children, Devizes, Wiltshire. Peripatetic teaching to ‘slow-learners’ 1959-68. 1968-78 primary teaching in London. Retired 1978.

The School Air-Raid Shelter 5 3 5

This type of exchange appearing in many shelters helped to begn the erosion of the rigid conceptual boundary between school and home. For some teachers, this process was discomforting. Gladys Cotterell, another elementary school teacher from Newcastle, spoke of her sadness on hearing about the home lives of her pupils and added, “I didn’t really want to know because they did come from very poor homes, shockingly poor homes. It’s an important part of your conscience that would make you feel, ‘Well I’ve got to do this and get on with it.’ But you didn’t have to like it. Didn’t like it a t all.”” For others, however, this type of information opened what they believed to be a valuable insight into lives about which they knew little and provided them with an added layer of context through which to interpret a child’s behavior, appearance, attitude, and performance.

Many wartime teachers remember this new level of understanding in a benign light. Whereas once they had seen nothing but the child before them, with any notion of fault or problem beginning and ending in the classroom, now deeper and more profound reasons could be constructed from children’s lives outside the classroom and especially a t home. This recognition was a further contributory factor to their shift away from direct chas- tisement, especially from corporal punishment of the child. This desire to understand more fully the reasons for child behavior also had a further effect upon some teachers. It reinforced a set of causal explanations that increas- ingly centered on what were perceived as the failings of the worlung-class home. Seeing “the whole child,” a phrase used by many respondents, mapped a path directly to the door of the working-class parent and their parenting practices. In response to the question, “What kinds of things were they telling you [in the air raid shelter]?” Betty James remembered: “Well dad was in the forces, ‘uncle’ Bill had moved in and. . . . Sometimes mum and ‘uncle’ Bill had had a row so he’d gone or he’d been called-up so ‘uncle’ Tom came! Very amenable. Or, ‘Oh no, mum works in Swinnertons [a local factory] so when she comes home she’s dead beat, she just goes to bed and leaves us to do the washing and the ironing.’ And all that sort of thing.”” Birmingham teacher Norah Galton’s summary of what she learned about children a t this time is also interesting: “It was a difficult time but it made you realize so much. Well as I say, I’d been very isolated, brought up as an only child and it made me see how lucky I was, I mean with my parents. And some of the homes these children had and when the thought of, I mean they’d tell you all sorts of things. Dad going to the pub and coming home drunk and all this. That hadn’t even entered my life and you don’t realise.”j6

Parallels may be drawn between identification by teachers of the working-class family as an adverse influence upon their pupils and conclusions

“Gladys Cotterall, see foomote 47 ”Betty James, see footnote 53. ’‘Norah Galton, see footnote 39.

536 History of Education Quar-tedy

formed by other contemporary middle-class observers about similar children in other wartime settings. Evacuation undoubtedly helped to reveal the levels of poverty present in urban Britain to policymakers and the wider public. It also gave rise to an enduring image of the evacuee as an ill-man- nered, verminous, poorly fed, bed wetter from the city placed within the respectable homes of rural Britain, and as John Macnicol has shown, the conclusions drawn from this perception were of “problem evacuees” as “a product of poor quality home life among some sections of the working- class.”” Listening to teachers who experienced school shelters, a similar tendency may have arisen. Hearing of the home lives of pupils in detail for the first time, some seemed to construct a negative composite image of the worlung-class household. Inevitably, the most colorful stories of children that teachers took away from shelters gave rise to an image of home life populated with the stock characters of absent or uncaring fathers and neglect- ful or morally suspect mothers.

T h e extent to which this conceptualization was resilient, one that teachers took into the postwar decades to shape their perceptions of the children they taught and the homes from which those pupils came, is very difficult to gauge. Wartime teachers remembered happenings, such as air- raid shelter teaching and evacuation, as more formal influences such as training college, in self-contained, episodic memories. However, they expressed their understanding of the longer term impacts of these events with less certainty and in much less coherent ways. Only occasionally did individual respondents prove able to join wartime experiences such as shelter teaching with later developments in their postwar classrooms. For example, Monica Wood, one of the more progressive teachers interviewed, revealed interpretations of her shelter experiences. While describing her career in the elementary schools of Liverpool, she spoke several times of her struggles to teach in new ways: using small groups, spending time with individual children, promoting play for its pedagogical value, and estab- lishing a small library in her classroom. Moreover she expressed a passion that her pupils might “get on” in life. In talking about the influence upon her of teaching children in air-raid shelters, she reflected: “Do you think it changed your relationship as a teacher with the children?” ‘Yes, I think it did, erm, well me certainly. I got closer to what, things that they did and some were not the things, there didn’t seem to be an improvement, they were rude and dirty. Not a lot, but it did happen and it did change. You had to think of . . . from another sort of angle sort of thing. Yes it was a good experience I think, anyone who did teaching in air raid shelters and

‘-John Macnicol, “The Evacuation of Schoolchildren,” in War and Social Change: British sociely in the Second World War, ed. Harold L. Smith, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 20.


things, I think i t must have been a valuable experience.” Later still she discussed the longer-term implications of this period for her professional development:

Do y o i i think that [shelter experience] rhanged~you~ attitude towards the children thenisehes?

Yes, I think it made me more tolerant when I saw the sort of conditions that a n u d e r of children lived in, it had, it had just never occurred to me that they didn’t have say facilities and things that I did[ ....I h d ?;hw-Yoz i say mure tolerant, hou. would that come uiit in.yuur teaching afei- the mar?

I think I expected less from them because they had more to put up with more than I’d realised. And then of course you do try and raise the standards when you are teaching, try and make them understand that there is a higher grade in life than the one they are living. It did make a difference, I’ll say that.’b

The notion of allowing children to escape from the social and cultural restrictions of the working-class home evolved as a crucial component of progressive ideologies that developed on a much wider scale in the British postwar primary school system.jY Testimony such as that of Monica Wood offers the tantalizing suggestion that the air-raid shelter may have played a part in laying the way open for this by providing some teachers with a new framework with which to understand their pupils. Many teachers’ framework now cast the worlung-class home as a negative influence that could stifle a child’s progress. Once this was understood, teachers began to see that their role should be to help children overcome their handicaps.

Conclusion

Alongside evacuation, the air-raid shelter represented the most significant and widespread wartime disruption to school routine. Both entailed a situation in which teaching methods and other teaching relationships could and, indeed, had to take root. Evacuation represented a sustained period during which this change could occur, but shelter teaching also touched the lives of many people and became a common feature of the school day during long phases of the war.

Teachers’ memories often revealed significant changes that occurred in the air-raid shelter. Many found it a place in which teachers and pupils shared a set of emotional and physical experiences. It was a place that represented a degree of common ground. Teachers also had to develop new ways to maintain their control in these unique teaching environments. Gone, for periods of the school day, was the traditional order offered by the rigid

’“Monica Wood, Fee footnote 42. ’“Vlacnicol, “The Evacuation,” 18-20

538 History of Education Quarter4

layout of the classroom and by corporal punishment. Teachers’ recognition of the pupils’ emotional states and the degree of disruption to their routine led them to increased leniency in regards to discipline, even to physical comfort and intimacy.

In the eyes of most wartime teachers, formal learning was the biggest casualty inside the shelter. Rather than being a time of no educational worth, however, it may be viewed as a place in which some of the child-centered pedagogy that gradually infused the general practice of primary teaching in the postwar years received an early implementation. Cramped space and lack of resources led to greater reliance on orality than previously witnessed. Inside the shelters, the teacher’s voice was not the only one heard. Teach- ers encouraged children to speak and practice their own verbal arts. The informal atmosphere of the shelter, coupled with the reliance on conver- sation, meant that air raids also became a time during which information could be exchanged between teachers and children. For the former, this became an opportunity to know and understand the behavior of individual pupils.

Most, if not all, of these developments had slowly begun to appear in elementary schools during the interwar years, before the shelter became a regular part of so many school lives. For example, wartime teachers I interviewed often mentioned that their prewar teacher training offered them an early introduction to a more child-centered approach in the classroom. However, many also remembered the difficulties of adopting this practice in prewar schools with their rigid timetables, the constraints of their physical layout, and the traditional outlook of headteachers and other colleagues. Most of these interviewed teachers were young men and women at the outbreak of war, a t a stage in their careers which suggests that many might have been open to the ideas and opportunities of innovation and change in the classroom.6o For some, their experience of teaching in air-raid shelters promoted this change, providing a quite unexpected time and space in which to develop new pedagogies. Others, to be sure, returned to their preferred and conventional practices when the air raids ceased.

Oral histories offer a tantalizing insight into the possible longer term impact of these changes on the attitudes and pedagogical practices of teachers, although this change is the hardest of all historical judgments to make.61 Looking back over a remarkable teaching career that had begun in an elementary school in south London in 1927, had continued through the Blitz and two evacuations, and still continues today as a voluntary assistant in a

“For an analysis of teachers’ career and life cycles see Michael Huberman, The Lines of Teachers (London, 1993), esp. ‘Introduction’; McCulloch, “Classroom Management,” 89; Hargreaves, “Curriculum Reform,” 2 52.

“Macnicol, “The Evacuation,” 5.


local London junior school, one ninety-four-year-old teacher talked of those hours in the school shelter and drew this conclusion: “It continued. The same job continued until peace time, late forty, forty-five, I can’t remember the dates, it don’t worry me. It was a continuous process and it has been ever since. That started me listening to children and I’ve done it ever since and I’m still doing it. Children come to me now in the school where I work and they tell me things that I’m surprised, but if you have a listening ear they’ll come to you, and I do think it started there.”6’

“Marjorie Powell, see footnote 35.

Documents

The School Air-Raid Shelter: Rethinking Wartime Pedagogies