On 18 October 1940, children and mothers continued to leave London as sustained Luftwaffe bombing renewed the urgency of evacuation. The previous day, the government reported that some 489,000 schoolchildren, around 56 per cent of the school-age population in London’s evacuation areas, had already left. The movement carried the consequences of the air battle into homes, schools and reception communities far beyond the capital.
The figures represented the cumulative scale of evacuation by mid-October. Families were still leaving at a rate of several thousand mothers and children a day, while many others continued to live under the threat of air raids. For those departing, safety involved separation from familiar surroundings and dependence on accommodation elsewhere.
A renewed departure from London
The government’s first large-scale evacuation had begun in September 1939, in anticipation of attacks on British cities. During the ensuing months, many evacuees returned home. Separation, the difficulties of settling into unfamiliar households and the absence of the expected immediate bombing all shaped families’ decisions.
The sustained assault on London from September 1940 transformed those calculations. Night bombing exposed children to repeated danger and disrupted the ordinary arrangements through which families lived. Damaged homes, shelter conditions and interrupted schooling made the question of departure increasingly urgent. Evacuation became a continuing response to an active bombing campaign.
The movement also required distinctions between different groups needing help. Schoolchildren, mothers with young children, and elderly or infirm people had different accommodation and care needs. Receiving communities consequently became part of the practical effort to protect London’s population, with housing and family arrangements central to the scheme’s operation.
Arrangements under pressure
On 17 October, Minister of Health Malcolm MacDonald explained the developing arrangements in the House of Commons. An extension of the scheme covered specified vulnerable groups normally living in London’s evacuation areas and certain coastal towns, where they could arrange reception elsewhere. Mothers with children under five in other evacuation areas could obtain billeting certificates when they made their own reception arrangements, taking older children with them.
These provisions show the administrative work behind the continuing departures. Travel and accommodation had to be connected, and assistance depended in part on where people lived and what arrangements they could make. By 18 October, evacuation involved both the immediate decision to leave danger and the longer task of sustaining life away from home.
The air war beneath the flight paths
London remained exposed to attack. On 18 October, a bomb struck the former Clyde Street junior school in Deptford, which was serving as an air-raid precautions post. Seven people died there. The building’s wartime use placed the incident within the civil-defence effort supporting a population under bombardment.
Fighter Command‘s defence of Britain and the wider air-defence system sought to resist the Luftwaffe campaign that was driving this displacement. The shift towards sustained night attacks presented severe interception difficulties. Bombers reaching the capital imposed consequences that continued after the aircraft had departed: damaged housing, disrupted services and renewed pressure on families to seek safety elsewhere.
Evacuation formed the civilian counterpart to that defensive struggle. Its effects extended into households receiving children and mothers, spreading the demands of London’s survival across the country. By mid-October, the departure of hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren had made the scale of that upheaval clear. The bombing campaign was reshaping where children lived, how they were cared for and the conditions in which their education could continue.