The date is 1st September 1939. Davenant schoolboys are evacuated by train to Soham and Chatteris in the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire to escape the impending perils of an aerial bombardment of London.

This page really should be compiled  by those who were evacuated to Soham and Chatteris  so here are some memory joggers

Cromwell Rd School

Charles Sinden - the Billeting Officer

The Old Manor Ruins

Birch Fen

The Old Vicarage

Lyons Yard

The Home Guard in The Church Hall

Dr. Nix

Dr. J. Standish Watson

The Rev. Hawthorn

Aspinal's Sweet Shop

The Allotments at Pecks Yard

Peels Fish and Chip Shop

The Picture Palace

Isaacs-The Pork Butcher

The Parish Hall

The Lending Library at The Station Bookshop

Photos of Cromwell Rd School and Aspinal's Sweetshop by Stacey Day ( International Foundation for Bio, New York ) from " The Davenant Foundation School, The War Years, 1939-1945 "   The book is registered in the Library of Congress ( L.C No. 00-13242   ISBN 0-934314-49-7)   

Copies in the British Library and several other English libraries in Cambridgeshire and London. Edited by Arnold Zimmerman.

The first contribution to this page!

Memories of Harold Rose

On September 1^st there took place the evacuation of London schoolchildren to safer, country areas. Sylvia joined my school party; and with our suitcases, gas masks and name labels and leaving tearful parents behind, we all walked, crocodile style, to we knew not where, in our case actually a station not far from Bethnal Green. We boarded our train still ignorant of our destination; for me and no doubt many others it was all an adventure. It was also somewhat disorganized; for part of the school, including our Headmaster, got off for some reason or other at Ely, whereas the rest of us were deposited at Chatteris, in Cambridgeshire.

This is a large village in the middle of the Fen district, an island in miles of completely flat and featureless arable land - bearing potatoes, turnips, sugar beet - crisscrossed by wide drainage ditches. It was the sky rather than the land which could sometimes be described as beautiful. In earlier times the Fens had the reputation of being terribly unhealthy; wives imported from the towns usually died of malaria within a few years, and there had been extensive inbreeding. The only notable thing about Chatteris in 1939 was that one of its blacksmiths, Eric Boone, had become British lightweight boxing champion, and we once saw him revisiting the village dressed in a camel-haired coat and sporting a blonde in his expensive open-topped sports car.

The village was no doubt expecting to greet a clutch of sweet children, and what it met was a bunch of rather strange and even foreign-looking boys of a kind never imagined in the Fens. By then a prefect, I was one of the last to be allocated a billet; and with David Lawton I found myself deposited in a bungalow occupied by two middle-aged spinsters. Two days later, on September 3^rd, while I was trying to catch wasps in a jam jar, I heard the Prime Minister, Mr Chamberlain, say on the wireless that we were had been with Germany since 11 o’clock. I have to admit to having been excited rather than alarmed by the news.

David and I spent only a very short time with the two ladies, who had not expected to have two tall adolescent boys shaving in their kitchen at the end of the week. We were sent across the road to a detached house which seemed imposing to my inexperienced eyes but looks very ordinary to me today. Its owner was a solicitor, one Colonel Dauncey of the Territorial (part-time) Army, and there was already one other boy billeted there.

Despite having passed Dauncey’s tests for “manners”, such as being to cope with sole-on-the-  bone at lunch in a pub at Newmarket, and obviously having been “well brought up” - clean, polite, pyjamas folded each morning etc etc - I was under some suspicion just because I, like the other two boys, was Jewish. Dauncey described me to his wife as the “White Jew”. So the atmosphere in the house was always strained; and one lunchtime, when David was late in coming to the kitchen, I tried to put back the time on the clock on the wall, and it fell to the ground and cracked. Dauncey was furious, alleging that the clock was valuable - it was actually a cheap Japanese one - and said that either David or I would have to go. And so I went. David went not much later, but back home.

I was then billeted on a Mr. and Mrs. Lea, a couple in their sixties, in a two-up and two-down terrace house. It had a loo at the bottom of the small garden and was lit by oil lamps; there was a jug and bowl in my bedroom for washing and shaving, and the only tap may well have been on the outside of the kitchen wall. It was about eight in the evening when I arrived, and for some reason I had not had supper. I was given a glass of home-made lemonade and some biscuits; and I thought that I had made a change very much for the worse. It took only a day for me to realise how wrong I was. I was fed copiously with the help of vegetables from the small garden, fruit from local orchards, pickled eggs and similar home-made delicacies, the occasional chicken and the more frequent rabbit brought from the farm where Mr Lea worked as a “simple” labourer. In the evening the lighting of the oil lamps and the coal fire in the front room made a comforting overture to the night, and we would then settle down with our lemonade and biscuits to listen to the accumulator-powered wireless, especially to that arch-comic traitor, Lord Haw-Haw, calling us from Germany with his sneers. I went to a bed in a devastatingly cold room that winter but one in which Mrs Lea had placed an earthenware hot water bottle. 

Mr and Mrs Lea were generosity itself and treated me as their second son - they had one who lived several miles away in March - renaming me Fifi for some reason; and I had rarely been happier than with them. Their view of me a Jew had its own illogical mixture of prejudice and benevolence; for when one day I heard them make some mildly anti-Semitic remark and reminded them that I was a Jew, Mrs Lea, who was the more articulate of the two, replied “Ah, but you are not one of them London Jews!” I was distressed to find years after the war that, despite having a son (who might, of course, have died) they had been buried in what was a pauper’s grave; and when I visited the Chatteris cemetery five years ago the mound which had marked their burial had, sadly, been worn away, leaving no trace whatsoever. The whole cemetery in which they were buried is now a wilderness of neglect.

We used the local school, which had been recently built in a modern light and airy style. Its young and attractive Scotttish lady dentist provoked an unusual willingness on the part of us sixth-formers to go for treatment. The fact that our arts sixth form had only a handful of boys - for most boys had left school after matriculation - meant that classes were more like tutorials. I used the school’s showers for my weekly scrubdown, but the winter of 1939 was so cold in East Anglia that even the hot showers froze. Sylvia was billeted in another house; and Monty, of all people, was put up in the Vicarage, a large Victorian house which is now an expensive-looking private house surrounded by a high wall with security devices. The vicar was a mild and rather vague man, and he must have been bewildered by the Marxist journals which came to litter his drawing-room floor.

Monty also made his mark in another way. Our school had just come to appoint an English teacher, a Mr. Rossetti in the Dante Gabriel mode. Somehow we came to know that Rossetti, whom we very much liked, was a conscientious objector; and as our history teacher, Mr Dale was a Quaker, he must also have been one. The Cambridgeshire Times had carried letters and reports of tribunals expressing acute hostility towards conscientious objectors, but in one issue there appeared a letter by one Montague Randolph Tannenbaum calling for tolerance and criticizing in a vigorous manner the intolerant. Gobbie, our headmaster, referred to this letter in a roundabout way at assembly and, without mentioning Monty, said that he could never believe that such a letter could ever be written by a Davenant boy ! Five years ago I went to the offices of the Cambridgeshire Times in March, traced Monty’s letter and gave him a photograph of it for his 75^th birthday present, labelling it “Your first Publication”.

Our life in Chatteris was peaceful: chatting up the few girls in the village - I struck up a hand-in-hand friendship with one Daphne, who worked in the still extant newspaper shop - borrowing bicycles; lying in the grass somewhere reading our poetry or history books; and looking for signs of the war. In addition to food and clothing rationing and the injunction to be on the alert for spies, parachutists etc, there were occasional rumours of the odd bomb having been dropped on some distant village. In the second or third week of the war I saw the bombers which had set out from neighbouring airfields to raid the Kiel Canal. They went out in proud formation, but those - fewer in number - which returned were obviously limping home as best they could, more than one trailing smoke. A few months later, when I was cycling along one of the roads, I was passed by a lorryload of soldiers, one of whom called out “Don’t worry son, they’ll get you yet !”, a prediction which I regarded as utterly ridiculous. Then came the summer of 1940 and the Battle of Britain, and although it was not fought over the Fens there could sometimes be seen the tell-tale vapour trail in the sky.

By July 1940 Monty and I had been accepted by the School of Commerce of the Regent Street Polytechnic (now Westminster University) to study for the London University Intermediate Examination, and we (and Sylvia) and said goodbye to Chatteris.

Harold Rose