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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Thinking Allowed: Evacuation

Evacuation

12/05/2010

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Evacuation

The social impact of sending millions from the cities to the country during WWII.

Millions of people were sent from the town to the country during the Second World War and a new light was shone on the shocking deprivation of Britain's cities.

In 1939 over three quarters of a million unattended schoolchildren left Britain's towns for the supposed safety of the countryside. They were the first wave of evacuees and they stunned their rural hosts with their combination of lice, bedwetting, bad table manners, dirtiness, inadequate clothing and malnutrition. For the first time the realities of urban deprivation were brought out of the shadows of the city and into the light of public opinion. What effect did the experience have on social policy in Britain? Laurie Taylor talks to John Welshman, the author of a new book Churchill's Children: The Evacuee experience in war time Britain and also to the social historian Selina Todd.
Also on the programme the extraordinary enthusiasm for the barbecue which gripped America in the years after the war. Laurie talks to Tim Miller about the birth of what has become known as 'Patio Daddy-o'.

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