Wartime Evacuees in Furness Vale

  On 2nd June 1940 a train arrived at Whaley Bridge from Southend on Sea in Essex. On board were 240 children evacuated due to the war.  They were accompanied by 12 teachers and 11 voluntary helpers.
   Met at Whaley Bridge, the children were first of all given tea, then medically examined and then allocated to their billets. The operation took a considerable time and caused a few tears.  Some billetors refused boys, others would not take girls. Some, confronted with brother and sister wanted to take one but not the other. Some children, boys in particular were hawked around several billets until kindly souls at last gave them shelter.
   Schoolrooms were established at the Mechanics Institute, at Whaley Bridge Church Hall and one classroom was made available at Furness Vale School.

  Wendy Brown is trying to find information about her mother's evacuation to Furness Vale.  Her name was Jean Hill (Rosenberg) and she was just six years old at the time.  She stayed with the Palmers who lived in Park Crescent.

  Val Stenson has added the following information:
"The Palmers were Percy Holmes Palmer (born in Bredbury but had lived in Chapel) & Lillian Gertrude Palmer nee Hodgkinson (from Lancashire) the couple married in Stockport in 1925 & lived at Woodlea off Yeardsley Lane which came under Whaley Bridge UDC in the 1939 National Registration. The couple had no children of their own, Percy worked as a Railway Signalman Heavy Works & Lillian stayed at home. Percy died in 1949 & by then the couple had moved to Melton Mowbury."

  The only "Woodlea" in Furness Vale is currently 236 Buxton Road and some distance from Park Crescent.

  If anybody remembers or knows of the Palmers, or Jean, then Wendy Brown would be delighted to hear from you.

Wendy Brown's niece chatted to here gran about her experiences for a school project and wrote down the conversation|:  

My Nana being Evacuated in World War II

During the War, my Nana was 6 ½ years old.  She had to be evacuated at the start of 1940.  She used to live on the South Coast at a place called Westcliff on Sea.

She was brought up on a steam train.  On this journey she remembers having no food or little and having some water, but the problem was the water tasted of soot because of the steam from the train.  The steam train dropped a lot of children off at Chinley.  When they got there, people either went to a home which made them clean or they went to homes where they were used as cheap labour, specially on farms or if they were lucky, they went to a nice family.  My Nana was lucky, she went to a Mr and Mrs Palmer.

My Nana was never short on food because they grew their own vegetables and kept hens.  The one food she disliked were runner beans because they salted them and kept them for winter.  She disliked them because they had them every day.

She can remember getting to their home in Furness Vale and them giving her a bath.  They kept scrubbing at her.  She remembers them saying “what have they sent us?”  They were saying this because she was very brown (because of a hot summer) and her accent.

When the war was over her mother came up to Furness Vale and Nana went to live with her.  Nana’s mum married a man called Sam Kitchen.  They lived together but my Nana never forgot Mr and Mrs Palmer.

 
  The photographs show the evacuee children  at Furness Vale School