SEE YOU AFTER THE DURATION - ARTICLES

THE  DAILY TELEGRAPH

The following article appeared in the Daily Telegraph (UK) on September 2 2009:

WW2: Former evacuees look back

To mark the 70th anniversary of evacuation, hundreds of people gathered at a service in St Paul's cathedral yesterday. To some, it had been an adventure; to others, a lonely and fearful separation. In these moving testimonies, former evacuees recall the day when their lives were altered for ever.

Michael Henderson
My life was turned upside down by evacuation, not in 1939 but in 1940. My horizons were narrow, just those of a patriotic young boy at a boarding school in Surrey. Then suddenly a voyage on an ocean liner over the Atlantic in a convoy with other ships, guarded by a battleship and five destroyers and being received by an unknown American family. We were some of the 3,000 British children who enjoyed the amazing generosity freely given by American families.

From school blazer and cap and gartered long stockings to corduroy knickerbockers, dungarees and baseball cap, from boys-only to co-education, from pounds, shillings and pence to the decimal system – there were abrupt changes. But American schools were welcoming. Every morning, American children salute the flag and recite the pledge of allegiance; for us, they thoughtfully placed a Union Jack that we could face. We were soon caught up in American rituals such as Halloween and Thanksgiving and quickly accepted hamburgers and hot dogs.

After three years, my father came on a mission to Washington and phoned up. My comment as I put down the phone was: "Gee, he talks just like in the movies." I can still recite American poetry and sing the college songs we learnt around the campfire in the summer. We returned home on an escort aircraft carrier, and on arrival walked past our mother without recognising her.

Not every overseas evacuee looks back on the time with pleasure. But my younger brother and I, despite the five years family separation, regard the experience as a blessing for which we have always been grateful.

Read article online here >>

THE PATRIOT LEDGER

The following article appeared in this Boston paper on June 20 2009:

Man recounts his evacuation from England during World War II

Former Milton resident Michael Henderson, the author of “See You After the Duration: The Story of British Evacuees To North America in World War II” recounts the experiences that shaped that book.

During World War II, I was one of 3,000 children evacuated from England to the United States for safekeeping. Today, at age 77, I have returned to Milton Academy for a reunion of the Class of 1949 with the boys and girls with whom I shared the fourth, fifth and sixth grades.

In the anniversary of the 70 years since World War II, little is known of the generosity of the American foster families of that time who took in British evacuees. My brother and I were two of them, at ages 6 and 8.

Only decades later, when my own daughter was 8, did I realize how dire the situation was for parents to be willing to send their children across the dangerous waters of the Atlantic.

In 1939, over a million children had been evacuated out of English cities into the countryside through a fear of bombings. But in 1940, with the collapse of France and the evacuation of Dunkirk, there was a very real prospect of German troops landing on our beaches, and so overseas evacuation was considered.

My mother had a particular reason to get us out of the war zone. Our family had lived for hundreds of years in Ireland – Protestants in a largely Catholic country. She lived through the “troubles” in the early 1920s, and her father was told “to leave the country by the end of the week or be shot.” That is why I am English.

During the World War II evacuation my brother and I were on an ocean liner, The Duchess of York, bound for North America, in a convoy escorted by the battleship HMS Revenge and five destroyers. Inside we sat on our bunks playing “battleships,” oblivious to what was going on in the waters around us. We returned five years later in an aircraft carrier. It’s no wonder that for many of us, it was a great adventure rather than a traumatic event. For parents, it was far more upsetting because in some cases it was weeks before they knew their children had arrived safely. For instance, 77 children were killed in the sinking of The City of Benares.

Our host family lived in Milton. Walter Hinchman was a teacher at Milton Academy and enrolled us in the junior school (Thacher School). We were quickly introduced to co-education, baseball, basketball, American football and ice hockey. I can still sing the college and military songs we learned around the summer campfires in New Hampshire. After Pearl Harbor, our war efforts to support U.S. involvement included collecting scrap metal, saving for war bonds and spotting for planes from the top of the chapel at the academy.

I can still list all the American presidents up to Grover Cleveland, but I can’t get beyond him, because in 1945 the war ended and we returned to England. I was 13 years old.

The return trip was probably far harder for us as we were more aware of the world around us. The principle fear on our part was that we wouldn’t recognize our parents from whom we had been separated for five years. In fact, we walked past our mother at the train station without recognizing her.

Back home we sometimes had to contend with criticism of our American accents or not having shared the rigors of the war. Our father, who had been in the War Office, probably expected quicker obedience than we gave him. Our parents’ admonitions were often met with “We don’t do it that way in America. We don’t do this. We don’t do that.” Pretty soon America became known in our family as “We Land.” This exposure to American life has led me to my life’s work of building bridges of understanding between people as a journalist and author.

Today I am still in touch with descendants of the family I lived with. I recently stayed with a grandson, Walter Hinchman, Jr. He is now a grandfather, which makes me feel particularly old.

In 1940, Dr. Vivian T. Pomeroy, a Milton church minister, predicted, “The children who would come from Britain would go back with a great love of America in their hearts, a deep and grateful feeling for the people who saved them, and thereby, they will become a strong ingredient of a better understanding of America among the English people.” So now nearly 70 years later, I can guarantee that his aspirations are fact.

by Suzette Martinez Standring
For The Patriot Ledger

Michael Henderson is also the author of “No Enemy To Conquer – Forgiveness In An Unforgiving World.” A member of Initiatives of Change International, he’s worked for more than 50 years for peace and understanding in 25 countries. He was awarded three George Washington Honor Medals from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge. He lives in Westward Ho! England. Visit www.michaelhenderson.org.uk

Read article online here

THE POMFRET TIMES

The following article appeared in The Pomfret Times in Connecticut in June 2008 by Michael Henderson:

It is little known nowadays that during World War II American families hosted several thousand British children threatened by bombing and invasion. It was a generosity that is remembered today with great gratitude by those who spent anything from two to six years in this country.

My brother Gerald, then aged six, and I aged 8, were two of them. I have written a book, See You After the Duration, that conveys a sense of the adventure and heartache of those wartime years. The book expresses to Americans our continuing sense of gratitude to those families and will, I hope, introduce to British readers the generous heart of America which we encountered at that young age.

There is a strong Pomfret connection in the book and I devote a whole chapter to it. First of all the American family that took us in were the Walter Hinchmans of Milton, Massachusetts. In May their grandson, Walter, was our host in Pomfret where he taught for many years at Pomfret School.

The second connection is that I was at the Rectory School in 1944 and 1945. I was glad to be able to speak to the whole school recently about our wartime experiences.

In 1939 at the start of the war there had been planning in Britain for the evacuation of a million and a half children from cities to the countryside to get them away from the dangers of bombing. No thought at all had been given to overseas evacuation. But by May 1940 a German invasion was expected and offers came in from Commonwealth countries and from the United States to take British children. In fact, a Gallup poll at that time indicated that five million American families would be ready to host British children. One family who made the offer was the Hinchmans.

The Rectory headmaster, John Bigelow, or Mr. John as we came to know him, had shared in the decision by the Association of Junior Boarding School Heads, to offer scholarships to English youngsters. I was glad that at the time of the school’s 75^th anniversary I was able on behalf of my brother and me and the half dozen English boys who benefited to thank him publicly for this act.

On my visit last month I was given the opportunity to speak to the whole school and convey to them some of our experiences during World War II. They seemed very interested though, as I pointed out, my speaking to them about World War II would be as if when I was at Rectory some alumnus had come to talk about the Spanish-American War.

I told them that during the war the school thoughtfully had even hung a Union Jack in the assembly hall so that we could turn and face it when the American boys made their Pledge of Allegiance time to the Stars and Stripes. When I mentioned to the students that I could still remember many of the songs I learned around the fire at camp in New Hampshire one of them called out ‘sing’ and I was on the spot. I responded by singing the parody of the Notre Dame song and I nearly got a standing ovation!

By the time we came to Rectory in 1943 life in the schoolwas reflecting the difficulties of rationing, staff shortage and above all the fact that some 200 alumni were in the services and were spread around the world with some killed or wounded or decorated. The war was brought home to us dramatically by the death of the father of one of the boys. Commenting on the sad news of reported deaths Mr. John wrote in The Rectory News: ‘The price of winning the war is tremendous. May we find means to make the peace which will follow it universal and lasting. That is the least we shall owe to our dead.’

At Rectory and during the war years in the United States were laid many of the foundations of my life, not least a great love for this country and its people and a desire to work for closer understanding. Perhaps the commitment of our lives, both Gerald and mine, to peacemaking and my books on the subject of creating that universal and lasting peace, like Forgiveness:Breaking the Chain of Hate,are an unconscious response to Mr. John’s challenge.

While with the Hinchmans this time I visited Pomfret School and was able to tell some of the students how I specifically got involved in efforts to create understanding in the world. I described how returning to England after five years separation there was the need to reestablish a sense of family. Our parents admonitions had often been met with ‘We don’t do it that way in America’ and pretty soon America became known as ‘we-land’ in our family. So as a family we visited a new center of reconciliation at Caux, Switzerland which had been set up by Swiss to help bring together those who had fought against each other.

There we found more than a new family unity; my mother found though apology an answer as an Irish Protestant to division with Irish Catholics, my father a new relationship with Africans with whom he did business and my brother and I sense of calling to work for a better world with the group who had set up the center. They were known then as Moral Re-Armament or MRA because its initiator, Frank Buchman, said in 1938 that along with the emphasis on military rearmament we needed moral and spiritual rearmament, to deal with the element in people’s hearts that led to war. Now it is called Initiatives of Change and continues through Caux its work to bring nations together.

My next contribution to that work is a book which comes out in January. It is No Enemy To Conquer - Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World (Baylor University Press) and has a foreword by the Dalai Lama.

Some social scientists say that the whole evacuation was a wrong step to take. Certainly there were some children who did not have as happy an experience as we did and suffered from the family dislocation. But for my brother and me and our friends we rate those years as an experience for which we have always been grateful. It introduced us to generations of Americans we would not have known and became, as the final report of the committee that sent us wrote, ‘an applied lesson in international understanding’.

Indeed it was. So once again a big thank you to Pomfret, to the Hinchman family and to Rectory School.

THE OREGONIAN

The following article appeared in The Oregonian on May 18, 2005 under the headline "Words of gratitude for U.S. care of British children in wartime"
by Michael Henderson:

In Britain’s public life there is a community of several thousand men and women who have their own special relationship with the United States. They include former cabinet ministers and members of parliament and at least a dozen well-known writers. During World War II they were evacuated, as I was, to the United States and spent anything from two to six years living with American families.

If there is a common outlook as a result it is a deep sense of gratitude for American generosity and an appreciation of the United States at its best. Some may disagree at times with US policies but they would not indulge in crass anti-Americanism.

In the spring of 1940 when England expected an invasion by Hitler offers of sanctuary for children flowed into Britain from the Dominions, and American companies and universities and schools threw open their doors to welcome British children. The UK government launched a program to ensure that the option was also available for those who could not afford the passage. More than 200,000 children were signed up.

That only 3,000 children came to the United States was due to the fact that in September 1940 the City of Benares was sunk, 77 children died, and the overseas evacuation ceased.

Some evacuees had memorable encounters. One was taught to swim by Ronald Reagan, another was in the same school soccer team as George Bush, another was helped in her math homework by Albert Einstein, yet another went trick or treating on Halloween and was given a silver dollar by Orville Wright. Our Boston host had captained the American cricket team at the turn of the century.

For most of us life was like that of every other young person, with school and work and exams and sports, new sports of course like ice hockey, baseball, basketball, American football. I went like many to summer camp and can still sing the college and patriotic and traditional songs we learned round the campfire.

Sixty years ago this week I returned with other children to England on a little escort carrier. Adventure had triumphed over trauma and patriotism had sustained us throughout. The challenge of reintegrating into family life turned out for many to be harder than the earlier parting.

The presence of British children in the United States in 1940 helped bring home to Americans the reality of the war in Europe . The friendships established then persist to this day. Wendy Best, a granddaughter of the family I lived with, now from Parkdale (OR), recently stayed with us in Devon . Such friendships have helped on both sides of the Atlantic to provide a window into the heart of our two nations and to make the wartime years, as was stated in the final report of the American evacuation committee, ‘an applied lesson in international understanding’.

My book See You After the Duration is an expression of that gratitude we all feel for the generosity of the American people.

CHILDREN IN WAR – THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EVACUEE AND WAR CHILD STUDIES

An article by Michael Henderson on 'The evacuation of British children to North America in World War II' appeared in December 2005
Download in PDF format

Autumn 2006 issue of This England
by Michael Henderson

Like the Narnia evacuee children I had a magic wardrobe. Opening its doors, however, did not transport me to a make-believe land inhabited by Aslan and the other denizens of the wood. Rather I was carried into the very real world of the British lion and the trappings of empire. My wardrobe was not in the New Forest but in New England .

My brother, Gerald, and I were two of the some ten thousand young British who were evacuated to Canada and the United States in World War II and the ‘wardrobe' was a huge cupboard in which my American hosts stored back numbers of the Illustrated London News and The Boy's Own Annual . Their enthralling pages contained stories of bravery under fire, portraits of the Royal family, cross sections of Royal Naval ships and much more which fed my pride in country and helped to sustain me in five years of separation from my parents.

I was eight and my brother six when we set off in August 1940. ‘See you after the duration' I called out to my parents. We sailed in a liner, the Duchess of York, in a convoy escorted by five destroyers and the battleship HMS Revenge . I was particularly pleased to secure the autograph of the battleship's signalman. No wonder that for many of us it was the adventure not the trauma that we remember.

For parents it was a different matter. One father, Ted Matthews, noted in his diary during an air raid on 10 August, the day that four of his daughters sailed for the US , ‘I feel as if I had committed some horrible crime. There are mines strewn across the oceans, submarines lying in wait to torpedo them, aircraft searching for them to blow them to pieces. Yet I cannot but believe that the crime of exposing them to these dangers is less than the crime of keeping them at home to be the possible victims of an invading army. Every minute that passes takes their ship further and further away from that danger. If ever my children read this, I beg them to forgive me for doing this thing. They have no conception of what it has cost to make this decision. They will never know the agony which I suffer at the thought of them tonight.'

In the spring of 1940 when it looked as if Britain would be invaded offers of refuge for children poured in from the dominions and from the USA . Companies like Kodak, Hoover and Warner Brothers and the Ford Motor Company in Canada decided to take children of their employees in Britain . Universities made similar overtures as did organisations like the English-Speaking Union. The British government set up a scheme, CORB, the Children's Overseas Reception Board, so that the opportunity to get out of England would be available for all, not just for those who could afford it. More than 213,000 children were signed up. The scheme came to an end in September when the City of Benares was sunk and 77 children died.

Our mother had grown up at the time of ‘the troubles' in Ireland . In 1922, at the time of independence, her school was occupied by troops and her father was ordered to leave the country by the end of the week or be shot. So she had good reason to want us out of the war zone. Our parents like other parents also felt that they would be able to pursue their war responsibilities more effectively without us: our father in the War Office and our mother in the Ministry of Information. The broadcaster, J.B. Priestley, describing his first night in the Home Guard, wrote, ‘I remember wishing that we could send all our children out of this island, every boy and girl of them across the sea to the wide Dominions, and turn Britain into the greatest fortress the world has known; so that then, with an easy mind, we could fight and fight these Nazis until we broke their black hearts.'

But British parents had no idea in 1940 that the separation would last for five years, any more than American or Canadian hosts could imagine that their generous offers of help, at a time of Britain 's desperate need, would be so stretched out.

Great care had been taken to try and place evacuees with families where they would fit in. We were placed with the Hinchmans. Walter Hinchman was a teacher and he had captained an American cricket team when it toured England in 1900. Mrs. Hinchman's brother had been at Dunkirk . The Hinchmans had six children, the youngest being 16 when we arrived. We owe them all a profound debt of gratitude.

Some evacuees in the United States had memorable encounters. One was taught to swim by Ronald Reagan, another was in the same school soccer team as George Bush, and one young English girl was helped in her math homework by an old man who turned out to be Albert Einstein. Writer Anthony Bailey went trick or treating and was given a silver dollar by Orville Wright, the pioneer of flight. But for most of us life was like that of every other young person, with school work and exams and sports, new sports like baseball, American football and ice hockey.

First days at school were often a trial for evacuees with their classmates making fun of British dress and accents. Most of us were, as the late Janet Baker (Lady Young) confirmed to me, ‘intensely patriotic', and this helped us deal with such difficulties. Tremayne Rodd, an English evacuee in kindergarten on Long Island , learned that America had beaten Britain in the War of Independence. His stout response, ‘It's not true. I won't have it.' Like Anthony Bailey, we saw our role as ambassadors for our country. He writes, ‘Whether because of wartime patriotism or the Portsmouth naval tradition, perhaps transmitted in a school history lesson, I had taken to heart Nelson's flag signal flown on The Victory before Trafalgar, “ England expects every man to do his duty.”'

Historian Alistair Horne says that with comments like ‘Why, I was doing Virgil before I left England' and ‘We don't wear helmets to play rugger, or gloves and masks to play cricket' he and older evacuees at his school were sometimes so arrogant that it was almost a mystery ‘why most of us were not massacred within a week of arrival'. I was inwardly glad that English boys at my school came top in work and sports.

Many Americans went out of their way to be welcoming to the influx of young British. At my school a Union Jack was strategically positioned so that we could face it when American children were daily ‘pledging their allegiance' to the stars and stripes. I was proud that a painting I did of a spitfire over the Channel was hung in the assembly hall.

We had already imbibed attitudes that may seem quaint by today's standards. Soon after our arrival a local paper described a woman observing a group of English children awaiting homes. One of them fell down, and he must have hurt himself but he did not cry. ‘You must be a very brave boy,' she said to him. His reply ‘It's all for England .' The paper commented, ‘There are many of us here who are learning new lessons of self-control and courage these days.' At a Western Canadian station an escort found a small girl of seven crying. An eleven-year-old girl went up to her and said, ‘Stop it at once and be British.' The escort recorded that the child immediately pulled herself together.

‘There'll always be an England ' became almost our signature tune, being sung at many occasions when evacuees got together. Indeed, Sir Martin Gilbert, who was an evacuee to Canada , even chose it forty years later as his first record on ‘Desert Island discs'. He says he cried involuntarily, as he read its words in my book about evacuees to which he kindly wrote the foreword.

Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose broadcast to us, the first time their voices had been heard widely. And we were given the chance to hear our parents and broadcast to them. Though it was an anxious moment when the wrong parents were put on to speak to Gerald and me.

I went like many to summer camp and can still sing the college and patriotic and traditional songs we learned round the camp fire. Every week I had to learn stirring poetry, ranging from Tennyson's ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade' and Newbolt's ‘Drake's Drum' to Holmes ‘Old Ironsides' and Whittier's ‘Barbara Frietchie'.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 brought a dramatic change. As President Roosevelt wrote to King George VI, ‘Our two nations are now full comrades-in-arms.' We joined in collecting scrap metal, digging up lawns for vegetable growing, saving for war bonds. Despite my youth I was allowed to take a turn spotting for planes from the top of the school chapel. Older evacuees even found themselves making speeches or christening planes. I was there in the crowd waving my British flag when Prime Minister Churchill spoke in Harvard Yard in 1943.

Then, as the years went by, pressures grew to get the children back to Britain , although the Atlantic was still dangerous. Passages were hard to find, with space reserved for soldiers and supplies for D-Day. We started returning on neutral or Royal Navy ships, and my brother and I came back on a little escort carrier, HMS Patroller . Now we could actually see the uniforms we had studied in the Illustrated London News . There was a captured Japanese Zero plane inside the hangar and we even had the thrill of watching a surrendered German submarine being towed to the United States .

Uppermost in the minds of most children was the fear of not recognizing their parents. Indeed Gerald and I walked right past our mother on the station platform. Then began the process of re-establishing a sense of family. Our parents admonitions were often met with ‘We don't do it that way in America , we don't do this, we don't do that.' So much so, that America became known in our family as ‘We-land.'

How much the presence of several thousand British children in the United States played a part in bringing home to the American public the reality of the war in Europe it would be hard to measure. But the links we established have continued to foster the special relationship that is often denigrated. Even those for whom the separation still rankles expressions of gratitude to North American hosts prevail.

The four daughters whose father's diary I quoted from earlier returned home safely. Their father wrote to their hosts, the Meems in Santa Fé, ‘Whatever the future may hold for us all I promise that, as far as it is in my power, the adventure of the last four years shall not end at my front door. With the strong emotional bonds which unite your family and mine we have no right to remain strangers to each other. You must know how utterly impossible it is to find words adequately to express our gratitude to you. You must realize how very large is the number of people whose hearts you have touched by your generosity to the children, and whose faith in the ultimate decency and kindness of human beings you have restored.'

Whatever the downside of evacuation, with family ties weakened and education made difficult, ours was a small price to pay compared to the wartime sufferings of others. In a way evacuation was our war service. The experience enriched our lives and introduced us to generations of Americans and Canadians we would not have known and became, as the final report of the committee that sent us wrote, ‘an applied lesson in international understanding'.

CHILDREN IN WAR – THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EVACUEE AND WAR CHILD STUDIES

An article by Michael Henderson on ‘The role of patriotism in sustaining the evacuees to North America in World War II’ appeared in December 2006
Download in PDF format

RELIGION NEWS SERVICE

The following commentary was sent out to the American press by Religion News Service (New York) in May 2005, by Michael Henderson

As we mark the 60th anniversary of the ending of World War II, may I, as an Englishman, express gratitude to the American people. Not only for what you did to preserve freedom in the world but for a less well recognized example of American generosity.

Sixty years ago this month (May) my brother Gerald and I returned to Britain after having spent five years with a family in Boston unknown to us when the war started. We were two of some 3,000 Brits who, in 1940, when it looked as if Britain was going to be invaded by Hitler, were offered refuge in the United States "for the duration of the war." A poll at the time indicated that several million American families were willing to take British children. Thousands more children were signed up to come. The sinking of The City of Benares, with 77 children killed, however, brought the evacuation to an end.

What might seem traumatic, the separation from parents, was, for the two of us, not only the start of a transatlantic adventure but also the impetus for a spiritual journey as well.

"See you after the duration," this 8-year-old called out as we set off for America. Little did parents realize that they were sending their children away for so long; nor did American hosts have any idea their hospitality would be so extended. But young children were oblivious to such considerations. What an excitement to cross the Atlantic in a liner in a convoy escorted by a battleship and destroyers and to return on an aircraft carrier. And to sit on our bunks playing 'battleships'. For all of us it was the adventure of our lives, many of us sustained by a sense of patriotism.

Most evacuees enjoyed their enforced exile but even those who were unhappy speak of the generosity of their host country. They may sometimes disagree with American policies but they do not lapse into mindless anti-Americanism.

It was the return to Britain that caused greater upheaval. Many found it difficult to recognize their parents -- and parents their children. It was hard to live into the minds of parents who had survived the 'blitz' and jumped at any loud sounds. My brother and I often responded to parents' admonitions with, "We don't do it that way in America. We don't do this, we don't do that. ..." So much so that America became known in our family as "We-land."

Our presence in the United States may have helped Americans to appreciate the reality of the war in Europe. It certainly gave us insights into possibilities undreamed of. Shirley Williams, for instance, a political leader and one of a number of evacuees prominent in British life, felt her years in the U.S. gave her a sense of promise of a "new world where everything is possible," which drove her into politics.

Friendships formed during the "duration" have stood the test of time. We have just had staying with us a granddaughter of the family we lived with. She is a grandmother. So it is with five generations of an American family we keep those trans-Atlantic links. A report by the committee that brought many children to the United States described the experience as "an applied lesson in international understanding."

In 1947, concerned about family divisions, we went to the center of reconciliation in Caux, Switzerland. This had been created to heal divisions between wartime combatants. In the framework of thousands finding an end to hates and hurts, we came closer together. Through honesty with each other about ourselves, the barriers were demolished. Our father discovered a new attitude to the people of Africa where he did business while our Irish mother through apology built bridges with Irish Catholics to whom our family had been indifferent. Together we found a way to make real our Christian faith and to relate it to the world's needs.

So the uprooting in World War II, difficult as it was, became the source of a love for America and a springboard to a life of Christian service.