Separate lives

Historian Margaret Sheridan, who lives in the village of Alveley in Shrops, which hosted 80 evacuees, tells how children generally weren't shipped that far away from their homes.

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She said: “For many children the journey will have felt like a million miles away but in fact they weren’t that far away from home, just far enough away from danger.

“But for a lot this was the first time they'd ever been on a train and when they arrived to their destinations, the first time they'd ever seen a cow or a sheep. This was a real culture shock for some.”

Margaret says many of the kids sent to Alveley came from nearby Liverpool. She said the village was small but the people there were labourers and quarrymen and money was tight. Having more mouths to feed was tough on the locals.