September 11 2010 by Correspondent for The Liverpool Echo
Under the headline USA evacuation changed my life, Gerald Henderson tells the story of his and his brother Michael's evacuation from England to the USA as young boys during World War II. The article appears in The Liverpool Echo, 11 September 2010.
Liverpool Hope University honorary fellow Gerald Henderson recalls how being evacuated to the USA changed his life
Gerald Henderson and his brother Michael were evacuated to the USA 70 years ago. Here he recounts the experience
As a six-year-old, comforted by my koala bear and accompanied by my older brother, Michael, eight, I set off in 1940 on a journey that was to change our lives. We were two of the thousands of young British who were evacuated overseas.
The internal evacuation to escape the German bombing is better known than the overseas evacuation that was precipitated by the threat of a German invasion. But it, too, had become officially sanctioned when complaints were aired that refuge in the United States and elsewhere should not be just for those who could afford it or had company or university links. Our father was at that point in the army working with Movement Control in the docks at Birkenhead.
Our mother had grown up as a child in Dublin during the Irish civil war. She did not want us to experience the dangers that she had lived through. We had cheerfully waved goodbye, little knowing that we would be separated from our parents for five years. They held back their tears, yet conscious that they might not see us again. Only years later did we realise that, as a friend wrote us when our mother died, ‘She was terribly brave.’
As we left with others we were filled with excitement of what seemed to us to be an adventure.
Stepping aboard the SS Early August, a security description to hide our ship’s real name, we had no idea of the dangers. We were excited by our convoy of ships from Liverpool and Glasgow which formed up off Rathlin Island, Northern Ireland, and were joined by a battleship and five destroyers.
We even played the game of Battleship while submarines were looking for us.
Just a month later, on Friday September 13, the City of Benares with 90 children aboard sailed from Liverpool. It was sunk with 77 children killed. One of the few children saved, Bess Cummings, has just died, aged 85. The Atlantic was too dangerous and overseas evacuation officially ended.
For five years we were cared for by a Boston family, a care that left us with an abiding gratitude for them and a deep love of the United States. Not every evacuee had as satisfying experience as we did and we all faced challenges on return.
One was to rebuild a relationship with our parents, who were still affected by the strains and stresses of what they had been through, particularly as they moved to London – with our father in the War Office and our mother in the Censorship. They had lived through the Blitz and the V1s and V2s and jumped at any loud noise.
Relations were understandably not helped by our cocky mind-set: ‘This is how we do it over there’.
In a bid to rebuild our unity we visited the centre for reconciliation in Caux, Switzerland which had been started in 1946 to help heal the hates of World War II.
I was challenged to look at my own life to see where there were things that I needed to put right as a starting point. This led to unity in our family.
But even more it helped me to set out on a lifelong journey working with Initiatives of Change for better community relations, engaging in trust-building and reconciliation in a variety of countries, ending up based in Liverpool over the last 20 years in a programme called ‘Hope in the Cities’. It led to my brother writing books not only about the evacuation like See You After the Duration but also on subjects like reconciliation and forgiveness, as in No Enemy to Conquer.
We were more fortunate than some. Our only casualty? My koala bear, which somehow got lost on the trip.