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The momentous and unprecedented decision to evacuate the school population together with the children under school age accompanied by their mothers, under a voluntary scheme, was undertaken in anticipation of and under fear of continuous and devastating attacks from the air. That these anticipations have not as yet been fulfilled has meant that so far a scheme devised to meet such terrible contingencies, a scheme which at the best could prove acceptable only as an alternative to danger and devastation such as this country has never experienced, has been, as it were, left in the air. The place of security and safety in the country, with all its drawbacks, difficulties and deprivations, has had to bear comparison not with homes endangered or devastated, but with the familiar, ordinary life which is so far still enjoyed in safety in our cities. That after six months of such daily comparison most of the mothers and at least half of the children have returned to their homes is not surprising. How greatly this reflux has added to the difficulties of adjustment between the health authorities of the evacuating areas and of the reception areas I shall discuss later. The evacuation scheme was carried out by the combined action of the Ministry of Education, which dealt with the children of school age, and the Ministry of Health, which dealt with the mothers and the children under school age. The difficulties inherent in the task were enormous and were added to by the nature of the relationship in which the Ministry of Health stands to the many local health authorities throughout the country. A main function of the Ministry is the control and co-ordination of schemes for child health originating locally. It is a body which exists to advise. It is in no sense a legislating power and it cannot readily enforce compliance upon the local authorities by dictation or insistence, except in so far as it is dealing with specific parliamentary enactments. It encourages the local authorities, facilitates, criticizes, and perhaps aids in the financing of their schemes. To an outsider there appears to be nothing bureaucratic in the Ministry of Health. It exists to place all its resources at the disposal of the various public health authorities in town and country, but the authority remains with them. With a public health organization so conceived and so existing, the task of the Ministry became one of great difficulty when it was called upon in a day, under a voluntary scheme, voluntary, that is, both as regards the evacuated population and those who received them, to transfer the child population of cities with their elaborate and expensive health services into rural areas with slender resources, exiguous staffs, and comparatively rudimentary health services. The rural areas had to be encouraged and assisted to inaugurate and extend services and to arrange for the reception of such of the medical and nursing staff as could be spared from the evacuating area and the evacuating area was willing to relinquish. The increased expenditure incurred by the reception area had to be met by an agreed contribution from the evacuating area or by special grant. The scheme for evacuation does not, and in the present constitution of the Public Health Service could not, lay down even minimal requirements in respect of what each rural health authority must supply and create. The scheme starts with the assumption that the only possible way to provide shelter for such great numbers of children was by billeting. They were so numerous that no plan was considered whereby they might be received into a communal life in quarters previously prepared for their reception. They must occupy any room in any house which happened to be empty, and their mothers had to be content to surrender their children to the care and protection of its unknown owner. In my view it is beyond question that the year since Munich might have been profitably employed in many areas to perfect arrangements in villages and towns whereby each Section for the Study of Disease in Children undertook the communal reception of its assessed quota of children in buildings selected or in huts erected for the purpose. Here is a letter which I wrote and sent to The Times soon after Munich. Although perhaps in the light of experience I might to-day word it a little differently, it still embodies what I believe would have been the wiser plan, at any rate in many parts of the country.