Introduction

British child guidance had, by 1939, grown in terms of the number of clinics and the number of patients referred. Although the spread was uneven, recognition by the Board of Education and the Commonwealth Fund's continuing support had resulted in the establishment of clinics both in London and in other parts of the country. In financial terms these were maintained by voluntary donations, local authority support, indirect CGC subsidies or a mixture of all three. The child guidance message was also being spread by way of popular journals and by the educational activities of practitioners and supporters. The experience of clinic patients too has been examined as have concepts such as normalcy and happiness.

In this chapter we examine child guidance in wartime. We focus first on the significance of evacuation for child guidance's development. The former derived not only from the experience of evacuation but also by way of, for example, surveys undertaken to assess its impact. Such surveys, although differing in terms of methodology, nonetheless reinforced the idea that the child's home environment was crucial to its mental well-being and that most maladjustment found among evacuees in fact pre-dated removal from the family home. By and large, then, evacuation highlighted existing problems rather than actually creating them. We examine too the continuing growth of child guidance provision, the organizational and economic constraints of wartime notwithstanding, and the actual practice of child guidance under such challenging conditions.