Introduction

This chapter discusses the availability of services for frail and sick elderly people in the Second World War, and suggests that the quality of this provision was often influenced strongly by arguments about whether or not these elderly people were war victims. It was often claimed that war victims had a right to special care from the state which avoided any possible stigma through association with Poor Law provision. The social needs of groups not defined as war victims were seen as a low priority in conditions of war.

The chapter therefore begins by providing a brief outline of state provision for elderly people in 1939 followed by a more detailed outline of the limitations of public assistance institutions (PAIs) for the frail and sick. Next the disruption caused first by the establishment of the Emergency Medical Service (EMS) and then by the bombing raids from Autumn 1940 onwards is examined. This will be followed by a consideration of the responses made by central and local government to this situation in terms of billeting and evacuation arrangements. A central theme throughout the chapter is that little attempt was made to direct help to those elderly people most ‘at risk’ through illness and frailty; rather attention was focused upon those elderly people who might have the capacity to disrupt civilian morale either through their behaviour (for example, in air raid shelters) or through their complaints (for example, to the press).

Before attempting these tasks, the limitation of what has been achieved needs to be stressed. An attempt has been made to unravel policies towards certain groups of elderly people that were being implemented at a time of major civil disruption. To fully examine the bombing raids, the EMS and the evacuation arrangements would require more extensive research than it was possible to carry out. Not only this but the main subjects of the study – frail and sick elderly people – were far from being the central concern of senior civil servants and key politicians. Instead, the disrupted lives of elderly people and the implications of this disruption for Poor Law and evacuation policy tended to be dealt with by relatively junior officials on a case-by-case basis. As Titmuss explains, “the interminable corresponding, interpreting, minuting and accounting on this or that issue went on steadily among the lower and middle ranks of officialdom” (Titmuss, 1976, p 235).