When the war started, 10-year-old Joseph Cozier was evacuated from the East End of London with his 12-year-old sister Joan and 8-year-old brother Christopher to Great Bedwyn, near Malborough, in Wiltshire: ‘There was a crowd of us from the East End, but we were the only coloured children. We were given our gas masks and the whole school was taken on a coach to a railway station and then we went off to a village. It was quite an adventure because we’d never left home before.’ The Cozier children were taken to the village hall in Great Bedwyn where the vicar and some women from the village offered different children to villagers for fostering. Each child had its name called out and was told to stand on the stage. The villagers came and picked the children they wanted, but the Coziers were left out. They only picked the white children. Joseph said:
Afterwards there was just Joan, Chris, myself left in the village hall. I thought to myself, ‘I won’t let this bother me’. I was with my brother and sister anyway. At the end of the day the vicar took us to his vicarage, but he wasn’t married, and didn’t have a clue how to look after us. So he asked one of our teachers to feed us. But she was a spinster and couldn’t cook either. Instead she fed us garibaldi biscuits with milk and raisins for breakfast, dinner and tea! When the health visitor came, she told the vicar we must be given proper meals.
Luckily for the Cozier children, Mrs MacDonald, an Irish woman who had been evacuated to the same village with her two daughters, knew their family and took them under her wing. Joseph described her as a ‘lovely woman’ who mended their clothes, and took them for walks in the countryside:
We were together for about two years. I don’t know what would have happened to us if she hadn’t been there. We had the run of the vicarage, and access to orchards and forests. We even had a canal, something we’d never seen before. It was a very happy experience. We roamed all over the countryside. It was an adventure. There was always something new to find out every day. Mum and Dad visited us when they could, and Dad wrote us letters. When we returned to London, we had great difficulties adjusting. We lived right on the docks. We could see the funnels of the ships at the top of our street.
This information is from Stephen Bourne's books Mother Country: Britain's Black Community on the Home Front 1939-45 (The History Press, 2010) , The Motherland Calls: Britain's Black Servicemen and Women 1939-45 (The History Press, 2012) and War to Windrush: Black Women in Britain 1939-48 (Jacaranda Books, 2018).
SECOND WORLD WAR CONTENTS:
COMING SOON!
Profiles People
Living through Conflict
A Fight For Freedom
Commonwealth War Graves Commission Stories
Commemoration and Legacy
Artistic Responses to Conflict