How the Girl Guides Won the War

On that night ‘The entire Jewish population of Germany was subjected to a reign of terror,’ reported the Daily Telegraph. ‘No attempt was made by the police to restrain the savagery of the mob. Almost every synagogue in the country was burnt to the ground. Scarcely a Jewish shop escaped being wrecked. Looting occurred on a great scale. Jews of all ages, of both sexes, were beaten in the streets and in their homes. Jewish patients in hospitals were dragged outside in their nightclothes.’ The Nazis imprisoned 30,000 Jewish men on what became known as ‘Kristallnacht’, or the Night of Broken Glass.

Two weeks later, Hoare, now Home Secretary, held a breakfast meeting with Jewish, Quaker and other religious leaders, and the Committee for the Care of Children from Germany was formed. He proposed that Britain should admit European Jewish children as long as organisations or families agreed to sponsor them once they arrived. He had been assured by Jewish organisations that in order to save their children from the Nazis, Jewish parents in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were prepared to send their children to a strange country and an uncertain future.

Later that evening, a full-scale debate on refugee policy took place in the House of Commons. Hoare announced that the Home Office would allow entry to all child refugees whose maintenance could be guaranteed. The Commons resolved ‘That this House notes with profound concern the deplorable treatment suffered by certain racial, religious, and political minorities in Europe, and, in view of the growing gravity of the refugee problem, would welcome an immediate concerted effort amongst the nations.’

Hoare agreed immediately that in order to speed up the immigration process, travel documents would be issued on the basis of group lists rather than individual applications, and from December 1938 Jewish children began to arrive in Britain from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Their parents had taken the agonising decision to send them away, not knowing what the future held. The Nazi authorities decreed that leave-takings must happen quickly and without fuss, so farewells were brief. The trains carrying the children often left at night, and while some children saw the journey as an adventure, most were frightened and distressed. Few would see their parents again.

The first two hundred children of the ‘Kindertransport’ departed from Berlin on 1 December 1938. After that, an average of 250 children aged between four and seventeen left Germany and Austria every week, arriving by train at the Hook of Holland, where they were despatched onto night ferries to Harwich in Essex. A few travelled on to stay with relatives in America, others went to Paraguay, but the majority remained in Britain. Some went to live with Jewish relatives; others were offered homes with families of other religions, often Quakers. Upon arrival, many of them stayed in wooden chalets in Warner’s Holiday Camp at Dovercourt near Harwich. ‘The whole camp was charged with anxiety and fear,’ wrote Hugh Barret, a volunteer student. ‘It was there I first heard the word “angst” and appreciated what it meant.’ When the children heard a rumour about a pogrom in Vienna, they started wailing, and panic soon spread among the Viennese staff. Shouting above the noise that it was only a rumour did not help, and the refugees only calmed down when one of the older Jewish helpers started to sing a Hebrew song of courage and hope, that every child knew. Within minutes, the camp hall was filled with the sound of soothed voices, united in song.

Ingrid Jacoby, an eleven-year-old growing up in Vienna, was not a Guide, but her diary reveals the painful and challenging experiences endured by many Kindertransport girls. On 11 March 1938 she wrote: ‘My father is in a terrible state because Hitler has marched into Austria. It happened two days after my eleventh birthday and I couldn’t have my party. I cried. Still no period. I pray for it, but Granny says it’s wicked to think of God in the lavatory.’ Just over a year later, her aunt had secured visas for her and her older sister Lieselotte to go to England, and in a matter of days the girls were taken to a station in Vienna. ‘We were each given a cardboard number on a string, to hang round our necks. As I lay in Mummy’s arms, saying goodbye to her for heaven knows how long, I still didn’t realise what was happening. We joined a queue with hundreds of other children, and stood about for a very long time. Then suddenly we were on the train and waved to Mummy until the train took us out of sight. The other children were all talking and shouting and running about. We sang Viennese songs and some of the children cried. When we crossed the border into Holland and freedom, a great cheer went up. Some Dutch people handed each child a bar of Nestlé’s milk chocolate through the train windows.’ The children were all sick on the overnight Channel crossing. They then took a train from Harwich to London, where Ingrid and her sister were put on another train on their own to Exeter.

Three weeks later, now living in Falmouth with a solicitor’s family, Ingrid confessed to her diary in German: ‘I’m tortured by homesickness. If only I could be back in Vienna, going for walks with my parents. I wish Austria was a monarchy and that Hitler didn’t exist. Everything is destroyed. But I must keep telling myself that everything will be all right in the end. Now I must explain to you the meaning of the word “melancholy”. It is when one doesn’t feel like doing anything any more and believes that nothing will ever make one happy again. It is wanting to cry all the time. It is looking forward to nothing and suffering from homesickness and memories of the past.’ A week later: ‘Homesickness is terrible. I used to pray and pray and long and long for my visa to come to England. My wish was granted. Now I pray and long to be back in Vienna. To think I may be here for months, years! I feel I shall die of misery. If Mummy had the slightest suspicion, how upset and unhappy she’d be. She must never, never know!’

Unfortunately, Ingrid’s foster parents, Mr and Mrs Robins, never recognised this melancholy; they saw only a lazy girl who didn’t tidy her room, and wrote to her parents to tell them they preferred her older sister. They told the girls how to stand, sit, throw a ball and breathe; and then went on holiday for three weeks without them. On their return they announced that if Ingrid’s English didn’t improve they would send her away. ‘It seems I can’t do anything right,’ poor Ingrid wrote. On 2 September 1939 she wrote in her diary, ‘Hitler, I hate you even more than I hate Mrs Robins!’

On 18 April 1939, Ruth Wassermann, aged twelve, said goodbye to her family in Germany. Her father had been imprisoned on Kristallnacht, and her mother hoped to save their daughter’s life. She joined several hundred other children at Berlin station, each carrying one small suitcase. After arriving in Britain, Ruth lived with a Jewish family, but their children did not treat her well, and in July the Committee moved her to a hostel for refugee girls in Hackney run by B’nai B’rith — ‘Children of the Covenant’ — a Jewish welfare organisation set up in New York in 1843. The girls all went to Lauriston Road School in Hackney. Ruth shared a room with Gretel Heller from Berlin, also twelve years old, who had arrived in London in June 1939. Her father had also been imprisoned on Kristallnacht. Gretel had lived with a German Jewish family for a month, but then they had emigrated to the USA.

By the end of August 1939, over 10,000 children had come to Britain on the Kindertransport scheme. The last train left Germany a few days before war broke out, and from that moment the British government cancelled all outstanding visas, and borders were closed. The last children arrived in England on 2 September. Another train, containing 250 children, was about to leave Prague on 3 September, but the Germans did not let it leave the station. In future, for Kinder-transport children in Britain, communication with their parents was limited to twenty-five-word Red Cross postcards.

As soon as war seemed inevitable, the Committee for the Care of Children from Germany made plans to evacuate all the girls in the B’nai B’rith hostel out of London. They left on the morning of Saturday, 2 September with other children from Hackney. It took them all day to reach Swaffham in Norfolk, a journey that normally took about two hours. With two million children being evacuated from cities all over Britain and thousands of soldiers returning to their posts, the nation’s transport system was in chaos.

Village halls all over the country became billeting stations where anyone with a spare room or a warm heart turned up to collect as many children as they could manage. Not many people wanted children who spoke the language of the enemy, but in rural Norfolk lived a landowner who understood their predicament and wanted to help. Sir Samuel Roberts owned the small feudal village of Cockley Cley, close to Thetford Forest, and employed everyone who lived there apart from the postmistress.

‘It seemed to take forever, sitting on railway platforms,’ recalled Gretel Heller. ‘We finally arrived in Cockley Cley village hall, along with some English children also evacuated from Lauriston Road School, Hackney. We were lined up and the villagers of Cockley Cley picked the children they wanted to take home. They were looking for children who spoke English, and who could be useful.’ This left a dozen girls from the B’nai B’rith hostel who spoke little or no English, including best friends Ruth Wassermann and Gretel Heller.

The Robertses had been expecting twenty-five children, but by the time Lady Roberts arrived at the corrugated-iron village hall, she found that most of them had already been billeted around the village. She took nine of the Kindertransport girls, aged eight to thirteen, back to Cockley Cley Hall, a four-storey Victorian house where she and her husband lived with the ancient Dowager Lady Roberts and their son Peter, who worked on the farm. Working for them were a butler, two teenage footmen, a lady’s maid, a cook, a scullery maid and a head housemaid with several maids under her.

Sir Samuel and Lady Roberts welcomed ‘the Jewish girls’, as they called them. Escorting them was their rather bossy matron, Miss Kohn, who had been a teacher in Germany, Mrs Reissner the cook, and her twelve-year-old daughter Hanna. Both women had arrived in London in early 1939 and found refuge in the B’nai B’rith hostel. Lady Roberts understood that they would need a special kosher kitchen, and gave them the scullery. ‘We had our own kitchen downstairs,’ said Gretel, ‘and the top floor for our bedrooms — five to a room — and a sitting room. We were not permitted to go into the Roberts family part of the house.’

‘We kept kosher in the sense that we did not eat any meat,’ said Ruth, ‘except on the rare occasions when it was sent from London. By the time it arrived in unrefrigerated trains, it was not the freshest, but “waste not want not” was the motto.’ The girls ate mainly turnips, potatoes, cabbages and greens grown in the Hall garden. In the summer, Lady Roberts treated them to baskets of soft fruit. ‘Lady Roberts was very elegant looking,’ said Gretel, ‘very stately, tall, always neat and properly dressed. She came into our sitting room about once a week and would pat a girl on the head.’ All the girls were homesick, but during the day they never showed it: they were expected to be grateful. At night their bedrooms were filled with the sound of muffled sobs as they cried into their pillows.

Not all the Kindertransport girls lived in the Hall. Mr and Mrs Howard, the cowman and the dairymaid of the Cockley Cley estate farm, picked twelve-year-old Cilly-Jutta Horwitz from Hamburg and Lotte Levy from Cologne. In the Howards’ cottage, water came from a well in the garden, the floors were made of stone and there was no electricity. Cilly-Jutta, later known as Celia, and Lotte were both used to living in middle-class urban homes. Celia had been learning English at grammar school in Hamburg for two years, and had arrived on the first Kindertransport train in December 1938, so her English was already good, but even so, things were very difficult. ‘Living with the Howards in a small village in Norfolk was a real culture shock,’ she remembered. ‘Everything was a blur. You no sooner seemed to have settled somewhere than you were off again. My first homes in Britain were two holiday camps in the south-east. After three cold months I was taken in by a Jewish family in Hackney and then by a hostel for young refugees.’

Lotte was braver than Celia, and told the cook, Mrs Reisner, that she was unhappy at the Howards’. The girls at the Hall were asked if any of them would swap places. ‘I was very stupid,’ said Gretel. ‘I said yes.’ Gretel, brought up in Berlin, found life with the Howards no easier than Lotte had: ‘There were paraffin lamps and we went to bed with a candle. Mrs Howard treated me and Celia like servants. There was no heating and I had perpetual colds living there. I soon regretted it, especially when winter came and it was so cold.’ The winter of 1939—40 was the coldest for decades: even the River Thames froze for the first time in over fifty years. ‘Mrs Howard cooked a delicious dumpling stew on our first night; she was a good plain cook,’ remembered Celia. ‘But after that she was quite mean with the bread and margarine. I liked the countryside, but not the outside toilets.’ Exiled from Germany for being Jewish, she was now taunted by some of the other refugee girls for being only half-Jewish — her mother had converted to Judaism before marrying her father. ‘That counted as Jewish to Hitler,’ she said. ‘When my parents divorced, my father insisted that my mother renounced being a Jew to save herself. In addition, standing up in class in England was agony when I had to say my name, “Cilly-Jutta”. The children always laughed.’ After she was married she changed her first name to Celia. Mr and Mrs Howard had two teenage sons — the oldest was Nigel, aged fifteen, who looked after the pigs and had a slight squint; his younger brother Geoffrey, who was fourteen, sometimes took Celia around the village on the horse-drawn milk cart, doling out fresh milk into housewives’ jugs. ‘I had a bit of a crush on Geoffrey,’ said Celia, ‘so that was always fun.’

Cockley Cley village school had closed down a few years earlier due to a shortage of children. The few local children went to school in Swaffham, three miles away, and did not mix much with the evacuees. The village school was reopened for the British children from Hackney and the eighteen Kindertransport girls. Two teachers were drafted in from London — Miss Gadsby and Miss Payne — one for the five-to-eight-year-olds, the other for nine-to-fourteen-year-olds. ‘They had to cope with a wide range of children,’ said Gretel, ‘including some very naughty London evacuee boys. One was beaten with a cane often.’

The teachers had to deal with both homesick London evacuees and girls who spoke little or no English and had even more reason to be homesick. ‘Miss Payne was a very good English teacher, especially for poetry,’ said Celia. Ruth described how the teachers ‘taught us songs and poetry by rote. Arithmetic was easier since they could use the blackboard. They also taught us drawing.’ Ruth enjoyed art: her grandfather had been a folk poet, and encouraged her to embellish his poetry with drawings while listening to music. The children learned English quickly: ‘The teachers took an interest in us, and found creative ways of teaching. We wrote essays, read English books and got a good appreciation of English songs, poetry and literature.’

Miss Gadsby had been a Guide, and after a couple of months she suggested starting a Guide company in Cockley Cley. ‘Those of us from Germany had never heard of such a thing,’ said Gretel Heller. ‘Miss Gadsby explained to us that Guides were about doing daily Good Deeds, and taking badges. We thought this all sounded like a good idea. But we couldn’t afford a full uniform.’ Each girl was issued with a hat, a maroon scarf and a Guide belt, donated by Lady Roberts. ‘The best part was learning Morse code and being able to signal secret messages to each other. We did a lot of stalking in the woods. We would have used these skills if the Germans had invaded.’

The 1st Cockley Cley Guide company had two patrols — the Sky Larks and the Swallows. Ruth was Patrol Leader of the Larks, with Gretel as her Second; Celia was in the Swallows. Miss Gadsby acknowledged that the Cockley Cley Guides were not British by amending part of their Guide promise from ‘ To do my duty to God and the King’ to ‘ To do my duty to God and the country in which I am a guest.’ ‘We enjoyed doing the Guide salute,’ said Gretel. ‘It helped us to connect to Britain, and to what was going on elsewhere in the country.’

Miss Gadsby was not alone: running companies near her in Norfolk were other Guide Captains such as Miss Twiddy, Miss Jolly, Miss Cocks, Miss Flowerday, Miss Sparrow and Miss Capon. One day the President of the Guides, the Princess Royal, came to Cockley Cley on her way to Sandringham. The Guides polished their badges and belts to perfection. ‘We knew she was the sister of King George,’ said Gretel. ‘We all lined up and curtsied to her.’

Lady Roberts had given the Guides a wind-up gramophone and a few records. Their favourite was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. ‘Dot-dot-dot-dash, the Morse code V for Victory opening, became a code of hope for victory throughout England,’ Ruth said. ‘We played it constantly; it gave us courage as well as an appreciation of classical music, which most of us had been accustomed to at home.’

The teachers started a Victory Garden at the school, where the Guides grew vegetables for themselves and to sell to the villagers. ‘I got terrible blisters,’ said Celia, ‘but it was a joy growing things like carrots.’ Ruth, Celia and Gretel made up a song, in English, which they sang while working in the garden:

For days work and weeks work, As we go on and on, Digging many trenches Which is not much fun.

Teacher saw as lazy She thought we never knew. Oh teachers who like gardening, You can do ours too.

‘We knew that the teachers were watching us and yet, apparently, we were lazy and did not care,’ said Gretel. ‘We also made up a lot of secret sentences, in German, that concerned our matron.’ Matron was not very popular, especially as she told the other girls not to talk to Celia because she was ‘not really Jewish’.

‘The Guides taught us self-discipline, responsibility, provided adventure, a good respect for self-reliance, and to be helpful to others,’ said Ruth. ‘It helped us to cope. We also learned path-finding, knotting and semaphore with flags. The Guide principles played a big role in our formative years, especially since we had no parents to guide us.’ ‘I was very proud of being a Guide,’ said Celia. Guide meetings were among the few times when she was happy, and she was delighted to be photographed giving her three-fingered promise salute in her uniform.

Lady Roberts’ lady’s maid was Ellen Richardson. She looked after her mistress’s clothes, and due to her well-corseted body she bent down with an absolutely straight back. She insisted that the Kinder-transport Guides did their housework properly, but also invited them into her parlour for tea and to listen to her wireless. ‘That was the only way we could hear the news,’ said Ruth. ‘When we needed advice, which we were afraid to ask matron, we went to Miss Richardson. She never divulged our secrets. Whenever she needed to correct us, she came to us directly; we were fond of her and trusted her.’ She also gave them scraps of wool and cloth with which they could make presents. ‘She showed us how to make small mending bags with a crocheted thimble-cover attached, a most useless but unique gift.’

None of the Kinder Guides had lived in the country before, but they came to appreciate the beauty of Norfolk. ‘Near the village were the Spring Woods,’ remembered Ruth, ‘with their early splendour of blooms. The Hall had a beautiful formal garden, leading to a lake with swans, where I learnt Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud…”’

With the fall of France in May 1940, the British public, encouraged by newspapers and Churchill, began to panic about ‘fifth columnists’ — saboteurs and spies in their midst. Guides all over the country were on full alert, watching for flashing torches that could be German spies sending Morse messages to each other: the BBC warned Germany that any parachutists not wearing uniform would be shot on sight, rather than taken as prisoners of war.

As Britain prepared for invasion, the Prime Minister issued a leaflet which declared: ‘STAND FIRM. Do not run away, or stop work. Do the shopping, send the children to school, do not evacuate to other areas… With a bit of common sense you can tell whether a soldier is really British or only pretending to be so. If in doubt, ask a policeman. Disable or hide your bicycle, destroy your maps.’

The fear was so great that 27,000 German and Austrian refugees were interned on the Isle of Man, many of them Jews who had only recently fled from their homes. ‘We were not aware that we were enemy aliens,’ said Gretel, ‘until the British government started to intern the men, and announced that no “enemy alien” women over the age of sixteen years could live anywhere near the south or east coast. Miss Kohn and Mrs Reissner had to go back to London.’ Mrs Reissner’s daughter Hanna remained at Cockley Cley, and took over the cooking.

All refugees were subjected to tribunals at which they had to prove their allegiance to Britain. The Germans had overrun Belgium and Holland with ease, and the girls remembered that when they had left Germany the Nazi guards had told them, ‘You can go now, but we’ll get you in the end.’ When Holland was invaded, Germans who had lived there for years rose up to support the Nazis. Would the same thing happen in Britain?

For their own protection, the girls at the Hall were told to destroy all letters from their parents written in German. ‘For me it felt like cutting out a part of my life,’ said Ruth. ‘I always carried these letters with me in my gas mask case. Once war started we seldom got word from our parents. We could receive messages of twenty-five words via the Swiss Red Cross. These came seldom and usually were very carefully worded because of the German censor. Even before the war, all letters were opened by the Nazis.’

Celia had to do any household chores that her hosts required. Only girls who had already left school had the protection of the Home Office ruling which stated that refugee girls under eighteen could only work as domestic staff ‘where there are trained domestic servants, so that they can receive proper training’. This was intended to prevent exploitation by hosts who could not afford to pay domestic staff. But it did not apply to refugees who were still at school. Celia had some respite from the Howards’ cottage when she caught ringworm from the cows. ‘It was very contagious, and Peter Roberts’ young wife, Judith, took me into the Dower House where she lived in the village. She was very kind to me, something I had not felt since I left home.’ When Judith Roberts’ first daughter, Jane, was born in October 1940, the Kinder Guides presented her with crocheted clothes-hangers. ‘Getting to see the new-born baby was a great event for us,’ said Ruth. This tiny new life brought them some hope for the future.

With so many farm workers serving in the forces, the Guides at Cockley Cley weeded sugar-beet fields to help with the war effort. They were paid 1½ pence an hour — worth about 25p in today’s money. Even though nearly all the land in Britain was by now under the plough, Cockley Cley still had woods and thick hedges. ‘There were gorgeous old trees,’ remembered Ruth. ‘We could climb to a comfortable spot in the low branches of the beech trees where we could read. Privacy was a very precious commodity for us who lived dormitory style.’ The Guides received sixpence a week pocket money, which they could spend in the village post office. ‘I splurged my chocolate ration on a Milky Way. I would take a bite a day to make it last longer.’ Ruth saved up enough of her sugar-beet earnings to buy wool to knit herself a jersey, which lasted the entire war. She was also working hard at her Guide badges. By the summer of 1941 she had learned the names of thirty-two English wild flowers she had spotted in the Norfolk meadows. They included Viper’s Bugloss, hare’s foot clover and the ubiquitous stinging nettle. She also learned to identify wild fruit that could be eaten, including the gooseberries and beech nuts that grew along the road to the Hall.