My Evacuee Story

Imagine if you can. You are four years old (almost five) and living with Mum and Dad in Deptford, a stone’s throw from the southern bank of the River Thames and in the centre of London’s industrial heartland. Dad is a lighterman, who works on the river, moving barges and cargo around the docks.

It’s early September 1939 and war with Germany has just been declared, and just like in 1914, once again the lamps start to go out all over Europe.

You are dressed in your best clothes. You are told to put the gas mask in its cardboard box over one shoulder, and a canvas satchel containing a banana, a drink and sandwich over the other. There is a big buff coloured label with your name on it. A small suitcase follows containing a change of clothes, your plimsolls and perhaps your favourite toy.

You assemble at the school, say goodbye to Mum, but can’t find your friends and have no idea really what is happening. You are taken to Paddington Station, put on a train with 1000 other children heading for the west country.

Later, much later, you remember changing trains at Plymouth, there are less of you now, but still a hundred or more. You arrive at Bideford and are then put on a bus and driven to a small fishing port called Clovelly on the North Devon coastline. The journey has taken two days, and you have forgotten to eat the banana.

At Clovelly, the children are allocated to their host families. A dozen go to the Manor House, you are told to follow along down the High Street as more and more children are deposited here and there.

Eventually, as you reach the little harbour, with its lifeboat station, there are just two of you left. At a cottage on the harbour’s edge, you are introduced to Mrs Ethel Shakson and her husband, Mr Charlie Shakson. She smiles, while he looks a bit fierce. This is to be your home for the next three and a half years, and this is Colin Williams’ evacuee story.

Charlie Shakson was a Clovelly fisherman, the lifeboat engineer, the harbour master, the mortuary keeper, the pallbearer and the volunteer coast guard. Nothing much went on in Clovelly and certainly not in the harbour without him knowing about it. Ethel Shakson was a generous, loving woman. They had no children of their own and warmly welcomed Colin and his new roommate Peter Tibbles (also from London) into their world.

Colin can vividly recall some memories of this time, as if it was yesterday. He remembers being given a pair of ‘best boots’ for school and church that had to be polished regularly. He wasn’t allowed to wear the boots at other times, often preferring to go barefoot in and around the harbour.

With an additional 100 evacuee pupils in the area, the small school at Higher Clovelly was rapidly expanded. Four extra classrooms were created by dividing the hall with heavy curtains. There were constant distractions from the other side of the curtain but Colin and Peter were able to go home for lunch, being given an extra 15 minutes to get up and down the steep hill to the harbour.

Sundays were busy days. Chapel first thing, then home for lunch before Sunday School in the afternoon, then to Clovelly Church in the evening. Colin remembers helping Mrs Shakson in the kitchen preparing the Sunday lunch on the coalfired range.

Not long after arriving, Mr Shakson gave Colin his own dingy with the name ‘Colin’ painted on the bow.

Closely Harbour. Colin’s bedroom was the fifth dormer from the left

It was an amazing opportunity for a young London boy, with a mass of freedom in an idyllic environment. He quickly learnt to swim and to skull over the stern of his dingy. He learned how to fish with a line and catch crabs using a cane and hook. He became a skilled cliff climber and soon developed a lifelong passion for rowing. He became fairly self-sufficient and independent at a very young age, learning cooking, ironing and how to do chores from Mrs Shakson. It was also a basic life with no electricity or gas in the fisherman’s cottages. Lighting was by oil lamp and the milkman delivered milk carrying two churns on a yoke over his shoulder.

There was freedom, but it wasn’t all fun. Colin missed his Mum. He contracted impetigo and remembers the painful yellow scabs on his legs. There was tragedy too when his room mate Peter developed meningitis and died.

Still only 6 or 7 years old, Colin remembers helping Charlie Shakson and his brother fishing for herring just outside the harbour. They would row out in two ‘drift boats’ towing a net between them. Colin’s job was to shake the net as it was pulled in, freeing the herrings and packing them in baskets.

After a year, Colin’s mother was able to visit Clovelly and visited annually after that. On first arriving, she asked Mrs Shakson where Colin was. ‘Look out of the window, there be Colin rowing across the harbour’, Mrs Shakson said. Colin’s mother gasped, ‘Oh dear, is that safe? He can’t swim’. The blunt reply was ‘Well, he can now’.

Colin with his Mum

Another memory was of Motor Torpedo Boats anchoring overnight just outside the harbour and German aircraft strafing them. Other than that in some respects the war seemed a long way away.

Charlie Shakson’s father telling a story to a group of local and evacuee children in October 1940 (Colin is 3rd from right).

Colin returned to London in 1943 when he was nearly 10 to find the family home had been bombed. There were bomb sites everywhere which became a magnet to Colin and his gang of kids. Later, when the Germans launched V1 and V2 rockets at London, Colin and his grandparents were evacuated to the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. While away, a V2 rocket hit the J. Stones & Co engineering factory at the end of their road.

Colin talks very positively of his time in Clovelly. It was a defining time in his life. After the war he returned several times, eventually moving with his own family to Bude before settling here in Probus.

Colin Williams - June 2020