Pembridge School in World War II: D-Day Exhibition

Portrait of Pembridge is researching the impact of the war on the lives of the children and their teachers. This will be part of a larger exhibition looking at the lives of Pembridge residents during the conflict.

One aspect is the enormous number of evacuees who made Pembridge home. There were three waves of evacuation. 1939 bought children from Tiber Street School in Liverpool. A year later they were joined by children from Colgreave School, West Ham. Additionally, there were private evacuees, sent by their families to friends or relatives in the country. Barbara and Max Breakwell were sent from Birmingham to their grandparents in Pembridge, and you can read Barbara’s story in our History section.

Liverpool evacuee, Henry Mayers who lived with the Williams family on East Street, has kindly agreed to share his memories with us. We’d like to hear other firsthand accounts of this time from evacuees, families who took them in, and children at the school in the 1940s.

To help jog memories, below is a list of those evacuees we have identified. Did you know any of them? Did your family billet evacuees? Were you one of those who settled in Herefordshire, or the descendent of an evacuee? Please share your memories with us. We want to pass on to future generations an appreciation of our forebears’ experience.

Please contact me at ingramkay3@gmail.com or text at 07342 625897.

Kay Ingram