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Secularisation in the Christian World: Essays in Honour of Hugh McLeod. Edited by Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape

retrospective narratives with an account of the development of official policy towards the evacuees at local and national level. The personal papers of G.M. Bland, Lancaster’s Billeting Officer, reveal Bland’s efforts to improve the medical condition of evacuees and provide them with adequate footwear and clothing, as well as his exasperation with Salford parents who jeopardized the scheme by removing their children seemingly on a whim from billets that he had found with difficulty. Bland’s local government perspective on the (to him) irritating messiness of human behaviour contrasts well with public celebratory statements about the civic success of evacuation. At national level the story is constructed in part from the papers of Elizabeth Denby, who collected evidence on the features of evacuees that became notorious in the autumn of 1939, notably bedwetting, head lice, poor nutrition and evil manners, for a report published as Our Towns, a Close Up in 1943. While simultaneously condemning the inadequacies of ‘problem families’ (slum parents), the report made recommendations for future welfare provision, from better housing to nursery schools. Welshman also discusses the investigations and opinions of school medical officers, civil servants and politicians, including Sir Maurice Holmes at the Board of Education and R.A. Butler, President of the Board from 1941. He includes enough detail about their deliberations on school milk, meals, medical inspection and educational reform to support the argument that he elaborates elsewhere that evacuation made an important contribution to post-war reconstruction and to the establishment of the welfare state. Welshman’s effort to combine personal, subjective accounts of the experience of evacuation with the history of evacuation as social policy is worthy and ambitious. The issue it throws up, however, is how to connect the two stories. None of these evacuees confesses to wetting the bed or having nits. They do not mention medical inspection or school meals. Those who recall difficulties do not write of deficits they brought with them from their own homes, which was the category of problem with which the authorities were concerned and to which social reform was directed in the 1940s. They remember the emotional consequences of evacuation, notably the pain of separation from their families and, for a small number, neglect and abuse by their hosts, and they reflect on the impact of these childhood experiences across their lives to the present day. In terms of historical method, Welshman’s book unwittingly highlights the very different demands of writing a history of emotions, compared with reconstructing the history of policy.