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This story is contributed by Cyril Blunt and added to the site with his permission.

I lived in Folkestone and in the early part of the war we actually had evacuees come to Folkestone because the Government was afraid that London would be bombed. We had about 800 evacuees coming from London. Eventually we were evacuated….with the German advancing in France and fear of invasion, the London evacuees went first of all…they went the middle of May. Then we were evacuated, we assembled in the park about 3,100 schoolchildren, about 90 per cent of the schoolchildren population in Folkestone and we left the station - it was Sunday 2nd June and we left about nine o’clock heading for Merthyr Tydfil. And at that time of course we were right in the middle of the Dunkirk evacuation and we stopped at one or two stations en route to Merthyr, and the platforms were full of troops getting cups of tea, and when you think how little time the government had to organise all these trains for both the evacuees and the soldiers, it was a marvellous piece of organisation. I wonder if they could organise such things today.

When we arrived in Merthyr Tydfil when we got out of the train the streets were lined with people and we were marched off to a nearby miners hall where we were allocated to our various prospective foster parents. There was a row of three miners cottages and I lived in one of those. There were two rooms downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs and I remember we had to climb a spiral stone staircase and through our foster parents bedroom to get to our own. And outside the back of these cottages was a row of three toilets without flushing system, which was something we weren’t quite used to but the Merthyr people were extremely kind to us and I think the experience did us a lot of good.
We hadn’t a marvellous house where I came from — it was a terraced house — but we did have a bathroom and a flush toilet!

We went to school in a castle — Cyfartha Castle in Merthyr Tydfil — and to begin with we had the school in the afternoon and the Merthyr boys had it in the morning. But that proved to be unworkable, so they split the school in two and the juniors went elsewhere and we stayed in the Castle. When you became 15 years old you could join one of the pre-service training units and I joined the Air Training Corps and we became part of the Merthyr Squadron — in fact we were allowed to form a flight of our own. We joined in with the Merthyr boys — but we had a Folkestone flight.

My sister was evacuated to Merthyr aswell but she was in Dowlais which was just a little way outside Merthyr — I was there about four and a half years. We returned just before Christmas in 1944 when things were a lot better. My father was a schoolmaster in Folkestone, and most of the elementary schools had been evacuated to Monmouthshire and were billeted around the countryside. And I used to spend my holidays with my father and mother in Monmouthshire and they were billeted on two different farms at one time. and I became interested in agriculture as a result of spending time there and it more or less decided my career because I took a career in agriculture. When we came back, my father being in Monmouthshire, I travelled separately back from the school and I remember when we came through London, it was just before the end of December 1944, I can’t remember whether it was an underground station we had entered or one we had emerged from but it had been hit that day by a V2 rocket and there was quite a bit of damage there….and I think that’s about the end of my wartime experience.

On the fiftieth anniversary of when we were evacuated to Merthyr…when we were young we never really appreciated how good the people of Merthyr had been to us and I thought I’d better write a letter on behalf of the school to say how grateful we were for what they had done for us. So I wrote a letter and posted it to the then mayor of Merthyr and had a very nice letter back saying that the mayor was very interested in my letter and — it was from the Mayor’s secretary — and he said he was going on leave, but once he got back he would fix a date when I should go and see the Mayor in the Mayor’s parlour. Unfortunately I never heard another thing. But in 1994 a group of Folkestone evacuees went back to Merthyr and were shown around the old school by one or two members of the council and I discovered that the Mayor had sadly died just after receiving my letter. I believe he was an ex-miner and died from silicosis. Unfortunately my letter had been lost when the council moved office. While we were there in 1944 the 40 or so evacuees who were there attended a concert given by the Dowlais Male Voice Choir in the leisure centre and at the beginning of the concert they announced that some Folkestone evacuees were in the audience…and we had rapturous applause from the audience.

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