Czech Children who came to Britain in WW2

Czech Children who came to Britain in WW2

The excellent ITV series 'Home Fires' (2015/16) did much to raise awareness of the fact that there had been Czech nationals in our area during the Second World War.

The series was inspired by Cheshire-born writer Julie Summers' book Jambusters (2013), which tells the story of the Women's Institutes during the war years.
The TV series was centred on the activities of the WI in Great Paxford, which is based on our own village of Bunbury where many of the scenes were filmed.
Into the plot the script writers wove part of the story of the army camp which had been set up in Cholmondeley Park, from July to October 1940, to accommodate around 3,500 Czech soldiers who had escaped the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

Although the TV series raised awareness of the Czech wartime presence at Cholmondeley, it did not make reference to another significant group of Czechs who came to Cheshire and neighbouring Shropshire, in the early years of the war.
These were the children, predominantly from Jewish families, many of whom escaped by means of the Kindertransport ('Children's Transport') organized by British banker Nicholas Winton during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the war.

Some of them were enrolled eventually into the Czechoslovak State School, located at first in Surrey but later moved to Hinton Hall, just in Shropshire but less than half a mile from the border with Cheshire.
There were a number of such wartime Czech schools located around Britain. Hinton Hall, established as a school around 1941, stands among trees on a hillside and can be seen clearly from the towpath on the Cheshire side of the Llangollen Canal.

The story of one Czech refugee's life in Britain is told by Vera Gissing in her book Pearls of Childhood (1988 – the book can be read on-line).
She was looked after by foster parents when at the age of ten she first came to this country, returning to them during school holidays after she had been enrolled at Hinton Hall.
Beside the refugees, the pupils included other Czechs, among them young soldiers and airmen who came to the school to sit for examinations.
Vera was very happy at Hinton and enjoyed exploring the meadows and fields of the surrounding countryside, where there were also a pond to swim in, and woods which reminded her of her early childhood at home in Czechoslovakia.
On Saturdays the pupils were allowed to cycle into Whitchurch, which in Vera's eyes had two important assets: a cinema and a Woolworths!

By 1943 Hinton Hall was bursting at the seams and literally crumbling about the ears of the pupils and staff. One day at lunchtime the dining room ceiling came crashing down, making the headmaster determined to have the school transferred to new premises.
Eventually the senior pupils moved to a hotel at Llanwrtyd Wells, in mid-Wales.

Meanwhile, because of the lack of accommodation, overflow dormitories had been set up for some of the girls at the neighbouring property of Hinton Manor, the wartime home of Malpas resident Mrs Jill Hutchinson-Smith.
Jill still has the letter which Arthur Weir, the headmaster, sent to her mother in 1945 after the war had finished and he was about to return to Czechoslovakia.
The letter contains the information that when the school (at Llanwrtyd Wells) finally broke up, on 28th June 1945, it was filled to capacity with around 150 pupils.

The junior pupils were moved from Hinton to Maesfen Hall near Malpas, formerly the home of the Kenyon family, where they stayed until July 1945.
Not much is known about their time there.
Norman Wycherley, the local air raid warden, recalled that when he took them their gas masks they danced around him, singing 'Here comes the gas mask man'!

A sad story from the time of the Czech school at Maesfen is that of eight-year old pupil Vaclav Paser, who drowned in January 1943 after falling through thin ice on a pit close to the Hall.
He is buried in a corner of Tushingham's Old Chad churchyard, where his grave is marked by a simple granite memorial.
Maesfen Hall was demolished in 1960, so that poignant gravestone is all that survives to tell of the Czech children who fled from the horrors of the Holocaust and came to our part of Cheshire, during the turbulent years of WW2.

However, some of the former Czech refugees still visit Llanwrtyd Wells, with which they have forged strong links.
They have even donated a piece of Czech gold to the town and this now forms part of the mayor's chain of office.
To cement the link, Llanwrtyd Wells is twinned with Cesky Krumlov, a town in the Czech Republic.

At Cholmondeley there is a permanent memorial to the Czechs who were encamped there and for whom a major re-union was held in 2000 in the Castle grounds, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Czechs' arrival there in 1940.

Czech Pupils and Teachers at Maesfen Hall

(Photo courtesy of Jane Griffith, whose mother is second from left in the back row but one)

Article updated and published by Chris Whitehurst
16th August 2024

Acknowledgements:
Original article written by David Hayns
Article published by My Village News in September 2021