In Reference Titmuss1950, Richard Titmuss argued that wartime evacuation stirred the national conscience and produced important changes in social policy – more free milk and meals for schoolchildren, less rigorous means testing of benefits, the 1944 Education Act. By the 1980s, revisionists like Jose Harris and John Macnicol were pulling Titmuss's thesis apart. But in Reference Welshman1998, John Welshman wrote a post-revisionist defence of Titmuss, arguing that while evacuation might not have changed attitudes about state welfare provision overnight, the sight of thousands of poor and malnourished evacuees around the country exposed the deficiencies of agencies like the pre-war School Medical Service. Partly as a result of this, the case for more urgent state intervention to reduce the worst effects of poverty gathered support. In Churchill's Children, Welshman leaves his analysis of the relationship between evacuation and policy reform largely where it was in 1998. He explains that he did not want to make his latest book ‘too academic’. Rather than reflect further on the war and social change thesis, he wanted to write a popular history of evacuation – one that attempted to see the war ‘through the eyes of the children and adults who were there at the time’ (p. 5). He hopes that it will be the ‘vividness of the stories that the reader takes away from the book’ (p. 10). All of which makes the book difficult to review for an academic journal. Welshman's method is to construct a linear narrative around thirteen people's accounts of their evacuation experiences. Nine of these were child evacuees, four were adults who were involved in the evacuation scheme – organising, supporting or drawing policy conclusions from it. In effect, there are two parallel sets of narratives. One tells a story of how some children coped with being moved away from their families. The other describes part of the bureaucratic and voluntary effort behind the people's war. His principal sources are autobiographical rather than oral testimony – several of his chosen cast have already published accounts of their wartime experiences, others sent him unpublished manuscripts and/or correspondence. There are no footnotes. Instead, there is a short bibliographical essay for each chapter at the end of the book.

Welshman guides us over familiar ground. We know how the story goes, but the characters in the tale are largely new to us. As the earliest accounts of evacuation explained, the way children were matched up with host families was a lottery, often producing mismatches of class and religious identity. Some, like Eddy Rowley and Maggie Quinn in this book, were lucky enough to find good foster families and enjoyed their time away. They kept in regular contact with their wartime foster parents long after 1945. Others were less fortunate – Mary-Rose Benton's carers unloaded their unhappiness on her by inflicting regular physical and emotional abuse. In the middle ground were evacuees who no doubt missed their parents, but who got on reasonably well, and who perhaps had some difficulties re-adjusting when they returned home. One of the strengths of this book is that it goes beyond the initial evacuation waves of 1939–40 to look at the years of the ‘long hard slog’ and the return of peacetime (although it takes the first two-thirds of the book to bring us to spring 1941). The two most interesting adults that Welshman describes are probably Elizabeth Denby and Judith Grunfeld. Denby was a pre-war housing consultant who advised architects about social housing projects. In wartime, she was part of the volunteer corps that kept committees and advisory groups going – in her case, mainly the Women's Group on Public Welfare that published the Our Towns report in March 1943. Grunfeld, meanwhile, was the head-teacher of a London Jewish Secondary School who had to relocate her pupils to Shefford in Bedfordshire in September 1939, and who coped with whatever difficulties she met. By the time the school was able to move back to London in August 1945, some 600 pupils had passed through it, and the village came out in number to say farewell.

Popular history is a difficult form for academic historians to write. The danger is that the text is left stranded between different genre protocols – insufficiently critical for academic peers, but lacking the imaginative qualities of genuinely popular work. The marketing material for this book says that it tells the ‘often moving story’ of evacuation and ‘above all is a highly evocative portrait’. But too often the author falls back on the trope of the historian who lets her/his subjects speak for themselves. So the book is heavy with anecdotes, but not necessarily of a kind that offers psychological insight, or which carry particular metaphorical or narrative power. And he never passes an opportunity to reproduce someone's early biographical details from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – without explaining how it helps us to know where these people were born (sometimes including the house number), where they went to school (usually private) or which university they went to (usually Oxbridge). Ironically perhaps – given the book's main aim – the discussion of public health policy and reform is handled with much greater assurance. But then, as he has shown in his previous books, this is the author's home field. I hope his attempt to break into the popular market succeeds, but at the same time I wonder whether we need academic historians to produce yet more ‘evocative’ portraits of wartime Britain. It may be seventy years exactly since ‘1940 and all that’, but hasn't a new war on the poor just opened in Britain? John Welshman might be just the kind of historian to help us argue against its worst excesses.