The start of war in 1939 saw the state organise an evacuation of over a million mainly working class children — I was one of them — from areas likely to be bombed to safe places. Some 176,000 Scots went from Glasgow, Edinburgh Rosyth, Dundee and Clydebank, mainly to Perthshire, Kintyre, Rothesay, the Borders and the Highlands.

Little is written about a private evacuation which preceded it. Early in 1939 numbers of wealthy families moved abroad, particularly to the US. 

In the weeks before the declaration of war, other well-off parents sent their children, sometimes with their grandparents, to the west country and Wales. They moved into holiday homes, hotels and with resident families. Professor Richard Titmuss estimates a total of two million. So what? When the official evacuation commenced there was a shortage of places for the state children. Overall, 18 per cent of intended places had gone. 

The war certainly created 1.5 million jobs for women to replace men. Many welcomed it. Numbers resented the low pay, well below what men received. Glasgow recruited thousands of women. The Rolls-Royce factory at Hillington in Glasgow became the largest aero-engine plant in the world with 22,000 workers, of whom over half were women. Yet they were paid much less than men for similar jobs. In 1941, the women walked out and won negotiations.

By 1943, improvements were conceded but not equal pay. Once the war was over, most women, no matter how skilled, lost their jobs to men. Younger, single women were conscripted and sent to a limited number of munition factories which produced essential war equipment. 

A factory in Cardonald in Glasgow was one of the 21 engineering factories in Britain where hundreds of staff produced the metal casings for bombs and shells. More dangerous were the eight explosive factories, of which Scotland had two. Bishopton in Renfrewshire manufactured cordite which propelled bullets and shells. A site of 2,000 acres employed 20,000 workers, most of them women.

Drumgans in Dumfries manufactured acids and nitro-cellulose for explosives with a workforce of 1,350. It was hard, long, unpleasant work. The workers had to avoid contact with the elements at all costs. Even without directly touching them they sometimes suffered from severe skin itching. Many of the staff were housed in hostels which meant a restricted lifestyle. 

The women in these factories were nearly all working-class. Stuart Hylton stated in his study of women’s involvement: “If public schoolboys had the divine right to become officers, the ladies of the same class even had their own branch of the armed forces. “The Voluntary Aids Detachments consisted of some 4,000 middle and upper-class women who volunteered to do basic nursing and other duties. This gave them exemption from less desirable war work.”

The rationing of food certainly ensured that all citizens received basic supplies. But the affluent were not restricted to the rations. Coupons were not required in private restaurants and hotels. The diary of one VIP recorded a dinner party in 1944 in which 19 car-loads of people dined on oysters, salmon, dressed crab, minced chicken and enough alcohol to get happily drunk.

Bombing was directed at the docks and factories in cities so it was mostly working-class people who were killed, injured and lost their homes. Scotland never experienced the intensity of the London blitz but the extent of its attacks from the Luftwaffe has been underestimated. Aberdeen, Inverness, Edinburgh and other towns were bombed. 

The first 200-bomber raid of the war was unleashed on Glasgow in March 1941. The factories and docks were mainly missed and it was homes and people who suffered. Then followed two nights of intensive bombing of Clydebank and Greenock, where working-class people dwelt in cramped conditions resulting in over 500 deaths and 35,000 made homeless. Not far away in Paisley, a direct hit on a first aid post killed 92 people. The numbers recorded as killed do not count those who died of injuries months later.

Overall, as Angus Calder in his classic The People’s War concluded, “the forces of wealth, bureaucracy and privilege survived with little inconvenience.

”Yet there were gains for workers. Much of this was due to the Labour MP Ernie Bevin — a former leader of the Transport and General Workers Union — being minister of labour in the coalition government. He insisted on negotiating with, not fighting, trade unions. The outcome was almost full employment with decent wages — at least for men. 

The TUC pushed for improvements which resulted in William Beveridge’s Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services in 1942. It was well received but the Conservatives, who were in a majority, postponed legislation.In 1941 Churchill appointed the Scot Tom Johnston as secretary of state for Scotland. He drew 700 businesses and 90,000 jobs to Scotland, regulated rents and even set up a prototype state health service for expected war casualties. A supporter of home rule, he also created a Scottish council of state as a counter to the wartime power which Whitehall exercised over Scotland.

Simultaneously, the extent of family poverty was being revealed. The evacuees tended to be from the inner cities, their foster carers from the countryside. In Cydebank, nearly all the evacuees were working-class while 59 per cent of their hosts were graded as “wealthy.” 

Not all working-class evacuees were poor but a quarter were from families assessed as too poor to make any financial contribution to evacuation. Now the two sides met and learned about each other.

The report by eight professional women on the evacuation Our Towns: a Close-up (1943) acknowledged: “The dreadful lesson of the evacuation was the light it threw upon the home conditions of the lowest of the town dwellers.” They then outlined radical proposals to end family poverty.

There were other reports on social services but no legislation. Some childcare services developed in areas of evacuation but within the existing framework. Only two pieces of notable welfare legislation passed the Commons.

The Education Act of 1944, guided through by AB Butler, the Conservative president of the Board of Education, ensured a tripartite system of secondary education made up of grammar, technical and secondary schools with the school leaving age raised to 15. 

The leaving age provision was soon postponed while the tripartite system served to enhance class differences. As far as the Conservatives were concerned, the success was that Butler ignored the public schools in which so many of them had been boarded.

More important was the Family Allowances Act of 1945. It had the backing of those for whom the evacuation had revealed the evil of child poverty. The Act stipulated that mothers should receive five shillings a week for each child after the first. A few MPs complained that the sum was too small and wanted it for the first children as well. Nonetheless, it was the outstanding legislation of the war.

Little legislation to challenge the class system occurred during the war. But there was growing pressure for social change.

In the areas of bombing, it was resident working-class people who took charge to combat fires, organise ambulances and mass shelters. In Glasgow, the onset of bombing led to the inauguration of local people into the Auxiliary Fire Service which augmented the regular fire service by dealing with fires caused by bombing, first aid clearance posts and available for almost anything. It continued even after its post at Bankhead School was bombed in 1941 with the loss of 21 lives.

There was a spirit of being good neighbours at the worst of times.When a couple who lived opposite our family were bombed out, they were welcomed into our home.

Not for long as we soon lost our roof and moved temporarily into gran’s. Our dad, in the ARP, dug out the victims, dead and alive. When he was working at the munitions factory, someone else dug out — and saved — our mother and brother. 

After the war, he and his colleagues had the confidence to start a working men’s club which served the community for years. As the East End priest Father John Groser recalled: “The coming of the war lifted the working class at once out of that awful trough of despair and made its members feel that they were persons again with a real part to play in life.”

These were the people who, once the war was over, voted in their thousands for Labour.

The war stimulated a pressure for change from two sources. The continuation of class differences stimulated working-class resentment about women’s pay and jobs, about the huge material gap between those on high and low incomes, about the working class having to suffer from enemy raids. 

Simultaneously, the gains by trade unions, the growing desire to tackle child poverty and the large-scale involvement of working-class people in combatting the enemy led to a realisation that improvements were possible.

The general election of 1945, which I can remember, gave Labour a huge majority which had seemed impossible in 1939. The new government legislated for higher taxes on the rich, security of employment, pensions, housing, planning, children. I recall my father rushing in and holding up the Daily Herald and its headlines about the National Health Service. The welfare state had come. But much political and economic power was left with the wealthy and public school elites. The fight was not over. 

• Bob Holman is a campaigner for greater equality.