Researching War-time Evacuation with Belmont Primary School Children

The Lancashire village of Belmont was created at the start of the nineteenth century to house workers for the bleaching and dyeing works built by industrialist Thomas Ryecroft and landowner Rev. Charles Wright. By the 1930s it had been incorporated into Turton Urban District and although very much rural still functioned as an industrial village. The 1939 National Register records that the majority of the population was working in the local bleach works or paper mill with just 10% farmers or workers on the land. It had a tiny school with just 75 pupils, which was more than doubled in size by the arrival of 80 infants from Temple School, Manchester in September 1939. This was Belmont’s quota of Turton’s allocation of 1,600 evacuees. Today the village is technically part of Blackburn with Darwen, and the parish consists of around 300 homes. It has a lively primary school with a good reputation for supporting pupils with disabilities and high-quality work in the Arts.