London students in the Second World War
Professor Georgina Brewis explores the experiences of students in London between 1939 and 1945 – from wartime evacuations to their return to a campus marked by the effects of the Blitz.
Portico Magazine | Spring 2025
This is an edited extract from the forthcoming book ‘Student London: A New History of Higher Education in the Capital’, based on extensive archival research as well as interviews with alumni who remember the war. The book, co-authored by Professor Georgina Brewis and Dr Sam Blaxland, will be published in 2026 to mark UCL’s 200th anniversary.
When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, plans were immediately put into action for the evacuation of London’s students. As the largest college of the University of London, UCL’s faculties were scattered across several host institutions.
The autumn 1939 issue of the student magazine reflected this dispersal in the manner of a BBC radio announcer: "This is New Phineas calling Aber, Bangor, Cambridge, Cardiff, Oxford, Sheffield, Swansea".
Students from the Institute of Education were sent to University College, Nottingham, the School of Pharmacy was transplanted to the "far distant city of Cardiff", and the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW) spent a year divided between St Andrews and Aberdeen before moving to Exeter.
School of Pharmacy students in Cardiff in 1941. Image: School of Pharmacy Library.
School of Pharmacy students in Cardiff in 1941. Image: School of Pharmacy Library.
Securing accommodation was the first major challenge. Women students might be allocated to halls of residence, but men were usually required to find lodgings with private landladies.
Some institutions resorted to inventive methods to house their students. Staff from the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, for instance, wrote to every doctor in Bristol to persuade potential landlords to choose their preclinical students over the many government officials who were also seeking rooms in the city.
Accommodation pressures eased as the lowering of the age of conscription meant that student numbers had decreased to about half their pre-war numbers by 1943.
The distribution of UCL students in the first year of the war. Published in UCL's student magazine, New Phineas, Autumn 1939.
The distribution of UCL students in the first year of the war. Published in UCL's student magazine, New Phineas, Autumn 1939.
"We are all in this together"
Gathered in provincial towns and often living away from home for the first time, London students had a taste of residential student life. Despite wartime rationing and black-out requirements, they experienced new social opportunities, taking part in dances, rambles and sports in their host colleges.
The post-war edition of The Student Union’s UCL Student’s Song Book, published in 1946, was to include several songs learned in Bangor and Aberystwyth. The School of Pharmacy joined in social and sporting activities with Cardiff students but also continued to hold a separate dinner and Christmas party so that "the Square spirit remains as much in evidence as ever" – a reference to Bloomsbury Square, the School's then home.
Milein Cosman, a Jewish refugee from Germany studying at the Slade, recalled how "remarkably peaceful" her time in Oxford felt and how cut off she felt from the war.
Evacuation led to greater mixing between men and women students. For instance, UCL’s medical students reportedly appreciated the "attractive and interesting" Cardiff women. Inevitably many romantic relationships began. John Newton, a law student evacuated to Aberystwyth, met his Welsh wife-to-be at a freshers’ dance in 1939. The arrival of the Slade in Oxford, where the men’s colleges dominated in peacetime, also helped to change the gender balance of the university. UCL’s 1941 annual report noted Slade "social life has suffered little, if any, eclipse".
Staff and students in Bangor, North Wales. Image: UCL Special Collections.
Staff and students in Bangor, North Wales. Image: UCL Special Collections.
Phineas (UCL's mascot) with medical students outside Fetcham Park House in Surrey, where UCL’s preclinical medical students were housed from 1940 to 1945. Image: UCL Special Collections.
Phineas (UCL's mascot) with medical students outside Fetcham Park House in Surrey, where UCL’s preclinical medical students were housed from 1940 to 1945. Image: UCL Special Collections.
However, London students were frustrated at some of the restrictions provincial colleges imposed. The University College of Wales in Aberystwyth had extensive rules governing student behaviour, such as requiring students to get permission to stay out after midnight or to enter a public house.
However, evidence from oral history interviews with former students show that these rules were often ignored rather than followed. Interviewed at the age of 101, alumnus Andrew Hall remembered drinking in the Skinner’s Arms in the centre of Aberystwyth.
Evacuation could also be expensive. For some, the costs of living away from London were to prove too great, and they abandoned their courses. Students’ unions at UCL, LSMW and the School of Pharmacy established hardship funds for those facing difficulties. One LSWM student appealing for help reported that despite taking a job in Boots, the hostel costs in Exeter were a considerable drain on her father’s resources.
While the Board of Education agreed to pay hostel fees for education students who would have been living at home had the IOE remained in London, unforeseen expenses remained. Women allocated to the University of Nottingham’s Florence Boot Hall were sent an extensive kit list requiring "three bath towels, three hand towels, three table napkins and a ring, one pair of brown or black house shoes".
Others found wartime rationing helped conceal class differences, and students we interviewed for this project recalled cheap and filling meals from "British Restaurants", mobile canteens or fish and chip shops.
London’s multi-cultural student body also faced challenges in evacuation to less diverse parts of the country. During the war, the number of students from what were then British colonies increased, supported in part by scholarships provided through the Colonial and Development Welfare Act of 1940. Wartime conditions and ongoing racism meant African and Asian students’ chances of securing lodgings remained difficult.
Evacuated to Nottingham with the IOE, Duan-ying Zhao Wang was made to feel uncomfortable because, as she later recalled, few people had ever seen a Chinese person before.
A significant number of Jewish students were evacuated to Wales. In Aberystwyth, the Jewish Students Society organised social events and the more religiously observant, including Chaim Herzog, a future president of Israel, set up a temporary synagogue. However, both British Jews and refugees from Nazism experienced prejudice from local people. Several of these refugee students found themselves interned by the British government in 1940 as part of its crackdown on so-called "enemy aliens".
The Phoney War of 1939-1940 convinced many London college heads that the evacuation was unnecessary, although hopes of returning to the capital were dashed by the outbreak of the Blitz in September 1940.
On 18 September 1940, a bomb destroyed UCL’s Great Hall and Carey Foster Physics Lab, killing caretaker Robert Collard and his 11-year-old son. A week later another bomb hit the main building in what college authorities called "a second disaster". Students and staff were deeply affected by the destruction – as a poem published in New Phineas put it, "Gower Street has fallen, but U.C. carries on".
UCL’s provost, Sir Allen Mawer, wrote to reassure students: "We are all in this together".
The destroyed Great Hall in 1940. Image: UCL Special Collections.
The destroyed Great Hall in 1940. Image: UCL Special Collections.
War work took up much of students’ spare time. At first voluntary, from 1941 male students were compelled to train with an officers’ training corps, university air squadron or local defence volunteer unit (the "Home Guard") alongside their studies.
Medical students in the Home Guard. Image: UCL Special Collections.
Medical students in the Home Guard. Image: UCL Special Collections.
Women undertook youth work, agricultural labour, first aid or canteen work, often through the Women’s Voluntary Service.
Students volunteer for gardening and agricultural labour duties during wartime. Image: UCL Special Collections.
Students volunteer for gardening and agricultural labour duties during wartime. Image: UCL Special Collections.
Fire-watching was an important duty everywhere. In Oxford, Slade students’ nightly fire-watching rota at the Ashmolean Museum was a social occasion with a gramophone providing music to dance to. Many medical or nursing students remained in London even during the height of the Blitz, often taking part in voluntary work in air raid shelters.
Lesley Forsyth, for example, joined UCH as a nursing student in August 1940. She said "We crept up on the roof at night and watched and listened as the docks were being bombed. As an audio and visual exhibition, it was awesome. The skies looked like the paintings of the Great Fire of London. . . I have never forgotten the sounds. Bombers, explosions and the increasing sound of the bells as the fire trucks approached London. There was always the feeling ‘is the next bomb for us’?" (Lesley Forsyth, ‘Nursing and University College Hospital, London, England 1940–41’, 1997, UCH/6/3/3, UCL Special Collections)
UCL’s engineering students were caught up in the Swansea Blitz in February 1941, an intense three nights of bombing that left at least 227 people dead. Student accounts reveal how they helped put out incendiary bombs, rerouted traffic, guarded unexploded bombs and helped clear the devastated town centre.
College magazines reveal a sense of pride at these contributions, with University College Hospital Magazine reflecting that: "out in the streets of London uniforms and badges of all kinds were to be seen by the score at this time, and the wearer of a uniform, were he only a white-coated student, was highly respected".
Perhaps most exceptional of all was the work of 100 students from nine London medical schools who, in April 1945, were asked to help with the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
Towards the end of the War
Towards the end of the war, colleges began to return to London. IOE student Doris Lee recalled that in 1943, "despite air raids, wartime blackout, and other restrictions, student activities back in London went on apace". While the year 1943-44 opened in comparative quiet, it closed with new dangers – one IOE student was killed by a flying bomb that fell on Aldwych at lunchtime on 30 June 1944.
Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou – better known by her pen name Han Suyin – started as a medical student at the LSMW in 1944 and recalled that being a student in the war years meant "being scruffy and messy and cold more than usual, and hungry more than usual". Suyin reported that students continued working right under the large glass windows of the lab despite the dangers of the bombs. In February 1945, a V2 rocket destroyed part of the LSMW’s building in an attack that the college magazine was unable to report at the time because of wartime censorship – though no one was killed.
The return of multiple UCL departments to a badly bombed site required careful planning, with the return staggered over the academic year 1944/1945. The end of the war finally came in August, with the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
For many students the main feeling was joy the war was over at last. However, Han Suyin remembered feeling "that taste of horror, of something monstrous, fraught with doom for all of us".
"A few hours later we wound our way through crowded London streets, when peace was still young. I could see us play a part in history as, with elastic steps, we flowed like a river banked by people standing still, our bobbing heads like waves."
Do you remember VE Day in 1945?
We’ve been fortunate to interview several former UCL students who studied during the Second World War. If you or someone you know was at UCL during that time, we’d love to hear these memories.
Please email Professor Georgina Brewis to share your story.
Professor Georgina Brewis is Professor of Social History at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society and leads Generation UCL: Two Hundred Years of Student Life in London.
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