The real problems with the evacuation started in the areas where the children arrived. Some of the careful organisation broke down. Not all of the promised accommodation was available.
It became difficult to fit families into households who turned out to have strong preferences for older boys who could work, or single sex families, or who did not want mothers or babies. The statistics on the forms turned out to be individuals with complicated feelings and needs.
Many of the problems however arose from the different social backgrounds of the people who were being expected to share houses.
There were predictable problems (although the authorities did not always predict them) between rich and poor and Protestant and Catholic. But even poor people in country villages and farms found it difficult to understand poor people from the cities.
Many children came from families who lived in one or two roomed houses with no bathroom or inside toilet, in a city tenement, which was very likely to be very difficult or impossible to keep clean. They had a different way of life and way of thinking to country people.
Many of the children were dirty and suffering from complaints like scabies or nits which both flourished where there was overcrowding. These conditions were an accepted part of life in the city slums.
During the school term these conditions were improved by constant inspection and treatment by the school medical service, but evacuation had taken place at the very start of the new term after the summer holidays and it had been decided not to hold up the process by a systematic medical examination.
City children, and particularly the mothers who were evacuated, expected entertainment outside the house - pubs, cinemas or dance-halls - and this shocked many of their hosts.
Many children were simply upset by the whole experience and the most distressing result was bed-wetting. Most people with experience of bringing up children or nursing them would have expected this and understood it, but for some of the receiving householders who were already upset by the scruffy, underfed, badly clothed and probably loud city children, it was the last straw.
The historical sources record these problems unevenly. First of all, written sources emphasize the problems because the successes of the scheme did not need to be written down.
Some places, like Inveraray, encountered problems which were taken up by the press and parliament, and were thus magnified. Few local authorities kept the day-to-day correspondence generated by billeting appeals, complaints from householders and complaints from evacuees.
Rothesay did hold on to these files and so we are able to build a detailed account of the town’s problems, but we are not able to compare them with those of places where similar files were destroyed.