Peter Paterson

Freedom in Wales

From orphan to evacuee

issue 23 July 2011

Peter Paterson, who died last week, was a political columnist for this magazine in 1970, and later a frequent contributor. This extract, from a piece published in The Spectator in 1983, describes his evacuation, in 1944, from Spurgeon’s Orphan Home, south London, to Cwmllynfell, South Wales:

Our trainload of orphans had arrived in 1944 in Port Talbot, fugitives from the German V-2 rockets, our minders having been promised that we should all be kept together in some Welsh version of the institution from which we had been evacuated.

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