33 Market Place is no longer there

This building was demolished immediately after the war to make the road through to Grey’s Road Carpark. It was a key building for the war effort, with office space for several wartime agencies including Billeting, the WVS and CAB.

Billeting was a very important part of Henley’s wartime life. Henley was designated a refuge area for evacuees from big cities. They started arriving in large numbers, under official schemes, mothers with children, unaccompanied children, and some whole schools. The Council was responsible for accommodating evacuees, ‘billeting’ them on private homeowners, by agreement if possible and compulsorily if necessary. This was quite controversial and became more so as the town began to fill up.  When the bombing of the big cities lessened in 1941, many evacuees returned to the cities, and evacuees in the town fell by more than two thirds in 1942. Henley’s Billeting Office then turned its efforts to designated ‘war workers’ including Land Army Girls and civilian staff working in military establishments around Henley, as war-related work shunted conscripted individuals around the country.

The Women’s Voluntary Service (“WVS”) was a vital element of ARP in Henley, with an enormous body of 850 members in the district by the end of 1940. It supplied a flexible response to the needs of the moment including producing hospital supplies, providing drivers for road transport needs, taking mobile canteens into blitzed areas where people had lost everything, and supplying extra hands locally when evacuees arrived.  The WVS also supplied staff to serve at the British Restaurant (see Stop 5 for details).

Henley’s Citizens Advice Bureau (“CAB”) shared offices with the WVS to begin with. In November 1940 CAB moved, rather bizarrely, to a time share with the town’s Ladies cloakroom behind the Town Hall. CAB had it during the daytime (except Saturdays), on the clear understanding that it would revert to being a Ladies Loo in the evening.  Initially CAB’s main clients were evacuees seeking billets, householders complaining about evacuees and their children behaving badly, the unfair distribution of evacuees and the insufficient billeting allowance of 10/6 a week per evacuee. After 1941 when evacuees returned home, advice was offered to war workers, often far from home and townsfolk who had many problems resulting from the war. After the war matrimonial difficulties of returning soldiers and an acute housing shortage added to the load. The CAB is still in the town today, its sign just across the Market Place in the old Kings Arms Barn.