TV Aspel's reunion with wartime pals in Somerset

Television presenter Michael Aspel has had an emotional reunion with childhood friends he met as a World War II evacuee in Somerset – 64 years after he last saw them.

The 75-year-old broadcaster was among 3.5 million youngsters uprooted from their families and sent away to live with foster parents in the countryside as part of Operation Pied Piper, the largest single movement of people in British history, to save them from German bombing.

In 1940, Mr Aspel, who was seven, his nine-year-old sister, Pat, and brother Alan, four, were each handed a suitcase and placed on a train from London to Chard, where he spent the next four-and-a-half years living in a small terraced cottage with "Auntie" Rose and "Uncle" Cyril Grabham.

Together with Mr Aspel's two best friends during his time there, fellow evacuees Ronnie Bronstein and Albie Mallows, the trio were nicknamed The Three Musketeers because they were always getting into mischief.

Now, the TV star has met his old pals again for the first time in decades as part of a five-part daily ITV1 series this week called Evacuees Reunited.

Mr Aspel is also presenting the show which features 15 other people evacuated as children during the conflict who returned to their wartime foster homes for the programme.

He last saw Mr Bronstein when Eamonn Andrews presented him the famous red book on This Is Your Life nearly 30 years ago, but he had not had any contact with Mr Mallows since he left Chard in 1944.

The series also follows the celebrity as he meets up with his old Somerset school teacher Audrey Guppy, now 96 and remarkably living just five minutes away from him in Surrey, as well as other long-lost Chard friends Dick Arnold and Pat Curtis.

Mr Aspel said: "'Auntie' Rose and 'Uncle' Cyril allowed me to roam free and I did most of that roaming with my two closest pals and fellow evacuees, Ronnie Bronstein and Albie Mallows.

"In the 1940s we were known as The Three Musketeers and got into many a scrape.

"The idea of us all going back to Chard to meet up again 68 years after we had been evacuated was slightly scary.

"Would we find we still had anything in common? Would we shuffle our feet, trying to find things to say? "In the event, once we had finished complimenting each other on how well we had survived the ravages of time, we found a lot to talk about.

"The years fell away, the seven-year-olds I'd first met reappeared, and Albie's smile was as wide as I remembered.

"To be united once more with both Ronnie and Albie, to re-establish that bond, was – to use our favourite word – smashing."

When Mr Aspel arrived in Chard with hundreds of other children, he was unexpectedly separated from his siblings, who were taken to live in what he remembered as being a "mansion".

But on his return for the TV series, he visited the house and realised it was not as big as he had recalled and that there was not enough room for him to have lived there as well.

Evacuees Reunited is on ITV1 each day this week from December 15 at 5pm.