Paul Dowswell, author of Aliens: The Chequered History of Britain’s Wartime Refugees, gives us a flavour of what life was really like in Britain for refugees fleeing fascism.
What is the traditional interpretation of Britain’s attitude towards refugees during the Second World War?
In our memory of the welcome given to Kindertransport children, and in deservedly lauded characters like Nicholas Winton, we have an image of Britain as a kind and welcoming country.
Books on the subject of refugees have been enormously popular and refugees remain a perennial theme in children’s literature. Many of the victims of Nazi racism have fond memories of the reception they received in Britain, but that is not the whole story.
How did British people actually feel towards these new arrivals?
There are many stories about the kindness of British strangers towards refugees – Venancio Zornoza, who came here during the Spanish Civil War, remembers: ‘The British people they behaved so well to us.’
But there was a great deal of animosity too, fuelled by a sense of resentment that ‘they’ were getting what ‘we’ were being deprived of – keenly felt in areas of the country that had been badly affected by the Great Depression in particular.
Antisemitism, which today is far more unspoken, was a commonly voiced prejudice in Britain. Even Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was unguarded enough to write to a friend: ‘No doubt the Jews aren’t a lovable people; I don’t care about them myself.’
What was the media’s role in the scaremongering?
The media was central in shaping British attitudes towards refugees. Before the war, the Daily Mail and Daily Express were particularly hostile towards the thousands of German and Austrian Jewish adults who had escaped here to work in domestic service.
In April 1939, for example, a Daily Mail article proclaimed that ‘we are nicely honeycombed with little cells of potential betrayal’ and that ‘even the paltriest kitchen maid … is a menace to the safety of the country’.
The tone of these articles was of particular concern to Home Secretary John Anderson, who wrote to his father: ‘The newspapers are working up feeling about aliens. I shall have to do something about it or we may be stampeded into an unnecessarily oppressive policy.’
In 1940, a government report showed that fewer than one in 100 British people were concerned about Jewish refugees being a threat to the country. But following the Nazi conquest of Western Europe in the spring of that year, the press generated sufficient hysteria against refugees that the government felt compelled to imprison tens of thousands of recently arrived Jews.
How did Britain’s treatment of refugees compare with the rest of the world?
In the book, I end a chapter on Israel by quoting Kindertransport refugee Bertha Leverton, who said that Britain ‘did more than any other country in the world in saving Jews, and that record stands’. But the question is a difficult one to answer, not least because statistics are so inconsistent and because the question covers such a wide area. We did take thousands of Jewish refugees, but we actually took only 16% of those who wanted to come here. America, too, took only a small percentage of those who applied for visas there.
How is this similar to contemporary British sentiment around refugees?
Press coverage from the pre-war years concerning Jewish refugees is painfully similar to headlines and articles about refugees from the Middle East and Africa today, although no one in the mainstream British press, to my knowledge, compared Jews to cockroaches back in the 1930s and ’40s.
But this is a complex situation, and a proper answer deserves a chapter rather than a paragraph. Britain has undoubtedly seen a huge influx of new inhabitants born outside the UK in the past few decades, and this has fuelled resentment and anxiety in a country in the midst of a housing crisis and with decaying public services. Today, there is a general suspicion of any new arrival – whether immigrant, refugee or asylum seeker. It is not a good time to be a refugee coming to Britain.
Aliens: The Chequered History of Britain’s Wartime Refugees is out 22 August.
Pre-order it here.
For more books on immigration, take a look at:
For more books on the Second World War, how about…
- The Women Behind the Few: The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and British Intelligence during the Second World War by Sarah Louise Miller
- In the Shadows: The extraordinary men and women of the Intelligence Corps by Michael Ashcroft
- The Diary That Changed the World: The Remarkable Story of Otto Frank and the Diary of Anne Frank by Karen Bartlett