In 1550, Edward VI granted Huguenot refugees freedom to worship. They took over the French church in London’s Threadneedle Street. Attending a service there with his French wife, Samuel Peyps writes in his diary for 30th November 1662:
“Dined alone with my wife to-day with great content, my house being quite clean from top to bottom. In the afternoon I to the French church here in the city, and stood in the aisle all the sermon, with great delight hearing a very admirable sermon, from a very young man, upon the article in our creed, in order of catechism, upon the Resurrection.”
The Abbé Baston, who fled to London after the French Revolution of 1789, explains in his memoirs his loathing for the city in which he found refuge:
“It’s the awful and constant racket of vehicles, carriages, of merchants’ cries offering you bread, rabbits, greens, potatoes, and all sorts of foodstuffs... It’s the vulgarity, the malevolence, the wickedness, of the artisans or working people toward anyone foreign and especially French.”
In his 1892 memoir Children of the Ghetto, Israel Zangwill reflects on the influx into London of Jews fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe:
“Into the heart of East London they poured from Russia, from Poland, from Germany, from Holland, streams of Jewish exiles... The majority bore with them nothing but their phylacteries and praying shawls, and a good-natured contempt for Christians and Christianity.”
The novelist Agatha Christie based the character of Hercule Poirot on a Belgian refugee displaced during the First World War. In her autobiography, Christie writes:
“We had quite a colony of Belgian refugees living in the parish of Tor. Why not make my detective a Belgian? I thought. There were all types of refugees. How about a refugee police officer? A retired police officer.”
The family of historian Eric Hobsbawm left Berlin for London after Hitler came to power in 1933. In a diary column in the London Review of Books in 2008, Hobsbawm reflects on the impact that German refugees made on life in Britain:
“It was also Hitler who produced the community of refugees who came to play a disproportionately prominent part in their countries of refuge and to whom Weimar’s memory owes so much... They may have made little impact on the old entrenched professions—medicine, law—but their impact on more open fields, and eventually on science and public life, was quite remarkable.”
In 1944, the novelist Iris Murdoch joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the agency charged with rehabilitating the millions of refugees displaced in a Europe still at war. In December of that year, she writes to her friend Lilian Eldridge:
“[UNRRA] is rather too full of inept British civil servants, uncoordinated foreigners with Special Ideas & an imperfect command of English. Pretty fair chaos. V. many noble-hearted good-intentioned people—who drown in the general flood of mediocrity and muddle. [It is] a very mad show, full of extremely nice people with no esprit de corps.”
On 15th November 1946, George Orwell writes in his diary:
“Hundreds of thousands of homeless Jews are now trying desperately to get to Palestine... How about inviting, say, 100,000 Jewish refugees to settle in this country? Or what about the Displaced Persons, numbering nearly a million, who are dotted in camps all over Germany, with no future and no place to go, the United States and the British Dominions having already refused to admit them in significant numbers? Why not solve their problems by offering them British citizenship? It is easy to imagine what the average Briton’s answer would be.”
In February 1968, as Kenyan Asian refugees began to arrive in the UK in large numbers, Home Secretary James Callaghan prepared legislation to limit the influx. His Cabinet colleague Richard Crossman writes in his diary:
“Jim arrived with the air of a man whose mind was made up. He wasn’t going to tolerate any of this bloody liberalism.”
In 1989, the UK government announced plans to repatriate Vietnamese refugees from Hong Kong, then still under British control. In his memoirs, Douglas Hurd, Foreign Secretary at the time, writes:
“The Americans, whose hostile policy towards Vietnam was one reason for the country’s poverty and the outflow of boat people, began to object on humanitarian grounds to what we intended. Despite this, I decided in December 1989 that we must begin to fly even unwilling Vietnamese home from Hong Kong. There were by then 57,000 boat people in Hong Kong. This seemed the only way of deterring larger numbers from risking the voyage.”
“Dined alone with my wife to-day with great content, my house being quite clean from top to bottom. In the afternoon I to the French church here in the city, and stood in the aisle all the sermon, with great delight hearing a very admirable sermon, from a very young man, upon the article in our creed, in order of catechism, upon the Resurrection.”
The Abbé Baston, who fled to London after the French Revolution of 1789, explains in his memoirs his loathing for the city in which he found refuge:
“It’s the awful and constant racket of vehicles, carriages, of merchants’ cries offering you bread, rabbits, greens, potatoes, and all sorts of foodstuffs... It’s the vulgarity, the malevolence, the wickedness, of the artisans or working people toward anyone foreign and especially French.”
In his 1892 memoir Children of the Ghetto, Israel Zangwill reflects on the influx into London of Jews fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe:
“Into the heart of East London they poured from Russia, from Poland, from Germany, from Holland, streams of Jewish exiles... The majority bore with them nothing but their phylacteries and praying shawls, and a good-natured contempt for Christians and Christianity.”
The novelist Agatha Christie based the character of Hercule Poirot on a Belgian refugee displaced during the First World War. In her autobiography, Christie writes:
“We had quite a colony of Belgian refugees living in the parish of Tor. Why not make my detective a Belgian? I thought. There were all types of refugees. How about a refugee police officer? A retired police officer.”
The family of historian Eric Hobsbawm left Berlin for London after Hitler came to power in 1933. In a diary column in the London Review of Books in 2008, Hobsbawm reflects on the impact that German refugees made on life in Britain:
“It was also Hitler who produced the community of refugees who came to play a disproportionately prominent part in their countries of refuge and to whom Weimar’s memory owes so much... They may have made little impact on the old entrenched professions—medicine, law—but their impact on more open fields, and eventually on science and public life, was quite remarkable.”
In 1944, the novelist Iris Murdoch joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the agency charged with rehabilitating the millions of refugees displaced in a Europe still at war. In December of that year, she writes to her friend Lilian Eldridge:
“[UNRRA] is rather too full of inept British civil servants, uncoordinated foreigners with Special Ideas & an imperfect command of English. Pretty fair chaos. V. many noble-hearted good-intentioned people—who drown in the general flood of mediocrity and muddle. [It is] a very mad show, full of extremely nice people with no esprit de corps.”
On 15th November 1946, George Orwell writes in his diary:
“Hundreds of thousands of homeless Jews are now trying desperately to get to Palestine... How about inviting, say, 100,000 Jewish refugees to settle in this country? Or what about the Displaced Persons, numbering nearly a million, who are dotted in camps all over Germany, with no future and no place to go, the United States and the British Dominions having already refused to admit them in significant numbers? Why not solve their problems by offering them British citizenship? It is easy to imagine what the average Briton’s answer would be.”
In February 1968, as Kenyan Asian refugees began to arrive in the UK in large numbers, Home Secretary James Callaghan prepared legislation to limit the influx. His Cabinet colleague Richard Crossman writes in his diary:
“Jim arrived with the air of a man whose mind was made up. He wasn’t going to tolerate any of this bloody liberalism.”
In 1989, the UK government announced plans to repatriate Vietnamese refugees from Hong Kong, then still under British control. In his memoirs, Douglas Hurd, Foreign Secretary at the time, writes:
“The Americans, whose hostile policy towards Vietnam was one reason for the country’s poverty and the outflow of boat people, began to object on humanitarian grounds to what we intended. Despite this, I decided in December 1989 that we must begin to fly even unwilling Vietnamese home from Hong Kong. There were by then 57,000 boat people in Hong Kong. This seemed the only way of deterring larger numbers from risking the voyage.”
