When you are researching an archive, the historical events that form its background can unexpectedly connect with your own family's history and with current events. It stops being remote and become so much more real. Last week the papers were full of this story:
The stripping of citizenship – well, that's familiar! History repeating itself, but in a minor key. It was a problem that the subjects of my researches had grappled with in the late 1930s. Bertram Pickard, in his role as a reporter for a number of newspapers, including the Washington Post, but also as an observer on behalf of the international Quaker community, attended the conference at Evian-les-Bains held between the 6th and 15th of July 1938; a conference called by President Roosevelt precisely because of the stripping of citizenship from so many people in central Europe was causing a refugee crisis.
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had stripped German citizenship away from 'non-Aryans'. The Anschluss and the annexation of Czechoslovakia now extended that to the Jewish, Roma and other 'non-Aryans' of Austria and the freshly dismembered Czechoslovakia.
Évian was the sound of the world bolting their door tight against any potential influx of refugees. Only previously allowed quotas would be accepted. In many cases, much as a result of the often hysterical reporting of the press, there was pressure to reduce even those. The Daily Mail ran headlines such as:
German Jews Pouring into the Country
and wrote reports such as:
Never before has it been more difficult for an alien to land unlawfully and remain out of police hands for more than a few hours. The favourite method is to come ashore in a rowing boat with the appearance of having been out for a short sea-trip. Despite coastal watch it is possible for an alien to escape notice in this way, but his inevitable struggle for existence is almost certain to lead him before long into police hands. Daily Mail, 2nd August, 1938
What! Aliens landing on British shores in small boats!
Migrant crisis ‘out control’ as Channel crossings treble last year’s total
THE growing number of illegal migrants crossing the channel is now a "national emergency", a senior Tory MP has warned.
Clearly history is repeating itself, replete with press outrage and calls for the government to act, as Becky Taylor (Reader in Modern History, University of East Anglia) reminds us in her recent blog post on Refugee History.
Just as now there are those who see refugees not as a threat but as people in distress who need help, so there were in the late 1930s. The subjects of my research were very much involved in such action, and were part of the Quaker effort to provide relief and assistance. Efforts that were co-ordinated from Friends House, London, the central offices of the Quakers in Britain:
Up to 1937 the staff and volunteers in the London office were never more than nine people. The work escalated after the invasion of Austria, so that by the end of 1938 the number of case workers employed had risen to 59. The stream of refugees needing help at Friends House swelled so much that the two great staircases became more or less permanently blocked by queues of people waiting to be attended to. Interviews had to be conducted in corridors when the offices were overflowing. A few months later, in February 1939, the work moved to Bloomsbury House. At this time a staff of 80 case workers moved out of Friends House along with 14,000 case records. The expansion of the work for Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia led to the formation of a co-ordinating body known as the Inter-Church Council for German Refugees. Bertha Bracey was the Secretary of this body, whilst still employed by Friends Service Council as Secretary to the Friends Committee on Refugees and Aliens. Lawrence Darton, Friends Committee on Refugees and Aliens, Appendix IV and pp. 58-9
My own family became involved when my mother received into her home a Jewish couple from Czechoslovakia, having paid the necessary surety money to the UK government to ensure that the couple would not become 'a charge upon the public purse' – the equivalent of about £5,000 in modern values. Technically the couple came as 'domestic servants' – due to the so called 'servant shortage' that was one of the very few categories of immigrant allowed into the UK – quite a claim for a couple who had owned a major store in Prague trading in fur coats – but a necessary fiction.
In the light of subsequent events, it seems the Quakers, and, in this case, my parents, were on the right side of history.
