Repelling refugees, 2020 / 1938

This seems a good moment to remember Britain’s well-established tradition of repelling refugees from its shores.

As the persecution of Jews and dissidents in Nazi-controlled Germany and Austria intensified in the summer of 1938, and as the liberal democracies which surrounded its territories imposed more and tougher visa restrictions and hardened their borders against refugees, those seeking refuge started to look for other means to enter safe countries. Those who had reached France, but feared that the country might soon be in line for invasion, or who already had relatives in Britain, started to enter the country illegally.

By definition, we have no means of knowing how many people did so successfully. If there are traces of these movements, they will lie in family memory, diaries and personal accounts and not public record. What we do have are accounts from newspapers, which over the summer and autumn of 1938 frequently carried stories of desperate attempts by refugees without the correct documentation to enter or remain in Britain. Reporters covered deportations of refugees landing at Croydon airport or Harwich port only to be turned back by immigration officers. They also wrote of refugees paying to cross the Channel in motor boats, landing at night or swimming ashore to circumvent immigration restrictions. They penned lurid reports of prosecutions for bigamous marriages, where German Jewish women were alleged to have offered money and other inducements to British men in exchange for marriage and the prospect of British nationality it offered.

Alongside these stories, the newspapers devoted growing numbers of column inches to prosecutions of aliens who had successfully entered the country without the consent of an immigration official but had subsequently been caught. The aim here was to emphasise that the British state remained in control of the situation, even where its borders had been breached. Considering the case of an illegal Polish immigrant, the presiding magistrate at Old Street Police, Herbert Metcalfe, declared that immigration law, which at that time made distinction between refugees and other immigrants, ‘should be sternly enforced, and it ought to go forth as a general warning that people who disobeyed the aliens’ law and disregarded the whole thing generally would have “a rough time”’. Two months later, Metcalfe sentenced three aliens who had entered Britain without the permission of an immigration officer, stating: ‘it was becoming an outrage the way in which stateless Jews were pouring in from every port of this country. As far as he was concerned, he intended to enforce the law to the fullest extent’. Although the occasional newspaper report suggested that some magistrates dealt with illegal immigration with a degree of leniency in the months following Germany’s annexation of Austria, overall the tone of reported judgements suggests that deportation was the default option for anyone seen to be contravening immigration law.

The penalties could be significant. Those landing illegally faced deportation. In July 1938 two foreign seamen were sentenced to three months in prison with hard labour for helping a German Jewish refugee to land illegally in Britain. Reporting on this case on 2nd August, the Daily Mail was keen both to make the most of the Home Office’s alarm at the increase in illegal landings and to stress the government’s proficiency in tracking down offenders:

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.

Warming to its theme, the article went on to discuss other means by which aliens were attempting to enter the country, before reassuring readers that ‘Immigration authorities now have a secret and scientific method’ for detecting the ploys of illegal aliens, so that ‘the offender soon finds himself trapped’. A week later, the Mail was again reporting on the Home Office’s ‘new drive to keep aliens out’, this time flagging up the ‘Eire dodge’, in which refugees were landing ‘from a fishing or small trading vessel at out-of-the-way places on the coast of Eire’, from whence they came to Britain: ‘Our ports are so keenly watched by Scotland Yard and immigration officers, that it is not worth any foreigner’s while trying to “gate-crash” into this country’.

Clandestine entry, desperation, prosecution, deportation, a hysterical press: it is hard not to draw parallels with the present, even as these facts sit uncomfortably with Britain’s persistent sense of itself as having a ‘tradition of welcome’ towards vulnerable strangers. Seeing how refugees from Nazism – now held up as the emblematic refugees of the twentieth century – were treated when they attempted to reach Britain’s shores pushes us to acknowledge how history can be distorted for the purposes of the present. Alongside the welcome given to the Kindertransportees, we need to set the histories of those kept out and turned back from Britain’s shores. Both are part of Britain’s long and ambivalent relationship with refugees.

Revisiting this history also reminds us that the agency of desperate people also has a history, and one that highlights how, if one can both be a ‘real refugee’ and enter a country illegally, then the problem lies not with the people landing but with the law.

Sources
The Metcalfe judgements can be found in ‘Unwanted Aliens’, The Times, 21 Jun 1938, p.8; and ‘Warning to Aliens’, The Times, 20 Aug 1938, 12. The Daily Mail’s observations are taken from ‘New drive to keep aliens out’, Daily Mail, 2 Aug 1938, p. 11.

Image: Luggage tag used by a Jewish girl during a Kindertransport. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998.102.1

Becky Taylor is Reader of Modern History at the University of East Anglia. Her book, Refugees in Twentieth-Century Britain. A History is due out in April 2021 from Cambridge University Press.