Changing Britain: The Continental Arrivals

...They include the late Alexander Korda, the film producer...

...Oh, mostly former Chetniks," I was told...

...Insensibly, the inhospitable islanders have had to become patient, understanding hosts...

...At the same time, this infusion of new blood has given a stimulus to British life whose importance is likely to be cumulative, especially as the influx of immigrants is continuing...

...In a minor but not insignificant way, these contributed their part to the emergence of Britain from the Depression of the Thirties...

...As a result—the Thirties were Oswald Mosley's brief phase of prominence—British fascism received a few scraps of new propaganda material...

...The grandchildren of the former East End immigrants are noticeably well represented in the academic world and, as in the United States, in law, medicine and scientific research...

...The press featured reports of friction between groups of Poles and their neighbors (above all, it seemed, in Scottish towns and dance halls...

...Both officers and men were handicapped because most of them had been in uniform and out of civilian employment for six years or more...

...Karl Ebert, who is responsible for outstanding opera productions at Glvndebourne...

...For once, nothing can be said against the generosity of the Government authorities concerned...

...Their initial impact was considerable...

...resentment and publicity...

...Again, the political steps leading to the British-Polish alliance of I'll') may have been accidental, but they ultimately brought an unexpected new element to the population of the British Isles...

...It was helped, of course, by one vital circumstance...

...In sum, therefore, one can say that the forty disturbed years since the October Revolution have brought half a million Continental immigrants and refugees to Britain...

...George Mikes, who has not looked back since writing How to Be an Alien...

...The striking fact, given the insularity of the British character, was the ready acceptance of the refugees and their integration into British society...

...the postwar era by expansion, inflation and labor shortage...

...and so on...

...They set lo work in the tailoring, fur and furniture trades...

...The Thirties in Britain were marked by mass unemployment...

...This is the first article of series describing them...

...In many cases, it was said, they stayed only because they did not have the passage money for the intended further trip across the Atlantic...

...They were mostly impoverished...

...Cases of Poles appearing before the courts received undue publicity...

...It is noteworthy that this is already largely history...

...They are picturesque in their variety: Jewish professional men and scholars from Central Europe, including men of world reputation, Czech industrialists, Polish officers, German ex-soldiers, simple Ukrainian and Baltic land-workers, brilliant Hungarian intellectuals and now, for a change, Hungarian miners...

...After this influx toward the end of Queen Victoria's reign, immigration from the Continent came to a temporary halt...

...The Continental newcomers had to adapt themselves to the insular rhythm of English life...

...Of the Polish soldiers, sailors and airmen who fought in British uniforms under General Anders, those who after the war chose to stay in Britain with their dependents numbered about 130,000...

...Since, unlike the Americans, the British had little tradition of receiving immigrants—theirs, after all, had been the great emigration tradition —the ready absorption of the newcomers can be taken as another sign that Britain has moved closer to the Continent...

...Here was a problem of a new kind...

...In 1940, during the great confusion after the fall of France, the refugees were rounded up and briefly interned...

...such polemical Oxford economists as Thomas Balogh and Nikolas Kaldor, and so forth—a brilliant concentration of talent...

...This they have mostly done, but they have themselves insensibly brought new colors to English life to an extent which cannot yet be measured though it is interesting to note the stages...

...The group of Russian-Jewish families who arrived in 1917-20 seem to have specialized in producing historians, such as Sir Isaiah Berlin and Professor Max Beloff...

...Who on earth are they...

...A word should be said about the extraordinary renommee achieved by the small group of Hungarian-born intellectuals who came to this country before the war...

...I asked...

...many of them knew little English...

...Ernest Chain, who worked with Florey on penicillin...

...They are today being assimilated into British life but still give rise to some surprising encounters when met in the English countryside or in Yorkshire textile mills...

...On the Treforest Industrial Estate, near those South Wales coalfields where in the Depression days the class struggle had reached its bitterest pitch, one can today see a whole series of factories put up by enterprising emigre Czech industrialists...

...The latest arrivals are the Hungarians—21,000 arrivals, of whom 16,000 are staying...

...Here, indeed, is a transformation...

...Detective-story writers began to introduce Poles among their less desirable foreign characters...

...Thus, in 1947, the Polish School of Medicine in Edinburgh and the Polish University College in London had between them 1,500 members while another 1,500 Polish students held grants at British universities...

...For the British have specialized in being at once emigrants and insular, and history shows that the Continental immigrants of today have had few forerunners...

...In the Resettlement Corps, financed by British funds, the Polish ex-officers and soldiers were given efficient aid in vocational training and starting new careers...

...These have been of diverse origins...

...In the United States such a phenomenon would hardly attract notice, but in Britain it denotes a major change...

...Hitler's seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and the Communist coup in Prague in 1948 brought their quotas of newcomers to Britain...

...Hans A. Krebs, who is Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford...

...I was recently told there are 15,000 Yugoslavs in Britain...

...In the 17th century, for example, there were the French Huguenots, who, on first arriving in the East End of London, were called the "scum of White-chapel," but soon gave Britain some new aristocratic families...

...Vicky," the foremost British cartoonist...

...Satiric references to Central Europeans were frequent in the press and in revues, nor were most of the immigrants temperamentally of the type to hide their light modestly under a bushel...

...Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 and its consequences brought to Britain about 150,000 refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, the majority of them Jewish, of whom around 100,000 have stayed on...

...sociologists like Professor Polanyi of Manchester and the late Professor Karl Mannheim...

...But the labor market remained unsatisfied and so, in 1949-51, about 100,000 displaced persons were brought from the Continental camps to Britain under the first organized scheme for immigration into Britain ever conducted by any British government...

...Whitechapel—dirty, vital, swarming, not especially intellectual, as described by Zangwill— became for some decades one of the best known modern ghettos...

...This helped other immigrants...

...The first large-scale intrusion, showing that the Channel was no longer the old barrier, occurred only in 18951905, when in the course of the Jewish mass exodus from the Tsarist Empire many thousands of East European Jews arrived in Britain, especially in the East End of London...

...T. R. Fyvel, former literary editor of the London Tribune, was for several years our regular correspondent in Great Britain...

...Sir Lewis Namier, whose writings have made him probably the most influential British historian of the day, had arrived from Russia some years earlier...

...For instance, the Russian refugees who settled in London after the Bolshevik Revolution included the two brilliant ballerinas, Karsavina and Lopokhova—the latter married Lord Keynes, the famous economist, himself a balletomane...

...London A point which will strike the observant visitor to Britain is the part played by newcomers from the Continent in almost every walk of life...

...For example, over 23,000 German prisoners who during the war had worked in British agriculture applied after 1945 to come back to their jobs and most of them did (probably to the delight of British farmers...

...In the circumstances, the absorption of these Polish exiles into British life was surprisingly swift...

...In the arts, amid scores of prominent names one might mention the holders of three key professorships of fine arts...

...The result can be summed up like this: In the late Forties, the British still seemed to regard the Poles as a puzzling foreign element in their midst...

...Arthur Koestler, now a detached literary man in his country house in Kent...

...But they have already gone through the usual experience...

...At any rate, while one should neither exaggerate nor minimize the effect of this influx of intellectuals on British achievement, it undoubtedly also had some effect in changing the whole atmosphere of British life, changing it slowly but noticeably, and making it easier for the Continentals who have followed...

...The absorption is accomplished...

...the Jews did not stay in Whitechapel longer than their Huguenot predecessors...

...and Dr...

...In the arts and sciences, the influx was also fructif\ing...

...Much could also be said of the stimulus which the arrival in London of Freud and his daughter Anna, as well as of Melanie Klein, gave to British psychoanalysis...

...Even while the press and public were criticizing the bloody-mindedness of the British miners in refusing to have Hungarians in the pits, it was announced that most of the Hungarians had already found other work and were, with their national adaptability, fitting themselves more quickly into English life than any previous immigrants...

...When speaking of the Thirties one should also not forget the sizable group of anti-Franco Spaniards who remained in Britain, the best-known, of course, being Salvador de Madariaga...

...For a time, jokes were current that in the Swiss Cottage district of London an ordinary Englishman had need of a consul...

...Changing Britain-1 THE CONTINENTAL ARRIVALS By T R. Fyvel While Englishmen over two centuries have settled North America, Australasia and much of Africa, recently Britain has been settled by newcomers from abroad...

...and the Sephardic Jews, who were first admitted as useful and picturesque foreigners by Cromwell, and in due course provided England with such colorful figures as the bare-knuckle champion Mendoza, the economist David Ricardo, and the Disraelis, father and son...

...But almost at once they were released again and integrated into the war effort, and since then most of them have never looked back...

...The newcomers attracted attention...

...They were assorted victims of Stalinism—Baits, Ukrainians, Volks-deutsche...

...Australian and New Zealand professional men and West Indian and African workers have been coming here in growing numbers, especially of late the West Indians...

...In scientific endeavor—to pick out just a few names —one could mention such physicists of world reputation (well-known for their role in nuclear development) as Sir Francis Simon, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, today professors respectively at Oxford, Cambridge and Birmingham: or two joint Nobel Prize winners like Dr...

...The Hungarian arrivals of today appear by contrast much more ordinary, with trade-union workers to the fore...

...In retrospect, these incidents are unimportant...

...But this is another story...

...Unlike the prewar refugees, the Poles demobilized in Britain under the Polish Resettlement Act of 1947 did not represent an immigration of intellectuals and professional men but a cross-section of the Polish nation, the majority being ordinary soldiers who had been peasants or workers...

...Yet today, after only a few years, the Polish question in Britain is no longer a problem—not even a Polish question: No one today is surprised to meet Polish doctors, engineers, architects, pharmacists, and Polish members of British trade-union branches and sporting teams...

...The Anglo-Jewish community of today, which numbers about 450,000 people, is busily turning itself into an increasingly middle-class, suburban and professional community...

...They came as farm and factory workers and were at first often placed in hostels vacated by the Poles...

...But the 1914-18 war heralded the new era during which Britain has taken in more than half a million Continental Europeans of the most varied kinds, and has set out to assimilate them...

...Rudolf Bing, who initiated the Edinburgh Festival...

...But these early Continental settlers in Britain were still exceptional...

...The businessmen and industrialists from Central Europe established hundreds of new firms and factories, some in branches of industry still fairly new to Britain, and many of them on the Government-sponsored trading estates in the Depressed Areas of mass unemployment...

...True, these included some notable elements...

...they were ardent Catholics in a largely Protestant and agnostic country strange to them, while some of their nationalist leaders, hoping for a return to a liberated Poland, paid only lip-service to settlement in Britain...

...During the last twenty or thirty years, the Commonwealth has also discovered London...