Europe's interwar refugee problem began immediately after the First World War with the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Revolution, and the civil war that followed. The crisis for the displaced continued in the 1930s with civil war in Spain and the intensification of Nazi persecution of political opponents and religious and ethnic groups in Germany and the annexed territories.Footnote 1 For some, Britain and the British Empire became a refuge.Footnote 2 A series of alien orders passed after the Great War, however, meant that only a trickle of refugees were admitted at a time.Footnote 3 On 21 May 1937, the British government reluctantly allowed a ship to carry 3,862 Basque children to Britain as refugees.Footnote 4 This number represented a small fraction of the thirty-three thousand children sent to safety from war-torn Spain, but it was the largest group of refugees ever admitted to Britain.Footnote 5 Campaigns by pro-Francoists and the Catholic Church to repatriate the children began as soon as they arrived.
Just over a year later, after the Munich Agreement and the violence of Kristallnacht, a marked change in official attitudes to refugees, and to refugee children in particular, took place.Footnote 6 The British government agreed to allow ten thousand unaccompanied children to come immediately to Britain from Czechoslovakia on what came to be known as the Kindertransports.Footnote 7 The Czech refugees were funded by an intense and sustained fund-raising campaign that galvanized schoolchildren, churches, unions, Jewish communities, cinemas, actors, models, and fashion houses to raise money to bring endangered children, most of whom were Jewish, to Britain.Footnote 8 By June 1939, local newspapers celebrated the fact that Britain had admitted twenty-nine thousand refugees from Nazi aggression, including thousands of unaccompanied children.Footnote 9 This was a very different response to refugees than occurred in 1937 when the arrival of the Spanish children met with hostility and opposition.
This article explores the politics and emotions of humanitarian activism and internationalism in interwar Britain by using the public and official responses to assisting refugee children as a lens. Interwar charities and refugee committees had to negotiate the unstable terrain between the politics of nation and the ideals of internationalism as they attempted to persuade Britons to support the call to care for foreign children. All appeals were to “save” children, and yet the responses and the amounts raised were vastly different. Campaigns to support almost four thousand Basque children proved politically polarizing and bureaucratic. By contrast, the mass appeal and immediate response to fund-raising to bring ten thousand children to Britain in 1938 suggests that a significant shift in attitudes had taken place. Unlike the political divisions that hampered support for the Basque children, by 1938 Britons from all walks of life appeared to embrace the responsibility for Europe's refugee children in a way they had not just a year before.
An analysis of British responses to refugee emergencies after the Great War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities suggests that the ideas and debates about Britain's role in humanitarian protection shifted in the interwar years. The admission of Spanish refugees in 1937 and the admission of the Kindertransports in 1938 are generally seen as two discrete episodes in British and, indeed, European history. By connecting these two events with one another, this article explores the moment that a transition from the politics of nation to internationalism took place within British culture. The examination of attitudes toward refugee children at the end of the 1930s reveals part of a larger, complex story of Britain's embrace of international responsibility and humanitarian activism at a critical juncture in the twentieth century.
There is considerable current scholarly interest in the origins of Britain's international humanitarianism and treatment of refugees. Michelle Tusan's recent and timely work on the Armenian genocide locates Britain's international humanitarianism in the late nineteenth century, as political efforts to assist Armenian refugees in surviving purges meted out by the Ottoman Empire took place well before the genocide of 1915.Footnote 10 Others, such as Tehila Sasson and Linda Mahood and Vic Satzewich, maintain that colonial knowledge and experience were foundational to Britain's twentieth-century humanitarianism. This attitude, they argue, was institutionalized after the Great War as Britain strove to maintain leadership of the League of Nations’ efforts to initiate international cooperation for the relief of suffering.Footnote 11 Indeed, the move toward supervision of the League of Nations internationalism is something that Susan Pedersen also describes in her study of the interwar Mandate system.Footnote 12 Emily Baughan, on the other hand, argues that Britain's fear of American ascendency after the Great War created a platform of benevolent patriotism to ensure a wide base of support for international humanitarian aid to refugees, including former enemies.Footnote 13 This benevolent patriotism was balanced between the nationalism that marked the outbreak of the Great War and the subsequent internationalism espoused by Western democracies in the postwar period.Footnote 14 The negotiation of that balance, I argue, can be seen most clearly by examining the change in British responses to two sets of refugee children from two different areas of Europe: Spain in 1937 and Czechoslovakia in 1938. The shift in attitudes marks the moment when humanitarian internationalism was understood as embracing refugees from outside the boundaries of empire.
Yet the history of Britain's humanitarianism is also a history of emotional responses to international crises, particularly those affecting children. The history of emotions has received considerable recent attention from scholars, especially those focused on childhood.Footnote 15 Stephanie Olsen argues that adults in different times and places considered childhood and youth the most significant life-cycle stages for emotional development and education. By the late nineteenth century, childhood emotions in Britain were carefully shaped by education and authority figures to mold future imperial citizens.Footnote 16 Viviana Zelizer looks at the emotional expectations of adults which, she argues, became greater as children were deemed increasingly vulnerable and dependent.Footnote 17 This vulnerability magnified the worth of children and with it, the value of their emotional education. Yet the state could also reference childhood vulnerability to intervene in the welfare of the child and the future of the nation. Notions of innocence, according to Lydia Murdoch, could be used as justification for separating poor children from their parents to be “fashioned into citizens” by others.Footnote 18 Indeed, increasingly in the twentieth-century, the state claimed the right to interfere in the education and emotional lives of children. Tara Zahra argues that in the newly formed Czechoslovakia (1918), both Czech and German nationalists claimed “rights” to children and ascribed “national characteristics” to them in a radical campaign to “eliminate indifference” to nation building in areas where families saw themselves as neither German nor Czech.Footnote 19 Thus, children, their emotional education, and the emotions of adults toward children as future citizens had political resonance.Footnote 20
As Britain faced war in the 1930s, the influx of unaccompanied refugee children, plus the prospect of thousands more child evacuees from Britain's urban centers, created concerns about the emotional health of those separated from their parents. As John Welshman argues, mental-health professionals like John Bowlby warned of the dangers of evacuation for the emotional state of young children who, they argued, would exhibit persistent delinquency and anxiety when separated from their mothers.Footnote 21 Michal Shapira discusses the way that other psychoanalysts, like Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, both themselves refugees, focused attention on the emotions of children “whose family life had been broken up” by war.Footnote 22 Shapira maintains that welfare planners looked to understand the “dynamism of early relationships” and the impact of dysfunctional emotions on mental health in order to prevent a “submission to an authoritarian leader” later in life.Footnote 23 Thus children and efforts to “save” the child were given multiple political, social, cultural, and emotional meanings in the interwar years. This article explores the multiple ways these meanings resonated as Britons were faced with the European child refugee crises between the two world wars.
Saving the Children
British port blockades aimed at bringing a swift end to the Great War were successful but created a humanitarian crisis as foodstuffs failed to reach enemy civilian populations. Austria and Russia both experienced famine and starvation as well as civil unrest following the Bolshevik Revolution and the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.Footnote 24 As the crisis deepened, anti-blockade lobby groups formed in Britain. Eglantyne Jebb, the honorary secretary of one such group, Fight the Famine Council, established the Save the Children Fund with her sister, Dorothy Frances Buxton. The main purpose of the charity was to raise funds for the child victims of the Great War.Footnote 25 All charities, Frank Prochaska maintains, have political agendas, whether implicit or explicit, and claim to know how society should be administered.Footnote 26 In this case, Save the Children assumed the responsibility for alleviating the suffering caused by a British foreign policy the organization opposed and used children as the motivator for fund-raising. The focus on the child was deliberate; children were considered innocent, vulnerable, dependent, and inherently “apolitical” victims. Save the Children campaigns initially emphasized the plight of starving Russian children but had difficulty raising funds in a country officially opposed to the new revolutionary government. Despite the well-established “child-saving movement” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Britons baulked at the idea of “feeding the enemy's children,” arguing that they would simply grow up and wage war against Britain.Footnote 27 Save the Children responded to this jingoistic sentiment by changing its message and by promoting the idea that the fund was to assist children throughout the world, as opposed to a specific national group.Footnote 28 Despite public hesitancy, it was supported by unions and workers who gave willingly because they also believed that the British blockade of ports had created the calamity.Footnote 29 The Labour Party, however, argued that the Russian government was deliberately blocking food from reaching starving peasants as a political tool of control and so held back support.Footnote 30 When a League of Nations report ascribed the famine to a combination of poor harvests and political interference, this helped promote a sense of urgency to stave off starvation and consequently, donations to Save the Children increased.Footnote 31 By September 1921, it had collected £484,000 from British donors to assist child victims of famine in Russia—a considerable amount of money for the time.Footnote 32 The organization sent supplies and personnel to assist Russia's starving children, alongside and supervised by the international humanitarian efforts of the newly formed League of Nations.Footnote 33
There was famine in Austria too. Civilians in Vienna had been living on insufficient rations since 1917 because of the blockades and the dislocations of war. By 1919, British Quakers had set up soup kitchens, temporary shelters, and training workshops in Vienna and the surrounding areas as Austrians faced famine and starvation.Footnote 34 A 1919 Friends Relief Fund leaflet titled “Child Misery in Vienna” showed photographs of starving children—a ten-year-old weighing just thirty-three pounds and a seven-year-old weighing only twenty-three pounds.Footnote 35 In a country decimated by war and ravaged by shortages and famine, thousands of children were starving in what was once the cultural, political, and economic capital of empire. British Quakers, who opposed war in any form, had changed their focus after the Great War from simply conscientious objection to providing assistance to those affected by warfare.Footnote 36 Quakers set up farms and taught husbandry to assist Austrians dealing with the all-encompassing disruptions of the world war.Footnote 37 While the images of starving children shocked Britons, they also stimulated the emotional response the Quakers hoped for. Starving innocent children were the consequence of war. Friends in Britain opened their wallets and gave to help those suffering the long-term effects of international strife.Footnote 38
While the Quakers retained continuous support from the Friends religious network, by the early 1920s, the Save the Children Fund no longer received the large donations needed to continue its work. As one of its chief fund-raisers, Eglantyne Jebb used the ideals of internationalism espoused by the League of Nations to elicit donations. Indeed, feminists like Jebb and women's organizations supported and promoted the internationalism of the interwar years as a way to promote cooperation and peace. Internationalism also created a space to rethink nineteenth-century notions of child-centered philanthropy.Footnote 39 Jebb drafted the Children's Charter in 1922, initially to generate donations for Save the Children. In the charter, she argued that child welfare was no longer simply the responsibility of volunteers and state intervention; rather, children had “rights,” including the right to protection from the international community. By 1924, the charter was adopted by the League of Nations.Footnote 40 Thus, the rights of children and the child refugee to protection were formally enshrined in the internationalism of the interwar years.
The Emergency in Germany
When Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party came to power in 1933, the Anglo-Jewish community immediately established the Jewish Refugees Committee. The Central British Fund for German Jewry was founded later that year and began a widespread and successful fund-raising campaign among Jewish communities, preparing for the probability of mass emigration from Germany to Britain.Footnote 41 Other Jewish organizations were established to save European children but on a smaller scale.Footnote 42 Most of these groups later came together under an umbrella organization, the Refugee Children's Movement, founded in November 1938 to deal with the escalating refugee problem.Footnote 43 One group was the Manchester Ladies Lodge of B'nai Brith, the most influential women's organization in Manchester's Jewish community. From 1935, the group sponsored and gave financial assistance and employment to sixty teenaged women fleeing Nazi persecution. The jobs were mainly in domestic service as working-class British women found alternative employment in factories and stores.Footnote 44 The Manchester Victoria Memorial Jewish Hospital also provided places for qualified refugees. For example, Charlotte Sochaczewer was employed in 1936 as an X-ray technician, and Werner Kupperman, who arrived in Britain in 1933 and attended medical school at Edinburgh University to validate his German medical qualifications, was employed at the hospital as a doctor from 1937.Footnote 45 Numerous professional and lay psychoanalysts found sponsorship, employment, and support among the members of the British Society for Psychical Research, making London the new European center for psychoanalysis.Footnote 46
Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, principal of the Jewish Secondary Schools Movement, sponsored and found employment for thirteen hundred rabbis, teachers, and their families between 1933 and 1938.Footnote 47 Many more children came to Britain unaccompanied. Between 1934 and 1939, parents made agonizing decisions to send their children from Germany and Austria, mainly to England or Switzerland. In all, more than eighteen thousand unaccompanied children left home to live with relatives or with strangers in England and other European countries.Footnote 48 The Jewish community in Britain sponsored and took financial responsibility for child evacuees from 1933, albeit as discretely as possible to prevent arousing the anti-Semitism that simmered close to the surface during the years of economic depression and unemployment.Footnote 49
Anti-Semitism in Britain was principally fomented by fascist groups in the 1920s and 1930s. The largest group was the British Union of Fascists, which held intimidating open-air meetings in Golders Green, an area of London known for its large Orthodox Jewish population, to stir up anti-Semitism.Footnote 50 The fascist group attracted members from all social and economic classes.Footnote 51 As Thomas Linehan argues, its rhetoric and activism appealed to the emotions and “exhibited devotional, evangelical, sacrificial and penitential . . . characteristics,” attracting a significant number of low-level clerics determined to convert their flocks.Footnote 52 The group's leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, was a gifted orator whose large rallies incited violence among supporters and opponents.Footnote 53 A rally at Olympia in June 1934 was, according to Bret Rubin, the moment that Mosley turned toward “hysterical” anti-Semitism.Footnote 54 The rally attracted antifascist and fascist supporters and a great amount of violence. Skirmishes between fascists and British Jews broke out at the rallies and in the streets. Anti-Semitism within the group “boiled over into outright persecution” and Jews, particularly those in working-class East London, were targeted and assaulted.Footnote 55 When the British Council for German Jewry formed after the passage of the Nazi Nuremburg Laws in September 1935, members committed to rescuing at least 100,000 young people from Germany and assisting them to emigrate to parts of the British Empire other than the metropole.Footnote 56
Like the Anglo-Jewish community, Quakers understood the threat posed by the Nazi regime. British Friends established the Germany Emergency Committee in 1933 (later renamed the Friends Committee for Refugees and Aliens). Initially, Friends assisted Christians who opposed the regime and lost jobs as a consequence or who left because they could not “conscientiously meet the demands of the new state.”Footnote 57 By 1934, however, the Friends Service Committee reported a serious refugee problem as Germans fled to England, France, Holland, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia.Footnote 58 As the situation deteriorated, the committee worked with other British organizations including the Jewish Refugees Committee, who gave advice and assistance to refugees in England as well as hospitality to students, professors, social workers, teachers and children fleeing persecution. The committee sponsored and found employment for teachers in Jewish schools and placed unaccompanied children in newly established Jewish or Quaker boarding schools. As the situation in Germany deteriorated, Quakers joined efforts with more charities formed to deal with the crisis—the German Refugee Assistance Fund, the Academic Assistance Council, the International Student Service, the Save the Children Fund, the International Committee for Seeking Employment for Refugees, and the German Refugee Hospitality Committee—sponsoring teachers and university professors fleeing the Nazi regime.Footnote 59
British Quakers opened their homes and wallets. By 1 January 1936, Friends had raised £8,652 from members to help bring more refugee children to Britain—a considerable amount given the small number of Friends in Britain and the multiple Quaker committees asking for donations. Together with money raised later in 1936 from the “National Churches Appeal,” the Jewish Refugees Committee identified and assisted twenty-three “non-Aryan” Christian refugees to sponsor and successfully escape Germany to Britain. Non-Aryans included converts from Judaism and others categorized as insufficiently Aryan under the Nazi Racial Hygiene laws. The church appeal also paid for dozens of children to attend boarding school and be cared for during the holidays by Jewish and Quaker families.Footnote 60 By March 1936, the Inter-Aid Committee for Children from Germany (under the auspices of the Save the Children Fund) brought and supported another 471 refugee children from Germany and Austria to Britain.Footnote 61
Assisting adults proved more difficult. According to the 1920 Aliens Order, adult refugees could only enter Britain if they were “sponsored” and had financial means or a job offer and were “of a sound mind, healthy, and able to support themselves and any dependents.” Refugees needed proof of employment, and Britain refused any criminals or anyone who had been deported from Britain in the past.Footnote 62 Those refugees admitted to Britain were given only temporary visas and expected to re-emigrate within two years. Each refugee paid a £50 deposit to the government to pay for that future re-emigration.Footnote 63
The Aliens Order stipulated that refugees could not take employment away from British workers who were still recovering from the economic depression and large-scale unemployment.Footnote 64 To circumvent this policy, voluntary organizations sponsored refugees and placed them in jobs with high vacancies and with training schemes. Other professional groups, like the British Society for Psychical Research, assisted many well-known psychoanalysts to emigrate to Britain, including Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna. Anna later established “war nurseries” and worked with children separated from their families or orphaned in wartime; she also assisted other Jewish refugee professionals find meaningful work in Britain.Footnote 65
While the Germany Emergency Committee assisted small numbers of persecuted adult refugees to enter Britain, it was impossible to find jobs and housing for large numbers. Indeed, many people in Britain experienced hunger and homelessness. The economic realities of rebuilding after a costly war, the unemployment of veterans, and the care of the injured culminated in political instability and worker unrest, most significantly in the General Strike of 1926 and the subsequent nine-month lockout.Footnote 66 It also fomented anti-Semitism, particularly within the fascist movement.Footnote 67 A worldwide economic depression following the New York Stock Market crash in 1929 compounded the problems. The economy began a slow recovery, but poverty, hunger, and unemployment remained, particularly in the northeast of England, culminating in the Jarrow Hunger March that began on 5 October 1936.Footnote 68
Civil War in Spain
In the summer of 1936, two major events took place: the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War on 17 July and the start of the Berlin Olympics two weeks later. Parliament was not in session for either event, schools were closed, and many Britons were on holiday.Footnote 69 The British government, led by Stanley Baldwin, along with the French and Belgians, voted for a policy of nonintervention in Spain in the hope that the war would not expand into a larger European war, a fear expressed in the press.Footnote 70 Italy, Germany, and the USSR also agreed to nonintervention.Footnote 71 The Labour Party and the larger labor movement initially endorsed nonintervention, but the civil war soon threatened to divide the loyalties of the rank and file.Footnote 72
Spain remained neutral in the First World War and was still largely agrarian in the 1930s. The small workers’ movement that did exist was factionalized and dominated by communists and anarchists. Unfavorable stereotypes about Spanish workers also flourished in Britain.Footnote 73 Spain was viewed as Europe's backwater, and the war was regarded as an internal feud between competing revolutionary forces.Footnote 74 While the British Communist Party immediately proclaimed the war as one of international significance and an ideological fight between Democratic Republicans and Fascist Nationalists, labor leaders disagreed. They did not believe that communists and anarchists were democratic and further, could see no clear worker movement to support in Spain. The problem, in their opinion, was a national one. Even the Roman Catholic Church in Britain did not seem unduly alarmed at first.Footnote 75
Nevertheless, as Catholic and leftist presses began to describe the atrocities meted out by both sides in the conflict, the church and unions, albeit on opposite sides, committed to providing humanitarian aid.Footnote 76 The Trades Union Congress asked individual unions to send donations, and the Catholic Church asked members to similarly contribute to a centralized fund.Footnote 77 As eyewitness accounts appeared in the news chronicling atrocities meted out on civilians, these bureaucratized and impersonal responses proved insufficient.Footnote 78 Left-leaning workers and intellectuals lobbied Parliament to intervene; they joined the International Brigades and fought on the Republican side, set up their own fund-raising activities, and gave to the Communist Party Spanish Medical Aid Committee.Footnote 79 Catholic workers, on the other hand, joined the International Brigades on the Nationalist side, went on strike to protest the imposition of union levies given to the Republicans, and gave generously to Catholic and Nationalist fund-raising campaigns.Footnote 80 Thus, the reaction to the war in Spain was deeply emotional and revealed deep social, religious, and political divisions that played out in the press, volunteer movements, fund-raising campaigns, and the worker rank and file.Footnote 81
Both sides in the war used children as symbols of innocence and vulnerability. For the Republicans, the loss of children's lives during the unrelenting bombing of civilian populations by the Nationalists was “evidence” of Francoist atrocities. For the Nationalists, children became a symbol of the future and their assumed malleability was a reason to seize them away from their Republican families to be reshaped according to Francoist politics.Footnote 82 When Nationalist forces fire-bombed Guernica in April 1937, eyewitness accounts and newsreels portrayed the devastation in newspapers and local cinemas. Reports claimed that mothers carrying babies and clutching the hands of their children were targeted by the bombers even as they fled the city.Footnote 83 Pressure mounted on the British government to allow “innocent” refugee children into the country. The Basque government lobbied Ralph Stevenson, the British consul in Bilbao, to pressure the Foreign Office to accept Basque children into Britain.Footnote 84 The former leader of the National Union of Teachers, Leah Manning, went to the Basque region to assess the situation for the Trades Union Congress. The cross-party National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, formed in December 1936, and by 1 May 1937 it had launched a campaign in the press to bring Basque children to safety. The committee was chaired by the Duchess of Atholl, a Conservative MP and the coauthor of the campaign letters with Ellen Wilkinson, Labour MP for Jarrow.Footnote 85 The campaign exerted enough pressure that on 19 May 1937, Baldwin's government reluctantly conceded to allow two thousand children to come to Britain as a short-term humanitarian measure.Footnote 86 There were, however, strict conditions. The Treasury refused to shoulder any cost. Only private funds could be used for the children's education and welfare, and only non-combatants of all political parties would be admitted.Footnote 87
To ensure that the refugees were politically inclusive, the non-partisan Basque Children Committee formed on 15 May 1937 under the umbrella of the National Joint Committee. The committee included members of the Catholic Church, the Labour movement, the Quakers, Save the Children, the Salvation Army, and the Spanish Medical Aid, the Communist Party organization.Footnote 88 The Basque Children Committee raised funds and, perhaps as evidence of the class makeup of the organization, greatly underestimated the cost of feeding and housing the children, projected at a mere shilling per child per week for board and lodging.Footnote 89
The journey began in Bilbao as anxious parents signed forms to allow their children to be transported to England by the National Joint Committee. A team of four doctors, including Dr. Richard Ellis, arrived to examine the children. As Ellis later wrote, the medical mission was shown immediately into a bomb shelter and told, “One siren means the planes are sighted, two's danger, and three they are right overhead.” Women were filling sandbags, and “there were children everywhere.”Footnote 90 The following day the children arrived for a medical examination just outside a bomb shelter. Sirens delayed the examinations for hours. The doctors noted that a few children verged on starvation but most were healthy. “It was equally clear, however,” Ellis observed, “that many of the women had starved themselves to supply their children with food.”Footnote 91
When the SS Habana arrived at Southampton on 23 May 1937, almost four thousand children, accompanied by priests and teachers, disembarked. This was double the expected number. The fifteen-hour journey, according to Ellis, was “best forgotten”: “Four thousand wretchedly seasick children crowded into an old boat whose very latrines are apt to regurgitate in sympathy, are not a pretty sight.”Footnote 92 Fortunately, most of the children fell asleep, exhausted. When they arrived in port, buses took them to a field of tents set up by the Boys Brigade just outside Southampton. The organizers planned to keep the children together and ensure they were taught in Spanish and served by their Catholic priests. No effort was made to integrate the children into British society, as they were expected to return home within two or three months. The camp was chaotic, and volunteers took four hours to serve the first meal. Heavy and unseasonable downpours meant the field became a quagmire, and organizers feared an outbreak of disease.Footnote 93 The first cases of typhoid broke out within days but only affected five children.Footnote 94 To prevent the spread of disease, all the children were kept in medical quarantine and received compulsory vaccinations before they were permitted to leave the campsite.Footnote 95
As part of the Basque Children Committee, the Catholic Church reluctantly took twelve hundred children into their orphanages and convents. The church hesitated because the priests who accompanied the children were known Republicans and did not support Franco; also, the church was expected to assume the cost of caring for the children.Footnote 96 The Salvation Army agreed to house 450 refugee children in a hostel in East London. One of the young girls described the hostel: “It was all so big and dark, it seemed like a prison . . . there was an awful smell . . . It was cold and overcrowded.”Footnote 97 The rest of the children were sent to seventy “colonies” throughout the country, under medical quarantine and separated from the British population.Footnote 98 The “colonies” were housed in abandoned school buildings, churches, orphanages, and even stately homes, supported by funds from local Basque Children's Committees, who in turn received central funds from the National Joint Committee. A former evacuee remembers, “There was no heating, little, if any, adult supervision, and very little food. There was a lot of bullying and we were left to our own devices to survive.”Footnote 99
To help fund the cost of the children's bed and board, the National Joint Committee organized fund-raising events like the Grand International Meeting on Spain and Culture at the Royal Albert Hall on 27 June 1937, featuring Paul Robeson and Heinrich Mann, among others.Footnote 100 Local Basque Children's Committees also raised money, although the insistence by the government that each child receive ten shillings a week (rather than the original estimate of one shilling per child per week) grated on some, as this amount was more than the amount given to children of the British unemployed. The Jarrow Hunger March protesting the starvation rates of unemployment payments had taken place just seven months before the Basque children's arrival.
Many of the children came from the Basque region, but some had fled there from the south. Nevertheless, fund-raisers called all the children Basque for several reasons. First, it was an attempt to depoliticize the children—this was not about Republican versus Nationalist “Spanish” children; second, there was a historical connection between the Basque region and Britain. For more than a century, England and Wales had traded coal for Basque iron ore, and some had intermarried and settled, mainly in the coal mining areas of South Wales.Footnote 101 Additionally, during the First World War, despite Spanish neutrality, Basque shipping companies continued to supply British ports with much-needed food.Footnote 102 This common history generated funds from the impoverished mining communities throughout England and Wales, most of them supporting the Republican cause. In the northeast of England, however, the working-class and mining populations were largely Roman Catholic and supported Franco, arguing that the children should return to Spain.Footnote 103
Scotland's working-class industrial areas were mainly Protestant and supported the Basque children with a number of grassroots fund-raising activities. Bagpipers played in the impoverished areas and outside the labor exchanges, asking for pennies and tinned food; concerts generated funds, as did door-to-door collections. Schoolchildren took it upon themselves to sell single cigarettes to raise money, mainly from each other.Footnote 104 Volunteer groups and organizations as diverse as the Baker's Union, the Blind Institution, the Dundee Breakfast Club, and the Women's liberal Association donated generously to fund Scotland's only colony of twenty-five Basque children.Footnote 105 In June, the Dundee School of Music played at a special fund-raising concert at Caird Hall. The Boys Brigade and Girl Guides sold programs and acted as stewards. A total of £27 6s.3d was collected at the event following an appeal by Mr. David Thompson, the northern organizer of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief. This amount was just enough to support the Basque children's colony in Dundee for two weeks.Footnote 106
Two fund-raising films were released. The first, Modern Orphans of the Storm, with a total running time of just ten minutes, was a publicity film financed by the National Joint Committee and jointly produced by the Realist Film Unit and Victor Saville Productions.Footnote 107 Its main emphasis was the identity of the children as “Basque,” their experiences in Spain as innocent victims, and their humanitarian rescue in Britain. The second film, Save Spanish Children, fifteen minutes in length, was designed to raise awareness and funds for the National Joint Committee's relief work.Footnote 108 “A final emotive sequence compares dead bodies in a Spanish street with happy smiling children” safe in Britain, graphically illustrating the importance of international humanitarian activism and the very real danger of leaving the children in Spain.Footnote 109 As Myers attests, the fact that both were fund-raising films shaped their content. In all the images, the children appear passive, without spontaneity, maximizing the idea that the children were victims, not radical political beings, and thus worthy of British emotional and financial support.Footnote 110 In an even shorter film by British Pathé, Basque Civil War Refugee Children Arrive at Southampton (1937), the narrator claims the children are Basque, not Spanish, and “belong to neither side” in the war. The film explains that the children were “snatched from a living horror” in the Basque area as bombs fell. As the film shows the children stepping down from the ship and then the buses in Southampton, the narrator explains that each child is medically examined and given an identity tag, suggesting that they present no potential harm to Britain. In an appeal to the benevolent patriotism that Baughan describes, the narrator claims, “Britain has always been a safe home for exiles.” The Basque children, the film clarifies, are apolitical, innocent, and vulnerable victims of a war that has nothing to do with them, and thus they are worthy of British compassion.Footnote 111
Despite attempts to depoliticize the children, calls for immediate repatriation began immediately from pro-Franco supporters in Britain.Footnote 112 A pro-Franco group, the Basque Children's Repatriation Committee, chaired by the right-wing Arthur Wellesley, 5th Duke of Wellington, formed in 1937 specifically to exert pressure to return the children to Spain.Footnote 113 Antonio Masaeda, head of Franco's Repatriation Service, also called for the children to be returned home. He claimed, “Our sacred mission is to recover for God and Spain the souls of these children who have been poisoned for so many years by anti-Catholic and anti-patriotic ideas.”Footnote 114 The children could only be saved, according to Masaeda, when placed in the right environment and educated by patriots and Catholics. They belonged to Spain, where the correct environment for malleable, educable children could create patriotic future citizens.
The Basque region fell to Franco's forces just two weeks after the children arrived in Britain, increasing the pressure for their return. When the children heard the news, they were distraught because they knew what that meant in political terms: their families would be targeted for reprisals by the Nationalist forces. The first refugee was returned in July 1937.Footnote 115 By October 1937, the Repatriation Committee of the National Joint Committee succumbed to pressure and agreed to allow eight hundred children to return under the auspices of the Apostolic Delegate at Bilbao as long as they had documentation from parents supporting their child's return.Footnote 116 The Roman Catholic Church in Britain supported repatriation and most of the twelve hundred children in their care were the first to go back.Footnote 117 Yet the situation in the Basque region was far from stable. Republicans were being executed or sent to “re-education” camps. Those who could escaped to refugee camps in France. Nevertheless, Franco argued that the area around Bilbao was no longer at war and the children should return.
Pressure to send the Basque children back continued despite the National Joint Committee receiving letters from some parents begging them not to send their children home. Food was scarce and safety not guaranteed. Facing increased pressure to return the children, the committee wrote to the editor of the London Times in January 1938. The letter explained that the committee could only send back the children if they had permission from the parents to do so. In some cases, the parents were dead or missing, and the committee had to rely on Spanish contacts to find other family members. The letter argued that the campaign to return the children to a war zone irrespective of parents’ desire was flawed. While the committee guaranteed that the children would all eventually return, until they did, funds were still needed to ensure adequate support for those “snatched from the horrors of Bilbao.”Footnote 118 Nevertheless, by the end of 1938, less than five hundred Basque children remained in Britain.Footnote 119
Kindertransports and Czech Refugee Children
Neville Chamberlain replaced Stanley Baldwin as prime minister at the end of May 1937, just days after the Basque children arrived in Britain.Footnote 120 While Chamberlain's commitment to peace and the Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938 is seen as a failure, the agreement did provide an armistice for refugees. The agreement allowed Czechs in the Sudetenland to leave from the following day, 1 October 1938, ahead of the annexation. On 3 October, the Nottingham Journal reported that Hitler's troops had marched triumphantly into the Sudetenland, creating an immediate refugee crisis in Prague.Footnote 121
A couple of weeks later, volunteers formed the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain's government agreed to the admission of unaccompanied children from Czechoslovakia.Footnote 122 There were conditions: once again, the British government insisted that no public funds be used to transport or care for the children. However, Sir Samuel Hoare, the Home Office secretary, did agree to speed up the immigration process by issuing travel documents based on lists rather than individual applications. The Home Office nevertheless continued to insist that each refugee child pay £50 for their eventual re-emigration.Footnote 123 The committee set about fund-raising, and a volunteer network known as the Refugee Children's Movement divided the country into a dozen “zones” and began to look for foster homes for the children.Footnote 124
Although Baldwin had opposed bringing the Basque children to Britain in May 1937, after the violence of Kristallnacht in November 1938, he and his wife launched a fund-raising effort to bring Czech children to Britain, raising the enormous sum of £522,651 in just nine months.Footnote 125 Baldwin claimed a moral responsibility for providing the children with a “hiding place from the wind and a covert from the tempest.”Footnote 126 Kristallnacht, the “night of breaking glass,” was regarded as a merciless attack on Jews, and the urgency of assisting refugees from Nazi aggression intensified. As British newspapers covered the events that left over ninety German Jews dead and thirty thousand incarcerated, reporters noted that the German police watched and did nothing as the attacks took place.Footnote 127 Letters to the editor of the London Times urged Britain to take the lead in assisting refugees.Footnote 128 The archbishop of Canterbury appealed to the British government to officially condemn the persecution.Footnote 129
After Kristallnacht, the Council for German Jewry raised £500,000 in just one month to help Jews escape Germany.Footnote 130 Further fund-raising continued in earnest. In Scotland, the theatre, cinema, and actors all generously contributed to the fund, as did the world of fashion. In May 1939, models and beauty queens donated their time and fashion houses their collections, to a charity fashion show held at the Glasgow Exhibition Fashion Pavilion. At two shillings a ticket, the show raised a considerable amount for the fund.Footnote 131 In London, the Lord Mayor's Czech Refugee Fund raised £528,510. Mayors all over Britain established funds, and schoolchildren began fund-raising for the Czech children.Footnote 132
The first Kindertransport of approximately two hundred children accompanied by eight adults left Berlin on 29 November 1938, traveling through Holland and then by boat to Britain, arriving on 2 December.Footnote 133 Despite the focus on Czech refugees, the children were German, from a Jewish orphanage in Berlin damaged in the Kristallnacht attacks. Newspapers reported the first refugees as “sad . . . victims of violent Nazi anti-semitism” who fled a burning orphanage, “pursued by the shadows of unseen griefs,” and who “sighed as they trod on English soil today” free from torment.Footnote 134
Just as fund-raisers for the Spanish children a year earlier used the term “Basque” rather than Spanish, campaigns to raise money for Jewish children fleeing Nazi aggression continued to refer to the children as “Czech.” However, unlike the argument that Basque children should be allowed in because Britain had a history of welcoming refugees, appeals to assist Czechs took a different form. In an emotional fund-raising appeal for Czech refugees, the Rev. D. M. Balsillie told the townsfolk of Weymouth that Britons “owed it to these people to do everything possible” to assist them.Footnote 135 This sentiment was similarly expressed in newspapers all over the country.Footnote 136 In a late October 1938 article titled “Lord Mayor's Czech Refugee Fund,” the Birmingham Daily Gazette asked, “Have you thought what you owe Czechoslovakia? Perhaps your children's safety, your life, your home? Give generously!”Footnote 137 The implication was clear: Czechoslovakia had been sacrificed to prevent another European war. The Munich Agreement made by Britain, France, Italy, and Germany had divided Czechoslovakia in half. Britons understood this and perhaps also believed, like the author of the Birmingham Gazette article, that they had a responsibility to those caught by an international agreement to which they were not party. The Munich Agreement represented the culmination of years of appeasement—a policy that failed Czechoslovakia. A perceptible shift in attitudes to refugees took place as Britons appeared to embrace international humanitarianism and responsibility for the plight of Europe's refugees.
The Save the Children Fund Inter-Aid Committee for Children arranged for large numbers of children to come to Britain from Germany and Austria for education. In the newly annexed Sudetenland, Jewish children were not permitted to go to school. The Home Office agreed to allow the Inter-Aid Committee to bring the children into Britain without visas in recognition of their “stateless” designation by Nazi authorities. Instead, each child received a two-part identity document completed by the committee and then submitted to Passport Control for a stamp. The Foreign Office waived the need for a passport or visa and accepted the identity paper instead. On the children's arrival in Britain, one section of their identity document was kept by immigration and the other part forwarded to the Inter-Aid Committee.Footnote 138 This system speeded up immigration considerably.
Unlike the Basque children who were sheltered in tents the year before, the Kindertransport children without sponsors or foster families went immediately to Dovercourt Bay, a newly opened luxury holiday camp.Footnote 139 Within one month, the transports brought 3,500 child refugees to Britain. The children were met by Refugee Children's Movement members, volunteers and translators. Unlike the Basque children, those on the Kindertransports were largely unaccompanied and very scared. One child, Ursula Kantorowicz, was just three years old and cared for by older children on the train.Footnote 140 The Refugee Children's Movement contacted every Jewish household in each of the twelve zones to try to place the children within the Jewish community.Footnote 141 While the committee secured dozens of placements, these were hardly enough for the expected ten thousand children.Footnote 142 An initial newspaper appeal for foster homes garnered five hundred volunteers, most of whom were not Jewish. Desperate parents placed ads in the Jewish Chronicle, asking plaintively, “Would anybody kindly take German barrister's children into their home or help to place them suitably; intelligent, healthy children, boy 7, girl 11; need not be together; fullest references.” The parents of two Viennese children, girls aged ten and fourteen years, claimed they were “very well educated, speak English and French. Photographs and references willingly sent.”Footnote 143 Despite efforts to place children with coreligionists, many went to Quaker, Protestant, and secular homes, effectively placing them out of reach of the Jewish community. Clergy responsible for parishes called on families to provide homes for the children still at Dovercourt Bay. The response was encouraging.Footnote 144 As the Kindertransports continued, frantic parents placed ads in regional British papers. In May 1939, an ad in the Yorkshire Post asked, “Would someone kindly guarantee and, possibly, provide home for Prague boy and girl, cousins (both 13), good family, healthy, intelligent, good English already?”Footnote 145 Sadly, we have no way of knowing if the cousins came to Britain, but fund-raising efforts continued to pay for the transportation and support of the thousands of refugee children.Footnote 146
On 12 January 1939, a few weeks after the first Kindertransport arrived in Britain, Lady Marion Philips and others came to observe the communal living facilities at Dovercourt Bay. The camp was owned by the Butlin company and used in the summer months for holidays.Footnote 147 As a refugee camp, it acted as a clearing station for German and Austrian Jewish and non-Aryan refugee children until foster homes could be found. The children ranged in age from five to seventeen years, and their parents were dead or in concentration camps. The observers noted that the children seemed “wonderfully happy, considering all they had been through,” and the camp leaders were “full of human kindness, vitality and emanating a cheerful atmosphere.” Nevertheless, while the camp worked well in the short term, observers noted that schooling and leisure activities lacked organization and variety. If the camp became more long-term, changes would be needed to ensure proper educational opportunities and prevent boredom.Footnote 148
As the refugees arrived in Britain, they were handed a booklet, While You Are in England: Helpful Information and Guidance for Every Refugee. Published in 1938, the booklet encouraged refugees to learn English as soon as possible and follow the manners and customs of Britain. They were never to speak German in public, never to criticize the British government, and to act as inconspicuously as possible. Ever concerned with stirring up anti-Semitism, the booklet explained the “tolerance and sympathy of Britain” but the do's and don'ts suggested that sympathy and tolerance were dependent on assimilation. The booklet also explained the very limited training options available to refugee boys (agriculture and handicrafts) and girls (nursing and domestic service).Footnote 149
Older boys presented more of a problem than teenage girls. Many older teenage boys were included in the early transports because they were deemed most at risk of being sent to concentration camps. Two refugee hostels opened; orthodox young men went to Westgate, and the others went to Barham House, Claydon, near Ipswich.Footnote 150 From the hostels, the young men went to training camps. An advertisement for the Lord Baldwin Fund for Refugees featured a photo of eight teenagers carrying farm implements and walking on what looks like a tilled field. They are unsmiling but look stoic, healthy, and active. The caption said, “These have been rescued . . . but there are thousands more calling to you from Germany.” The small print told the reader that these young men had been denied even “the most elementary human rights” and “debarred from earning a living.” While those in the picture had been rescued, others had died. The ad assured Britons that no refugees had taken British jobs but then asked: Didn't they have the “right to live?” Refugees needed employment to survive as much as British workers did. The emotional plea continued, urging Britons to donate to the fund to bring the hundreds more waiting for a chance to leave Germany and live: “Before it is too late—get them out!”Footnote 151
By March 1939, local newspapers were featuring photos and articles about “training schemes” available to male teenagers. The Leeds Mercury proudly reported on the agricultural training center opened at Fountain's Hall, near Ripon. The scheme housed thirty young men and trained them for a career in agriculture.Footnote 152 Another thirty acres of woodland were added to the Fountain Abbey site so that refugees could also be trained in forestry.Footnote 153 Young women, however, were usually destined for domestic work. That same month, the Yorkshire Post claimed, “Refugees are the treasure we have been missing—housework help!”Footnote 154
The local and national presses also published news about fund-raising. The Edinburgh Evening News outlined plans by the Scottish Christian Council for Refugees to raise “extensive funds” through church members in Scotland as part of their “Christian duty.”Footnote 155 Even Mother's Day in 1939 was given over to raising funds for refugees.Footnote 156 The press also wrote about success stories. In July 1939, the Manchester Evening News claimed that seventy-nine German boys between the ages of twelve and fourteen years were “learning English ways” and language, courtesy of the National Children's Home and Orphanage in Yorkshire.Footnote 157 Local authorities celebrated Czech holidays with poetry readings and music.Footnote 158 Refugee children were encouraged to join the Boy Scouts. Eleven “continental” scouts joined their British peers in Staffordshire, supported by the local Rotary Club.Footnote 159 When a transport of seventy children arrived in Britain in August 1939, a seven-year-old boy was reunited with his father after three years.Footnote 160
There were sad stories too. Leo Levi, aged twelve, was found, collapsed, in Gateshead. When the boy was taken to the local hospital, doctors found a letter in his hand beseeching the king to use his influence to get his mother and father out of Germany.Footnote 161 Fritz Sommerfield was fifteen when he came to Britain on a Kindertransport, leaving his mother, brother, and sister in Germany. On 22 May 1939, when he heard that his siblings had been sent to camps and his mother had committed suicide, he hung himself in a London flat.Footnote 162 The enormity of the situation for Jews in Europe proved just too much for this young teen.
Not all Britons were in favor of assisting the refugees. Some felt that the fund-raising for “foreigners” meant that the poor and destitute in Britain were neglected.Footnote 163 The British Union of Fascists accelerated their dissemination of anti-Semitism and intimidated refugee committees. Others, like members of the Medical Practitioners Union, threatened to strike, claiming that Austrian doctors were taking their jobs and livelihoods.Footnote 164 Unlike the Basque refugees who underwent routine medical examinations and vaccination, the refugees from Germany did not. The medical officer for health for the Borough of Hampstead feared that the Jewish children might bring diseases with them. Large numbers of children had entered the borough and were housed in hostels and schools, yet had not been examined by a doctor or quarantined. Resurrecting the rhetoric of the “diseased foreigner,” the doctor asked: What if they imported some kind of infectious disease? Should there not be some control in place to ensure the health of Britons?Footnote 165
The refugee committees continued to work, but for many, the financial burden was great.Footnote 166 A two-hundred-strong Parliamentary Refugee Committee asked the British government for help.Footnote 167 As the crisis threatened to overwhelm voluntary organizations, the Home Office established the Czechoslovak Refugee Trust, making public funds available to refugees. Finally, on the eve of the Second World War, the government appeared to take financial responsibility for the human toll the policy of appeasement had taken and embrace international humanitarianism alongside Britons. The last Kindertransport arrived in Britain just twenty-four hours before Britain declared war on 3 September 1939. Some refugees went to other areas of the British Empire. A small number settled in Palestine. The majority remained in Britain for the duration of the war years.
Conclusion
Britain's response to Europe's interwar child refugee crises offers a lens to examine a shift in responsiveness to the ideals of internationalism espoused by the League of Nations, feminists, peace activists, and humanitarians. While governmental and other cultural leaders embraced internationalism and humanitarian activism immediately after the Great War, large sections of British society did not. As Britain recovered from a costly war and economic depression, international humanitarianism was largely focused on perceived imperial responsibilities. The child refugee crisis fueled by civil war in Spain and Nazi aggression in Germany and the annexed territories required Britons to reassess the meaning of international humanitarianism to include those outside the imperial trajectory. Arguably, both the official policy on non-intervention in the Spanish civil war and the Munich Agreement were part of the policy of appeasement that strove to prevent another world war. The politics of nation surpassed the ideals of internationalism. Britons understood the refugees from Spain as temporary and as ultimately not their responsibility. Yet just a year later, the nation appeared to take full responsibility for the sponsorship and care of ten thousand Czech children.
At some moment between May 1937 and November 1938, British attitudes to refugee children underwent significant change. This transformation, I suggest, was more than simply a difference in foreign policy or political leadership. Chamberlain continued Baldwin's appeasement policies. Britons returned the Spanish children to appease Franco. A year later, many in Britain appeared to understand that supporting the government's foreign policy made them responsible for the children displaced as a result. The shift in the response to the refugees was indicative of a larger, more widespread acceptance of the responsibilities of the internationalism espoused by the League of Nations in the interwar years. The child refugee crises of interwar Europe encouraged Britons to rethink the boundaries of obligation and, eventually, embrace the emotional cost of internationalism to include care for Europe's refugee children. Studying the change in responses to child refugees from Spain and Czechoslovakia reveals part of the complex genealogy of humanitarian activism and the reimagination of responsibility that took place in late 1930s Britain.
