The Ministry of Labour and National Service welcomes you to this country. They are anxious that if you want a job you should understand that this will happen. First, nothing will be done about this until you are rested and settled down … . People all over the country are making offers of jobs. In whatever part of the country the job is found for you, accommodation will also be found. This will all take a little time, but please be assured that we want to do all we can to help you.Footnote 1
This extract is from a circular issued to Hungarian refugees on their arrival in British reception centers in 1956. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in late October 1956 had precipitated the exodus of approximately two hundred thousand Hungarians, most of whom escaped to Austria. In an international effort not seen before or since, the majority of these refugees were rapidly resettled in a third country within a matter of weeks. Britain, after initially promising to take twenty-five hundred, ultimately accepted around twenty-one thousand refugees.Footnote 2 As the opening passage suggests, Britain very quickly established a network of reception and resettlement centers through which the refugees were found both homes and work; by the end of 1957 only fifteen hundred remained in hostels.Footnote 3 Despite the suddenness and scale of the operation, and in contrast to the scholarship on Hungarian refugees to Canada for example, the episode has received little attention from either archival or oral historians.Footnote 4
I seek to historicize the process of reception and resettlement of the Hungarian refugees to Britain. The Hungarians were the first significant body of European refugees to be created after the passing of the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees. They were also the first to arrive in Britain after the construction of its postwar welfare state. How did the new era of rights and benefits mediate the reception and treatment of the Hungarians in their first months in the United Kingdom? In the light of present-day discourses, which routinely normalize the vilification of refugees, I explore the language used during the reception and resettlement process and the attitudes of those working with the refugees, in order to consider how their reception was understood and articulated.
Today, immigration and the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees generate some of the most intense political and popular debates within Britain and across Europe. Since the 1980s we have seen the growing popularity of depictions of immigration presuming both that the arrival of foreign nationals is a problem and that there are limits to states' obligations toward persecuted, dispossessed, and stateless persons. Within this the British government has tried to position itself simultaneously as both “fairer” and “firmer” by using the novel category “bogus asylum seeker” to stand as a foil to the implicitly deserving refugee. The first, and more numerous, might be dealt with by refusing applications and removing the individuals concerned, while only the second, and far smaller category can find a place in British society.Footnote 5
In a climate of ever-growing hostility toward those seeking refuge in Britain, it has become common in the emerging historical literature to seek the pedigree of these attitudes. Historians have also explored how refugees have integrated into—and contributed to—British society, while also establishing distinctive communities across the country.Footnote 6 Challenging the widely accepted belief of Britain's long history of welcoming refugees, a number of scholars have charted an ingrained and sustained tradition of intolerance toward outsiders.Footnote 7 Work by Louise London for the 1930s and 1940s, and Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox across the twentieth century, has begun the process of reflecting seriously on how Britain's attitudes toward receiving outsiders were shaped the grudging acceptance (and sometimes exclusion) of refugees by the government and wider society.Footnote 8 Kushner in particular has set out the dominance of the myth of British tolerance and the “cult of gratitude” foisted upon refugees in mediating Britain's very partial acceptance of them.Footnote 9 Moreover, his work on the arrival of 250,000 Belgian refugees in 1914, less than a decade after the passing of the 1905 Aliens Act, demonstrated the importance of paying attention to the specificities of a particular historical moment. The Belgians, seen as plucky defenders of liberty against the cruel Hun, crystalized the complex geopolitical reasons for Britain's entry into the war and were warmly received.Footnote 10 A similar conjunction of human plight and geopolitics—this time the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in late 1956—served to produce a historically specific conjunction whereby Hungarian refugees were able to find an enthusiastic welcome in the West.Footnote 11
Alongside such carefully nuanced historical work, there are also more overtly politicized accounts tying the reception of contemporary asylum seekers to historical events. The most explicit of these—Debra Hayes's work on the 1905 Aliens Act, or Steve Cohen's Standing on the Shoulders of Fascism—while making significant contributions to contemporary political debates, have tended to flatten the historical picture. Both unproblematically join up the beginning and end of the twentieth century to create a trajectory of prejudice without exploring any tensions with, or dissonances and deviations from, this narrative.Footnote 12 Hayes, for example, argues that the 1905 Aliens Act “illustrates a long term construction of the refugee … as burdensome, needy, socially costly, and consequently undesirable, and therefore intrinsically at odds with a welfare state aiming to support ‘its own.’”Footnote 13
So, while there has then been a growing willingness to consider the historical mobilization of negative stereotypes of refugees, there remains much work to be done. Significantly, where refugees have been considered it has largely been on the periphery of, rather than within mainstream currents and trends of historical experience. Indeed, commenting on the current limitations within refugee histories from a European perspective, Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch have argued for moving beyond “piecemeal national approaches” that have produced specialized and localized refugee histories. Instead, they demand “greater contextualization,” requiring an analysis of “the nature of the states themselves.” This includes the process of exploring definitions of citizenship and how they might be tied to conceptions of economic and social desirability.Footnote 14 Here I do not answer their call to move beyond national boundaries, yet I take on their insights to suggest that our understanding of refugee history is enriched through considering how the processes and attitudes, which shaped wider British society in the 1950s, affected refugees.
The sources I use in this article were largely generated by the state, by voluntary agencies involved in the reception and resettlement process, and by the media. In the absence of oral histories and memoirs of Hungarian refugees resettling in Britain, the voices of refugees themselves, if present, either take the form of reported direct speech, which was likely mediated via an interpreter, or of the occasional surviving letter. However, taking inspiration from the methodologies long-adopted by the subaltern studies movement, as well as work by other historians on marginalized groups, this article demonstrates how we might usefully reinterpret press, outsider, and official sources to reveal something of the experiences of individual refugees.Footnote 15 Using such sources also allows me to construct a history of refugees, which is embedded in, rather than sitting adjacent to, established histories for this period. In particular, I demonstrate how refugee experiences of voluntary and state agencies and of assimilation might be understood in the light of histories of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, ideas of charity, and welfare in the Britain of the 1950s.
RIGHTS, ENTITLEMENT, AND THE WELFARE STATE
In Britain, as across the rest of Europe, the years after the Second World War signaled a new era for nationals and refugees alike. Not only did the 1951 UN Convention require signatory countries—of which Britain was one—to treat refugees as they did nationals in the spheres of welfare, social security, and labor rights, but this occurred at a time when such rights were being massively extended.Footnote 16 Central to the creation of the British post-1945 welfare state was an acknowledgement that entitlement to benefits was an intrinsic part of an individual's citizenship. While a recipient of poor relief had had rights—including the franchise—taken away, under the new system it was precisely owing to an individual's status as British citizen that he or she was able to claim the new and extensive health, educational, and housing benefits. The creation and extension of the welfare state therefore changed the nature of social inclusion and exclusion and added a new formal layer of significance to citizen status. Embracing refugees within the terms of the welfare state might then be seen as a powerful indicator of their inclusion in postwar British society more generally.
Such inclusion was a marked contrast to the interwar period, which had been characterized by government's insistence that aliens must not become a charge on the rates, so that right up to 1939, a refugee without means was entirely reliant on private sponsorship—by either an individual or a refugee organization—to gain entry. Refugees' complete marginalization from Britain's welfare system was mirrored by their precarious entry status as the explicit right to asylum granted under the 1905 Aliens Act was removed in 1920. This meant that refugees in the interwar period had no special standing in the eyes of immigration law and were assessed for entry on the same grounds as any other alien.
While overall the postwar developments represented a welcome and significant break with pre-1939 practice, they also created a tension. The extension of state services intensified the debate over who exactly was entitled to these benefits, for nationals and recent arrivals alike. Central to the functioning of the welfare state were work-based insurance contributions, which had the effect of both explicitly and implicitly linking citizen status to particular behaviors—notably ideas of work and contributions to the communal good. Ideas of active citizenship were most explicitly expounded by T. H. Marshall, but they were often implicit in depictions of the postwar consensus. Yet a number of historians have observed that such ideas excluded, among others, women, colonial immigrants, Scottish and Welsh Britons, Gypsy Travelers, and the long-term disabled.Footnote 17 All of these groups fit uneasily into a model of citizenship, described by Sonya Rose as being located within an ideal-typical conception of English manhood. In this formulation, the good citizen was “temperate, hard-working, loyal and white” and with the time, education, and inclination to enact participatory citizenship. So, while formal citizenship rights were expanded in this period, a pervasive idea of good citizenship defined by “moral ‘oughts’ rather than legal ‘musts,’” ensured that within public discourse the legitimate citizen remained a tightly constrained object.Footnote 18 Therefore, although the new welfare state did create a new practice joining citizenship to welfare rights, this also operated alongside a more nebulous notion of citizenship as achievement. The corollary of this, as Lowe has argued, was that there was a “permanent emphasis on the danger of scrounging,” so that once on “supplementary benefit the unemployed were treated with suspicion.”Footnote 19 Such attitudes meant that the disjuncture between the welfare state and earlier eras of charitable activities was less distinct than contemporaries supposed. Indeed, John Welshman has highlighted the persistence of ideas of the deserving and undeserving poor running through different approaches to welfare from the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 20 Across time some categories remained consistent: the aged poor, no longer able to work through infirmity; the young widow with children; and the injured or sick laborer, were always “deserving.” In contrast, the drunk, the feckless, and the unmarried mother were “undeserving.” Behavior on receipt of relief also determined an individual's status, so that outward demonstrations of respectable behavior—including a willingness to undertake hard work, thriftiness, explicit gratitude, or piety—might serve to lodge someone into the category of deserving. Likewise, actively demanding support or spending money profligately on alcohol or items perceived by welfare workers as luxuries might consign someone to the category of undeserving.Footnote 21 This suggests that despite the 1950s being the high point of the welfare state, for those living on the margins of society or at the edges of social acceptance, rights were precarious and partial rather than absolute.
The immediate postwar period also saw the reworking of ideas of belonging and entitlement as immigration and decolonization provoked questions about the meaning of Britishness and the place of foreigners in Britain. Jordanna Bailkin's work has shown the importance of moving beyond simplistic readings of the British welfare state, setting its history alongside those of decolonization and migration.Footnote 22 And yet, we need to be wary of assuming that attitudes toward, and treatment of (ex)colonial migrants in this era can be translated across to the reception and treatment of refugees in the same period. Crucially, the Hungarians specifically, and refugees more generally, were understood as being European—very specifically a product of the Second World War and its aftermath. Indeed, this was enshrined in the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, which only extended its definition of refugees to people in Europe affected by events prior to 1951. This legal position both underlined and reflected wider public imagination. Refugees, when they were thought of at all, conjured up pictures of the people languishing in displaced persons camps in Austria or Germany, the Poles remaining in Britain after the end of the war, or those entering through the various European volunteer schemes.Footnote 23 Within Britain it would not be until the 1970s and the arrival of Ugandan Asians that a link was explicitly made between (post)colonial migrations and refugees, although, of course, many of the Ugandan Asians themselves, as holders of British passports, rejected the label refugee. This stands in sharp distinction to the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, which was characterized by the construction and elision of the categories immigrant, (bogus) asylum seeker, and refugee.Footnote 24 Both the 1948 and 1962 Nationality and Citizenship acts were preoccupied entirely with the relationship between metropolitan Britain and its disintegrating empire and dealt neither with the issue of aliens nor of refugees and asylum.Footnote 25
Historical work, including oral history collection, has revealed that the reality of life for European refugees coming to Britain was often difficult, with experiences of trauma, language barriers, and hostility presenting particular challenges.Footnote 26 Local-level and individual experiences spoke of tension as much as settling in; however, at the national scale government and media alike frequently assumed that the presence of groups of Europeans and the arrival of New Commonwealth migrants engendered a different set of social questions. As Kathleen Paul, Wendy Webster, and others have observed, immigration policy was racially charged and actively oriented toward encouraging the entry of Europeans rather than (ex)colonial British subjects, with “official approbation of intermarriage between refugee men and British women” standing in stark contrast to concerns about interracial marriages.Footnote 27 Similarly, sociologists of the period discussing the place of new immigrants within British society, while accepting the tendency of the British to dislike “strangers” of any sort, concluded that European migrants found it easier to assimilate than arrivals from the West Indies, West Africa, and South Asia.Footnote 28 If issues of empire and immigration influenced the reception of the Hungarians, it was through suggesting that their European culture, religion, and pigmentation aligned them more closely to the “British” than their “immigrant” status aligned them to New Commonwealth migrants. Where there were difficulties, these were not framed within the same discussions of “maladjustment of immigrants,” which dominated debates over arrivals from Britain's disintegrating empire.Footnote 29
WELCOMING THE HUNGARIANS
Our Hungarian Friend, we greet you affectionately on English soil … The British have paid admiring homage to the courage of the Hungarians and suffer with the Hungarians in the horrors of oppression and bloody repression. The refugees of the freedom fight are welcome guests in this country.Footnote 30
Spurred on by the Pathé/Movietone newsreels and graphically illustrated press accounts of the Hungarian uprising and the subsequent Soviet invasion, the response of the British public was manifest across class and political divides. Statements supporting the uprising and condemning the Soviet Union were issued by numerous national figures, including the prime minister, prominent members of the Labor Party, the archbishop of Canterbury, and in debates in the House of Commons. National newspapers from across the political spectrum followed events in Hungary closely and carried sympathetic accounts of the Hungarian uprising.Footnote 31 Public reactions in Britain were in common with the rest of Western Europe, which saw large-scale demonstrations and strikes in support of the Hungarians, included protests across university campuses and mass resignations of British Communist Party members. Outrage was also expressed by trade unions: for example, British dockers refused to handle any Soviet ships.Footnote 32
Consequently, when accounts reached Britain of Hungarian refugees crossing into Austria and being welcomed into makeshift camps, it did not take long for public outrage and sympathy to be translated into offers of practical support.Footnote 33 Very quickly the government announced that it would be admitting twenty-five hundred Hungarians “in the shortest possible time,” with the Ministry of Labour declaring that it was “prepared to allow the refugees to work anywhere where employment was available.”Footnote 34 Under pressure from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which coordinated the international resettlement effort in tandem with the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, this number was rapidly increased to just over twenty thousand, with the majority arriving in a few short weeks in November and December. Such an immediate and active response from governments and individuals alike stood in stark contrast to the reception of Jewish refugees in the 1930s.
Again, in contrast to the interwar period, what was most notable about the British reception effort of 1956/7 was that it involved action at all levels—from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and intergovernmental coordination to close cooperation in Britain between government departments, the voluntary British Council for Aid to Refugees (BCAR), and the uniformed civilian organizations.Footnote 35 The cohorts of refugees were selected and processed in Austria by a combined Home Office/BCAR delegation. Indeed, the BCAR became the central contact point for the combined government/voluntary relief program so that by January its Hungarian Department—funded through a government grant—had 143 members, including twenty-two interpreters, forty-nine seconded civil servants, sixty-two paid employees and a fluctuating number of voluntary workers.Footnote 36 This department managed the £2.5 million raised through the Lord Mayor's Fund and dealt with the flood of in-kind donations, receiving ten thousand offers of accommodation, clothing worth £650,000, and bedding and household goods from across the country.Footnote 37 The BCAR also acted as the coordinating body for the uniformed voluntary organizations who took up particular aspects of the reception and resettlement process.Footnote 38 The Women's Voluntary Service (WVS) collected, sorted, and distributed clothing, opening extra collection centers and holding sorting sessions across the country. In the first fortnight of its opening, the central sorting depot in London had an average of forty people working daily sorting nearly 100,000 garments. The WVS also organized and staffed reception hostels and resettlement camps, and checked and coordinated all the private offers of accommodation.Footnote 39 The YMCA, ran reception hostels and coordinated many of the language classes—including the thousands of volunteers who offered to teach formal and conversational English. Seconded Ministry of Labour civil servants worked within the BCAR “to help on the employment side” to ensure good cooperation with the local Ministry of Labour Offices.Footnote 40 While the National Assistance Board undertook “to supply certain items to the refugees, such as tools and industrial clothing,” the BCAR administered a separate fund for “compassionate grants and loans,” coming from donations they had received directly from the public.Footnote 41
Beneath these nationally coordinated, official activities, across the country individuals and organizations responded spontaneously to events. Taking the activities of one area as an example illustrates that offers of help and support came from across the social spectrum. In the Teesside area of north-east England, Stockton-on-Tees' Labour Town Council increased the mayor's salary by one hundred pounds, which he donated to the Hungarian Relief Fund, whereas the mayor of Middlesbrough opened an appeal, attracting sixty pounds in two days. Whitby Co-operative gave ten guineas while Thornaby Women's Conservative Association held a “small whist drive” raising three pounds, five shillings. Local notables and companies also wanted to be seen to be contributing: Colonel Pennyman of Ormesby Hall offered a nine-bedroom wing of their hall as temporary lodgings for five refugee families. In nearby Loftus, flats were provided rent free by Hope and Anchor Breweries, which “also provided free lighting and fuel until the Hungarians could find work and become self-sufficient.” Also in Loftus, the WVS provided support and individual local people donated household goods, including a bicycle for each employable refugee, owing to the town's “isolated location.”Footnote 42
Consequently, if we locate the atmosphere surrounding the Hungarians' entry to Britain within the language of charity and welfare, as a cohort the refugees were firmly positioned as “deserving.” Their reception was broadly conducted within an atmosphere of individual generosity and coordinated voluntary effort, supported and fostered by the actions and rhetoric of national government and the international community. A sense of their deservingness was reinforced by initial press accounts of their arrival. These commonly showed pictures of angelic children clutching donated toys, “making friends” with London policemen, or being swept up into the arms of Red Cross or WVS volunteers. Despite approximately two-thirds of Hungarian refugees being young men, it was “bewildered,” “small,” or “sick” women; children; and the elderly who were depicted.Footnote 43 That is, all the groups traditionally understood as belonging to the deserving poor. What is most striking is that although the international effort was being coordinated under the United Nations, the discourse in Britain did not center around the Hungarians rights under the 1951 Convention to find refuge. The language used by the press, the government, and reception workers was not one of obligation under international law, but rather of welcome based on the refugees' behavior at a particular moment in the Cold War.
If the refugees were positioned in discourse as deserving, then this picture was reinforced by the ways in which the British understood their own role in the process. For every mention that these “welcome guests” were “heroic freedom fighters” there was another situating Britain as a moral leader on the international stage coming to the rescue of the Hungarians as part of its “tradition” of welcoming “fighters for liberty.” Firsthand accounts from WVS volunteers give a detailed picture of their activities at the airports, way stations, and reception centers. And yet, they are also a frustrating and difficult collection of sources to use, couched in a brisk, matter-of-fact language that hid as much as it revealed. Volunteers were universally “cheerful,” “stalwart,” or “willing”—ever “working tirelessly” or with “cheerful efficiency,” and “creating order out of chaos” while “taking things in their stride.” Refugees were typically “grateful” to be “happily settled” in their new home, which had been furnished and stocked by local volunteers. Reports frequently focused on WVS members' ingenuity in sourcing items, working to a tight deadline, and remembering details such as knickknacks for the mantelpiece or a vase of flowers. As one WVS volunteer reported in a self-congratulatory manner: “Mr A used to say in his broken English, ‘WVS can find everything.’”Footnote 44 Equally, where there were “difficulties,” they were brushed over. “Disgruntled” refugees might sometimes have been “trying,” but with patience any “misunderstanding” was surmounted by a redoubtable WVS volunteer and the provision of a cup of tea. Similar language and attitudes were deployed in the WVS information sheets sent out to British householders who had offered accommodation to refugees. The “hosts” were assumed to be welcoming refugees into their “cheerful home.” Those who found they had any “misunderstandings” were enjoined to offer them “patience and sympathy” and to “make light” of any differences.Footnote 45
The WVS advice to householders did not suggest that the process of hosting would be trouble free: indeed the advice they gave was predicated on an expectation that cultural and language differences would create tensions. However, the emphasis in the literature was on remaining bright, reasonable, and calm in the “hope you will be rewarded by their appreciation.”Footnote 46 Overall, WVS reports and advice implied that the expected dynamic of interactions with refugees should consist of beneficent giving on the part of the British and gratifying appreciation on the part of the refugees. One volunteer at the end of the process reflected that her group had received a number of letters “expressing grateful thanks for our help,” and that “women have broken down, and … men have kissed our hands.” While admitting that there were “a number who have shown no gratitude at all,” the volunteer observed that these were “in the minority,” and overall, she declared, her experience was “very well worthwhile.”Footnote 47
This volunteer, as in many of the WVS reports, focused on the emotions and behavior of the refugees, particularly centering on the performance of gratitude. Her use of language is important, as it located her interaction with the refugees firmly within a tradition of charitable works in which the recipient knew their place, and not in a discourse of rights under international law and within the welfare state.
The positioning of refugees as charitable subjects by WVS volunteers sits within what Tony Kushner has termed a habit of “national self-congratulation.”Footnote 48 If the British were disposed to see themselves as cheerful dispensers of practical charity and common sense, then this was viewed as an extension of the nation's tradition of tolerance and hospitality. Newspaper accounts, statements in the House of Commons and the comments of voluntary organizations and individuals all repeated a mantra of “tolerance,” “welcome,” and “fair play,” which emphasized that the British government, its police force, rule of law, and everyday society operated on the basis of trust and openness.Footnote 49 Such self-congratulation was visible at all levels of the reception effort. Colonel Pennyman, who had opened one wing of his house, Ormesby Hall, for refugees was thanked by the local branch of the Red Cross for “the laudable way in which you have so worthily upheld the tradition of British hospitality.”Footnote 50 Similarly, WVS clothes sorting volunteers were praised for their “generosity” and for their efforts that exemplified the “goodwill of the human beings in the finest country in the world.”Footnote 51 More public was the special English-Hungarian phrase list issued by the Times Educational Supplement, which aimed to “give a few useful phrases and hints to English hosts who are unable to communicate with their guests.” Alongside basic words and expressions the list provided translations of phrases such as “you do not need papers to walk around,” “we have no secret police,” and “everybody here wants to help you. The English people are giving much money to help the Hungarians.”Footnote 52 Likewise, joint BCAR/WVS briefing material aimed at explaining British culture to the refugees, reinforced, wherever possible, the reasonableness of the English. Advice ranged from not haggling in shops to the importance of queuing, of politeness, and of tea as a social lubricant:
The English policeman is kindly, friendly and helpful. He is in the street in order to help the public … If more than three or four people wait at a [bus] stop, you must queue up. This is no great hardship in England, as the British are calm and disciplined … If someone is only two or three minutes late, he apologies … Just as important is “thank you.” You cannot say it too often. You thank the bus conductor for the bus ticket and the conductor thanks you for being allowed to give you one.Footnote 53
While the emphasis of both the press content and information packs was on Britain's reasonableness and tolerance, these assertions commonly came with a qualification. While present-day declarations of Britain's openness to refugees come with the caveat that ‘bogus asylum seekers’ will be removed, the Hungarians in 1956 were met with statements making it clear that their welcome was ultimately tied to appropriate conduct. This did not simply mean performing gratitude during face-to-face interactions with reception and resettlement staff. Embedded in the array of information made available to the Hungarians via translated leaflets, notices, and speaker events was an assumption that grateful Hungarians would accept British attitudes and standards of behavior and get on quietly with the process of assimilation. The ideal trajectory for refugees was exemplified in one WVS volunteer's account of a Hungarian family's arrival in her town, in which she emphasized the hard work of volunteers and the local mayor: together they ensured that accommodation and enough furniture, clothes, and bedding were found for the refugees. The family, for their part, responded appropriately, with the father starting work immediately, the son attending school, and the family continuing to visit the WVS to express their gratitude: “The small boy now writes English words … and always very politely says ‘Goodbye Aunties’ on leaving.”Footnote 54
This same emphasis on refugees accepting what was offered, learning polite English, and assimilating to British ways was tellingly present in the explanation of the “English national character” given by speakers at a tour of reception centers in February 1957. This suggested that “English” national characteristics could be best understood as stemming from an “island race” mentality:
(a) Their ancestors have come by sea, often in small boats. It helps seafarers to survive if they:
(i) Move deliberately and not rock the boat;
(ii) Not argue with the skipper in a storm;
(iii) Not try to turn back half-way through a voyage;
(iv) The skipper respects the legitimate wishes of the Company. Hence the tradition of Government by consent.
(b) Island position:
(i) Freedom from successful invasion for nearly 900 years; hence no fear of foreigners;
(ii) Traditional asylum for the persecuted; but never before of such large numbers at such short notice with so much enthusiasm. It is for you to justify the welcome, for otherwise those coming after you may find it more difficult later.
(c) Climate:
(i) Frequent change discourages any dogmatic assertion concerning future events and fosters a practical approach to problems as they arise;
(ii) Lack of very clearly defined natural seasons of the year compensated by more rigid adherence to various seasons of the calendar. The turn of everything and everybody comes round in due course; be not impatient, everybody's turn will come.Footnote 55
This offered a profoundly paternalistic account of “English” identity that rejected the possibility of class conflict or differences in class interest, and that brushed aside any possibility of unfair treatment or legitimate grounds for complaint. “English” society in this formulation was fair, apolitical, and consensually governed; and those who waited their turn, avoided dogmatism, accepted authority, and assimilated would, in time, have their reasonable needs met. This narrative served to position any individual who had difficulties or complaints as impatient and demanding more than their due. Moreover, the piece was explicit in linking a tradition of tolerance with the refugees' good behavior, reminding them that it “is for you to justify the welcome.” That is, refugees' presence was not articulated as a right, but rather a privilege granted to them (and to future refugees), which needed to be continually earned through performing particular behaviors. Thus even this most deserving of refugee cohorts might, through their behavior, tip into the category of undeserving.
Similar dynamics were at play in the broadcast of the BBC's influential The Brains Trust program, which was devoted entirely to the arrival of the Hungarians.Footnote 56 It was presented by a panel of British and Hungarian intellectuals and individuals involved in the reception process who, in their different ways, emphasized the need for refugees to demonstrate their gratitude to the British public. This could be done, the panelists suggested, through everyday courtesies, making efforts to assimilate, and leaving behind the assumptions and practices of their native country. Throughout, contributors emphasized the idea of Britain as a fair, open, and generous society, setting it in contrast to the authoritarianism of the Hungary state. The BBC's Hungarian broadcaster László Szabó stressed the importance of refugees leaving behind the Hungarian mindset of perpetually seeking ways of getting “the better of authorities who exploited, cheated, misled and persecuted the people.” This he contrasted with Britain where there was “mutual trust between the authorities and the ordinary Englishman,” and where “dealings are conducted with good faith.” Joining the discussion, the Hungarian journalist and novelist Paul Tabori stressed the importance of learning English and assimilating quickly, emphasizing that this would be eased by the tolerance and friendliness of the general population:
The Englishman does not laugh at the foreigner who speaks the language badly. He helps the foreigner, he does not make fun of him … On the contrary, he regards almost with gratitude and joy the man who tries to learn his not at all easy language.Footnote 57
Taken together, at the household level and nationally the advice and media coverage aimed at the Hungarians was couched in the language of host and guest. Just as the fact that the hosts might be paid board and lodging at standard National Assistance Board rates was glossed over, so too was the fact that the refugees were being resettled under a United Nations program legitimized under the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees.Footnote 58 The language of reception centered on the promotion of a spectrum of expected behavior that began with picking up social cues and learning English and moved on to finding employment, settling down happily, and assimilating. Beneath expressions of welcome we can see certain processes at work that located the position of Britain as the host nation and the new arrivals as guests around discourses of behavior rather than rights.
RECEPTION, RESETTLEMENT, AND RIOTING
How did this discourse of conditional welcome and the climate of high expectations translate into everyday experience in the reception and resettlement process? The official report produced at the end of the resettlement program made explicit the weight of responsibility placed on refugees themselves to ensure that the process went as smoothly and efficiently as possible. As the writers pointed out, “[i]t might have been expected that the Hungarians would be particularly amenable, being filled with gratitude for the help and generosity of the British people.” However, the report went on to observe how, having been feted as heroes, they “came to Britain expecting far too much.” It was also, the report admitted, because they came “with inflated ideas of Western prosperity (perhaps Western propaganda was to blame for this), not really expecting to have to work for a living.” And finally, and most unwelcome for the British government and public, the reality was that most of the refugees did not want to come to Britain at all, but rather to North America where there was already an extensive Hungarian diaspora.Footnote 59
It did not take long for the initial wave of enthusiasm for the Hungarians to be blunted by the reality of meeting the “freedom fighters.” As one WVS worker observed, “[w]hen we began this work, we prepared to receive twenty thousand heroes, but we soon discovered that we had to deal with ordinary human beings, made up of all types, good, bad and indifferent.’’Footnote 60 Moreover, the behaviors exhibited by some of the refugees were decidedly unattractive. Fueled by fears of being infiltrated by Hungarian government spies, many hostels operated with an atmosphere of mutual mistrust. And in sharp distinction to the enthusiasm of the British volunteers, often the refugees “would not help with the running of the camp, even for their own benefit” unless they were paid.Footnote 61
Colonel Pennyman soon found that he was having to deal with “difficult” families rather than “heroes.” The first twenty residents arrived at Ormesby Hall at the beginning of January 1957, with the refugees finding a warm reception within the house and the wider community. The house log book recorded that for the first two weeks of their stay, “people keep dropping in with presents and offers of hospitality.” But by the beginning of February Colonel Pennyman had made the decision to close his house to Hungarians, having found them “difficult and uncooperative.” His accounts record the “plain thievery” of fifty blankets, an “extravagant” use of gas and the loss of fifty teacups and of over £16 worth of cutlery.Footnote 62 This was not what the press reports had led him to expect, even if taking everyday household items was entirely understandable behavior from people who had lost everything and were trying to reconstruct both their households and their lives.
Possibly most damningly as far as Colonel Pennyman was concerned, the refugees he was housing were not interested in finding work, learning English, or settling down. Instead, all the families wanted to immigrate to the United States, Australia, or South Africa, where they already had relatives. A speech he delivered to the refugees expressed his expectations and disappointments with their behavior. He pointed out that “the English people subscribed 2 million” for their relief but they would “not subscribe any more to keep you in idleness while they are working … Nothing is worse for people than idleness, mental and bodily. People who don't work deteriorate.”Footnote 63
The foot-dragging, recalcitrance, and petty theft might have looked like surly noncooperation from the colonel's perspective, yet these are all recognized responses of those trying to assert themselves from positions in which they have little power.Footnote 64 We get an insight into the motivations and experiences of individual Hungarians in the small amount of surviving correspondence from the refugees themselves and their relatives. One resident of Ormesby Hall resorted to writing to a relative who was already living in America, in order to communicate her position to the colonel. The relative then wrote to the colonel in English explaining that her sister had been sent to England through a “misunderstanding,” as she herself was expecting her in America where there was “everything ready for them: home and work alike.” The relative went on, “do not think that they do not like to work; it is only that they do not want to tie themselves down.” Indeed, rather than being a “problem family,” in fact the refugee family had farmed two hundred acres in Hungary and struggled with their reduced status and the feeling that they were currently a “burden on others.”Footnote 65 What appeared as ingratitude to the colonel on closer inspection becomes a reasonable explanation of a family trying to manage significantly reduced circumstances within a context of geopolitical events, bureaucratic chaos, and almost complete powerlessness. Another family, writing to the Pennyman's from Australia the following year, asked the colonel to forgive their “impatience” during their stay with him.Footnote 66 Distance and time allowed the family members to reconfigure their experience of flight and the anxiety and uncertainty experienced during their time at Ormesby Hall, and to articulate their gratitude, albeit retrospectively.
Ormesby Hall's experience was a microcosm of a far larger phenomenon. British public opinion was “surprised and disappointed” to find that most of the Hungarian refugees “who had been welcomed with so much love” did not wish to stay in Britain.Footnote 67 As early as December 1956 it became clear that many of the first batch of Hungarians—largely, it seems, through confusion and lack of communication at the camps in Austria—had thought that Britain was simply a step on the way to immigration to America or Canada. Often identified as “restlessness” by those working with them, the legitimate desire of the refugees to join the large Hungarian communities in North America was typically interpreted as a slight to the generosity of the British government and people.Footnote 68 One WVS volunteer reported that she found the refugees “on the whole very impatient,” expecting all “their requests to be granted at once,” including the desire to be transferred to America.Footnote 69 East Riding's county welfare officer spoke for many when he admitted that he was looking forward to their departure:
I hoping that within the next week or so they will be on their way to Canada. Although we did everything possible to try to make the stay in the East Riding of the Hungarians as happy as possible, my experience so far has rather hardened my heart a little.Footnote 70
A problem with constructing a discourse of refugee reception around enthusiastic welcome rather than around rights, was how to deal with a rejection of that welcome. Public enthusiasm and voluntary effort could only be sustained within an atmosphere of gratitude, and without it the welcome easily turned sour. And indeed, the initial wave of reception was followed by a period of months when Hungarians waited in resettlement camps and hostels to be found employment and housing, and tensions between the expectations of resettlement workers and the behavior of refugees—both as individuals and as a group—were expressed in a range of ways. Sometimes this meant categorizing some refugees as more genuine than others: “The present refugees are different [to the previous cohort in the camp]. One feels that they have not the spirit of the others—the real fighters for freedom.”Footnote 71 More common was a turbid taxonomy, which borrowed freely from established tropes within the imagery of welfare and colonial categorizations. This made distinctions between different national groups, between ordinary or good types, and rough, difficult or even bad types. The manager of Broomlee Camp, for example, categorized fifteen of the sixteen unmarried women under his care as “of a feckless, low-grade type” who refused to take employment. These he contrasted with the married women, who were “mainly of the decent working class” and who “gather their husbands and children into available corners and attempt to organise home-life in a heart-moving, pathetic sort of way.”Footnote 72 Broomlee's medical officer felt qualified to make even more sweeping statements, seeing the refugees as “less noisy than the Dutch, more tractable from the French, friendly, uncomplaining, and grateful for little services.” As were many who worked with refugees in camps, however, he was concerned that inactivity and institutionalization could adversely affect even respectable refugees, noting among camp residents “signs of deterioration. A mere handful of people appear for breakfast. Many appear unshaven and in pyjamas at lunch time.”Footnote 73
The largest camp—Thorneypits, in Wiltshire—held two thousand refugees at its peak, but by the summer of 1957 this had been reduced to around eight hundred. This camp, which suffered throughout its existence from inadequate staffing and a lack of interpreters, became notorious among resettlement staff and volunteers. By June it had become the focus of a joint WVS/BCAR investigation. While its purpose was to explore ways to improve interagency cooperation, in fact the observations in the report clustered around the issue of “difficult” refugees and “moral deterioration,” which was evinced by the large numbers of non-married cohabiting couples and a marked reluctance of many residents to seek work.Footnote 74 The inspector visiting the camp recorded that in one hut “fifteen refugees were found in bed in the afternoon,” behavior that was compounded by the fact that none had registered for work and in fact had “stated categorically that they had no intention of seeking employment.”Footnote 75
Paying close attention to the behavior of the refugees chimes with accounts by “home advisers,” social workers, and other welfare professionals in the same period, whose interventions with officially defined problem families revolved around preoccupations with standards of housework, personal habits, and evidence of job seeking.Footnote 76 In common with a reductionist approach to the range of difficulties faced by those living in poverty, comments from the WVS representative, whose task it was to try and place Hungarians in work, mobilized a familiar narrative that located difficulties in refugees' behavior rather than within any wider understanding of the structural barriers they faced. Categorizing refugees who had refused to work or who had been sent back from a placement as “rolling stone[s]—difficult to help,” the camp's WVS coordinator singled out young unmarried women as the worst offenders, describing most as “either pregnant” or “already mothers,” the WVS worker did not accept childbearing as a genuine reason for refusing employment. Rather, she complained that “all refuse to take a step which entails them being separate from the herd,” a herd that she described as consisting of “toughs and trouble-makers.” On top of this, she depicted the camp inhabitants' unwillingness to attend English classes regularly as “resistance … symptomatic of a general mental attitude.”Footnote 77
In the reports, assertiveness and anti-authoritarianism, unwillingness to seek work, extramarital pregnancies, and nonengagement in language classes were bundled into one to create the same kind of picture as was seen to make up the “problem family” and other elements of Britain's recalcitrant poor. Taking a different perspective, an unwillingness to be separated “from the herd” might be interpreted as an attempt by those who have recently experienced life-changing and traumatic events to seek the security and support of others in the same position. Whereas later cohorts of refugees to Britain were dealt with by welfare and support workers who understood that trauma was a common part of the refugee experience, refugees in 1956 who failed to manage their experiences in a socially approved fashion were blamed for their response.Footnote 78
Not all attempts to challenge camp conditions and expectations were dismissed out of hand. Distinguishing between bad and good types meant grievances of the latter needed to be treated with seriousness. At the isolated Belmont camp near Forfar in Scotland residents complained about “the unsuitability of the food, coldness of the huts, washing accommodation and lack of privacy for married couples.”Footnote 79 The refugees succeeded in gaining press attention for their situation and sent a delegation to London to make their case to the BCAR, where they “created a favourable impression.”Footnote 80 Despite the fact that the complaints presented by the refugees included apparently superficial issues—the matter of the lack of hairdressing facilities on or near the camp was raised—the BCAR and authorities responded by making attempts to improve camp facilities and speed up the emigration process.Footnote 81
Such a sympathetic response to refugee protests was an exception, and in part can be attributed to the “good impression” the refugees made. The camp delegates had been at pains to stress that they were not troublemakers, and had travelled to London to rebut some of the press claims and show that they were simply respectable refugees wanting adequate accommodation and clear information. That they appealed to London was also important: those staffing the BCAR office in Bloomsbury, although constantly overstretched, largely maintained a wider perspective on the issues raised by the presence of the refugees. Those working in the reception centers themselves had a tendency to become ground down by the day-to-day strains of managing the resettlement process. Indeed, we can see a similar division in approach between national and grassroots levels of the WVS. National-level advice sought to explain that cohabiting without marriage and girls of fourteen or fifteen establishing such relationships was far more common and socially acceptable in Hungary than in Britain.Footnote 82 However, this more open response to cultural difference did not feed through to volunteers on the ground, where it is clear that many who volunteered and worked in the camps, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, found much of the experience disillusioning.Footnote 83
Notwithstanding the anxieties of those involved in the resettlement process, the time in which the bulk of refugees were resident in hostels was in fact short, so that by September 1957 only around two thousand of the original 21,000 remained in a camp or reception hostel. The main thrust of the resettlement effort was focused on moving the refugees out of hostels and into permanent accommodation and work as soon as possible. This strategy was informed by the postwar experience that had seen Polish and other refugees languishing in hostels for years; and, given public enthusiasm for the Hungarians and a state of near full employment nationally, this goal was not considered problematic. However, being housed or, for single men, living in an employment hostel, did not necessarily equate to being settled, nor to being welcomed by the local population. Within weeks of the first Hungarians' being housed, stories circulated in the press of hostel managers' reports of bad behavior. Usually involving young men, reports included drunkenness, theft of bicycles and motor bikes, fights, and downing tools at work. Chiming with contemporary anxieties over juvenile delinquents and youth culture, the “romantic heroes” and “indomitable giants” were transformed in the press into “loud mouthed ruffians, a bunch of lazy, grabbing, Central European teddy boys.”Footnote 84
If Thorneypits was known by those working with the refugees as housing bad types, the hostel at Haverton Hill in County Durham gained national notoriety following rioting between hostel residents and the surrounding population. Although most of the young male refugees had found “good employment” in the local steel and chemical industries, in the opinion of the authorities, the hostel housed a number of “bad characters with propensities for trouble making quite out of proportion to their numbers.” Residents were accused of a range of unlawful and antisocial acts, including drunkenness, hooliganism, assault, and malicious damage.Footnote 85 This culminated in a full-scale riot in June 1957 that saw serious and sustained disturbances over a succession of nights involving groups of up to one hundred Hungarians armed with fence posts—“some bearing four inch nails,” metal spikes, stones, lumps of clay, and an unlit Molotov cocktail. Tensions were such that the police and fire brigade surrounded the hostel in force for three nights until the crowds dissipated.Footnote 86
Although accepting the role that poor standards of accommodation and amenities offered in the hostel had in fomenting the riot, government officials centered their attention on the residents' “bad characters.” Consequently the main tactic for managing the situation was to stamp out the unruly behavior at its source. This meant the police “taking a firmer line” and working closely with hostel staff “to bring prosecutions for assault or for causing malicious damage … with the least possible delay.”Footnote 87 And yet, when we look more closely at the reasons behind the rioting and unrest, such a response barely touched the surface of the issue. Newspaper reports of the event noted the role of the “British element” in sustaining the disturbance, even asserting the “Hungarians showed a disinclination to brawl.” The final night of the disturbances in fact saw the refugees corralled in the hostel, surrounded by a hostile crowd of up to six hundred local people and dependent on the police for protection.Footnote 88
Evidence suggests that there were two key underlying issues that caused the escalation of tensions. The first was personal relationships, with the preceding weeks having seen a number of fights between young local men and hostel residents—with the former accusing the latter of taking “their” women. Indeed, another local camp had recently been threatened with an arson attack, and on the first night of rioting the injury of a female bystander was one of the factors inflaming the situation.Footnote 89 More than this, however, was the issue of employment. The National Coal Board had used the Hungarian crisis to recruit what it hoped would be ten thousand new miners to deal with a labor shortage in the industry. While supported by its national executive, this policy did not find favor in the localities. At the local level unions were highly resistant to working with the Hungarians and across the country local branches publically came out against the National Coal Board's attempts to employ refugees underground.Footnote 90 Locally, in Durham and North Riding, the mining and steelworker unions had resisted bringing in refugees to their industries, arguing that the Hungarians would take away jobs, and that the language barrier would create an unsafe working environment.Footnote 91 Resistance across the country was such that by the end of May 1957 only 221 Hungarians had found employment below ground, with a further 115 working in ancillary roles within the coal industry.Footnote 92
All this strongly suggests that the rioting and behavior of the Hungarians demands to be placed within the context of the ways in which refugees were actually received within local communities. Beneath the initial outpouring of support for them, the reality was far more sobering. Shorn of their heroic status, living within unfamiliar communities, sometimes exhibiting antisocial behavior, competing for work and unsettling established cultures of socializing, the Hungarians could easily be positioned as threatening outsiders. The hostility displayed toward the “unwelcome guests” of Stockton revealed the genuine difficulties involved in absorbing a distinctive cohort of strangers. It was equally revealing of the shallowness of the narrative of British tolerance and welcome.
The inclination of the National Assistance Board and the BCAR to focus blame on the refugees for the rioting was entirely in keeping with their general approach to displays of anti-authoritarian behavior within the resettlement and welfare services more broadly. The difficulty that the camp authorities faced at Haverton Hill and beyond was that, unlike the National Assistance Board, which had powers to remove benefits from uncooperative claimants, the BCAR had few sanctions at its disposal. Refugees were free to come and go from the camps; they could not be compelled to accept an offer of work or accommodation; and their expenses were paid on a per capita basis, which was in no way tied to personal behavior. One of the few measures that the authorities could, and in a few cases did, take, was that of withholding the small weekly allowance that was granted so that the refugees could buy personal items. Nevertheless the issue of punishments for those designated as troublesome refugees was discussed within government and the BCAR. Proposed solutions included isolating them in a purpose-run hostel or dispersing troublemakers across locations to dilute their presence. In a very small number of cases, some married men at Thorneypits who consistently refused to work or pay rent were taken through eviction proceedings.Footnote 93 Aside from this the only other measure against them was rather weak: “they might be informed that their refusal to undertake work would count against them when arrangements were being made for the transfer of persons to America, Canada etc.”Footnote 94 Crucially for the refugees, while their legitimacy in Britain and access to support was couched in a language of gratitude and deservingness, in reality their position was firmly protected by a structure of legal rights and not dependent on the shifting whims of a nation.
CONCLUSION
Hungarians—entering Britain during the Cold War and at a moment when the British government was eager to direct attention away from Suez—might well stand alongside the Belgians as Britain's preeminent “deserving” refugees of the twentieth century. Plucky, independent spirited, standing up to the iron-grip of Moscow, they were widely welcomed as heroes and a huge cross section of British society responded to their plight with sympathy. Frank and Reinisch have observed that the popular sympathy for the Hungarians was fed by an international community eager to demonstrate how far it had come from the dark days of the 1930s. These predominantly young, male, able-bodied, and anti-Communist Hungarians were the first test of the post-1951 international refugee regime, and they were “almost heaven sent fitting the spirit if not the letter of the 1951 conception of the refugee like a glove.”Footnote 95 And for the British and French governments in particular, the timing of the crisis was even more welcome, as it provided a legitimate diversion of popular attention from their activities in Suez and allowed both countries to reestablish themselves in the eyes of the international community.Footnote 96
The historic moment of the Hungarians' arrival is important for other reasons, as the belief in a universalist welfare state was at its high point in the 1950s. For the arriving Hungarians this was reinforced by the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, which gave them broadly the same social security and welfare rights as nationals. In this sense the Hungarian refugee crisis acts as an important correction to the tendency to trace an arc of uninterrupted hostility toward aliens and refugees in modern Britain. And yet despite this welcome and the historical context of their arrival, what is striking is the failure of the discourse of rights to permeate the rhetoric that surrounded their reception. Instead, well-worn tropes of the generosity of the British and its traditions of tolerance and hospitality were deployed consistently at national and local levels.
And so, as entry to Britain was understood as stemming from a tradition of British generosity and not as a right governed by international agreements, then it was couched as a privilege and not something to be taken for granted. Hence it was almost axiomatic that the required response of incoming refugees was gratitude. Press accounts and the writing of WVS workers and others repeatedly reinforced the tropes of the beneficent British volunteer and grateful refugee, eager to learn English and settle down with minimum fuss and visibility. Moreover, Hungarians were positioned—collectively and individually—as being responsible for ensuring that the “trust” that Britain had placed in them was not abused.
The partial and conditional nature of acceptance was revealed when Britain was faced with perceived ingratitude. The demands of five thousand Hungarians to be allowed to immigrate to Canada, as well as the behavior of significant numbers of individuals—“restless,” rioting, criminal, or unemployed teenage boys and young men; unmarried pregnant women; “demanding” camp residents refusing to get out of bed or learn English—all challenged a simplistic picture of heroic, grateful refugees. And so in order to maintain belief in the “good” Hungarian, those who failed to fit into this stereotype needed to be sectioned off from the rest, sometimes physically through relocation, but most often conceptually and linguistically. The language and behavior of those working in the reception centers and camps hence quickly slipped into well-established patterns of language and thinking coming from the lexicon of charity and welfare work with the poor: there were good types who conformed and bad or rough types who did not. As well as dismissing the complaints of those who were seen as undeserving through belittling them as grumbling, others who protested at their treatment in reception centers were dismissed as troublemakers.
Such linguistic sleights of hand were reinforced by voluntary workers positioning themselves as fair-minded, calm, and cheerful, willing to smooth feathers with a cup of tea and common sense. Dismissal or the downplaying of refugees' grievances by British camp staff and volunteers demonstrated a paternalism that removed the legitimacy of complaints from refugees. At the same time, constructing a narrative in which everything was resolved through cheerfulness and tea reinforced the superior status of individual volunteers and of British society. There were occasional voices that reasoned that the refugees had been through many difficult, disorientating experiences and therefore would need more time, understanding, and support than was being offered; but overall these voices are only heard on the periphery.Footnote 97 In general, as with the undeserving poor, refugees' problems were individualized and located in their own behavior rather than their structural position. And yet the example of the riots in Stockton reveals the difficulties faced by refugees once they were placed in a local community that had theoretically welcomed them. As initial widespread enthusiasm surrounding the reception of Hungarian refugees became diluted and complicated by everyday interactions, community and workplace xenophobia could come to the fore. Such responses act as a salutatory reminder that, notwithstanding the importance of New Commonwealth migration to Britain in this period, difference was not always automatically refracted by “race” or empire, nor by a specific immigration status.
Crucially for the Hungarians, the structure of the welfare state and refugees' legal position in this period meant that despite the tendency to link ideas of deservingness to behavior, such rhetoric was not strong enough to undermine their absolute right to welfare and minimum standards of treatment. However, the persistence of the discourse of the (un)deserving poor and the importance of behavior within this had both immediate consequences and a significant legacy. Just as the “undeserving” poor were increasingly stigmatized and marginalized over the remainder of the twentieth century and enjoined to be grateful for what they received, so too did subsequent cohorts of refugees to the United Kingdom, arriving in less propitious times, face ever greater pressure to be silent unless they were expressing their gratitude.
