Eleanor Rathbone and the refugees
A timely post
I did think that I had finished writing about the indomitable Eleanor Rathbone, and I was not going to post on Substack again until next week, but events this week have brought her back to mind, and in particular her crusade on behalf of refugees from war-torn Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. When she died suddenly in January 1946 her sister said that she had been worn out by her struggles to get the British Government to do more for the Jewish people caught in Hitler’s hideous web - and perhaps her death was hastened by grief that so little had been achieved. After her travels to eastern Europe in 1937 she began to campaign frantically for action, and in December 1938 she and three other MPs formed a Parliamentary Committee on Refugees, which sounded official but was actually voluntary, run out of her London home and funded from her own resources. During the latter years of the war, friends commented that she wore a haunted, tragic look.
This week my daughter, a political journalist, wrote a piece about her grandfather who entered this country through the Kindertransport.
It was her plea for us all to remember a nicer, more welcoming Britain. But of course, that is only half the story. There is a reason it was called the ‘Kindertransport’, and not the ‘British Scheme to Rescue Children’. It was not organised by the Government, although they supported and publicised it, but primarily by the existing Jewish community with help from the Quakers. Numbers were not limited, but all children brought in had to have a sponsoring family and adequate funding. A great deal of paperwork. In all, ten thousand unaccompanied children arrived between November 1938 (after the horror of Kristallnacht) and the outbreak of war, an extraordinary achievement, and a testimony to the bravery, and desperation, of the parents who sent them away. Most of them never saw these parents again.
Zoe’s grandfather was one of the last to arrive - and when, aged 13 or 14, he got to Liverpool Street Station, there was no family to meet him and he was put in the stationmaster’s office - until a Rabbi arrived who was running a hostel in Hampstead for Jewish boys. Not everyone was welcoming to these children. His older sisters had arrived a couple of years earlier - they were working in service in families (Jewish families?) in Glasgow and Manchester, but were not having a happy time. When at the end of the War, one of them tried to travel to Palestine, the British interned her in a camp in Cyprus.
My three children are very proud of their Jewish surname and their grandfather’s story - my eldest married daughter has kept it and passed it on to her baby daughter, even though their grandfather abandoned his faith when he came to this country, and became one of the fiercest critics of Israel’s foreign policies, as early as the 1980s. And it never occurred to me that they should be worried about their name or heritage. But something very nasty is happening in Britain now.
‘Dorset police investigate antisemitic hate crimes including swastika graffiti’ : The Guardian today.
Two years ago we were lucky enough to buy ourselves a beautiful second home, a flat in a smart newly-built block on the East Cliff in Bournemouth. The view from my bedroom window stretches from The Needles on the Isle of Wight to Old Harry Rocks at Swanage. England at its most impressive. We soon discovered, to some surprise, that our block was in the midst of one of the largest Orthodox Jewish communities in England - or at least, where many Orthodox Jews choose to congregate for their August family holidays. The house next door contains a Mikvah, or ritual cleansing bath, and it is not unusual to see men wearing kippahs and taliths emerging at all hours carrying spongebags and towels. Down below us on the sand the large family gatherings merge into the multi-ethnic experience that is Bournemouth beach in the height of summer. We love it. At night when I give Ollie his last walk, the street outside usually has small groups of men in splendid hats standing on corners, very downtown Tel Aviv, while their sons (sadly, not their daughters) rush by on electric scooters. But last week, on our road, somebody took a potshot at one of these boys with an air rifle. Amazingly, very little physical damage done. However, combine it with the recent appearance of swastikas daubed on walls and bus shelters, and the tone becomes so much darker.
Bournemouth is already struggling with weekly protests outside a hotel housing refugees. The heath fires blazing on the hills above Studland seem a metaphor for temperatures rising after such a long, such a hot summer.
I have no answers to any of this, just a terrible sadness and fear. Rathbone’s Committee, established in 1938, had this remit: ‘To influence the Government and public opinion in favour of a generous yet carefully safeguarded refugee policy, including large-scale schemes of permanent settlement inside or outside of Empire; also, since 1000s of refugees would perish while awaiting such schemes – temporary reception homes in this country where refugees can be maintained, sorted out and eventually migrated, except in cases where there abilities can be profitably utilised here without injustice to our own workers.’ In 1943, she wrote:
If peace came tomorrow, we could not forget the millions for whom it would come too late, nor wash our hands of the stain of blood…[with] greater foresight,and courage there would have been no war, and if our policy towards refugees had been less miserably cautious, selfish and unimaginative, 1,000s of those already dead or in danger of death, might now be free and happy, contributing from their rich store of talent and industry to the welfare of mankind.
Where are our Eleanor Rathbones today, proudly standing up in Parliament week after week as she did, making the case, asking the questions, embarrassing the authorities. Sorely missed.
Someone today commented on Zoe’s piece:
‘I can’t comment on your daughter’s excellent piece, as I’m not a paid subscriber, but I have one slight minor, but, probably major in consequence quibble with her, when she says ‘this is not who we are, this is what we have become’. I believe this is, sadly, exactly what we are, but we must always resist our condition and work to become something else, something better, just as we did when when we opened our arms to the Kindertransport.’
I will let him have the last word.
Very moving piece.Those images alone simply devastating in their vicious recreation of a past we thought surely could never re emerge.
My grandmother from a Polish Jewish background came after the war to London. I heard it was very difficult to allow any sort of refugees in but she was lucky.
I’m sorry you are experiencing the swastikas near your home. I think it is possibly misguided frustration towards the Israeli government for the genocide but it’s some people have harboured an anti Jewish sentiment from years before.
Dialogue is key between all communities. Sharing food, sharing spaces to understand one another.