Huguenots and the South African Cape

With the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, French Protestants were stripped of any protect-ion they may have had in Louis XIV’s France. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the exiles' large communities in England, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland, but then people started talking about the small Hug­ue­n­ot diaspora in South Africa. I searched the other blogs and found a little eg The du Preez Family blog in Huguenot Exodus (1688 & 1689)

Cape of Good Hope and the Western Cape region

In fact the Dutch East India Co./VOC, under Jan van Riebeeck, had already made a permanent Calvin­ist settlement on the Cape of Good Hope. He arrived with five ships in Cape Town bay in 1652. Cape Town’s settlement was a predominantly as an interim port for VOC ships, en route from Europe to Asia. In order to fully stock Cape Town’s port, the VOC admitted good Protestant citizens who could settle as farmers and provide the food and drinks. As early as 1671 the first Huguenot refugee, Francois Villion/Viljoen, arrived at the Cape.

Clearly the Dutch East India Co. encouraged the Huguenots to emigrate to the Cape because they shared Calvinist beliefs. But they also recognised that most of the Huguenots were exper­ien­ced farmers from parts of France that specialised in wine growing. After their arrival at the Cape, the immigrants were expected to make a living from agric­ulture, business or by practicing a trade. If they decided to farm, they were allotted farm land without cost. As soon as a few families settled, they laid the first stone of the Cape’s Dutch Reformed chur­ch 1678, built and later renovated in the typical Cape Dutch style.

An agent was sent out from the Cape Colony in 1685 to attract more settlers and new immigrants began to arrive eg in 1686 the brothers Guill­aume and Francois du Toit reached South Africa. Timing was everything! With the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, many a French Protestant was looking around for a home. By 1688-9 the 201 Hug­uenot families who arrived were just large enough to leave an impression on the young settlement at the Cape, only 70 km outside Cape Town.

Franschhoek Valley, site of Huguenot vineyards

In 1688, French Huguenot refugees were given land by the Dutch government in a valley called Olifantshoek/Elephant's Corner. The name of the area soon changed to Le Quartier Francais and then to Fransch­hoek Valley. That year a group of c200 French Huguenots arrived from La Motte d'Aigues in Provence and other areas. As described by fellow blogger A Post-Modern Protestant in Paris in his post South African Wine a French Protestant Heritage, they specialised in vineyards.

When the de Villiers brothers arrived at the Cape with a reputation for viticulture, and in time, the brothers planted many thousands of vines at the Cape. They moved from the original farm that they had been granted, La Rochelle, to finally settle on individual land grants near Fransch­hoek in places they named Bourgogne, Champagne and La Brie. Lucky were the passing ships that stopped in Cape Town.

Huguenot Monument in Franschoek, 1945

Individual arrivals contin­ued on and off until the end of Company-supported emig­rat­ion in 1707. Undoubtedly these French Huguenot exiles created fertile valleys out of the tough land they had been given in the Cape. But the white pop­ulation in the Cape was small, so they soon married their children and grandchildren into the fam­ilies of other colon­ists. And it didn’t help that the Dutch East India Co. insisted that schools taught exclusively in Dutch. By the mid C18th the Huguenots ceased to maint­ain a distinct ident­ity. Within two generations even their home language largely disappeared.

What is left now? Some important surnames, today mostly Afrik­aans speaking, remain in families who had French-speaking great great grandparents eg Cronje/Cronier, de Klerk/Le Clercq, de Villiers, Terre-blanche and Viljoen/Villion. Plus a number of wine farms in the Western Cape still have French names, as do their products.

La Motte winery, named for the settlers' French home.

Then there is a large monu­ment, Huguenot Monument in Franschoek 1945, commemorating the arr­iv­al of the Huguenots in South Africa, that wasn’t inaug­urated by Dr AJ van der Merwe until 1948. The cen­tral fe­m­ale figure stood for religious free­dom, denied the Huguenots in their beloved France but offered by Dutch South Africa. A useful analysis of the Huguenot Monument can be found in the Franschhoek blog. Finally the Memorial Museum of Franschhoek next to the monument celebrates the his­tory of the French Huguenots who settled in the Cape.

WW1: from national heroines to national embarrassments

By 1914 a quarter of all British women were already in paid jobs. Yet it was only during WW1 British women were called on, by necessity, to do more work and to take on newer roles that were beyond traditional community expectations. Once the men left home and the family received only the breadwinner’s poor army pay, most women had to seek paid employment for the sake of their families’ survival. Or because they wanted to Do Their Bit in a desperate time for the nation. Or because they wanted to leave their parents’ home and get involved in exciting employment possibilities.

Poster, VADs were urgently needed

Government encouragement made the workplace accessible, gave the industrial environment respectability and encouraged a choice of industrial employment. In Britain nursing services like the Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps had started before WWI. But from 1914 on, recruitment for the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VADs), in particular, intensified. Posters across Britain stated that ward assistants, ambulance drivers and kitchen staff were urgently needed. These brave women were allowed in the front line within one year of the war starting (1915) and increased their skills so quickly that professional staff started to admire the VADs' contribution.

Poster, WRAF needed women's particiation

While older or less confident women were often involved in voluntary work eg serving at the Red Cross, the majority of young women took over real jobs that men had done. They worked in munitions factories, offices and large hangars used to build aircraft. Did the unions, who had fought for male workers’ rights against brutal capitalist opposition for decades, support women workers as vigorously? It would seem not, especially in the important highly skilled industries like engineering and ship building. Perhaps the unions already predicted the end of WW1 and wanted to ensure that every soldier would have a job to go back to. In any case, where unions did allow women to take over skilled jobs, the employers had to agree to sack the women as soon as the war ended.

Poster, WAAC, every fit woman can release a fit man

The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), which started in July 1917 with Dr Mona Chalmers-Watson as the Chief Controller, was the star attraction for women. Recruitment posters for the WAAC proclaimed that “Every fit woman can release a fit man”, and not surprisingly, endless numbers of women responded. But even life in the WAAC was not a doddle. In the lower ranks, unskilled work was paid at the rate of 24 shillings a week while shorthand typists could earn twice as much. Although uniforms and accommodation were free, money was deducted each week for food.

There was no work that women in the WAAC and other sites could not do. The Imperial War Museum has photos that show women doing heavy, dirty or even heart breaking work eg members of the WAAC's tending the graves of Allied soldiers. When compulsory male conscription was introduced in 1916, a competent female workforce became even more important. Restrictions that had denied access to particular trades were forgotten for the rest of the war, and women did work they were previously thought incapable of eg coal hauling and ship building.

 WAAC's tending the graves of Allied soldiers in Abbeville in France, 1918. Imperial War Museum photo

In Canada, recruiting of women intensified. Women trained to be munitions workers so that they were ready to move into factories; Canada could answer the call to nationalism with her Dependables.  Thousands of other women were helping with agricultural work via Canada’s Women’s Land Army. “The world with difficulty accustomed itself to the thought of women facing real danger and doing arduous work”. No occupation, including quarrying and mining, should be considered closed to women as “every one knows that the Canadian woman is a real Dependable!” She served her nation and the British Empire.

In Australia WW1 was a genuinely liberating experience for many women;  it made them feel useful as citizens and it also gave them the freedom and the wages only men had enjoyed so far.  Women joined the workforce between 1914-18 in Government departments, public transport, the post office, as clerks in business, as land workers and in factories, especially in the dangerous munitions factories. Women did very well, surprising men with their efficiency and their ability to undertake heavy work. By the mid war they were already regarded as a force to be proud of, part of the glory of the British Empire. Undoubtedly, however, the Australian unions were as worried about male workers coming home after the war as were the British unions.

Poster, women were needed to work with planes

If ever there had been confusion about the value of women’s work in Britain and the Empire, these heroines showed that women were highly capable of learning, training and working in very different fields. Although women were still paid less than men had been pre-war, women's equality was at least on the agenda by war’s end. The women workers had helped to save their nation in time of need, had improved their own individual lives and were changing the notion about women’s role in society.

Find a fine paper called WOMEN AND WORK IN WARTIME BRITAIN by Deborah Thom

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The really radical question was not “were women allowed to work in real jobs during the war?” but “what happened to those women once the war ended?”

Lucy Noakes suggested that the proposed emigration of large numbers of single women to the Empire in the aftermath of WW1 was one of the main ways Britain got rid of its "excess" single women. Although they had worked during the war and contributed enormously, they were a national embarrassment by 1919. They were forced to leave their exciting, meaningful jobs and were asked to go into domestic service. Worse still, so many men had died in the trenches in France and the Lowlands that these excess women would never find husbands or have babies in Britain.

Noakes said that women who refused to go into domestic work were vilified by the press as “ruthless self seekers, depriving men and their dependants of their livelihood”, or “leeches and parasites determined to have the time of their lives at the expense of the returning men and of wider society”. Women who had served in uniform were often depicted with particular venom. “Those women were bold and masculine, cigarette smoking.., with a loss of grace and charm”.

Thousands of women were asked to emigrate from Britain for new lives in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And although British women were willing to do exactly that (see the lines at Australia House in London), the irony was that these New World nations actually wanted women to be domestic servants and simple labourers for farms. Again! Once the soldiers returned home from Europe, these New World countries did NOT want female engineers, aeroplane makers and repairers, ambulance drivers or ammunition manufacturers taking the men’s jobs.

Single working women queued up at Australia House, 1919, to emigrate

Did the British manage to offload their unwanted women workers? Did Australia, Canada and New Zealand give them new homes, husbands and meaningful jobs? It would seem not. The British government launched the Free Passage Scheme in 1919 for ex-servicemen and their dependants. But by 1922, when the scheme closed down, only 5% of the migrants had been single women with years of working experience during WW1.

While Noakes judged the Free Passage Scheme a failure, based on the small number of working women who participated, others have pointed out that working  women's participation was never the primary aim of the scheme.

Ten Pound Poms: from Britain with love

Japan had bombed Darwin almost with impunity during World War 2. After the war ended, the Prime Minister Ben Chifley recognised that Australia needed a long-term strategy for defending the nation against any future invasion. He also recognised that the Australian labour force had suffered under the strains of total war and from massive death/injury rates to its young men. With only 7 million citizens, Australia needed to Populate Or Perish.

Skilled and fit workers were desperately needed. Orphaned children from Britain had been sent to the old British colonies for several decades, but how many orphans did Britain have? Desperate times called for vigorous measures.

Advertising poster, showing a well integrated British family settled into Australian life, Victoria Museum.

The Ten Pound Pom scheme was established i.e an assisted migration scheme that operated in Australia from 1946 onwards. Adult migrants were charged only ₤10 for their fare (a fraction of the true ticket cost) and children travelled for free. Priority was indeed given to British citizens, but workers and their families from all Commonwealth countries were welcome. Of the 400,000 people in Malta, for example, 140,000+ people left on an assisted passage scheme, 60% of them to Australia.

But while working class families were actively recruited, the screening was nonetheless intense. The father in each family needed to be in sound health, under the age of 45 years and ready to work. Every member of the family was given a physical health examination and some sort of intelligence test. People who might drain the health services in Australia were discouraged from applying.

400,000+ British citizens registered at Australia House in London for the project, in 1947 alone! Most were from ordinary, solid working families.

The programme worked very well for Australia, of course, but also for Britain. Seductive recruitment films were shown all over Britain, advertising a life of full employment and freestanding housing, a sunny climate and a sporty or beach-based lifestyle. Britain was still in the grip of bombed out cities, food and petrol rationing, and ex-servicemen looking for employment. And, I suspect, Britain was happy enough to have its working families sent out to the old colonies, to provide “breeding stock” for a vigorous British Commonwealth.

It also worked out very well for the shipping companies. Bunk accommodation on refitted troop ships was at first all that could be provided. Then shipping companies started to compete for the lucrative migrant trade and standards became quite classy.

Passengers welcomed off the SS Strathnaver. Daily Telegraph Sydney, March 1959.

How white was the programme? Australian politicians may have stopped talking about the White Australia Policy, but they still believed Britain had the best quality of citizen. So they looked to Britain (and then to northern European countries like Netherlands) for immigrants, believing that such people would more easily assimilated into the Australian community. Only when applications from British and Dutch migrant families dwindled (in the 1960s) did Australia gradually extend its assisted passage schemes to immigrants from other countries. By focusing on Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia, it was thus possible to maintain the very high levels of immigration enjoyed since the war.

Much of the early accommodation in Australia consisted of disused army camps-cum-hostels where migrant families could remain for up to a year. The goal was to give them training, to help them settle into the Australian community and to find well paid jobs. Fortunately the Nissan huts were gradually replaced with proper buildings and improved facilities.

If migrants returned home to Britain within two years of landing on Australian shores, they had to pay back the true costs of bringing their entire family out on the Ten Pound Pom Scheme. If they fulfilled their two years requirement in Australia, they were free to stay or go as they liked. An estimated quarter of the Ten Pound Poms left Australia within a few years of their arrival, either because they missed Britain and their families desperately, or because the migrant experience in Australia was tough eg the migrant hostels were fairly bleak or the work was too physical. Returnees were referred to as Boomerang Poms.

residential huts, Bathurst Migrant Camp, 1951. National Archives of Australia 

1969 was the peak year for the scheme with 80,000+ people sailing or, by that time, flying to Australia for ₤10. I didn’t realise this but one of the most famous Ten Pound Poms is Prime Minister Julia Gillard who migrated with her Welsh family in 1966. The Bee Gees migrated in the late 1950s from Manchester. Hugh Jackman’s parents and siblings were Ten Pound Poms in 1967.

I asked my in laws how they chose Australia as their forever home. It was easy, they said. They applied for visas to South Africa, Australia, Canada, USA and Argentina. Whichever nation responded first, they would accept. Just as well it was Australia. These impoverished Ten Pound Czechs worked hard from the day they arrived in 1952, providing their children with a lovely home, university education and professions. And me with a fine husband.

Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants, written by Hammerton and Thomson, told the story of the million plus Britons who emigrated to Australia between 1946 and 1970s. To document migrant life histories, the authors drew on letters, diaries, personal photographs and hundreds of oral history interviews with former migrants, including those who settled permanently in Australia and those who eventually returned home to Britain. It was published by Manchester University Press in 2005.

Southern Cross immigration poster, Victoria Museum (date?)

I also like Adventure Before Dementia where the author published her mother's experiences, both en route to Australia and after the family arrived. The photos, diary entries and menus provide wonderful material for the family to relive and for other readers to examine.

Broken Hill: outback yes, gold rush yes, but Jewish?

As I suggested in the history of Ballarat, Jewish migrants came to Australia in response to the Gold Rush in the 1850s, where they largely acted as shopkeepers and traders. Thus there were Jewish communities in remote gold rush cities, including Broken Hill (NSW), Bendigo and Ballarat (Vic), Kalgoorlie and Koolgardie (WA).

Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) was the huge mining company that ran the town of Broken Hill for its 27,000 citizens at the turn of the new century. 1100 ks west of Sydney, this outback city could not have been more isolated from the urban centres of Australia, nor more remote from the centres of Jewish learning. From Broken Hill, Sydney is 1,167 kms, Melbourne 817 kms and Adelaide 506 kms. Yet Jewish migrants were attracted to Broken Hill, presumably because employment was always available and small businesses always had a ready market with the mining families.

Broken Hill synagogue, opened 1910

Some early evidence of the community comes from the tombstones. The first Jewish burials in Broken Hill’s cemetery occurred when a typhoid epidemic hit the town in 1888. Other gravestones tell of how the young son of Rebecca and Isaac Joseph died in 1892, and how Louis Dias was killed in the mines by a runaway cart in 1895.

The Broken Hill Jewish community was formally inaugurated in 1900, but as there was no special building available, religious services were held in the Masonic Hall. The first minister, the Rev Zalel Mandelbaum from Minsk, was appointed in 1905.

The foundation stone for the synagogue in Wolfram Street was dated 1910, at a time when the Jewish population of Broken Hill was c150. The façade was roughcast stone brick, but the rest of the building was corrugated iron, a typically Australian material. Next to the synagogue there was a house for the minister and his family, the place where Sunday school classes were held.

Plaque outside Broken Hill synagogue, marking the opening ceremony, 1910

Broken Hill's great days were in the 1920s and 30s, but WW2 was the beginning of the end of this impressive community. All young male citizens went into the army, the mines were closing and the remaining Jewish congregation was thinking of moving to Melbourne or Sydney. In 1962 the synagogue was permanently closed, with fittings given away to a Melbourne congregation. The last senior citizens of Broken Hill’s synagogue, too elderly to move once again, eventually died and were buried in the Jewish section of the local cemetery.

The synagogue building has been heritage listed and in 2004 it was taken over and restored, without its fittings, by the Broken Hill Historical Society. To celebrate the centenary of the synagogue in November 2010, a programme of historical talks and personal reminiscences about the Jews of Broken Hill and their contribution to the town was organised. They also arranged a bus tour of places where Jews had lived and worked, a walking tour of the Jewish section of the cemetery, and a tour to the Miners’ Memorial Arch. 200 ex-members of the town, or their children, gathered in the restored synagogue.

Restored synagogue interior

During the weekend, the visitors viewed the exhibition prepared for the Broken Hill Art Gallery. This was where the book, Jews of the Outback: The Centenary of the Broken Hill Synagogue 1910-2010, was launched by Professor Colin Tatz. He spoke about the issues relevant to a rural city: migration, family life, isolation, hard labour and assimilation – key elements that had been so well illustrated in this particular community.

                                                    

The book Jews of the Outback, was edited by Suzanne Rutland, Leon Mann and Margaret Price, and published by Hybrid Publishers in 2010 
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Map of SE corner of Australia, showing just how remote Broken Hill is from the state capitals

Cafe Scheherazade: remembering refugees' stories

I have ranted and raved about asylum seekers and refugees who desperately try to escape the death and destruction in their own countries by coming on small boats to Australia. It strikes me as barbaric to allow the boats to sink, send the refugees back to the hell holes they escaped from or imprison them on small Pacific islands.

Australia’s current policy became even more embarrassing when looking at the play Café Scheherazade, adapted by Therese Radic from the novel by Arnold Zable. The play is showing at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne and although there aren’t too many Holocaust survivors still alive, there are plenty of their children and grandchildren who were born from 1946 on. fortyfivedownstairs was packed.

Cafe Scheherazade, Acland St StKilda, 1950. (Photo: Jewish Museum of Australia)

After the war, a young couple called Avram and Masha Zeleznikow returned to Poland, found each other, got married and agreed to meet up in Paris. They chose to meet in a Parisian café named after the storyteller Queen Scheherazade who apparently told stories for 1001 nights to save her life. The name seemed appropriate since the Paris café was filled with refugees from Eastern Europe, sharing the stories, looking for any distant cousin who might have survived the Holocaust and eating cheesecake.

When they arrived in Australia in the 1950s, the Zeleznikows opened their own cafe in 1958 and of course they called it Café Scheherazade. They and their Eastern European patrons spent endless hours in Acland Street St.Kilda, recounting their own experiences as hunted enemy aliens in Poland and as refugees in the new country.

The play Café Scheherazade uses the device of Eastern European migrants in Melbourne telling their stories to a young journalist. The journalist wants to get down the details for a book; the café patrons just want to remember their journeys and their experiences of displacement and survival. There is nothing unique about this – I am certain the Afghanastani and Iraqi refugees are in the same position in 2011 that the Jews were in 1951. Refugee lives face universal problems, whether they analyse the issues in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Arabic or Uzbek.

For people who love klezmer music, the music was evocative of a time well and truly gone. From the moment Ernie Gruner struck up his violin, Arnold Zable noted, the theatre audience was back in the café. Back in Acland Street. Back on the roads of Siberia, the forests of Lithuania, the crowded streets of war-torn Shanghai, the back alleys of Kazakhstan or the streets of Warsaw.

The original Café Scheherazade in St Kilda was indeed an Acland Street icon. Throughout the 1958-70 era, my family joined thousands of others on Sunday afternoons enjoying beetroot borscht with sour cream, potato latkes with sour cream, cheese cake with sour cream, and black tea with lemon slices. Then we would walk to the beach (4 minutes away) for some vigorous exercise.

the play Cafe Scheherazade, remembering stories and drinking lemon tea

But not just an icon - I should call Cafe Scheherazade a haven. The play reminds us to celebrate and embrace those refugees who continue to arrive in Australia, because they are the future of this nation. They provide workers for our industries, chefs, artists and musicians, teachers and historians, as well as contributing to the rich diversity of this culture.

Child migrants/deportees from Britain to the Empire

“On Their Own - Britain’s Child Migrants” is a collaborative exhibition that came out of the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney and the National Museums Liverpool in the UK.

An organisation known as the Church of England Central Home for Waifs and Strays opened for business in 1881. By 1905 the Society had 93 homes throughout England and Wales, accounting for 3410 children in care. Two thirds of these lived in Society's homes, a few hundred in affiliated homes, and the rest were fostered. Because there weren't enough beds for all the children needing assistance, many of these young British citizens were sent to Canada.  The National Children's Homes, a Methodist organisation established in 1869, also emigrated over 3,000 of the children they took into care.

Under the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 and 1937, the British Government formally assisted private organisations to help people who wanted to settle in His Majesty’s Overseas Dominions. Most were adults. But some 130,000 children were also sent from Britain to Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth countries through child migration schemes.

The child migrants were largely lied to; they were told their parents were dead so that they were being sent on holiday to a place where the sun always shines and fruit can be picked off the trees. But few of the children were true orphans; many had originally been placed in the British orphanages because their parents had been unable to care for them, temporarily or for the long term.

Child migrants from Fairbridge, setting out for Australia, 1938.
Photo from Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool

Child migrants were sent abroad without passports, social histories or full birth certificates. Thus it was easy to tell the children that their parents had died and that there was no member of the family who could ever care for them or adopt them. And as the majority of the transportees were only between seven and ten years of age, they were in no position to have argued with the authorities.

The British government thought that they would offload their needy families and save the British economy a fortune. But the charitable and religious organisations in Britain often had a more moral and less financial motive. The Fairbridge Plan for caring for British child migrants originated with Kingsley Fairbridge’s “vision splendid”. He was truly appalled at the conditions of the thousands of under-privileged children with no future other than poverty. He wanted to transplant such children to the wide-open spaces in the colonies; the orphanages agreed and were very happy to send their charges overseas.

For their part, the Australian and other British Empire governments hoped these schemes would supply them with much needed population and labour. They could have imported cheap labour from any country, but they wanted sound, British stock. “Stock” was always the word that was used. In 1913 the first children arrived in Western Australia to take up residence on The Fairbridge Farm near Pinjarra, south-east of Perth. In 1937, The Fairbridge Farm Schools were opened in New South Wales.

"This is not a charity", declared the Prince of Wales in 1934 of the work of the Fairbridge farm schools... "it is an Imperial investment".

The Britain’s Child Migrants Exhibition’s own documentation notes that the lives of these children changed dramatically and fortunes varied. Some succeeded in creating new futures for themselves. Others suffered lonely childhoods, brutalised and exploited by the church organisations that were supposed to protect them. All experienced disruption and separation from their families and from the British towns they grew up in.

Exploitation and misery were not exclusively the fate of those children sent to Australia. The Child Migrants Trust said that while children in New Zealand were often placed with foster parents, those in Canada could be entrusted to the care of farmers, often without sufficient supervision. Some Canadian farmers were charged with manslaughter, such was the extent of their cruelty. Very few children were legally adopted in Canada and the vast majority spent their entire childhoods in farm schools or large, impersonal institutions which accommodated up to 350 children.

These child migration schemes received poor publicity from the outset, yet they continued until the 1960s. So why didn’t the schemes attract the critical attention of historians and welfare workers until the 1980s? And even then it was accidental. Margaret Humphreys was a social worker in Nottingham, specialising in child protection. One day an Australian woman contacted her, saying she had been taken from a children’s home in Nottingham and sent as a toddler to Australia by boat after WW2. Could Humphreys help her find her mother?

Humphrey’s pursuit of the scheme took her all over the British Commonwealth. To her very great credit, Humphreys also founded the Child Migrants Trust, to help those who suffered under the policy. What seems improbable to me was that Margaret Humphreys was the first concerned professional to raise the issues of involuntary child migration. Perhaps she was just the bravest. Or perhaps the others had been turned away by obdurate government officials.

Fairbridge Farm children on the SS Ormonde, 1950
Photo from the State Library of WA

Even so, it took until 1999 for the British government to set up and endow a travel fund to be spent on onetime visits for family reunions. Unfortunately there were so many restrictions that only 300 of the 10,000 post-WW2 migrants to Australia were able to go back home. The travel fund expired in 2002, but in any case, how many mothers and fathers who placed their children in care in 1938-46 would still have been alive in 2002? Formal apologies from the Australian Government in 2009 and British Government in 2010 were late, but were welcomed by the transportees.

The Australian National Maritime Museum has suggested the following reading list:

1.Bean, Philip & Melville, Joy Lost children of the Empire. London; Sydney Unwin Hyman, 1989.
2.Coldrey, Barry M Good British stock: child and youth migration to Australia.  National Archives of Australia, 1999
3.Gill, Alan Orphans of the Empire: the shocking story of child migration to Australia. Milsons Point Vintage, 1998.
4.Humphreys, Margaret Empty Cradles. London Corgi Books, 1995.
5.Sherington, Geoffrey & Jeffery, Chris Fairbridge: Empire and child migration. University of Western Australia Press, 1998
6.Wagner, Gillian Children of the Empire. London Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.
7. Wheeler, Charles Carried away, in BBC History, October 2003. Great article!
Months after writing this particular post, I saw the film Oranges and Sunshine, starring Emily Watson as the Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys and directed by Jim Loach. The film, which opened in Britain in April 2011 and in Australia in June 2011, focuses on the individuals' experiences of Britain's semi-secret child migrant programme to Australia. I say semi-secret because, although the relevant government ministers and church authorities thought they were doing the best thing for the unfortunate children, they destroyed the children's paperwork on purpose and lost the children's true identities. The film skilfully depicts the impact of this loss of identity, 50 years or more after the children had been deported from their homeland.

Young migrant children put out to labour in the fields,
Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney

Asylum seekers and refugees - Australia's future? or our destroyers?

I am really exasperated by the vitriol expressed towards refugees sailing in tiny boats towards Australia and the so-called people smugglers who bring them here on those boats. Australia is a migrant nation... that is what we do.. we offer a new chance at life to people caught up in wars, poverty and oppression overseas. Of course I can differentiate between refugees with visas and those without, but every single person in Australia has come from somewhere else. Or if not us, then our parents or grandparents. We know what desperation is.

In Israel, Singapore or Malta, if they accepted one more refugee, the poor newcomers might have to sleep in tents. There is no more space to put new arrivals! But Australia is a huge continent. Of course we want to accept newcomers in an orderly fashion and we want to assure ourselves that the refugees are truly escaping death and oppression, so security checks are indeed essential. But rejecting people because Australia doesn't have the space or the wealth to absorb new families is absurd. And immoral.

refugees arrive in a small boat

Eamine the language in just a single newpaper article, WAtoday: Huge wave of refugees predicted (headline 28th/3/2011). "Indonesian police intelligence suggests between 7000 and 10,000 more people are waiting in Malaysia to make the journey once their passage is organised by people smugglers. There is a large network of people smugglers servicing the 1 million Indonesian illegal workers who regularly go back and forth between the two countries by boat. These same networks also help arrange passage to Australia. On Saturday, Malaysian authorities arrested 36 Afghans and six Pakistanis being smuggled to Australia via Indonesia".

Note the nasty language - "huge wave", "people smugglers", "large network", "illegal workers", "Indonesians, Afghans and Pakistanis". I wonder if newspapers would use this language about Dutch, British or Swiss citizens.  Worse than racist, the language has rather nasty theories/myths embedded just below the surface:
Myth 1 - Refugees arriving by boats are queue jumpers stopping legitimate asylum seekers from gaining entry.
Myth 2 - Refugees are terrorists or potential terrorists.
Myth 3 - The number of 'boat people' and refugees in general is huge and growing.
Myth 4 - Boat owners who carry asylum seekers to Australia are evil, satanic and greedy.

Two presentations in Melbourne on this very topic will be essential.

People Smugglers: Friend or Foe?
Exhibition Opening Sunday 10th April, 3 – 5pm
Liberty Victoria and Amnesty International present a new exhibition that looks at the issue of people smuggling through the eyes of refugees. In a series of interviews, people from all over the world discuss how they came to Australia and the role people smugglers played in their journey. This exhibition explores the moral complexities of the people smuggling trade. At the same time, it looks at the positive impact refugees have had on Australian society from the Second World War to the present day.

Date: Sunday 10 April – Sunday 8 May
Time: Opening from 3 – 5pm
For more information please visit Liberty Victoria online.
Please RSVP to the opening by Wednesday 6 April: marketing@jewishmuseum.com.au


Finding Refuge: Coming to Australia as an Asylum Seeker
In association with their exhibition People Smugglers: Friend or Foe, Liberty Victoria presents this open discussion, which will explore the difficult issue of people smuggling. Several refugees will tell their stories and give their perspective on whether they see smugglers as good, bad or indifferent. There should be a lively debate to follow the panel discussion.

Date: Thursday 28 April
Venue: The Jewish Museum of Australia

Time: 7.30pm

59 Brick Lane Spitalfields: Christian, Jewish, Muslim

By the mid-late C17th, the long street in the East End of London called Brick Lane was being built up from the south. The Huguenots were fleeing religious persecution by the Catholic Church and Catholic government in France. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, tens of thousands of Huguenots sought sanctuary in Britain and brought with them their weaving and silver-making skills.

Traders and weavers lived next to, but not necessarily in Spitalfields. Their late 17th and C18th domestic buildings were well appointed terraced houses, perfect for housing the French weaver families once they became successful; fine city mansions were built around the newly created Spital Square.

substantial  houses, built since 1700

59 Brick Lane, on the corner of Fournier Street, was a plain but quite elegant, rectangular dark brick building with tall arched windows. Even in a heavily built up street like Brick Lane, natural light could flood into the spaces inside.  The building was described as having 2 storeys with a plain band between floors, 6 windows with red brick gauged arches and stone keys, recessed windows, a Palladian window in centre with semi-circular headed windows at sides (1st floor) and 4 segmental headed windows (2 blank in centre) on ground floor.

How was this building used over the centuries?
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today 59 Brick Lane is an elegant mosque

The first community to use 59 Brick Lane were the recently arrived Frenchmen. The Huguenot community built La Neuve Eglise as a Protestant Church in 1743, along with a small school. As these Calvinists worked hard and prospered, some of them could afford to build large and handsome Georgian houses around Brick Lane, with glass-ceilinged workshops in the attics, where they set up their weaving looms. They didn’t forget their religious values either. In 1700, there were nine French churches in Spitalfields, although by the end of two generations of English born Huguenots, the French-speaking community was clearly being assimilated through inter-marriage.

Interior of 59 Brick Lane, when used as a Methodist chapel  (above)

Interior of 59 Brick Lane, when used as a Jewish synagogue (below)

The next group to use 59 Brick Lane were a different people. The London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews used The Jews’ Chapel, as they called the building in 1809, to encourage the physical restoration of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and to encourage the Hebrew Christian Messianic movement. The Society only lasted for one decade in Brick Lane.

John Wesley himself had lived not far away on City Road and preached his first covenant sermon at a chapel, just off Brick Lane. The simplicity and plainness of The Methodist Chapel, as the Wesleyans called it in 1819, would no doubt have suited them well.

When the local silk-weaving trades went into decline, the abandoned properties in this suburb were sublet and in the C19th the East End became a cheap place to live. Waves of impoverished and rather desperate immigrants arrived over the decades, slowly prospered and then moved out of Spitalfields as soon as they could. So as Icons Of England has shown, the building changed a number of times as each community established its own place of worship here.

With the huge influx of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe flooding into the East End in the 1880s and 1890s, our Methodist Chapel was converted into The Spitalfields Great Synagogue in 1897. Brick Lane was the heart of London’s Jewish community and this was the principal synagogue of the area. Plus there were schoolrooms under the roof for children of the masses of impoverished, hard working refugees. From the 1960s, the Jewish community in the East End dwindled, many moving into more salubrious north London. The building eventually closed.

Since 1976 this building, Brick Lane Jamme Masjid, has been one of the largest mosques in London; 4,000 worshippers can fit into the prayer hall. The mosque has particularly served the religious needs of the large Bengali community which arrived after World War Two. The non-structural fittings like pews were removed, the opening in the centre of the gallery was reduced in size, made octagonal and moved eastwards, while retaining the columns on the ground floor supporting the gallery. A partition wall was inserted around the western end of the ground floor, and a qibla was constructed on the ground floor under the SE corner or the gallery. The northern and central vaults were also converted to prayer halls. Rooms adjacent to the prayer halls were adapted for washing.

Once again there is an school for religious instruction here, on the first floor, but this time it is an Islamic school. The former Huguenot chapel and former Great Synagogue in Fournier St and the adjacent former school buildings, now used as ancillary spaces for the mosque, are Grade II listed buildings.

Princelet St Synagogue, behind this Huguenot house

Another of the handsome Georgian houses in Spitalfields that were built by the Huguenots eventually became the Princelet St Synagogue. The front of the building is a former Huguenot house built in 1722, but at the rear was a synagogue, built in 1862. Like the other 38 synagogues in the City and the East End, Princelet St Synagogue lost its Jewish population in the two decades after WW2 ended.

Sandy's Row Synagogue, men on the ground floor, women section in the balcony

Sandy's Row Synagogue is fascinating for two reasons.  Firstly the synagogue was established in 1870 by a society of Dutch Jews, not Russians, Ukranians and Lithuanians. Secondly the synagogue, formerly a French Chapel, is the only extant, functioning synagogue in the East End today.

Two projects based on Spitalfields have recently come to my attention. Firstly a BBC programme called Saving Britain's Past was shown in Dec 2009. It did not ask whether the old Huguenot chapel cum synagogue should now be a mosque - that is beyond dispute. Rather it asked how today’s Bengali families could make the area their own, while not destroying the heritage value of old Spitalfields.

Georgian home in 27 Fournier St, restored by the Spitalfields Trust

Secondly The Spitalfields Trust bought crumbling Regency (1809-15) houses in Whitechapel, selling them on to Londoners who then let the Trust rebuild them observing strict conservation rules. For six years, Homes & Property has followed the story of the horseshoe of homes in a run-down part of East London. In this year’s Georgian Awards, presented by the Duke of Gloucester, the restoration work was highly commended. Plus The Spitalfields Trust project won first prize in Country Life’s national restoration competition.

One renovation stands out in particular. Fournier Street was the last street to be laid out on the Wood-Michell Estate and was originally known as Church St. 27 Fournier Street was built by Peter Bourdon of Spitalfields, who was granted a 98 year lease in 1725, the date that appears on the rainwater head on the front of the building. The weaver Mr Bourdon was believed to have been a prominent member of Spitalfields society. I assume from his surname that Mr Bourdon was a Huguenot. He would be delighted with how 27 Fournier St looks today.

The Tired of London, Tired of Life blog recommends visiting London's Museum of Immigration at 19 Princelet Street. The museum's home page says that 19 Princelet Street is a magical unrestored Huguenot master silk weaver's home, whose shabby frontage conceals a rare surviving synagogue built over its garden. The staff are working to save the building and to create a permanent exhibition documenting the history of the Huguenots, Irish, Jews, Bengalis, Somalis and others who shaped this Spitalfields.

Varian Fry: hero and rescuer of thousands

Varian Fry (1907 – 67) was an American journalist. While working as a foreign correspondent for an American paper, Fry visited Berlin in 1935 and was very distressed by Nazi violence against Jewish citizens.

Varian Fry, 1941

Following the occupation of France in August 1940, Fry was still distressed by what he knew what going to happen to the Jews. He went to Marseilles as an agent of the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee, in an effort to help persons wishing to flee the Nazis. Fry had a rather small pot of money and a short list of refugees under imminent threat of arrest by the Gestapo. Soon anti-Nazi writers, avant-garde artists and musicians were begging for his help.

Despite the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, Fry and his small group of volunteers hid refugees in a safe home until they could be smuggled out. 2,200 people were taken across the border to the safety of neutral Portugal from which they made their way to the USA. Others he helped escape on ships leaving Marseilles for the French colony of Martinique, from which they could go to the USA.

The rescue network was essential to his success. Miriam Davenport, a former art student at the Sorbonne, and Mary Jayne Gold, a wealthy cultured woman who had moved to Paris in the early 1930s were two American women. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Gold went to Marseilles to work with Fry and to fund his operation.

Most important was obtaining the visas Fry needed for the artists, writers and academics. He could not have succeeded without Hiram Bingham IV, an American Vice Consul in Marseilles who fought against US State Department anti-Semitism. Like the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, Bingham was personally responsible for issuing thousands of legal and illegal visas.

An amazing photo survives from those scary and heroic days. The Emergency Rescue Committee office in Marseilles in 1941 shows fine artists who escaped France: (from left to right) Max Ernst, Jacqueline Breton, Andre Masson, Andre Breton and Varian Fry.

Photograph Musee Cantini, Marseilles.

The list of people who escaped Nazi Europe, with the help of Fry and others, is like a roll call of European culture. A handful of famous names will suffice: Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, André Masson, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler Werfel, Jacques Lipchitz, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Heinrich Mann, Marc Chagall and André Breton.

Needless to say, Fry’s efforts did not endear him to the authorities in the USA. He was recalled several times by the American government and ignored every recall. He was finally ousted by the Vichy French government as an undesirable alien, for protecting Jews and anti-Nazis, in September 1941. His activities in France caused the Federal Bureau of Investigation to keep him under surveillance, thus preventing this hero from ever working for the USA government. He wrote and spoke critically against USA immigration policies, particularly relating to the issue of the fate of Jews in Europe. In The New Republic Dec 1942, he wrote an article with dire warnings called "The Massacre of Jews in Europe".

Many artistic émigrés found their way to New York City where Peggy Guggenheim exhibited their work at the Art of this Century gallery, which she opened in 1942. Another amazing photograph was taken during a gathering of these artists at her New York apartment. Guggenheim did not rescue them (apart from Max Ernst) but she helped their survival and integration, once they had safely landed on American soil.

"Artists in Exile", Peggy Guggenheim's apartment, New York, 1942. Front row: Stanley William Hayter, Leonara Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann. Second Row: Max Ernst, Amedee Ozenfant, Andre Breton, Fernand Leger, Berenice Abbott. Third Row: Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, John Ferren, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian. Photograph: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Photograph: Parrish Art Museum, NY.

At least the government of France recognised Fry's heroic efforts with the Legion of Honour in 1967, the only recognition he was alive for. In 1991 and 24 years after his death, Fry received his first official medal from a US agency, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. And in 1995 Varian Fry became the first American citizen to be listed in the Righteous Among the Nations in the national Holocaust Memorial, Jerusalem. What a shame that he died in 1967.

If you think only the USA and French government were right wing, anti-Semitic and anti-refugees, and that their anti refugee policies was only enacted during the chaos of World War Two, consider the plight of refugees today. The few, miserable refugees who escape the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan head for Australia in leaky tug boats. The right wing response in Australia, from 2000 to 2010, has been to imprison the refugees in Pacific island camps behind barbed wire fences and to demonise the rescuers as criminal thugs. We have learned nothing from Varian Fry, Sir Nicholas Winton, Raoul Wallenberg, Chiune Sugihara or Oskar Schindler.


Other blogs have recommended books about Fry:
Isenberg, Sheila A Hero of Our Own, Random House, 2001
Marino, Andy A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry, Macmillan, 2000.
McClafferty, Carla Killough In Defiance of Hitler: The Secret Mission of Varian Fry, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

Dunera and its Jewish Internees in 1940

The BBC said in 1940 thousands of Germans, Austrians and Italians in Britain were sent to camps set up at racecourses and incomplete housing estates, such as Huyton outside Liverpool. That many of the enemy aliens were Jewish refugees and therefore hardly likely to be sympathetic to the Nazis, didn’t seem to ring alarm bells. The majority were interned on the Isle of Man; in one Isle of Man camp, over 80% of the internees were Jewish refugees, most of whom had fled Germany and Austria after Kristallnacht 9/11/1938.

Because they were considered a risk to British security, 7,000+ internees were deported, the majority to Canada, some to Australia. The liner Arandora Star left for Canada in July 1940 carrying German and Italian internees, but it was torpedoed and sunk with huge loss of life.

2,542 men were taken to Australia on the Dunera, which sailed a week after the Arandora Star. According to the BBC, internees were subjected to humiliating treatment and intentionally abysmal conditions on the two-month voyage. Many had their possessions destroyed by the British military guards.

The ship arrived in Australia in June 1939, then the men was taken for internment in the tiny rural towns of Hay in New South Wales and Tatura in Victoria. Among the men on the Dunera who had so threatened Britain’s very security were sensitive, educated men like artists Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, art historians Franz Phillipp and Ernst Kitzinger, photographer Henry Talbot, composer Felix Werder, mathematician Dr Felix Behrend and Franz Stampfl, later Australia’s most brilliant athletics coach.

Whereas the British guards on the Dunera were brutal and anti-Semitic, the Australian guards were reported to be kind and generous with their own food and cigarettes. The internees were placed in barracks that housed 28 men apiece. Barbed wire and guard towers surrounded the perimeter, but the guards rarely intruded and the internees ran their own affairs through an elected parliament. They developed soccer teams, a choral and theatre group; they printed a newspaper and they published books.

So educated were these men that while they were interned in rural prison camps, they set up their own unofficial university to pass the time and to deal with Australia's hot summer weather.

Tatura Internment Camp, Victoria

The Dunera story is a testament to the human spirit, the ability of young men to survive, despite the Holocaust that befell their parents and siblings in Europe. Today the Dunera Museum in Hay is an internment centre that houses exhibits documenting the history of one of Australia’s lesser moments in history. It is located in Hay’s old railway station platform and two train carriages.

Why were the Jewish men so unwelcome in Australia? Two pressing factors lay behind Australia’s attitude to Jewish refugees. One was the high level of unemployment in the wake of the Depression, and the fear that a wave of refugees would take jobs from Australian workers. This was the generally held view about immigration in Australia before WW2, although we now know that migrants create more jobs than they occupy.

The second factor was Australia’s status as a self-described “British society.” As Australian Memories of the Holocaust noted Prime Minister Stanley Bruce said in 1928 that he wanted Australians to remain “essentially a British and white people.” In April 1938 the Australian Interior Minister, John McEwen, wrote in a Cabinet submission:

“The Jews are highly intelligent as a class and usually make a success of whatever occupation or business they fellow, but in view of their religious beliefs and strict rules as regards marriage, they remain a separate race, and this failure to become properly assimilated in the country of adoption appears to create difficulties in any country where they form a considerable proportion of the population.”

Even the Labour opposition party didn’t want Jews coming in. Labour MP Albert Green said about Jewish refugees in 1939: “My opposition to this proposal is far stronger than it would be if the immigrants were of the Nordic race and came from northern European countries. People from those places would help to develop Australia.”

Dunera Museum, Hay

ex-railway station, Hay

See an excellent article on the Dunera Boys in The National Library Magazine, June 2010. It was written by Dr Susannah Helman, Assistant Curator of Exhibitions at the National Library of Australia in Canberra and curator of a specialist exhibition in 2010 called The Dunera Boys: Seventy Years On.

Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia

Czar Catherine II established the Pale of Settlement in 1791 as a territory in which Russian Jews were obliged to live. Presumably she had been convinced to design this system to rid Moscow of Jewish businesses and to concentrate the Jews in a relatively narrow and well-defined space.

And because Russia annexed a large area of Poland soon after Catherine the Great’s announcement, Russia now included areas that had a VERY high concentration of Jewish inhabitants. According to Alden Oreck, the Pale of Settlement made up only a small proportion of European Russia. The map of the Pale below looks large, so I assume Oreck meant that the designated area was gradually reduced by the edicts of successive czars. Yet it clearly included territory inside modern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belorussia.

A liberalisation period in the 1860s, which granted Jews some of the rights of ordinary citizens, was reversed under the May Laws of 1882. As the Museum of Family History blog has shown, these laws of Czar Alexander III pushed Jews back into the Pale, to towns that were often overcrowded and offered limited economic opportunities. And even within the Pale, Jews were limited: for example they were not allowed to lease land or own farming land.

Jewish (and other minority) boys were conscripted into the army at the age of 12 and placed for their military education in Cantonist Schools. Then they were required to serve in the Russian army for 25 years after the completion of their studies. I had imagined that the plan was to denude the Pale of potential fathers for a new generation of Jewish families, but The Russian History Blog reported it as a Christianisation and Russification programme. He is correct. The goal was to convert the boys, by whatever method it took.

In addition, thousands of Jews were terrorised by devastating pogroms in the 1870s, 1880s and into the new century. Ironically it was these very pogroms inside the Pale that led to mass immigration of Russian Jews to establish vibrant communities in America, Britain, Palestine and South Africa.

Did the Pale of Settlement work? If the goal was to control the Jewish communities and keep their numbers down, clearly not. The Jewish population in Russia grew from 1.6 million in 1820 to 5.6 million in by the time World War One broke out. If the goal of the Pale was to keep Jews out of certain important cities, it worked well. The largest Jewish communities were Warsaw, Odessa, Lodz, Vilna, Kishinev, Minsk, Bialystok, Berdichev, Vitebsk and Kiev – NOT the capitals of Moscow, St Petersburg and Kiev. As Max Grossman noted, the Jews were successfully kept out of these cities, as well as Nikolaev, Sebastopol, Yalta, Rostov, Riga and Tallinn.

Even as late as 1911, when the Duma began debating whether to eliminate the Pale or not, extreme nationalists demanded the retention of the system. Only after the overthrow of the Czarist regime by the Bolsheviks in 1917 was the Pale of Settlement finally dismantled.

One side of my own family came from Berdyansk and Mariupol, via the East End of London, to Melbourne. The other side came from Odessa and Simferopol, via Jaffa in Israel, to Melbourne.