How welcoming Great Britain was to refugees in the 1930s and 1940s depended on many factors, including the age, gender, class and profession of an individual. Members of some of the British professions did all they could to rescue their persecuted brethren from the continent, while others did all they could to bar those who might potentially cause competition in the job market. This article considers how welcoming the professions and general public were to the internees in the years preceding the Second World War, how popular opinion changed after the fall of France and the Low Countries, and how Eleanor Rathbone and some of her peers campaigned to debunk the popular myths surrounding the refugees. Much of the rhetoric from this time period will seem familiar to those reading the newspapers and listening to news reports nowadays, showing how much still needs to be learned from this turbulent time in history.
Rachel Pistol is Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. She has presented papers on internment across the UK, including the keynote talk at the Italian Cultural Institute at the Italian Embassy in London in 2015, for the 75th anniversary of the tragedy of the Arandora Star. Her research focuses on Second World War internment in the UK and USA, immigration history, historical memory, the commemoration and preservation of historical sites, and also business history. She has appeared on the BBC and Sky News, and has published articles in The Independent, Newsweek and The Huffington Post. Her book Internment during the Second World War: A Comparative Study of Great Britain and the USA is published by Bloomsbury.