Aged just 20 my mother and her friend Gloria arrived in the UK from Germany on 3rd March 1947. She was issued with a Certificate of Registration under the Aliens Order Act of 1920 which shows that her last residence was at the DP camp in Oldenberg, Germany and that she sailed from the port of Cuxhaven. There is a receipt pinned to the back of the card showing that she paid one shilling for her Aliens Registration Card! The card is full of official stamps recording her various changes of address, employment and marital status over the course of four years and states that she is “permitted to land in United Kingdom on condition that she registers at once with the police, enters domestic employment in a hospital or other similar Institution specified by the Ministry of Labour and National Service, does not take other employment without permission of that Department and does not remain in United Kingdom longer than 12 months”. She and Gloria were sent straight away to Salisbury in Wiltshire to work at Odstock Hospital, which was being used as a TB hospital.
Identity photo of my mother, aliens registration card and official stamps
She must have been in the first wave of refugee immigrants who were allowed in from the DP camps in Germany. The European Voluntary Worker (EVW) programme was initiated by Clement Atlee’s Labour government to help alleviate severe labour shortages in key industries and jobs after the war. The initial stage was Operation “Balt Cygnet” where Baltic women between the ages of 20 and 40 were recruited to do elementary nursing, domestic and textile work from 1946 to 1947. The women chosen were single, young and fit and deemed to be suitable for integration into the local community - ie. marriageable! This was followed by Operation “Westward Ho!” when both men and women were recruited to work in unskilled jobs in agriculture, mining, mills etc. The Baltic peoples were considered to be the most desirable of the refugee population due to the high percentage of intellectuals and educated amongst them. There is a very detailed account of the Balt Cygnet programme and the whole Baltic DP experience in a thesis available online entitled The Illusion of Peace: The Fate of the Baltic Displaced Persons 1945-1952.
Britain was the first of the allied countries to offer this opportunity to refugees and although there were many stipulations attached to these job offers and no guarantee of naturalisation, most refugees were only too keen to accept. Due to the housing shortage after the war, most EVWs were housed in hostels or camps. My mother and her friend lived in the nurses’ accommodation at the hospital so were relatively fortunate compared to many. On arrival in this country they would have been issued with a small sum of money and basic clothes and clothing coupons. I can only imagine, though, what her first impressions of this country must have been. Postwar Britain must have seemed a drab, alien place, the food unappetising and unfamiliar and the weather damp and depressing but perhaps by this time, after several years of life in a DP camp under challenging conditions, she was only too ready for a change. In addition she had to come here without her mother and stepfather - they remained behind in the DP camp until they were able to join her at a later date - so she and her friend had to face all these challenges alone. A fascinating website and book called Changing Identities: Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians in Britain has many first-hand accounts of what it was like to arrive in this country to work as an EVW at that time. This paragraph particularly caught my eye and from what my mother had told me mirrored her experience of first arriving in this country:
“In most cases, the refugees’ first impressions of Britain as they passed through industrialised war-recovering cities were unforgettable, although hardly positive. The adjectives used in the descriptions of Britain on the journey from the ports to the holding camps are telling: they are of a dull, grey, drab, foggy, smoky and smoggy, 1940’s Britain. The refugees’ depiction of Britain reflected the huge contrast between this ‘never seen before’ landscape, and the newly industrialising, green, rural and picturesque vista that was the homeland. It seemed that even experiences of war ravaged Germany had not prepared the refugees for the industrialised urban sprawl of many of Britain’s towns and cities.”
The experience of being a refugee is never easy and although at this time they were welcomed as part of a workforce helping to rebuild postwar Britain, it was by no means a unanimous welcome by all sectors of society. The Trades Unions became opposed to the EVW programme as they feared British jobs would be sacrificed and many members of the British working classes viewed them with suspicion for this reason. An age-old problem which is still rearing its ugly head today……