ON 14 April 2022, Boris Johnson, of blessed memory, told an audience in Kent: “For centuries our United Kingdom has had a proud history of welcoming people from overseas, including many fleeing persecution.”
Well, yes and no. These two books are studies of a period in British history around which obfuscating clouds of nostalgia have gathered, and misleading myths have burgeoned. With the rise of Nazism on continental Europe, many sought refuge in the UK. The story with which we comfort ourselves is that those fleeing the Nazis were immediately made welcome on British shores. After all, that’s the sort of people we are, says Mr Johnson, confident that he will not be contradicted.
The real story affords much less reason to be so pleased with ourselves, as both Paul Dowswell and Andrea Hammel ably show. Dowswell, working on a wider canvas, reviews in his first chapter the whole sweep of the thirties — for him “a catalogue of calamities”. His final chapter is an appraisal of British treatment of refugees up to the present, which, to his mind, has been “a catalogue of disasters”. There is little for our comfort in the chapters between, least of all in those addressing the simmering anti-Semitism that between the wars smouldered like a bog fire in British society.
Hammel, the more forensic of our two investigators, concentrates on the most frequently revisited episode of these years when many fleeing Nazism sought refuge in the UK: the so-called “Kindertransport“. Under this programme, launched in 1938 and ending abruptly with the outbreak of war in 1939, the UK government welcomed with open arms — so it is maintained — thousands of Jewish children seeking survival on these shores.
Hammel’s purpose, as his subtitle bluntly has it, is to tell us “what really happened”. His method is to dissolve myth in the solvent of fact. Among the facts widely overlooked in the more flattering version of the Kindertransport story are these: the programme was never more, or other, than a visa-waiver scheme. Children were its beneficiaries not because they were deemed most at risk, but because they were less likely to “take our jobs”. The scheme was never state-funded, but financed by charities and donations: £50 — then a great deal of money — had to be lodged for every child admitted to indemnify the government against later claims on the public purse on the child’s behalf. The implementation of the scheme at every level was bedevilled by bureaucracy.

Both Hammel and Dowell draw on the many memoirs later written by the child refugees themselves, which show us how traumatic was their experience of being resettled in the UK, often with foster parents wholly ignorant or unappreciative of their religious and cultural backgrounds.
There is a substantial academic literature on the experience of Britain’s wartime refugees in general and, in particular, that of child refugees arriving in Britain under the Kindertransport programme. It is fair to say that all these Ph.D.s and learned articles have not done much to disturb the prevailing myths about British hospitality towards “aliens” seeking a home here. There is a continuing need for studies like these two publications, “combining research with readability”, as Hammel has it, to put the record straight.
Meanwhile, we have the memoirs in which the children of the Kindertransport speak for themselves. These make for harrowing reading. We are left with the prayer on our lips: “Lord, give to men who are old and tougher The things that little children suffer.”
Thank God, for the ten thousand children who made it. But the Kindertransport story supplies no grounds for national pride. We are too aware of what was in store for the many more left behind.
The Revd Dr John Pridmore is a former Rector of Hackney, in east London.
Aliens: The chequered history of Britain’s wartime refugees
Paul Dowswell
Biteback Publishing £25
(978-1-78590-793-7)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
The Kindertransport: What really happened
Andrea Hammel
Polity £15.99
(978-1-5095-5377-8)
Church Times Bookshop £14.39