The Polish Immigrant Experience in Britain 1. Polish Migration to Britain

Marie-Luise Egbert “Old Poles” and “New Blacks”: The Polish Immigrant Experience in Britain Two periods stand out in the history of Polish migration to Britain. The Second World War forced many Poles to leave their native country and brought more than 200,000 civilians and members of the Polish Armed Forces to Britain. Some sixty years later, another large wave of Poles arrived in the wake of their country’s accession to the European Union in May 2004. Motivated by economic rather than political reasons, they faced some of the prejudices and obstacles which people from Asia and the Caribbean had encountered before them, and they have occasionally been referred to as the “New Blacks”. After a selective look at the presence of both “old” and “new” Poles in Britain today, this essay studies a recent example of Anglo-Polish literature, Joanna Czechowska’s The Black Madonna of Derby. While its writing was occasioned by the latter wave of immigration, the novel actually centres on the life of the war and postwar generations and allows one to draw interesting parallels and differences between these Central European migrants and the postcolonial migrants of roughly the same period. 1. Polish Migration to Britain 1 September 2009 marked the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War with Hitler’s attack on Poland, a day officially commemorated throughout Europe, notably with a ceremony in the harbour of Gdansk, where German military action began in September 1939. It took until the same month in 2009 for the Polish soldiers and officers who had fought under British command and contributed to the allied forces’ victory over Nazi Germany to be finally granted official recognition when the Polish Forces War Memorial was unveiled at the British National Memorial Arboretum near Lichfield, Staffordshire.1 Created in 1997, the National Memorial Arbo- retum meanwhile contains over a hundred monuments and other commemo- rative plots to all those soldiers and civilians who suffered or lost their lives in their service to the UK.2 The initiative for the official memorial3 came 1 Cf. Caroline Davies, ‘Britain Finally Honours Polish War Effort with First Official Memo- rial’, The Guardian (1 September 2009) <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/01/ polish-war-effort-memorial-book> [accessed 1 September 2009]. 2 Cf. National Memorial Arboretum, ‘About Us’ <http://www.thenma.org.uk/content/About- Us-1053.shtml> [accessed 1 September 2009]. 3 There were already a number of unofficial memorials across the UK, a notable example being the Polish War Memorial near the A40/A4180 junction between Ruislip and Northolt (in the London Borough of Hillingdon). Northolt is the location of an RAF aerodrome where some of the Polish airmen had been stationed during the war. The memorial was erected on the instigation of the Pol- ish Air Force Association (an organisation of former Polish Air Force officers who stayed on in Britain after the war). Funded chiefly by private British donations, it was erected in 1948. 350 Marie-Luise Egbert from Polish war veterans who wanted to ensure that the part played by Polish airmen and soldiers in the fight for British liberty was firmly established in the collective memory as their own generation was approaching death.4 In- deed, many of the Poles who had come during and after the war felt torn between their gratitude for the new home they found in Britain and their sense of having been betrayed: while they themselves had suffered for Brit- ain, she had not helped to establish an independent Poland to which they might have returned after the war. To this was added the slight that their fighting efforts under British command were hardly acknowledged at all. Hence, much belated though it is, the recent Polish monument at the National Memorial Arboretum may be appreciated by these veterans and their families as a reconciliatory gesture. However, the story of Polish immigration in Britain does not begin with the Second World War. The eighteenth century saw the arrival of political refugees following the First Partition of Poland in 1772 and the Second Parti- tion in 1794. After the failed Polish Insurrection of 1831, more such refugees from Poland arrived in Britain. In the second half of the nineteenth century, there were an estimated 1,000 Polish exiles in Britain.5 Polish Jews found refuge there in the late nineteenth century when the Russian May Laws of 1882 introduced severe restrictions on residence for them. Henceforth, Jews had to move to the towns within the so-called Jewish Pale, an area including both the western-most region of Russia and parts of Eastern Poland. To es- cape the difficult, crowded situation of the Pale, some of these Jews went to Britain, many of them settling in the London East End.6 Some of the Polish Jews became successful businessmen in London, for example Michael Marks, the founder of Marks & Spencer.7 Another such Polish-Jewish suc- cess story is that of Jack Cohen, a second-generation Jew born in the East End who, together with T.E. Stockwell, gave his initials to the supermarket chain of Tesco.8 But greater by far was the number of Poles who came during and after the Second World War. As a consequence of the German attack on Poland and the subsequent division and occupation of the country by Germany and the Soviet Union, many Poles were evacuated to France, where a Polish govern- ment-in-exile was set up in 1939. Based on a Franco-Polish military agree- 4 Cf. Davies, ‘Britain Finally Honours Polish War Effort with First Official Memorial’. 5 Cf. Jerzy Zubrzycki, Polish Immigrants to Britain: A Study of Adjustment (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), pp.3-8. 6 Cf. Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Migration to Britain (London: Abacus, 2005), pp.228f.; Zubrzycki, pp.44f. 7 Cf. Winder, pp.226f. 8 Cf. ibid., pp.245f. .

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