They came as strangers

THIS book, the story of the refugees who, from far back in our history, have come to seek asylum in the British Isles, is intended for the general reader. Its object is to give some impression of the kind of people who came here, why they were fleeing, how they were received both by the man in the street, the upper classes and the authorities; how they lived here, what they contributed to the country and what they got out of it.

The book is divided into sections. Roughly, these cover the Flemings; Huguenots; émigrés from the French Revolution and political refugees of the nineteenth century; and lastly Jews. Then there is an epilogue on later influxes bringing us up to 1959. The greater part of the book is taken up with the history of refugees up to 1914. Why this is so is explained later.

There is a vast amount of material on the subject, much of it unreadable now, except to the research worker. On Huguenots, for instance, there is a whole section in the London Library, shelf after shelf of dusty volumes. Examining them one feels (as the French historian Bastide did earlier this century), as though one were disturbing the dead. But several refugees have written their Memoirs, some of them in the liveliest manner, and these are freely drawn on in this book, partly for their human interest but mainly because one sees their life here as they saw it, learns what they thought of their treatment and of this country in general. The political refugees, people like Chateaubriand, Herzen, Victor Hugo and Prince Kropotkin, are particularly articulate, but there are two graphic books by Huguenots: Misson's and the Reverend Jacques Fontaine's. The Flemings alas! are silent: we can only guess what they felt about us.