Doors onto lives

The portraits of Dharmendra Patel

It’s only about 10 metres’ walk from the door of the Heritage Gallery in the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich to the lecture room at its far end but, in the spring of this year, for the time it took you to cross the floor you would have been unable to avoid the image of a man crouched on the ground beside a radiator in front of you. This is ‘Yasser’, Dharmendra Patel’s stunning photograph of a Sudanese man painfully and emotionally stranded between the country in which he has been granted asylum status and the country he is still scared he will be sent back to.

Yasser – Birmingham, 2010 © Dharmendra Patel. Dharmendra’s full caption to the photograph is given at the end of this blog.

In the Heritage Gallery, where photographs from our 100 Images of Migration were on display, ‘Yasser’ was huge: literally, in a print (courtesy of the University of Leicester School of Museum Studies) measuring 3.5 metres wide and just over 2 metres high; but also metaphorically, in the mesmeric power it had to draw people into the space. Visitors sheltering from the rain in Queen Anne Court would see the picture and find themselves drawn into the room to look at it more closely. It was always one of the photos that received the most mentions in visitors’ comments.

Pastor Reynolds – Birmingham, 2010 © Dharmendra Patel. Dharmendra’s full caption to the photograph is given at the end of this blog.

On the adjacent wall there was another portrait, less harrowing and smaller in scale, but quietly powerful nonetheless. This was ‘Pastor Reynolds’, another photograph by Dharmendra, this time of an old man sitting in a (clearly) favourite armchair, surrounded by the bric-à-brac of his life, and looking into the camera with a gently contented smile.

Not exactly polar opposites, ‘Pastor Reynolds’ and ‘Yasser’ nevertheless epitomised the range of experience 100 Images of Migration set out to convey. Each packs a huge punch; each comes across as entirely natural – a life captured in an image – even though its artifice is plain to see. These are posed photographs, but photographs of rare depth and clear engagement between photographer and subject.

Dharmendra Patel is waiting for me at the railway station of Sandwell & Dudley, but I walk straight past him, embarrassingly because I am looking for a woman: Dharmendra signs himself ‘Dee’ on his e-mails, in wry recognition of the difficulty people who are not of Indian origin have in pronouncing his name – and the only ‘Dee’s I have met previously have been female. Dharmendra takes the confusion with good grace (good grace is clearly something he was born with) and we joke about it as he drives us to the municipal office where we are going to talk – and about the Chelsea footballer Azpilicueta, who was called ‘Dave’ by fans and players because they found his name too difficult; and how many British Asians get called by their family names, which are considered easier to pronounce than their first names. The embarrassment passes – and it was all on my side in any case.

Spoz; the first of four ‘Couch Stories’ portraits featured here. Each person was asked who they would like to be sitting alongside them on the couch or sofa, and their answer is given in capitals at the base of the photograph. Spoz is a former laureate from Birmingham, who enjoys listening to and playing music. © Dharmendra Patel

Dharmendra describes himself as an environmental portrait photographer. It’s the Ronseal description of what he does, which is to photograph portraits of people in their own environment. Both ‘Yasser’ and ‘Pastor Reynolds’ are examples of this approach, though they were in fact part of an earlier project, Land of Hope and Glory, which you can see on Dharmendra’s website – and for which he has written an introduction that I urge you to read: in a few hundred words it says more about migration in this country than I have read in articles ten times its length. It says so much about the man, too: his easy grace, his self-deprecating character, his excitement at having stumbled on something that he recognises to be so powerful.

For Dharmendra did stumble upon photography. He had always enjoyed photography, and done it, but it is only recently that he has practised it professionally. Before 2010 he worked in the clothing industry, having graduated from De Montfort University with a degree in business management and marketing. The change came, first, in 2008, when he bought a digital camera, and two years later, in 2010, when he was one of 15 people from different artistic backgrounds accepted onto a professional development programme. For Dharmendra this led to Land of Hope and Glory, a project in which he was, as he puts it, heavily mentored by Vanley Burke, the great photographic chronicler of the black community in Birmingham and Handsworth.

Rohit, a call-centre manager from Birmingham, is a sitar player and spoken-word poet. © Dharmendra Patel

Professional since 2011, Dharmendra has honed his portraiture skills over the course of the years, tracking down the photographers of images he loves and asking for their secrets, especially their tips on lighting (two strobes and a hot-shoe flash, all off camera, for any technophile who might be reading this). More recent projects – especially his Couch Stories, the source of most of the other photographs on this blog – show how much he has refined his technique. He is meticulous about setting up his portraits but candid about the fact that many of his best photos have been taken when he’s pretending to set the lighting up and when the conversation has just reached a point where there is an obviously natural connection between photographer and subject. His photographs are joyful, even when they tell painful stories, because of the clear empathy he has for his subjects. Human warmth courses through the celluloid. And through what he says, whether it’s in print or in person. To go back to ‘Yasser’ and ‘Pastor Reynolds’, these are powerful photographs in their own right, but they are doubly so when they are viewed alongside the text that Dharmendra has written about them.

Fab, a videographer and actor based in Birmingham, starred in a play at the RSC in Stratford. © Dharmendra Patel

His parents (she from Kenya, he from India) moved to this country in the late 1960s, and he grew up and went to school in Leicester, in a predominantly white neighbourhood where he got used to the predictable, if off-target, taunts of ‘Here come the Pakis’ (as a quiet act of vengeance he relished his schoolmates’ inability to distinguish between people of Indian and Pakistani heritage). Dharmendra is aware that some people claim never to have experienced racism – but he did, and it was something that came between him and his father, who (in a way typical of a first-generation migrant) preferred not to hear the racial abuse that the two of them experienced on the street. When he walks down the street with his own daughter now, Dharmendra wonders how he would respond to similar taunting – but it’s clear to both of us that he wouldn’t allow it, more importantly that he wouldn’t allow his daughter to believe people should be able to get away with that kind of abuse.

Louise, one of Yorkshire’s first female dry stone wallers, enjoys hiking and wild camping; she also teaches chainsaw and tree-felling courses. © Dharmendra Patel

Born and bred in Britain, Dharmendra always identified as British, but it wasn’t until he visited his father in India, who had just had a heart attack on a visit to his home village, that he had a recognition of stark clarity that ‘This was where I am from’. Since then, he has thought more about his extended family, his father and mother’s backgrounds, and the country of their origin. We talk about how it is feasible to have multiple loyalties and identities, and I sense that this lies at the heart of many of Dharmendra’s photographs: talking to people about where they belong, where they feel most comfortable, where they’re at home. On one level it’s a small project he has taken on, an exercise in miniatures, but it’s one that he has transmuted into something grander, something magical.

And it’s not entirely magical, but I like the story of how he met his wife, who was living in Walsall at the time, where Dharmendra had moved in 2002. Near enough to be almost neighbours, they actually met in India, where the two of them were attending the grand opening of the recently refurbished village temple of which Dharmendra’s grandfather was the priest – it turns out that their fathers knew each other. It’s a doubly sweet coincidence because the meeting of course led to their wedding, and the one aspect of Dharmendra’s professional life that he finds the least stimulating is wedding photographs, the staple diet of many a photographer.

I’d worried, when booking train tickets to meet him, that I’d left far too long between trains and that I’d have to invent some other engagement to go to when conversation ran dry. I needn’t have: we talk so long that we lose the chance to have lunch and missing my train back also begins to look a real possibility. ‘It’s all to do with stories,’ Dharmendra says about his photographs. ‘The images are just a door opening onto a life.’ I think about the phrase on the train back to London, how close it is to our own strapline of ‘All Our Stories’ – and I understand again the power of ‘Yasser’ and ‘Pastor Reynolds’ to move people.

Dharmendra’s full captions to ‘Yasser’ and ‘Pastor Reynolds’

‘Yasser’ – Yasser was brought up in a rural district near Khartoum. Growing up was hard – “Human rights are like the lottery in Sudan: some get it, some don’t.” 

He fled his country at the age of 28 after being imprisoned and tortured by the Sudanese State; leaving his mother and younger sister behind, he came to England. He had very little money and no contacts here. He was granted asylum in 2005. He loves the UK but, even though he has asylum status, he is scared to call on the authorities such as the police or the ambulance in case he is sent back to Sudan.

I decided to take the picture the way I did because it shows how he was feeling. It made me realise how much I was taking life for granted. I am the same age as this man, and his upbringing and mine were vastly different.

‘Pastor Reynolds’ – Pastor Reynolds was born in 1929 and came to England on 15 March 1960. It was difficult leaving his family and friends for a new land of opportunity and promises. Uncertainty got the better of him and he spent his last few moments in Jamaica contemplating what he was going to leave behind. This was the first time he had travelled out of his country. When he landed, the cold hit him and he spent the first few days battling homesickness.

Pastor Reynolds spent 20 years working on the railways of Birmingham and for a large engineering company before becoming a pastor.

The image was taken at the Pastor’s home in Birmingham. I decided to take the picture there because it was a reflection of his personality: relaxed and easy-going. He’s now retired and spends a lot of his time at the church and watching his children and grandchildren grow up.

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Dharmendra Patel’s photographs are on display on his website: www.outroslide.co.uk  His Twitter feed is @outroslide

The Truth About Immigration in the UK 2014 (BBC, HD 720p)

First published on ISH Blog

New Detention Services Order on serious immigration detention incidents

New Detention Services Order 05/2015 Reporting and communicating incidents out of hours in the immigration detention estate has just been published covering how out of hours incidents in immigration detention camps and during enforced removals (including charter flights) should be reported and communicated. It replaces two previous DSOs but I will not be conducting a minute examination of […]

The first mass migration from outside Europe

Mihir Bose, one of our distinguished friends, argues in this guest blog that Europe will need to think outside the box if it is to cope with the most unique migrant crisis in its history – and he looks back to 1971 and the painful birth of Bangladesh for a telling point of comparison. 

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The migrant crisis that has engulfed Europe has seen a whole range of responses, from Angela Merkel’s August Wilkommenskultur – although that is fraying a bit now that summer has turned to winter – to the stated willingness of those on the European far right to let the refugee boats sink in the Mediterranean. One thing everyone in Europe is agreed on, however: this is the worst migration crisis the continent has seen since the end of the Second World War.

Anti-racism protesters rally in August in Dresden, stronghold of the anti-Islam PEGIDA movement. Activists demonstrate in solidarity with migrants, in a show of defiance against far-right extremists who have mounted protests against the influx of migrants to Germany. (AFP/Robert Michael)

In terms of size and scale it certainly is, but the fundamental nature of this migration is very different. Europe has never experienced migration of this nature, or at least not for over a thousand years, and we need to understand how different this migration is, because failure to do so has distorted the migration debate and is the reason why Europe is yet to develop a humane, viable, migration policy.

What makes this migration crisis different is that it is seeing people coming to Europe from other continents – Asia and Africa – whereas the Second World War refugee crisis was a purely European migration. At that time one of the biggest movements was 10 million Germans fleeing from the German provinces east of the Oder–Neisse line and from Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the western part of Germany then controlled by the three victorious Allies: Britain, France and the United States. This movement of the Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans, marked the end of a forward-to-east, backwards-to-west movement which had been going on for almost a decade. These Germans had been living in Eastern Europe since about the 13th century. Hitler’s Nazi regime evacuated them to Germany between 1939 and 1940, only for them to be resettled, after Hitler had conquered Poland, in the newly conquered land – before they were forced back west, once again, after Poland was liberated by Soviet forces. The other movements of people were also Europeans – Poles, Ukrainians and Latvians – moving from one part of Europe to another.

In 1945, a handful of survivors remain of the 150 refugees who left Lodz in Poland two months earlier, headed for Berlin. They follow railway lines in the hope of being picked up by a British train. © Fred Ramage

There was also the migration of many thousands of Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, for whom Europe had become a slaughterhouse. This was an intercontinental movement – but it was Europeans moving to Asia, not the other way round, which is the current position. In that sense this was part of the migration from Europe, involving millions of people, that had been going on for almost four centuries as the Europeans built their vast colonial empires and populated various continents. Indeed, even after the Jewish state was created in Palestine, this European migration to other lands carried on for two – almost three – decades after the war. This period saw Australia, under its White Australia policy, welcoming many Europeans and in the process making Melbourne the biggest Greek city after Athens and Thessaloniki. In Britain this was known as the £10 Pom policy: for £10 the British could migrate to Australia, provided they were white. This would see some famous migrants, including fast bowler Harold Larwood – who had so terrorised Australian batsman on the bodyline tour of 1932–33 that it had nearly led to Australia quitting the British Empire. Unhappy in England, he was now welcomed under the £10 policy and lived there for the rest of his life. And it is worth recalling that the iconic post-war film, Brief Encounter, made in 1945, concerning an affair between a married woman and a doctor, ends with the doctor emigrating to South Africa. The fact is Europeans were still leaving this continent in vast numbers after the war, and continued to do so for many decades.

Today’s migration not only reverses that flow but brings people with very different religions and cultures to Europe. For all the differences between Germans and Poles, it cannot be argued that they match the differences in culture and religion between modern Europeans and the refugees from Syria and other parts of Asia and Africa. In that sense, Europe has not seen such migration for over a thousand years, when, as historians tell us, the arrival of Islam in the Indian subcontinent triggered a westward movement of people from that part of the world, resulting in the formation of the gypsy communities in the west.

In the reign of Muhammad Ghor (1149–1206), Muslims extended their reach into what we now call India. This is a painting depicting a scene from that era.

The other big difference between the migration we are seeing now and that following the Second World War is that in 1945 the movement of people began only after Europe was once again at peace. The migration we are coping with currently is coming even as the war in Syria still rages, with not only no conclusion in sight but no agreement as to what that solution might be. In that sense, what we are facing is more like what happened in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Indeed, the similarities between Syria and events in east Pakistan are so striking that it is surprising western policy makers or opinion formers have not commented on them so far.

Today the Bangladesh genocide of 1971 is little remembered, although it was almost as horrendous as that of Rwanda. Let us recall it, because it may provide some lessons for Syria.

Like Syria, which was artificially constructed after the First World War, the Pakistan that emerged as a result of the British withdrawal from India in 1947 was a somewhat unnatural state. It was meant to be a home for the Muslims of the subcontinent but culturally there were vast differences between the Punjabi Muslims of West Pakistan and the Bengali Muslims in the east. As the events of 1971 proved, religion could not overcome these cultural differences – and matters were not helped by the fact that the two halves were separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory, which made no secret that it did not want Pakistan to exist at all.

In 1970 the Avami League, dominated by the Bengalis in East Pakistan, won the country’s first truly democratic election. The outraged Punjabis of West Pakistan, who had ruled the country since its birth in 1947, unleashed a brutal crackdown, killing a quarter of a million Bengalis – maybe as many as a million – with 10 million refugees fleeing to neighbouring India, and thousands of women being raped. There was also a ferocious ethnic cleansing of the minority Hindu population of East Pakistan.

Refugees fleeing East Pakistan (shortly to become Bangladesh) into India at the time of the war of independence, 1970.

The Museum of Independence in Dhaka, which has evidence of Pakistani brutality, is one of the most chilling museums I have ever been to. As this blog is being written, Bangladesh is holding war crimes trials for those of its citizens who helped the Pakistanis in their genocidal activities – 45 years after the events in question took place there is no closure, and the trials hugely anger Pakistan, which refuses to accept what happened and still presents the break-up of Pakistan as the result of Indian machinations.

India’s intervention in the final month of the nine-month conflict was triggered by a Pakistani attack on its territory, though some have suggested that it might also have been influenced by the cost of supporting so many refugees from East Pakistan. Within weeks of its involvement, the war was over and most, if not all, of the 10 million refugees that had flooded into India at the start of the war went back to the newly created Bangladesh.

An Independence Day celebration held at the Museum of Independence in Dhaka.

Despite the scale of the 1971 migration crisis, one crucial difference between it and today’s Syrian-derived crisis is that the East Pakistani refugees had much in common with their Indian counterparts in west Bengal. In today’s migration crisis, there is no neighbouring country that can play the role India did then: Jordan, which has borne the burden of the refugees, is incapable of such a role; and Egypt, with which Syria had a union when President Nasser ruled Egypt and which, as the greatest Arab country, would have been ideally suited to play the role of India in this crisis, is so consumed by its own problems that it cannot even conceive such a thing.

So what does all this amount to? It means there can and will not be an easy solution to the Syrian crisis that lies at the root of Europe’s migration problem – and to go on drawing parallels with the Second World War refugee crisis means ignoring how much more complex this crisis is. We must also consider that for all the humanitarian motives of western statesmen, most notably Merkel, integrating very different communities is never easy. Even after 1,000 years the gypsy community remains a very distinct community in Europe, often distrusted, if not hated, by the majority community in many European lands – and one that Hitler tried to destroy.

This does not mean the refugee crisis cannot be solved – but it needs to be tackled along very different lines, or we are building false scenarios, with potentially worrying knock-on effects. As the security forces in France and Belgium come to grips with the dreadful terrorist attack on Paris, one of the most chilling discoveries has been that a passport of a Syrian refugee was found near the body of a dead suicide bomber. Although this was later discovered to be a fake, the inevitable conclusion people rushed to was that ISIS jihadists were infiltrating the refugees pouring into Europe and that therefore all such refugees were suspect and must be kept out. There is no proof that the Paris bombers were Syrian refugees – not even one of them – but it is a temping conclusion to jump to given how little we have considered the unique nature of this refugee crisis and how it requires Europe to think of solutions that are outside the box. It should not be beyond Europe’s powers to devise such solutions, but it cannot be done if we go on comparing this to the refugee crisis after the Second World War merely because the numbers are the same.

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Mihir Bose is a journalist and author, and a distinguished friend of the Migration Museum Project. His latest book, From Midnight to Glorious Morning: A Look at India Since 1947, will be published in the new year by Vikas. You can read more about him on his website and follow him on Twitter: @mihirbose

Changes to minimum salary for non-EU applicants

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/24/new-uk-immigration-rules-will-you-be-affected Migrant workers will now need to earn at least £35,000 to qualify for settlement in the UK.

The first Irish diaspora?

Among the many untold stories of migration, the forced repatriation of the Irish in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most often to serve English political purposes, ranks particularly high. In this guest blog, Nadege Ford-Vidal gives an account of this episode, with specific reference to Barbados.

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Redlegs in Barbados

I first came across the story of the Irish in the Caribbean when I discovered the book To Hell or Barbados by Sean O’Callaghan. I was working with the BBC development team, hoping to put together some programme ideas about the real pirates of the Caribbean, given the success of the film. I was astounded to read about the long-term forced migration of the Irish to the New World colonies by the English – an episode in the history of slavery I had never come across before. It interested me not only in relation to work but also on a more personal basis. My husband, whose family originates from Barbados, has an Irish name. He, and others like him, had always been led to believe that his name derived from the Irish plantation managers, who gave their names to the African slaves they ruled with an iron fist. O’Callaghan eloquently challenged this common belief, asserting that there was no evidence to support it. So where did these names come from, and when did this practice of forced migration begin?

An example deed of indenture, from the eighteenth century.

The first recorded sale of Irish slaves was to a settlement on the Amazon River in 1612 during the reign of James I (1603–25). During the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603), 30,000 Irish military prisoners had been captured and were officially banished over the following years – in the main to end up serving in European armies or, as the Proclamation of 1625 ordered, to be transported and sold as indentured servants to English planters, who were settling the islands of the West Indies and the New World colonies.

An engraving of one of the battles of the Nine Years’ War, artist unknown.

As the settlement of North America and the Caribbean moved ahead, the demand for slave labour grew and the policy of transportation became official and continued to the late 18th century.

During the Cromwellian period (called the Reign of Terror for good reason) the practice took on a new form. From around 1652 onwards, any member of the Irish Catholic population was liable to be ‘Barbadosed’. As sugar production began to take off on the island, Parliament saw it as its duty to provide an adequate labour force. It devised numerous ruses for ‘legally’ capturing individuals. Every petty infraction – including looking as if you were about to do something illegal or just being caught in the street (vagrancy, as it was officially termed) – carried a sentence of transportation. Forced migration had multiple up-sides for Parliament and Cromwell: it served to rid Ireland of unwanted Irish antagonists; it freed land that could then be given as gifts to English and Irish Parliamentarians; it produced a profit from slave trade while supporting the English in the colonies with labour.

A map of Barbados from the mid-17th century, with slavery already a firmly established feature.

The greed for profit from this (practically free) slave resource was so excessive that gangs called ‘Man Catchers’ became a common feature of the landscape, combing the city streets and countryside to kidnap enough people to fill out their quotas. No one in the lowest classes was safe, whatever their nationality, religion, sex or age.

Over 100,000 young children, who were orphans or had been taken from their Catholic parents, were sent abroad into slavery in the West Indies [and other colonies] … that they might lose their faith and all knowledge of their nationality
(Dr Thomas Emmet ‘Ireland under English rule, or a plea for the Plaintiff NY 1903)

Estimates suggest that the population of Ireland fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000 between 1641 and 1652. Banished soldiers who had taken part in the Confederation Revolt, and those kidnapped for servitude, were not allowed to take their wives and children with them. As a result, of course, there was a growing population of homeless women and children, who in turn had to be sold themselves.

Special demand for girls and women ‘not past breeding’ appears to have arisen from the planters’ desire for white mistresses (less frequently wives). Captain John Vernon, employed by the Commissioners of Ireland, signed a contract on behalf of Bristol merchants (many of whom preferred the Irish slave trade routes, which were far more profitable) to find 250 women over the age of 12 from five districts in Ireland. The Captain categorically stated that he could fulfil this quota from the region of Cork alone.

Captain John Vernon, not a huge friend to Irish women, especially those from Cork!

Patrick Prendergast in The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1865) states:

‘But at last the evil became too shocking … particularly when these dealers in Irish flesh began to seize the daughters and children of the English.’

And not just the daughters and children – on 25 March 1659, a petition of 72 Englishmen was received in London, claiming they were illegally ‘now in slavery in the Barbados’.

The Irish welcomed the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. The profitability of the slave trade, however, encouraged the King to charter the Company of Royal Adventurers in 1662, which later became the Royal African Company. The Royal Family – including Charles II, the Queen Dowager and the Duke of York – then contracted to supply at least 3,000 slaves annually to their chartered company.

Contemporary accounts suggest that there was little difference in the means of transportation from the African experience. A slave was a slave no matter the colour. Catholic priests in disguise sent letters to Rome describing the Irish herded into pens like cattle tied to each other by ropes around their necks before embarkation. We have the name of several slave ships involved in the transportation of the Irish to the Colonies: The Jane, The Susan and Mary, The Elizabeth and The Two Brothers, to name a few. It is clear that the same ships travelled the African slave routes, further supporting the likelihood that the Irish were treated in the same way during the voyage itself. Even as early as 1638 Thomas Rous, a Planter, sailed to Barbados with a ship holding 350 with the expectation that at least 20 per cent of the people would not make the journey.

‘… the mind shrinks from imagining the horrors of their suffering at sea … their hardships excited no sympathy in England … to them … there was little to choose between a cow and an Irish Roman Catholic – neither … could feel sorrow or pain’
(Elliot O’Donnell, The Irish Abroad, 1915)

An 18th-century illustration showing men from Dublin and Cork, chained and ready for deportation.

Little first-hand information is available to help us understand the plight of these white slaves: few returned, and those who did decided not to describe their experiences publicly. Colonel John Scott commented that ‘… [they] are just permitted to live, and a very great many Irish, derided by the negroes and branded with the Epithet of white slaves.’

Plantation managers enforced breeding between African slaves and Irish women to produce a free labour resource. The preference was for Coromantine and Mandingo men, who were noted for their strength and intelligence. The more attractive of the offspring produced by these breeding ‘farms’ were often at work in brothels from the age of 12 onwards. Planters also preferred them as mistresses to Irish women, whom the planters considered cold – no surprise, when one imagines the life they must have experienced.

‘They lived as in a prison, their faith banned, their race and nation despised, their virtue outraged, their tears derided.’
(Reverend EA Dalton 1910)

This was such common practice, apparently, that in 1681 legislation was passed ‘forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale’. The basis for this law was no moral objection but grave concern that the practice would adversely affect trading profit.

There are records of Irish and African slaves joining forces to rebel against their masters in Barbados. In 1649, the harshness of the servitude to which they had been subjected caused the Irish to rebel with the Africans against the English colonists.The rebellion failed, and many were hanged, drawn and quartered, and their heads deposited on pikes on high ground around Bridgetown, so that the entire population would be warned against future rebellions.

These rebellions increased the fear slave owners felt and thus the severity with which slaves were treated and the repercussions of any minor infraction. In Barbados, the Assembly (which controlled the Island legally and economically) was entirely made up of white plantation owners who served their own interests (and nominally those of the motherland) by turning harsh controls over slaves into law.

The treatment of Irish slaves is reflected in a letter written by Colonel William Brayne to the English authorities in 1656, urging the importation of African slaves on the grounds that, ‘as the planters would have to pay much more for them, they would have an interest in preserving their lives, which was wanting in the case of (the Irish) … ’

When there were skirmishes with rebels and runaways, the ‘servants and slaves fought to the bitter end, and often sought death, knowing the tortures that awaited them if taken alive’. One event in October 1657, which saw 12 of the militia (employed to police the Island) and 30 runaways killed, also resulted in six Irish captives being nailed to a cross, burnt and beheaded, as a public spectacle. Their owners were given £25 a man in compensation.

Some rebels and runaways tried to leave the island by boat, but even in this endeavour they were thwarted: the Assembly passed a law requiring all boat owners to guard their vessels, mostly out of the widespread fear that they would offer the French and Spanish vital information about the island’s fortifications and military strength. Some runaways clearly did escape by sea and appear to have been part of the crews of the pirate ships which trawled the Caribbean waters. They were known at the time as ‘Brethren of the Coast’. Many who escaped had been in the Irish armies defeated by Cromwell and were well trained in the use of weapons and used to hard living. Some were experienced gunners, who were welcomed with open arms. ‘Red Legs’ Greaves, an infamous marauder of the seas, was known to have escaped Barbados with three other Irish fellow slaves. He had been transported as a Tory (originally an Irish term for ‘outlaw’ or ‘robber’) and sold to a planter with a reputation for cruelty. The four men slipped their chains, killed the watchman guarding a lugger (a traditional fishing boat) and set sail. They were intercepted by a French captain of a pirate fleet of 10, who gladly took them on board and with whom they fought for more than two years.

The longevity of Irish slavery is demonstrated from records of Irish sold as slaves in 1664 to the French on St Bartholomew. In 1713, the Treaty of Assiento was signed: in it Spain granted England exclusive rights to the slave trade, and England agreed to supply Spanish colonies with 4,800 slaves a year for 30 years. England also shipped tens of thousands of Irish prisoners after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, who were sold as slaves in the Colonies and Australia. By the time African slaves in Barbados were emancipated in 1834, the transported Irish had disappeared into history; and by the time of the census of the 1880s no Barbadians were identified as Irish. What remained was a small population of poor whites, often called ‘redlegs’, who may well be the descendants of the Barbadosed Irish.

Erlene Downie and Betty Fenty, two of the Barbados ‘Redlegs’ – also known as ‘Baccra’ as a result of being allowed to sit only in the back row of churches. Betty Fenty is the great-aunt of the singer Rihanna. There are a few hundred Redlegs left in Barbados. ©Sheena Jolley

It would appear that during the 19th and early 20th century this period of Irish history, and the prolific involvement of the English in the white slave trade, was mentioned in several history books. It does raise the question why it has so seldom since featured in our modern history books and why many have, on occasion, attempted to deny that it ever happened …

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Nadege Forde-Vidal studied ancient history and Egyptology at UCL before taking a masters in Egyptian archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology. She assisted with the cataloguing of 80,000 objects for the online project, ‘Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology’, and her thesis  was on ‘The Emancipation of Greek Women in Ptolemaic Egypt’. She likes to sculpt!

City of London: Migrant Haven

The four panellists for ‘Migrant Haven’ (l to r): Stanislas Yassukovich, Kathleen Burk, Caroline Shaw and David Kynaston

What contribution have migrants made to the City of London, the financial powerhouse of the United Kingdom? And what role do they continue to play in shaping London’s financial institutions?

These questions were the focus of our latest Great Minds event, City of London: Migrant Haven, hosted by Schroders on 16 November 2015. The event chaired by eminent historian David Kynaston featured historical and personal perspectives on migrants who have left their mark on the City from the 17th century to the present day. The panel of speakers consisted of Caroline Shaw, Archivist at the Schroder Archive; Kathleen Burk, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London; and Stanislas Yassukovich, widely regarded as one of the architects of the international capital market and previously CEO at European Banking Group.

18th and 19th Century City of London

David Kynaston, author of the four-volume series The City of London, highlighted that the City has always been open to people coming from abroad to work, but that migration truly picked up pace in the late 17th century. This is reflected in the history of the Bank of England, a quarter of whose original board of directors at its founding in 1694 were of Huguenot heritage – including the first Governor of the Bank, John Houblon.

Sir John Houblon was a Huguenot who served as the first Governor of the Bank of England

By the early 18th century, the City of London was a visibly cosmopolitan financial capital. Joseph Addison wrote in The Spectator in 1711,

THERE is no place in the town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal Exchange. It gives me a secret satisfaction, and in some measure, gratifies my vanity, as I am an Englishman, to see so rich an assembly of countrymen and foreigners consulting together upon the private business of mankind, and making this metropolis a kind of emporium for the whole earth … sometimes I am justled among a body of Armenians: sometimes I am lost in a crowd of Jews; and sometimes make one in a group of Dutchmen. I am a Dane, Swede, or Frenchman at different times; or rather fancy myself like the old philosopher, who upon being asked what countryman he was, replied, that he was a citizen of the world.

According to David Kynaston, the 19th century City of London owes much to three game changers, all of them German Jewish immigrants: Nathan Rothschild, Ernest Cassel and Siegmund Warburg. The latter was instrumental in the development of the Eurobond, which marked the City’s revival as international financial centre. Commenting on the overwhelming internationalism in Canary Wharf today, Kynaston also left us with a provocative question about a potential downside to all this migration:

Has there been a ‘Wimbledon-isation’ of the City, i.e. rather like the tennis tournament, we provide the venue but we no longer provide the champions?

The German Connection

Caroline Shaw, Archivist at the Schroder Archive, explored the contributions of the Hanseatic Schroder family to the UK banking system in the 19th and 20th centuries. Schroders was founded in London by two brothers, Johann Friedrich and Johann Heinrich Schroder, in the early 1800s and their strong links to Germany were a significant factor in the firm’s early development. But, by the mid-19th century, the firm diversified into areas – including bond issuing and, more interestingly, taking on agency for the distribution of Peruvian guano – that were less dependent on the German connection and made it one of the most prominent merchant banks in the City.

The First World War brought the ‘nationality’ of the firm into question – the senior partner of the firm, Baron Bruno, was in immediate danger of internment as an enemy alien and the firm in imminent danger of seizure as enemy property. Not only that, but £4 million, more than the firm’s entire capital, was tied up in obligations accepted on behalf of German and Austrian clients.

The outbreak of the First World War brought the German origins of Schroders into sharp relief.

Schroders was deemed ‘too big to fail’, and the Bank of England lobbied intensively to save the firm. Despite the anti-German sentiment of the war years, Schroders had by that point “entered into the City’s cosmopolitan embrace, and was part of the City’s flows of commerce and capital”. As Caroline Shaw argued,

[Schroders] may indeed have been ‘too big to fail’ but I think we can also usefully see it as having been ‘too integrated to fail’.

Era of American Dominance

Kathleen Burk identified the deregulation of financial markets under the Thatcher government – also known as Big Bang – as the moment in history that opened up an era of dominance of American firms in the City. This had a profound effect on the working culture of the City, leading to longer work hours, shorter lunches and shakier marriages! The Americans were also instrumental in supplanting relationship banking with transactional banking (although the former did not completely disappear) and upending specialisation in markets and financial products with one-stop banking supermarkets.

The aggressive expansion of American business in London required more space for trading rooms and offices, leading first to the building of Broadgate in the mid-1980s, followed by the development of Canary Wharf – the consequence of which being that a large chunk of the City is now outside the City. Finally, Professor Burk argued that the American dominance emphasised, and accelerated, the position of the City of London as separate from the rest of the country, always looking outwards to ensure its survival. With the economic decline of the UK in the 20th century there was a danger that New York would take over. However, the Eurodollar market attracted American money in huge quantities so that, while New York City remains the financial capital of the United States, the City of London, partly due to its dominance in foreign exchange, is now the financial capital of the world.

Kathleen Burk on the American influence: “It could be argued that the influx of American firms, American money, and American business culture saved the City’s bacon.”

A Cosmopolitan Capital

Stanislas Yassukovich, a veteran of the Eurobond market who started in the City in 1961, spoke of his family’s personal experiences in London. He recalled that his Russian émigré father marvelled at the cosmopolitanism of the City of London in the first half of the 20th century. He credits this cosmopolitan culture as a significant reason why London was able to surpass Paris and Amsterdam as the financial capital of the world. Those cities were much more insular, whereas London not only welcomed individuals and skills but also integrated the cultures and ethos of migrants into the City. “Immigration is a key factor to London’s success,” said Yassukovich. He also acknowledged the changing nature of the City and particularly the erosion of its village-like feel, which has historically also made the City cohesive and successful.

Stanislas Yassukovich considers the characteristics that allowed the City of London to thrive.

The panel also engaged in a lively question-and-answer session with the audience that touched on topics such as migrants’ reception outside the City in the places they lived and the UK’s relationship to the EU. At a time when migration is a constant feature in the news, the panel discussion illuminated the long and continuing history of migrants’ contributions to London’s thriving financial institutions.

Migration and Youth

What do we know about young migrants in the UK?

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Demographics of Young Migrants in the UK

30th November 2015

Dr Yvonni Markaki

Rob McNeil

This briefing provides an overview of young migrants in the UK and their demographic characteristics. The analysis uses data from the Census for England and Wales and the UK Labour Force Survey, and focuses on people born outside the UK who are up to 24 years of age. It is part of a series of briefings the Migration Observatory is producing on migrant youth in the UK.

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