... And the Policeman Smiled (12 page)

Faith in the government as the banker of last resort was consistently misplaced. Chamberlain's cabinet was obsessed by the fear that if taxpayers' money was used to shore up the refugee organisations, other countries, not least Germany, would be encouraged to hand on to Britain yet more of their unwanted citizens. Accusations of defeatism were countered by the naive assumption that Sir Herbert Emerson, the League of Nation's high commissioner for refugees, who was based in London, had a trick or two up his sleeve.

The fact was that Sir Herbert was a desperately unhappy man. He spent his time looking for a Jewish homeland that was not Palestine. It was a hopeless task. Ever more fanciful proposals were raised, discussed at enormous length and consigned to the reject file. There was talk of setting up a Jewish state in Abyssinia, the Russians offered the Amur basin, as long as the population of the new republic was limited to 100,000 and several Latin American countries declared an interest in farmers who had a start capital of at least £500. (Few European refugees qualified either by occupation or savings.) Mexico welcomed single, able-bodied men, but they had to promise to marry local girls. Much praised at the Evian conference for a bold offer to absorb up to 100,000 refugees, the Dominican Republic had closed its application list at 2000. By November 1938 it had shortened to just twenty.

The best hope, decided Emerson, was British Guiana, which offered sub-tropical wide open spaces. The trouble was it offered little else except tropical wide open spaces. Essential services like housing and transport were not even on the drawing board. Emerson was not deterred. The prospects have been greatly improved,' he reported breathlessly, ‘by the promise of the British government to provide the main roads if the stage of mass settlement is reached.'

If this was the likeliest prospect for a major resettlement, what
chance was there for the re-emigration of the
Kindertransporte?
As it happened, of the 5381 children who arrived in the first six months of 1939, only 113 re-emigrated, and most of those went to join their parents who had escaped Germany by other routes. Yet, throughout, re-emigration remained the official policy. Its place at the centre of government thinking was re-emphasised in April 1939 when the RCM was told that, henceforth, each guarantor would have to put up a deposit of £50 to support the cost of a child's re-emigration. The order was supported, a trifle ingenuously, by a claim that the government was trying to broaden the scope of the RCM to take in more of the not so urgent cases. But, of course, the £50 deposit, at a time when the annual wage was less than £500, was a powerful deterrent to all but the wealthiest families and remained so until the Baldwin Fund agreed to put up the money for children without guarantors or for foster parents who could not afford to pay.

The government was on stronger ground with the proposal to set up a coordinating committee to act as a channel of communication, mainly to the Home Office, for up to thirty organisations involved with refugees. Lord Hanley, a bluff, no-nonsense administrator who had learned his trade as governor of the Punjab, was appointed chairman. He had the unenviable task of trying to reconcile the disparate interests of, say, the RCM and the International Solidarity Fund, whose interpretation of their grand title was to resist all efforts to open up the labour market to non-nationals.

Still, there was some virtue for the RCM in having the chance to compare notes with like-minded bodies such as the Society of Friends and the Christian Council for Refugees, the latter a long-sought-after but, at times, bitterly contested amalgam of the Catholic Committee for Refugees from Germany and the Church of England Committee for non-Aryan Christians.

Between them, the Quakers and the Christian Council looked after about twenty per cent of those who came over on the
Kindertransporte
. Often these children had no idea why they had been sent away. They knew nothing of Judaism, did not feel Jewish, and yet had enough Jewish blood in them to make them somehow different from their former friends, if not quite enough for them to be welcomed unreservedly into the Jewish community. They were to figure prominently among the more tragic case histories.

The experience of the coordinating committee, with its balance weighted towards non-Jewish affairs, undoubtedly persuaded the RCM to adopt more of a non-denominational role in its refugee work. Leading figures in the RCM like the Marchioness of Reading, who had been born into a Jewish family, converted to Christianity and had now converted back to Judaism; Elaine Blond, Sigmund Gestetner and Lola Hahn-Warburg quickly caught on to the message that the best chance of currying public favour was to play down the religious factor.

Malcolm Muggeridge was one of many observers of the political scene to note the ‘unmistakable tang' of anti-Semitism in the air. British Fascists were a small and divided minority, but not, it seems, without their influence.

Sir John Simon found it necessary to issue a statement that, despite a biblical name, he was of Welsh extraction; Lord Camrose, proprietor of the
Daily Telegraph
, brought a successful libel action against an organ of the British Union of Fascists for having falsely implied that he was a Jew; in one of his articles, Dean Inge suggested that Jews were using ‘their not inconsiderable influence in the Press and in Parliament to embroil us with Germany'.

(Malcom Muggeridge,
The Thirties
, p. 263)

Moreover, there was a powerful lobby of Jewish opinion in favour of putting adopted nationality before race and religion; indeed, this had been the keynote of Jewish immigration to Britain since the 1880s. Assimilation implied a working partnership with the religious and social establishment.

For this reason there was no resistance when Lord Hailey urged the RCM to take on Sir Charles Stead, another old India hand, as executive director. It was a post for which he was singularly unsuited and from which he removed himself or was gently pushed in September 1939, but, though he failed to hit it off with the central committee, he did bring to the organisation the stamp of institutional legitimacy.

After Stead's appointment, the RCM deliberately set out to become broad church. A religious triumvirate was formed with a Catholic, Canon George Craven, and a Protestant, the Reverend William Simpson, elected to the central committee to join Rabbi Maurice Swift.

The next move was to find a chairman from the ranks of the
great and the good, someone of acknowledged independence who combined the qualities of Solomon and Job. The choice fell on Lord Gorell, the son of an eminent judge who had inherited his title from his elder brother. At 55 he could claim a distinguished record of philanthropic and public service which included setting up the Royal Army Education Corps. As a cross-bencher in the House of Lords he had steered clear of party politics, but his writing and speeches put him firmly on the side of the underdog. That he was not Jewish was seen as another point in his favour.

Endorsed by the central committee, the invitation to Gorell to head the RCM was sent by a roundabout but significant route:

On 23 February 1939, the Archbishop of Canterbury, then Dr Lang, wrote to me to ask me to take on the Chairmanship of the Refugee Children's Movement, as a duality with Lord Samuel. With that diplomatic disingenuousness for which he was distinguished he added that he understood that ‘the duties would not be very exacting' – a humorous prelude to ten years of continuous, responsible, very difficult but also very rewarding work. I accepted, but almost at once, after a conference with Lord Samuel and Lord Hailey, it was agreed that I should carry on alone. I was therefore sole chairman until the Movement, having done its work, wound up ten years later.

(Lord Gorell:
One Man, Many Parts
, p. 303)

A second, critical appointment was that of a professional to take charge of the administration. Dorothy Hardisty did not actually take over from Sir Charles Stead as executive director until the outbreak of war, but by then she had already made her presence felt as an able and energetic deputy. A widow of fifty-eight, Dorothy Hardisty had the great quality of adoring children, though her generosity of spirit did not extend to all adults. For her, there was never any question of suffering fools gladly. Her capacity for work can be judged by her later career. When she retired from the RCM in 1948 she went on to run the Violet Melchet Infant Welfare Centre near Sloane Square, a job she held for the next twenty years. One of her joys was taking the bus along the King's Road when that thoroughfare was the epitome of the swinging sixties. At eighty-two, Dorothy Hardisty took her grandchildren to Battersea Fun Fair. When they showed an interest in the water chute, she
decided it was too dangerous for them to go on it alone. So she went with them and thought it was great fun.

The religious and cultural mix that was now characteristic of the RCM at national level showed too in the provincial committees which sprang up to recruit foster parents and organise hostel accommodation.

The first of these committees were in Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge and in South London (Battersea). All of these began work in the same week as the first
Kindertransporte
were given the go-ahead. That they managed to start up so speedily was largely thanks to local representatives of the Jewish Refugees Committee who simply doubled up for the RCM. Cambridgeshire was the exception in that a child refugee group, led by Greta Burkill, had been active since 1933. By September 1939, there were twelve regional committees and sixty-five area committees, the latter increasing to 175 by the end of the war.

In the early days, the chief burden of committee routine was inspecting likely homes for refugee children. A list of suggested lines of enquiry was circulated by head office – What is the husband's, or breadwinner's work? Is German spoken by anyone? General views on bringing up child. Is a maid kept?, and so on.

If the home was judged to be satisfactory, the prospective foster parent, or ‘befriender' as the RCM preferred to call them, was given some reading matter to prepare for the day. A pamphlet which achieved wide circulation was called
Helpful Information and Guidance for Every Refugee
. Though intended primarily for adults, the advice held good for young refugees. They were urged to learn English, to refrain from speaking or reading German, not to make themselves conspicuous by manners or dress, and to accept, without criticism, the way things were done in Britain. ‘The Englishman,' they were told, ‘attaches very great importance to modesty, understatement in speech rather than overstatement … He values good manners far more than he values the evidence of wealth.'

If the proposition is doubtful it is yet more evidence of the all-pervading influence of the public school ethic in refugee work. The ideal counted for more than the reality.

The responsibilities of the regional and area committees increased in line with the numbers of refugee children needing care. By mid-1939, in addition to finding places to live for children who
arrived without guarantors, the committees had delegated to them the twice-yearly inspection of homes, arrangements for schooling and vocational training, and the task of sorting out any difficulties over religious education.

Along with the spread of the RCM organisation across the country, the head office was put on a firmer footing with the purchase of Bloomsbury House, the former Palace Hotel just off London's Bedford Square. The deal was put through by Lord Hailey on behalf of all the major refugee bodies. At about the same time the aliens department of the Home Office took on extra staff and moved to Cleveland House on Thorney Street. Bloomsbury House was Hailey's finest achievement. At last there was room for a central bureau of information, which went a long way to reducing the confusion caused by overlapping responsibilities. The offices were cramped and without essentials like typewriters which had to be shared. Still, they were better than everything that had gone before.

In the first six months of 1939, the staff of the RCM at Bloomsbury House, mostly volunteers, fluctuated between sixty and seventy. They dealt with something like 5000 letters a week and interviewed up to 500 petitioners on behalf of children still in Germany. The visitors were herded into two large halls, which were once the hotel ballroom and dining room. There they had to wait, often for hours at a stretch. Tempers frayed with time.

‘If some of our visitors are somewhat lacking in restraint,' noted an RCM report euphemistically, ‘it must be remembered that many are overwrought with anxiety.'

Perhaps this was an example of the famous English preference for ‘understatement in speech rather than overstatement …' The same talent came into play whenever the religious issue surfaced. It was inevitable that the RCM commitment to accepting help from wherever it was offered would be seen by orthodox Jews as a betrayal and a challenge. A counter-attack was only a matter of time. It came in February 1939, when Harry Goodman, a dyspeptic character who worked alongside Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld on the Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council (CRREC), launched a bitter diatribe against the faint hearts of Bloomsbury House. Goodman contended that the RCM was putting at risk the interests of the Jewish faith by its readiness to enlist help from the Christian community. That gentile foster parents were liable to
imbue youngsters with their own values, however hard they tried to take a neutral line, was undeniable, but the alternative, to turn away children because there were not enough Jewish homes for them to go to, was rejected out of hand by the RCM's ruling council.

It was the beginning of a long-running feud which rumbled on throughout the war and beyond. The RCM tried hard to play down the issue, arguing that all those working for refugees would achieve most if they cooperated. But, uncompromising in their beliefs, the leaders of the CRREC chose to go their own way, negotiating directly with the Home Office for permits to bring over the children of strictly orthodox families. These were fostered by other strictly orthodox families or sent to hostels in north London – the girls to Stamford Hill, the boys to Amhurst Park.