What is it about?
Forced displacement is a traumatic and destructive experience, but it can also be a spur to creative achievement. Of the thousands of refugees driven from their homelands by the Nazis in the 1930s, some in Britain did indeed dynamize the host country and help to change it. This article describes key refugees whose imagination, tenacity and creativity enlivened the Britain that accepted them. The twenty-five émigrés discussed here from seven European countries transformed children’s recreation, their parents’ travel experiences, the new medium of TV and even their daily breakfast staple. It suggests that the émigrés brought innovation, flair and democratic opportunity to breath fresh life into a stale society. It contends that refugees from Nazism helped modernize conservative British outlooks.
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Why is it important?
In the ongoing debate over whether Britain belongs to Europe or should turn inwards and away, this article points out just a small fraction of the enormous impetus to growth and improvement that European immigrants have provided for modern Britain. They may be a special group - refugees from Nazism - but they are part of a continuum that has existed for three centuries ... and more.
Perspectives
I contend that there has been too little appreciation of the important contribution that dynamic European émigrés have contributed to progress and innovation in British life. There is an erroneous and widespread repetition of the myth that European immigrants - as all immigrants - have taken from Britain, rather than given to it. This article refutes that misconception by presenting the benefits brought to ordinary people by just one group.
Dr. Tony Morgan
Anglia Ruskin University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Toys, Travel, TV, and Toast: Refugees from Nazism Who Enlivened British Social Life, August 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004741348_003.
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