17 March, 2016
Last autumn, at a time when we were working with the National Maritime Museum on a residency exploring the theme of migration, the Museums Journal contacted us for our thoughts on the migration crisis for a piece that eventually appeared in its October edition.
Most museums plan their activity years in advance, so it can often be challenging for them to react when the focus of either their museum or their exhibition suddenly becomes front-page news. But the Migration Museum Project is a museum in search of a home and therefore able to react more nimbly than this. Our position is complicated, however, by the fact that we’re a heritage museum, with an ambition to tell the long story of migration into and out of this country; we are not a campaigning political organisation.
How then should we react to the stories of hundreds of thousands of people forced to leave their countries in search of safety and a better life?
One of a series of photographs taken by Chris Barrett, who visited the migrant camp in Calais twice on behalf of the Migration Museum Project. © Chris Barrett
How we do this in the physical space we hope to inhabit in the not-too-distant future will doubtless give our curators and designers a long line of sleepless nights. In the interim, though, we have run a number of blogs that have clearly been influenced by the current migrant crisis, even if that hasn’t been their main focus. Our principle here, as elsewhere, has been that how we understand the past affects the way we behave in the present, and that we think differently about current crises – and act differently, too – when we see them as part of a general pattern of human movement into and out of countries in search of safety, stability and better prospects.
© Chris Barrett
But talk is talk, and we have also planned a programme of activities that focuses centrally on current migration developments. We are planning an exhibition in June – a momentous month that sees both the referendum and Refugee Week – exploring the complexity and human stories behind the current refugee ‘crisis’ with a particular focus on the refugee camp in Calais. The exhibition will take place in the Londonewcastle Project Space in Shoreditch, London, and will be an immersive storytelling experience with work across visual art, photography, film, sound and performance. A significant group of established and emerging artists, some refugees and migrants themselves, some even camp residents, will show their artistic response to the Calais camp.
The exhibition will provide a backdrop for a wider programme of performances, talks, workshops and skills and shared learning sessions – as well as an education programme that will include workshops co-delivered with a young person who has experienced forced migration, and performances by students participating in our theatre-in-education programme.
© Chris Barrett
Anyone interested in working with us on this venture, or wanting to contribute funds to it, should get in touch with Sue McAlpine or Aditi Anand, who are curating our residency. We will keep you updated with developments, particularly in the area of funding, and give you full details of the dates and the programme of activities nearer the time.
The photographs featured on this post were taken by Chris Barrett in Calais. Chris’s photos, as well as those of many other photographers we have worked with, will be part of the display in June.
11 January, 2016
Our position has always been that the Migration Museum we are working to develop will be a museum about emigration as much as about immigration, and for two main reasons. The first is that, until the 1980s, Great Britain was a net exporter of people – more people left the country than came into it – and emigration has been a core part of our history for thousands of years. And the second is that every immigrant into a country is, of course, an emigrant from another – but, when people talk about migration, the focus tends always to be, unevenly, on the impact of immigration rather than that of emigration.
In this guest blog, Murray Watson tells the story of one particular episode of emigration in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This is in many ways a much less widely known story than that told by Mihir Bose in his recent blog comparing the current migration situation with that within Europe in the years following 1945.
Away from the ration book . . .
The mass movement of people in the years following the Second World War was exceptional. Much has been written about war brides and the millions of displaced persons as well as returning military personnel; but little attention has been given to the mass exodus of young British emigrants desperate to depart Britain’s war-torn shores.
In the years after the war more than 2 million people emigrated from the United Kingdom. Such was the scale of population loss that wartime leader Winston Churchill feared those leaving would hamper post-war recovery. He issued a patriotic appeal on the BBC:
I say to those that wish to leave our country, “Stay here and fight it out.” If we work together with brains and courage, as we did in days not long ago, we can make our country fit for all our people. Do not desert the old land.
Applicants for emigration to Australia queue at the Australian Embassy in London, December 1929. English-speaking Commonwealth countries such as Australia and Canada were favoured destinations for emigrants, with some governments offering assisted passage schemes to try and attract workers. © Getty Images
This was a battle Churchill was destined to lose and his feelings were made palpably clear when he described emigrants as ‘rats leaving a sinking ship’. Five years later, in 1952 on a visit to Canada, he had apparently modified his views when he said, ‘A magnificent future awaits [immigrants] in Canada.’
Canada was the most popular destination for post-war British emigrants, with over half a million emigrating there in the 25 years after the war. Other popular destinations, according to secretary of state Duncan Sandys, were Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia–Nyasaland and the USA.
A nurse inspecting a group of children from the Outer Hebrides on board the Canadian Pacific ship the SS Marloch, April 1924. © Getty Images
Why was emigration such an important phenomenon after the war? My new book, Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada Since 1945, co-authored with Marilyn Barber, reveals a complex mix of explanations. What was evident was that there was a pervasive nationwide propensity to emigrate; most adults would have been aware of some of their friends or family thinking about leaving Britain in pursuit of a new and better life.
The euphoria after VE Day and VJ Day was short-lived. The costs of fighting the most expensive war in history had plunged the country into a series of economic crises that even the Marshall plan from the USA could not relieve. Cities were bomb-scarred, and housing shortages – exacerbated by returning troops – were critical. There were food and fuel shortages, and an austerity regime rationing food, fuel, furniture and clothing continued until 1954. Newly married couples were often forced to share with parents or to live in cold, inadequate homes. And, if that was not enough, there was the winter of 1947, a winter of Canadian proportions that made life even more miserable. Conditions were such that George Drew, the Premier of Ontario, handed out food parcels from the people of Canada to hungry residents in Suffolk.
Scottish emigrants on board the Minnedosa, headed towards Canada. © Getty Images
George Drew was a wily operator. He, along with other politicians in the Federal Government, wanted to attract British immigrants. Drew, in another publicity stunt, personally welcomed the first thirty-nine airborne immigrants who arrived in Toronto on a Skymaster aircraft run by Transocean Air Lines in 1947.
Immigration offices from Commonwealth countries sprang up in cities throughout the UK, with Australia, Canada, and New Zealand extolling the benefits of better housing and employment opportunities, as well as offering incentives for an unsurpassed quality of life.
An immigration official processing new arrivals in the customs hall at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
At the age of twenty-one James Roland decided it was time to seek pastures new. He went to London and, as he recalled, ‘I sort of had this idea of the Commonwealth in my mind.’ He planned to go to the Australian, New Zealand and Canadian High Commissions to learn about emigrating. He went to Canada House first and never got any further. There he found a huge room full of people all wanting to go to Canada and waiting for several days to be processed. When an immigration officer discovered that Roland had a degree, however, he was fast-tracked and emerged three hours later, having had a medical and obtained an assisted passage and landed immigrant status. He did not bother to investigate Australia or New Zealand.
A group of cheering miners’ sons on board the ship Montcalm as they emigrate to Canada.
The crowded rooms and queues at immigration offices were largely populated by young people – married couples, nuclear families, and single men and women. James Roland was typical of the single people who emigrated. In the years after the war there was an urge to travel, for adventure and excitement. Shortages of cash and frequent spells of exchange controls meant there were few of the opportunities enjoyed by the backpackers of today. People had to go on working holidays, which meant they had to secure landed immigrant status. Some of these people returned, but many remained in their new homes.
Married couples and those with young children also sought adventure, but they also wanted better jobs and better housing. A typical example was Emma Bulmer, who was a child when she emigrated with her parents in 1948. Her family stories of English austerity shaped her childhood knowledge of her background:
Part of the stories of growing up was how there was not enough coal to heat the house, so we slept in the kitchen and that was really cold, and putting the baby in a drawer to sleep because there wasn’t enough money to buy a certain thing like a crib, and of the ration books …
Ex-servicemen and their families on the Canadian Pacific liner Montrose on their way to take up agricultural work in Canada, January 1927. They were sent under the auspices of the British Legion, which trained them in Canadian agricultural methods. © Getty Images
You can discover more about these hidden histories from dozens of immigrants who were interviewed for my new book. Our recorded life stories are intensely private, often funny, and occasionally heartbreaking. Many of the immigrant interviewees talk frankly about their motivations, fears, expectations, and family separation anxieties. Others refer mainly to their public lives, revealing insights into how individuals and families integrated into local communities and the Canadian way of life. The book also includes comparative examples of experiences of other immigrants, including those who went to Australia and New Zealand. Some accounts are positive, others negative; some are sad, others happy; some are success stories, others are not. They reveal memories about hardship, first impressions, culture shock, heartbreak, love, family, illness, death, ambition, work, patriotism, and much more.
Dr Murray Watson is an honorary research fellow in the School of Humanities (History) at the University of Dundee. He is the author of Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada since 1945 (University of Manitoba Press, 2015) and Being English in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2003). He was also a post-war migrant himself, emigrating to the West Indies with his parents and siblings in 1959.
17 December, 2015
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.
Dharmendra Patel’s photographs are on display on his website: www.outroslide.co.uk His Twitter feed is @outroslide
