This picture is part of a bigger project, developed in collaboration with Hackney Museum, about Cazenove Road, its community and its surroundings.
For me, Cazenove Road sums up the diversity of London: in this one road there is a mosque, a synagogue, a queer bar, a typical charity shop, second-hand shops, an art gallery, the organic shop, etc.
When the Huguenots started arriving in England, following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, London – where they mostly gathered – had a population of less than 500,000. The arrival of 25,000 migrants in the capital was the equivalent of more than 400,000 migrants arriving there nowadays. And yet London, and the broader country (where a further 25,000 dispersed), absorbed these migrants – or, to give them the name that they brought to our language, these réfugiés, refugees – with little difficulty and hostility.
In part this was down to a shared religion. The Huguenots were French (or French-speaking) Protestants, followers of John Calvin and Martin Luther, and the dominant Catholic aristocracy and establishment suspected them of plotting to take control of the country. For the second half of the 16th century, France witnessed a series of civil wars – the French Wars of Religion – and massacres (Mérindol in 1545, Vassy in 1562 and St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, among many others), which seem horribly familiar to a current sensibility.
Catherine de Medici outside the Louvre on the morning after the St Bartholomew massacre – painting by Édouard Débat-Ponsan
The Edict of Nantes in 1598 was an attempt to draw a line under these ugly episodes, and to give the Huguenots the freedom to practise their religion – but in the years that followed it was a law that was honoured more in the breech than in the observance. When the fiercely anti-Protestant Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, took to the throne in 1643, persecution of the Huguenots became more widespread and systematic; if you’re in any doubt, just read up about the dragonnades! This persecution became enshrined in law in 1685, when Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes in an attempt to force all Protestants to convert to Catholicism. Over the next ten years or so hundreds of thousands of Protestants left France.
The French king, Louis XIV, whose anti-Protestantism led to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the exile of hundreds of thousands of French-speaking Protestants. Louis’ death in 1715 is an anniversary that is being ‘celebrated’ in this year’s Huguenot Summer.
Leaving the country was, for most, not easy: the law made it a crime to flee France, and refugees went to extreme (and ingenious) lengths to do so, hiding in casks of wine, bales of straw and piles of coal to make the perilous journey to England (others left for the Netherlands, the Americas, South Africa – any Protestant-friendly country). They brought with them hardly anything in terms of wealth (the current Home Secretary would not approve!) but a richness of talent and skills that would transform the British economy and, some have said, lay the groundworks for the Industrial Revolution. For France it represented a drainage of talent similar to that of Nazi Germany in the 20th century (when ‘Hitler’s Gift’, in the form of the expulsion of Jews, scientists and academics, was a factor in his ultimate downfall), and one from which it, arguably, never fully recovered.
Huguenots fleeing France – an engraving by Jan Luyken, 1696.
The contribution of the Huguenots to the economy and culture of this country has been immense, and it is being celebrated this year in the Huguenot Summer, which we are now almost halfway through. This series of national events goes on until September, with activities in Canterbury, Winchester, Norwich and London – where the Huguenots of Spitalfields have been holding summer-long events now for the past three years.
The Huguenot Summer is presented as an anniversary, but the tag is slightly spurious – or maybe just a bit macabre. Centenaries and the like normally celebrate the birth of a famous person or movement, but this year marks the tercentenary of the death of Louis XIV. But the Summer could equally stand as the 320th anniversary of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, a celebration of the first national heritage collection (in the form of the recently opened Huguenot Museum in Rochester) or just an opportunity to reflect on the enduring legacy of these migrants, whose story of persecution, forced emigration and eventual assimilation has so many parallels today.
Boughton House, frequently referred to as the ‘English Versailles, which this summer hosts an exhibition on the influence of the Huguenots, to which the Migration Museum Project has contributed.
As part of the Huguenot Summer, Boughton House (the home of the dukes of Buccleuch and Queensberry) will be open to the public in August and, by arrangement, September, displaying an exhibition in which the Migration Museum Project is proud to have been involved. A future blog will focus on the story of this remarkable building – the ‘English Versailles’ – for which Ralph Montagu, the 1st Duke of Montagu, enlisted the services of the cream of Huguenot artisans and craftsmen.
This blog on the subject of boat people, written by Migration Museum Project trustee Jill Rutter, is timely for a number of reasons. First, it is published in Refugee Week, when the UK’s attention is focused on the predicament of refugees. This year, Refugee Week is celebrating the contribution of refugees to the UK. (For an inspiring story on the current Mediterranean refugee situation, listen to Regina Catrambone – an Italian millionaire who set up Migrants Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) – talking on Tuesday 16 June’s Today programme – she is interviewed at 7.50am, 1 hour 52 minutes and 58 seconds in. MOAS’s ship, MY Phoenix, last year rescued 3,000 people in a three-month period alone.) Another reason this blog is so timely is that it coincides with a new venture which we are involved in at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, and for which the International Maritime Organization (see below in Jill’s blog) has created three short films, focusing on the migrants’ view, the captain’s view and the law of the sea. Each film – in the form of vox pops with a range of people visiting the museum, followed by facts and footage shot by IMO – is between two and three minutes long.
Over the last month or so the world’s media have highlighted the plight of boat people risking their lives in an attempt to reach safety in Europe and South-East Asia. We have seen pitiful images of Rohingya Muslims fleeing Burma, and of migrants rescued from the Mediterranean.
Since the late 1990s, migrants from the Middle East, South Asia, the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa have been using people smugglers to transport them across the Mediterranean. Ten years ago, Spain was a popular destination for these people, with over-crowded boats setting off in its direction from Senegal and Morocco. Today, migration flows have moved east, with boats now leaving Turkey, Egypt and Libya, and making for Greece and Italy. But the factors that drive people to entrust their lives to people smugglers remain the same: persecution and threats to life, worklessness and the belief that Europe offers a route out of poverty.
Gateway to Lampedusa – Gateway to Europe, a memorial by the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino
Antigua cemetery in Fuenteventura, Canary Islands with named and unnamed memorial tablets for migrants who have drowned. The image is by the acclaimed Juan Medina who has been photographing migrants for nearly 20 years.
Nobody knows how many migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean. The International Organisation for Migration estimates 1,700 people have lost their lives this year and as many as 14,600 since 1993. This is almost certainly an underestimate, as the tally is based on retrieved bodies. We will never know the real number of deaths and many of the sea victims remain nameless, as is evident from the memorials to them in Spain and Italy.
Many people in Britain have been shocked by recent events, but the plight of the Mediterranean boat migrants can seem distant. Save for small numbers of Afghans, relatively few Mediterranean boat migrants now make it to Britain. Migration by sea may have been the usual route for most migrants coming to or leaving the UK until relatively recently, but almost all of them used the services of passenger shipping companies, rather than people smugglers.
One exception was Vietnamese refugees, most of whom arrived in Britain by way of camps in Hong Kong. Between 1979 and 1992 the British government admitted about 24,500 Vietnamese refugees, most of whom had left Vietnam in a sea-borne exodus of over 800,000 people. Setting off in small boats, they made for other South-East Asian countries, including Hong Kong. In journeys that could take many weeks, the boat people had to contend with thirst, storms and piracy. Estimates of the numbers who died at sea can only be guessed at, but the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees suggests that between 200,000 and 400,000 Vietnamese lost their lives at sea. South London and East London are now hubs for this community. The testimony of those who survived these journeys has been collected in a number of oral history projects.
Vietnamese refugees, 1979
Looking back further into British history, there are two other noteworthy arrivals of boat migrants. About 60,000 Protestant Huguenots and Walloons arrived by boat between 1550 and 1720 – a highly skilled group whose numbers included silversmiths, silk weavers and bankers.
A rescue is mounted for the ‘Poor Palatine’ boats
Between May and November 1709 about 13,000 impoverished ‘Poor Palatines’ crossed the North Sea in overloaded boats. The Nine Years War (1688–97) and the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), followed by a series of harsh winters and poor harvests, had created severe hardship in much of south-west Germany. Setting sail from Rotterdam in overladen boats, the migrants were, on arrival in Britain, initially sheltered in army tents on Blackheath and Camberwell in London. The Poor Palatines were mostly unskilled labourers and the failure to integrate them proved politically controversial. Most were eventually resettled in Ireland and North America, where their descendants included the Rockefeller family.
There is another and less well-known connection this country has with boat migrants: Britain has been at the forefront in developing international humanitarian law about the safety of life at sea. It was the first state to join the UN’s Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization, the previous name of today’s International Maritime Organization (IMO). Set up in 1949, the IMO has had its headquarters in London since 1959, first of all in Chancery Lane and then, since 1982, on the Albert Embankment. The IMO sees that international treaties and regulations on shipping are observed, including those relating to rescue at sea. The International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue, signed in 1979, requires that ‘Parties shall ensure that assistance be provided to any person in distress at sea … regardless of the nationality or status of such a person or the circumstances in which that person is found.’ In the same document, ‘rescue’ is defined as ‘An operation to retrieve persons in distress, provide for their initial medical or other needs, and deliver them to a place of safety.’
The IMO’s first headquarters in Chancery Lane, London.
Although treaties on shipping pre-date the founding of the United Nations (UN), the IMO is part of the UN family. Two of its former secretary-generals have been British, and much of the IMO’s work on maritime search and rescue was taken forward by British staff.
Today in the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy’s HMS Bulwark is part of Europe’s search-and-rescue mission. But, as the migrants are brought to safety, we should remember that boat people are not a new phenomenon – either as far as Britain is concerned or for the world as a whole.
Jill Rutter is a trustee of the Migration Museum Project.
The DJ Radical Sista hosting a ‘day-timer’ in a Bradford nightclub during the heyday of these music events in the 1990s. Day-timers were held in the afternoons for Asian teenagers who were often not allowed out during the evenings.
