Adjusting Your Vision

The British Ideal changes after World War II

Images are powerful, so powerful that that they can take us far from our current destination. In war, imagery becomes especially powerful, as soldiers fondly remember the vision of the homes that they are fighting for. During World War II, British soldiers had a particular vision of Britain that had been perpetuated over centuries, as Britain fought all over the world, extending their empire. In the 1940s, the most common British conception of Britain was a rural landscape, sun warming rolling green hills, a gentle brook flowing beside a traditional English cottage, quiet, and peaceful. Beyond the landscape there also was an understood ideal of the populace of Britain, quiet, stoic, white, hardworking men and women. It was this second half of this image that would be shattered as World War II ended and refugees flooded into Britian, creating a different landscape of new people, new values, and new customs.

When the Second World War needed in 1945, millions of refugees and displaced Europeans were left with no home, and often no place to go. In 1947 the International Refugee Organization was created; professor of history Gerald Cohen explains their mission in his article, In War’s Wake – Europe’s Displaced Persons in Postwar Europe “The organization [IRO] pressed governments to accept refugees but never superseded national immigration policies. Its main task was to orchestrate migration movements according to the manpower needs or humanitarian proclivities of host countries” (Cohen, 103). Even if every country in Europe received no immigrants after World War II, the War had still changed Europe physically, economically, and socially. Adding the addition of displaced persons and refugees brought forth images of over population, food shortages, and idle workers to the British government. The UN Economic and Social Council in particular feared that immigrants would be “old people. sick, mutilated, and maimed invalids’ (Cohen, 111).

Refugees did come to Britain however, under the labels of ‘victims of “fascism and Communism” (Cohen, 100). Already disrupting the British ideal vision, tens of thousands of refugees now sat idle on English lands. Another fear that the British had that they shared with the rest of Europe was the idleness of DPs and refugees. Like in the rest of Europe, great efforts were made to make this these new residents into an active labor force. Even though many refugees now had jobs, they were often given the most dangerous and low paying jobs, as was the case for Belgium’s mine workers. Now living and working with the ‘original’ British population, cultures and customs began to mix.

The culture and nationality of Great Britain had been reinforced during World War II when the country had a common enemy. The ideal of a resilient, stalwart, and heroic British people had been created during the War. however, by the end of the conflict, the greatest war time mirage had cleared, the British were not alone or the sole defenders of freedom from fascism. Not only did Europeans flood the British Isles, but so did peoples from British colonies. With the introduction of so many black immigrants, the English vision broke further as cultures clashed and English identity became more complex, as Professor Chris Waters points out in his article ‘Dark Strangers’ in Our Midst  “… the representation of Black migrants to Britain as un-British helped to reconfigure and secure the imagined community of the nation during a period of rapid change and great uncertainty”(Waters,  208).

Having refugees of not only different nationalities, but also of different race, greatly changed the British ideal, as author Wendy Webster points out in her article “There’ll Always Be an England”: Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration, 1948-1968 “It was in the 1950s, however, that representations of empire and its legacy-resistance to British colonial rule in empire and “immigrants” in the metropolis-increasingly converged on a common theme: the threat to an Englishness symbolized by the idea of ‘home'” (Webster, 573).  The Old British Empire was crumbling by the 1940s, and with it the British Ideal began to change, as the image of an ideal rustic landscape above shows. After World War II, tens of thousands of refugees and immigrants from Europe and British colonies brought about economic, social and cultural change; change that forever altered the vision of Britain.