Bloody foreigner. I am.

I am a bloody foreigner. Since I have gone to Scotland to study I become interested in issues of national identity and so on. So in this note I feel bloody Polish. Next note, I hope will appear sooner or later, will reveal my wee research on Scots and my wee sense of Scottishness.

I would like to introduce you to several passages about Poles and Poland from a wonderful book by Richard Winder Bloody foreigners: The story of immigration to Britian. Chapter: Imperial friends and foes.

There had been a small community of Catholic Poles in England since the late nineteenth century. Joseph Conrad was its most notable member, but perhaps 1,500 of his compatriots came with him as evacuees from unsuccessful sprisings against assorted rulers of Prussia, Austria and Russia.

Just to clarify and introduce Conrad. His polish name was Józef Konrad Korzeniowski and he settled in England in 1894. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelist in english literature. On the Scottish Parliament debate celebrating Scottish - Polish connection (28 October 2009) MSP and historian Christopher Harvie pointed out:

A year or so from now, Glasgow will open probably one of the world's greatest transport museums. It would be excellent if it could commemorate the genius of the Pole Joseph Conrad, the novelist of the sea when the Clyde built the ships and the close friend of that other exotic, Don Roberto Cunninghame Graham, the first president of our own Scottish National Party. It was Conrad, of course, who said in one of his novels, about a character who appears in it:

"He claimed Scottish ancestry, but what ambitious man has not done so?"

It was a nice compliment from an elegant Pole, and something that I hope we will be able to repay.

But going back to polish immigration and history:

When Poland fell into twin invasions of Hitler and Stalin, its army scattered: there was a stampede north to the Baltic and south to Romania. A new government-in-exile landed in London, bringing some three thousands officials and loyalists with it, and settling in South Kensington and Earl's court, an area which soon became known as Little Poland.

The mythology of the Second World War does not always remind us that Stalin invaded Poland only days after Hitler did, in accordance with the agreed carve-up of territory. In the process, he forced the potentially troublesome middle class of eastern Poland into camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan. It is possible that more than one and a half million Poles were transported to the east at this time; nearly a million of them died, mostly from starvation, over the next two years. Somewhere in this population was the doomed army. Four thousand Polish officers had been executed in March 1940 in Katyn Forest near Smolensk and dumped in a mass grave. More than twenty thousand others had suffered tha same fate at various sites. Only under glasnost in the Soviet Union were these details confirmed, and the extermination of these Poles remains one of the most neglected atrocities of an atrocious century.

Ulitimately, a large Polish military presence was stationed in Britain during the war, with an even larger number falling under its dominion overseas... The Royal Air Force accepted fourteen thousand Polish airman from October 1939. Polish pilots shot down one in seven of all German planes destroyed in the Battle of Britain. (Poles from 303 Polish fighting squadron on photo) Polish intelligence units, meanwhile, played a decisive part in the cracking of the German Enigma code, having long before appreciated that modern code-breaking required mathematicians, not rugby blues. The Poles were heroes, and were much mythologised as such - eager, brave, talented, incomprehensible, and palpably our friends. Despite the entrenched belief that one Englishman 'was worth ten bloody foreigners', the public cheered them on, as they did the Czech pilots whose homeland had been overrun in a similar fashion, and who served on similar terms. But in government circles the Poles were thought to be a slightly awkward case: an expatriate chattering class of defeated cavaliers.

The Poles were a frustrating issue especially for the government. Churchill knowing that he was the weakest player at the Yalta conference did not even mention Poland. It was obvious that there was going to be no restoration of independent and free goverment in Warsaw...

The Poles had been flung so far and so fast that many new attachments had formed: some of the soldiers had Romanian, Italian or Egyptian wives, and they did't expect our hospitality (British hopsitality). There were soldiers, civilians, government officials, men, women, children, orphants and exotic wives - 160.000 in all. Churchill, swallowing his personal reservations, rose to the occasion, as he so often did, in the House of Commons: 'His Majesty's Government', he promised, 'will never forget the debt the owe to the Polish troops... I earnestly hope that it may be possible to offer the citizenship and freedom of the British Empire, if they so desire... We should think it an honour to have such faithful and valiant warriors dwelling among us as if they were of our own blood.

Churchill reviewing Polish troops

Unfortunatelly, Home Secretary followed by Foreign Secretary were concerned about other foreigners who would claim equal consideration, hence, situation in which British citizenship was offered to Poles never arosed. Instead, institution known as Polish Resettlement Corps was established. It functioned as a labour exchange assigning Poles to job sectores.

Those traditional opponents of migrant workers - the unions - were among the first to make their voices heard over all this. The government was hoping to make their voices heard over all this. The government was hoping to send two thousand Poles into the coal mines each week. In response National Union of Mineworkers banned all Poles from its pits, even thought there was an estimated labour shortage of a hundred thousand men in the industry.

Maybe these attitudes were a surly a response to the fact that the Poles were (and still are) legendarily hard workers. Perhaps the unions were afraid that their members would be shown up. Two Polish ex-soldiers joined a factory where workers were expected to produce five hundred pins a day. They felt that no one would mind if they produced twelve hundred, but they were sacked. 'Haven forbid that you should work with excessive speed or enthusiasm,' wrote Karol Zbyszewski in one of the many Polish newspapers.

The National Union of Mineworkers achieved a significant victory for its members by agreeing to accept Poles only in return for a five-day week. In January there were 2.764 Poles working in British industry; by October there were 43.000. In the spring of 1950 there were 177 Polish farms, 128 Polish watch repair shops. 78 Polish furniture dealers, 70 Polish fotographers and 50 Polish boarding houses.

There were still occasional episodes of bad-feeling. Ill-wishers accused the Poles of racketeering, prospering while the heroes of El-Alamein were shunned. When a Polish thief went on the run whit a revolver, the papers warned of lawless aliens on the loose in our peaceful little Eden. One opinion poll reported that 56 per cent of Britions thought that the Poles should 'go home'. But there were isolated incidents. there were no racist riots, no attacks on Polish businesses. For the most part, the Poles continued to be thought as valiant Churchillian warriors. Certainly, no group of foreigners had ever melted into british society with such speed and so little clamour. 

Immigration tradition continues in the XXI century.

'New Scots' from Poland doing us proud