Dan Snow's History Hit - WWII Britain's 'Missing' Sailors

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

During WWII, the sailors of the British merchant navy played a vital role in keeping the UK fed and armed. They carried essential supplies across the treacherous Atlantic - and many paid with their lives. What's less well known is that many of those sailors were Chinese - volunteers who came to Britain to help the war effort and settled predominantly in the port city of Liverpool. But after the war, many of those Chinese sailors who returned home suddenly disappeared without a trace. For years families believed they'd decided to abandon them, but the reality was far worse.Dr Lucienne Loh, from the University of Liverpool, has been uncovering what happened to those sailors who endured war for Britain and how Britain turned its back on them. In previously secret Government documents, she discovered a shocking truth...Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hey folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History here. Liverpool. It's the beating heart of North West England. I'm sorry to my wife if you're listening, but it's true. You might be from Chester, that might have been where the action was in the Roman period, but more recently Liverpool is where it's at. It's home to beautiful docks, they now house museums and there's cafes and galleries. Visitors come from all over the world. Some to learn more about some kind of band, I think, named after an animal of some description. But most, no doubt, to look at the great museums exploring our maritime past, including the Western Approaches Museum, where the Battle of the Atlantic was won from,

including the Western Approaches Museum, where the Battle of the Atlantic was won from, deep beneath the streets of Liverpool. But anyway, at that time, 80 years ago, Liverpool was one of the most important places in wartime Britain. Liverpool was the terminus of Britain's transatlantic lifeline. Two thirds of the imported food that Britain's ate during the war came through this port. And of course, weapons, the supplies needed for British troops fighting in Europe and elsewhere. And those supplies were brought by the brave sailors, the Merchant Navy. Without them, Britain would not have been able to continue the war. What's less known and what is fascinating about this podcast is that as many as 20,000 of those sailors, those merchant mariners, were Chinese. They were volunteers who came to serve on British vessels in our time of need.

They worked on merchant ships, they went ashore, they often got married to local people, they had children, and they served their adopted country. served their adopted country. But, and this is the scandal, after the war those sailors disappeared from the streets of Liverpool, leaving families bereft and with unanswered questions. Many wives and their children came to believe that their husbands, their fathers, had just walked out on them. But recent archival research has uncovered the astonishing truth that shows that many of these men were taken by the Home Office and deported in a scheme known as the compulsory repatriation of undesirable Chinese seamen. These were men who'd risked all for Britain. They'd kept the supplies flooding into the country. They'd risked their lives for low wages. And their families had experienced harassment, prejudice and racism at home.

And these were the men who were forcibly expelled. We've recently made a documentary for History Hit TV investigating the story. We opened previously secret files. We searched historic documents. We spoke to direct descendants of the men who disappeared. And you can find the documentary, as with all of our documentaries, by following the link in the show notes and signing up to History Hit TV. Thank you to everyone who's done that. You're supporting everything we're doing here at History Hit. But for this episode of the podcast, I'm joined by Dr. Lucienne Lowe from the University of Liverpool. She has spent a huge amount of time investigating this story

and bringing these shocking truths to light. We're really grateful to Dr. Lowe for working with us on this and bringing it to our attention. It is a very important project, and we're privileged to have played a part. So here's Dr. Lowe herself. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Lucienne, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, it's a delight to be here. Thanks so much, Dan.

Why, when we're talking about Britain's maritime greatness, we hear about sailors, both merchant and naval, why do we not hear about, and how important were the Chinese component of these crews on these British flagged ships travelling all over the world? I think they were majorly important. Their contribution to the nation's, in fact, war efforts, and much earlier than that, to its maritime supremacy, can't really be underscored enough. I think the history of their contribution really is part of a much wider picture in which the Chinese community in Britain and their kind of long-standing

contributions to British society have been very much downplayed throughout history. But in terms of the Chinese semen in particular, I think a lot of it stems from a kind of intrinsic racism, partially because they weren't a community that, say, were very vocal. Their English language skills weren't necessarily very fluent. And they were a minority society within a significantly white British society. And it might be cultural as well. They kind of felt that they didn't want to kind of rock the boat too much. How did these sailors come to be on British ships? Let's go back to the 1860s and the mid-19th century. How did the British merchant marine recruit in China?

Yeah, so in the 1850s, Liverpool was already a really significant global trading port. And this is when a few Chinese merchant sailors started to settle in Liverpool. But it was really in 1865 with the establishment of the Blue Funnel shipping line, which was set up by two brothers, Alfred and Philip Holt. And they set up this shipping line, which was also known as the China Company. And it was kind of this flagship liner service. It was the world's first regular long distance cargo service. And for over a century, the Blue Funnel Line was the leading British shipping company trading to China. And this is really fundamental to the establishment of the Chinese community in Liverpool. Britain's maritime trade during its kind of imperial age was kind of actually fundamental to the establishment

of the Chinese community in Liverpool. The Blue Funnel ships with their distinctive tall vertical funnels were really the pride of Liverpool and the Merchant Marines. And for the Holt family, they amassed a massive amount of money trading with China, mainly tea and silk. They were quintessential Victorian industrialists and entrepreneurs and innovators. Holt's vessel and his inventions augured a kind of technological breakthrough at this time because these vessels didn't have to carry as much coal as previously. And so they could actually load more cargo to sell at profit rather than dedicating space to coal. So the Blue Funnel Line and its history is really intertwined with the Chinese community. And so would, whilst loading supplies and doing trade in China, they would take on local crew? Would they and that crew might end up doing a few pastures and then settling in Liverpool and looking for

work and joining the port community there. Yeah, that's correct, Dan. So they kind of settled in Liverpool. Sometimes they were kind of quite itinerant in terms of shore leave, and then they would return to the ports they came from or travel through other ports. And the Blue Fodder Line were really interested in Chinese seamen because they were cheaper, they were more reliable, they often did the hardest jobs on these vessels. And it was really from the mid-1860s onwards that then we get the formation of this kind of Anglo-Chinese community, which was formed primarily through the relationships between Chinese seamen and Irish women. And that's really important because that is the kind of foundations

for the history then of the deportations that then happened in the middle of the 20th century. Let's get to that period in the 20th century. During the First World War, during the Second World War, huge demand for mariners, both naval and merchant marine. So I suppose plenty of opportunity for Chinese people and people of Chinese descent to serve on board merchant ships. Yeah, absolutely. So just to give you a sense of what was happening with the Anglo-Chinese community in Liverpool as a result of the First World War. So many Chinese mariners were recruited to take the place of British men who then joined the Royal Navy.

It's interesting, I think, in order to set the context, the wider context for what happened in the mid-20th century is to have a sense of the kind of racism that was happening at the time in the early decades of the 20th century. So kind of around the time of the First World War. By kind of 1910, Liverpool's Chinatown had already established restaurants and shops and cafes and societies, community societies to cater for the Chinese community. And they settled mainly around Cleveland Square, Pitt Street, Frederick Street. And by the end of the First World War, Chinese seamen, according to the Alfred Holt wage

books, exceeded 2,500 men compared to almost 5,000 Western crew members. And around a quarter of the whole fleet was staffed by more Chinese seamen than Western ones. Leading up to it, it's quite interesting to think a little bit about the experience of these seamen as they kind of settled in Liverpool and they kind of established families and so on. So just to give you a sense of what their lives were like, because I think this sets a wider historical context for the mid-20th century events. So for example, in 1906, an article in the Liverpool Courier mentions that there were more than 30,000 Chinese living in Liverpool. And this is obviously a gross exaggeration, but it offers a sense of the way in which white Liverpudlians

did feel that the Chinese were kind of settling in insignificant numbers in the city. So this is obviously a period that coincided with what we call the kind of yellow peril scare because of Britain's kind of fears of China's growing global power. But in 1906, there were protests against the yellow peril in Liverpool. There was a Reverend Willem Carter who labelled the Chinese community an invasion in a letter to the editor. So this is just to give you a kind of flavour of what was happening around this time. He called the Chinese

seamen a deliberate affront to our moral code. But it's really important that against this backdrop, these seamen were establishing families, were having children, were contributing very significantly to the war effort. In 1918, a report by the Ministry of Shipping on the supply of seamen mentioned that there were a total of 3,200 Chinese seamen on shore. So that's quite a significant number. It's obviously much less than the 30,000 that Liverpool Courier claims. But this is to give you a sense that there was a significant community. And it was really then, I think in 1919, that this community waned. But the community that stayed in Liverpool with their families

often suffered kind of hostility, suffered racism, there was a great amount of suspicion around the relationships between the Chinese seamen and white women. The London Magazine of 1911, for example, couched these relationships as evil, as ill-assorted unions. So there was a significant amount of racism. And the kind of Fu Manchu character that Sax Roma promoted, Sax Roma was a writer in the early decades of the 20th century who kind of depicted this evil, conniving, lascivious Chinese man who kind of was really predatory.

That very much kind of fuelled the attitudes to these mixed race relationships. You listened to Dan Snow's history hit. Stick with us. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history.

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by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Belusian, I guess, the advent of the Second World War means suddenly we need sailors again. So the Chinese are kind of perhaps reluctantly, but they're welcomed with open arms, I imagine, by ship owners. I mean, they left really significantly after the end of the World War because of race riots.

So in 1919, at the end of the war, they were forced out of the country because these race riots tore throughout the country. It was at Cardiff and in Liverpool really significantly. A letter from the Home Office in 1919 said that the Chinese are unemployable due to bitter feeling towards them and the government will have to repatriate these unemployable men. So as early as 1919, there was a sense that the Chinese were kind of troublemakers. There was a feeling of resentment towards them. They needed to be set back, really. The British Seamen and Firemen's Union also exerted enormous pressure on the shipping companies like the Blue Funnel not to employ Chinese seamen. So I wanted to

give a sense that the events leading up to the mid-century 1946 deportations is very much a part of a much longer history of racism and attempted deportations. That was an effort involving government officials, shipping companies, which were really after profit, and then also British unions. It's quite a complex story that kind of involves different institutions and the state. Well, let's come to the deportations in a second. and the state. Well, let's come to the deportations in a second, but just remind us how important the Merchant Marine was in the Second World War and the dangers that those Chinese sailors would have faced on British ships. They were civilians, they were signed up to work for these companies, but they were basically on the front line. Yeah, they were. So because a lot of British

seamen were taken back into the Royal Navy, the Merchant Navy once again recruited Chinese seamen during the Second World War. They were around 20,000, in fact, based in the city and they were manning oil tankers, merchant vessels. They brought munitions, they brought food. So they're really absolutely crucial to the war effort. And without them, Britain would have really struggled. But their work and their treatment wasn't really acknowledged properly. They were paid about a third of the wages their European counterparts were paid. They were denied the war bonus, which was just given to British sailors, but not to them. And in fact, they went on strike in February 1942 for a number of months and then they were finally given the war bonus.

But by this time, they were really a problem for the Holt shipping company. And files held by the Ocean Archive at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Holt's files identify the seamen now as distinct troublemakers. This is because they refused to accept a lower pay despite their contributions and in response, really, to a kind of racist policy. Wow. Well, that neatly leads us on onto what happened at the end of that war. It really is just hard to believe, but talk me through what decisions were made and what happened to those sailors. Yeah, so at the end of the Second World War, the British government, colluding really with the Holt Company, wanted to expel Chinese seamen from the country Liverpool City Council in the home office they attempted some deportations because they

labeled these men kind of aliens and they altered the terms of their stay their pay was cut which made it very difficult for them to support their wives and families. They were not allowed to take shore jobs. And they were often offered a one-way passage back to China. But the men who had married or had relationships with white British and Irish women in Liverpool chose to stay. And it's that context then that then leads to the deportations of 46. So on the 19th of October 1945, two months after the end of the war, the Secretary of State for the Home Office chaired a secret meeting at Whitehall. He was joined by representatives of the Foreign Office, the Ministry of War Transport, and the Liverpool City Police, as well as Immigration

Inspectorate. And in this meeting, the Home Office finalised a policy titled compulsory Repatriation of Undesirable Chinese Seamen. So this is really all of these kind of government bodies coming together to definitively create a policy that was undeniably racist. And it was a file designated with the number H0213926. And it was only very recently declassified. number H0213926. And it was only very recently declassified. And I've access to these files at this moment, but I'm still kind of exploring them at length. Well, thank you for letting us in on this kind of cutting edge historical research. This is, I mean, very exciting, but also hugely tragic. So this was, it was secret at the time. So this was not something that the British public would have been aware of. No, and it was declassified in 2021.

And interestingly, in the same year, there was a report that was commissioned by the Immigration Minister in Parliament after a debate led by Kim Johnson, who is a Labour MP for Liverpool. This is the debate happened in 2021. And this report has only just been released. And it was basically the minister, the immigration minister, committed the Home Office to searching for any further information that could be provided to the relatives who had suffered the deportation of fathers and husbands, and then for this report to be sent back to Parliament. But I want to just highlight the Home Office report, which concluded a number of really important things. So this is really this historical event coming to light, coming to the acknowledgement of the British public.

And it is, I think, a real kind of moment of shame for the government because of the significant longstanding contributions of Chinese seamen to the wharf and to the merchant navy in this country. So the Home Office report concluded definitively that the repatriation of Chinese seamen from Liverpool was part of a large-scale post-war repatriation effort beginning in 1945. Also that Chinese seamen were targeted for repatriation because their presence in Liverpool was seen as disruptive, because there was pressure to man ships for war operations in the Far East,

and because this supported shipping companies' ability to maintain a pool of cheap labour. So effectively, this report was so fundamental to acknowledging the kind of collaborative efforts of the government and the shipping companies really in the name of profit to suppress a whole community, not only through their wages, but because of their race as well. So after this meeting that occurs at the home office that you describe, what actually happened after that? The mechanics are actually up to debate. So there's stories of fathers being dragged from their beds at night. But then other families kind of questioned that and said it didn't quite happen that way. There were seamen who were told to report on a particular ship, but then taken away and never allowed to kind of return.

So actually how they disappeared is really up to debate. Different families have different stories about how that happened. But they could just disappear. They weren't given any warning. No, they were just told to report to a particular ship on a particular day, and then they were just taken. And so their wives and children didn't know when they would return, so they were just told to report. But then there are other more sensational stories about men being dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night,

and that's the part that's kind of... Some families say that that's what happened. Other families say that didn't happen. It wasn't quite like that. But what is uncontested is that fathers, friends, lovers, husbands, they were there one minute and they were gone the next with no way of letting the families know what had happened. Yes, it appears to be that that's what happened. They were taken to often different port cities, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai. They really weren't allowed to kind of get into contact with their families. But also what happened is that the white mothers then tried their best to kind of reintegrate into the white Liverpudlian kind of society. reintegrate into the white Liverpudlian kind of society. So they often remarried, and the links to their Chinese partners was often kind of hushed away. The children often suffered racism. You hear that from the interviews of their descendants, and they didn't want to

foreground the links to their Chinese partners or their children's links to their Chinese fathers. To learn more about the impact on the family members of these men, we talked to Joe Phillips. It was for a documentary we've made for our streaming service, History Hit TV. It's up now. Please go and check it out. Joe says that he remembers his father being at home in Egerton Street. He had a wife, he had four kids. But then one day he just disappeared without a word,

leaving Joe's mother alone. She brought four children up. It's an amazing feat for a woman of mixed race in that day. Absolutely. As far as she was concerned, she was deserted and she had no time for him. And for all those years she never once talked about the only thing she did she hated him because she said he deserted you lot and left me to bring you up and as I say for a mother to

bring up four mixed-race kids is very difficult. She was very strong. Outstandingly strong. I knew nothing about my father. I was two when I believe he'd gone. My sister said she can remember the father, which she's four years older than me. But, you know, I never knew.

Leona also appears in our documentary, and she says that she has only a handful of pictures of her father and none of her Chinese merchant seaman grandfather. When she asked what happened to her granddad, she always had a similar story. Where is he now? He went away one day and never came back. What do you mean he never came back? Where did he go? granddad, she always had a similar story. And I don't think my dad had, my dad didn't have any answers. Looking back now, no more now. He obviously had no answers. He was just like, went to work one day, never came home.

Because in many of those cases, they could only believe that the men had simply disappeared and betrayed them and gone back, yeah. Yeah, that's the sense that I get from speaking to the families and hearing what they've had to say, yeah, that some of the families have one or two letters that their fathers managed to send back to Liverpool, but those that some of the families have one or two letters that their fathers managed to send back to Liverpool, but those are very few and far between. And by its nature, the end of the war slash post-war East Asian scene was one of turbulence and dislocation, gigantic civil war

in China. It was difficult to post someone a letter or to get in touch, presumably, and very difficult to identify where those people might have gone. Yeah, absolutely. The lines of communication were really fraught and really impossible. Has the government officially acknowledged these deportations now? So this report is really significant. I was kind of reading through the summary of the report, and the report does conclude that deportation orders were used to enforce repatriation of Chinese sailors, including other forms of coercion, the threat of deportation orders and the lack of employment were applied to persuade Seaman to depart. So the government has acknowledged in this particular report that the deportation did happen,

but the evidence for it is very scant. The report also mentions that despite searches of marriage registers and passenger lists, it's been almost impossible to identify more than a handful of Chinese seamen who had married British-born women. I mean, I think oftentimes these relationships were not kind of official. They were perhaps a little bit more informal. Although obviously some Chinese men did officially marry British and Irish white women. Why is this work that you're doing important? Why is it important for you, the families, for all of us?

Part of my work is really invested in the kind of longer history of racism against Chinese people in this country. And this is a really kind of, I think, shameful event that occurred. It's part of a longer colonial history of Britain in which extensive exploitation of a particular racial group then leads to a denial of their exploitation and then further harassment and neglect and almost an attempt by the state to kind of excise them from

history, you know. And I think that needs to be brought to light. But also these families who've been completely traumatized by this and then have gone subsequently then suffered kind of racism as a result of their mixed race heritage. I think that history needs to be brought to light as a kind of longer history of racism that continues to exist. Well, thank you very much indeed. Oh, you're very, very welcome, Dan. Thanks so much for this opportunity. you