How Britain secretly expelled Chinese sailors after the second world war, sometimes tearing families apart – and never apologised
- Thousands of Chinese men braved danger crewing British ships during World War II. Afterwards they were expelled without a word to the families some had ashore.
On October 19, 1945, 13 men gathered in London for a secret meeting. It was chaired by Courtenay Denis Carew Robinson, a senior British Home Office official, and he was joined by representatives of the Foreign Office, the Ministry of War Transport, and the police and immigration inspectorate of the city of Liverpool in northwest England.
After the meeting, the Home Office’s aliens department opened a new file, designated HO/213/926. Its contents were not to be discussed in Parliament, or with the press, or acknowledged to the public. It was titled “Compulsory repatriation of undesirable Chinese seamen”.
As the vast process of post-World War II reconstruction creaked into action, this deportation programme was, for the Home Office and Clement Attlee’s new government, just one tiny component. The country was devastated – hundreds of thousands were dead, millions were homeless, unemployment and inflation were soaring. The cost of the war had been so great that Britain would not finish paying off its debt to the United States until 2006. Amid the bomb sites left by the Luftwaffe, poverty, desperation and resentment were rife. In Liverpool, the city council was desperate to free up housing for returning servicemen.
During the war, as many as 20,000 Chinese seamen worked in the shipping industry out of Liverpool. They kept the British merchant navy afloat, and thus kept the people of Britain fuelled and fed while the Nazis attempted to choke off the country’s supply lines.
The seamen were a vital part of the Allied war effort, some of the “heroes of the fourth service” in the words of one book title about the merchant navy. Working below deck in the engine rooms, they died in their thousands on the perilous Atlantic runs under heavy attack from German U-boats.
Following the Whitehall meeting, in December 1945 and throughout 1946, the police and immigration inspectorate in Liverpool, working with the shipping companies, began the process of forcibly rounding up these men, putting them on boats and sending them back to China. With the war over and work scarce, many of them would have been more than ready to go home. But for others, the story was very different.
