Thank you, Britain!
Victor Ross (1919-2021)
“When you come to a house as a guest, you must try and leave the house a little nicer than you found it.” (George Steiner)
On 10th November the British Academy hosted a fascinating conference to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) and the Academy’s ‘Thank You Britain Fund’. Speakers included the Cambridge Classicist, Professor Simon Goldhill, Dr. Anthony Grenville, one of the key figures in the recent explosion of interest in the impact of Jewish refugees on modern British culture, the historian of ideas, Professor Stefan Collini, the author, journalist and commentator, Lord (Daniel) Finkelstein and Michael Newman, Chief Executive of the AJR.
In his superb book, Jewish Refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain, 1933-1970 (2010), Anthony Grenville, himself the son of Jewish refugees who fled from Vienna to London in 1938, writes about the ‘Thank You Britain’ Fund, one of the key moments in the relationship between Jewish refugees and post-war Britain.
The Fund was established sixty years ago and has a fascinating history. It started, writes Grenville, with “a proposal in 1963 that Jewish refugees from Central Europe should make a public gesture of thanks to their adopted homeland, to be paid for by their donations”. The idea came from Victor Ross (1919-2021), a former refugee from Vienna who came to Britain in 1936.
The Fund was announced in AJR Information in September 1963: “In November, twenty-five years will have elapsed since the mass exodus of the Jews from Central Europe started. During the few months between the pogroms and the outbreak of war, this small island … rescued more Jewish persecutes [sic] than any other single country. The Executive is considering ways of visibly expressing the gratitude of the former refugees to the British people, and it is hoped that details of an appropriate scheme will be announced shortly.”
The scheme became known as the “Thank You Britain” Fund, which would support research fellowships and the holding of lectures under the auspices of the British Academy, which continue to this day. The Thank You Britain Fund successfully raised well over £1m in today’s money and according to Ross’s obituary in The AJR Journal (May 2021) “is considered a major highlight of our community’s assimilation into British life”.
The Fund’s patrons included Lord Robbins, Sir Isaiah Berlin and a number of eminent refugees including Professor Sir Ernest Chain and Sir Hans Krebs, both Nobel Prize winning scientists, and Professor Ludwig Guttmann, who revolutionised the care of people with spinal injuries. The Fund’s committee also included leading figures from the AJR and other refugee organizations, including AJR chairman Alfred Dresel and Werner Rosenstock.
The British Academy is a highly prestigious institution that supports research and scholarship in the humanities. Past Presidents include Lord Balfour. Sir the Oxford classicist Sir Maurice Bowra, Lord Robbins (President at the time the Fund was inaugurated), Sir Isaiah Berlin (the only Jewish émigré to have been appointed President), and the historians Sir Keith Thomas and Sir David Cannadine.
Contributors to the Fund included the psychoanalyst Anna Freud, leading refugee academics such as the German historian FL Carsten, the Oxford classicist Eduard Fraenkel, the art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich, the statistician Sir Claus Moser and famous scientists such as Hans Kornberg, Nicholas Kurti and Max Perutz. The money raised by the Fund was formally handed over to the British Academy in November 1965.
“Thank-Offering to Britain” lectures have been given by a wide range of distinguished speakers. They include Roy Jenkins, Ralf Dahrendorf, Stuart Hampshire, as well as several refugees including Arthur Koestler, Otto Kahn-Freund and Claus Moser.
Ten years ago, on 10 November 2015, Anthony Grenville gave a speech to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the “Thank-Offering to Britain” Fund: “Commemoration and Celebration: The British Academy and the Jewish Refugee Academics in Britain after 1933”. He began by pointing out the larger historical context for the Fund: “A significant relationship had already developed between the refugee academics and British institutions like the Academy in the 1930s”, above all, “the Academic Assistance Council, founded in 1933 on the initiative of William Beveridge and the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard. This body reconstituted itself in 1936 as the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), which helped hundreds of refugee scholars to find employment in British or American academic institutions (see John Eidinow’s fascinating biography of Esther Simpson for more details).
The Jewish community were, of course, right to want to thank Britain for welcoming so many refugees to this country. And, of course, over many years Jewish refugees have made an enormous contribution to British culture and to British life in general.
In science they revolutionised physics and biology, physiology and medicine. Hermann Bondi wrote about the “steady-state” theory of the universe and Leslie Brent’s work with Peter Medawar on immunological tolerance was the basis of transplantation biology. Fritsch and Peierls worked out how much uranium it took to make an atomic bomb and Ernst Chain received the Nobel Prize along with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming for the discovery of penicillin. Key moments in the three great scientific stories of the mid-20th century – the making of the atomic bomb, the revolution in molecular biology and the discovery of penicillin – happened in Britain, and in each case refugees were key figures.
Then there are the films produced by Sir Alexander Korda (including The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Thief of Bagdad, The Third Man and that quintessential piece of Englishness, The Winslow Boy), and the films of Powell and Pressburger (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and Colonel Blimp) and Karel Reisz (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The French Lieutenant’s Woman).
Refugees and émigrés founded the Edinburgh Festival and Wolfson College in Oxford, the Warburg Institute and Glyndebourne, Thames and Hudson and the Ballet Rambert. They ran world-famous labs and built some of the landmarks of 20th century British architecture. And they transformed our everyday world: Fritz Landauer’s shop-fronts for Boots and Burtons, Vicky’s newspaper cartoons (including Supermac) and Hans Schleger’s advertisements for MacFisheries.
Of course, this isn’t just a story of celebration and achievement. Recent critics of both Britain’s attitude towards Jewish refugees and the Anglo-Jewish establishment saw the Fund as an example of what they considered “a servile gesture aimed at airbrushing British xenophobia out of history” and “proof of an excessive desire to express loyalty and gratitude to Britain”. More generally, there has been a wave of revisionist history re-examining the story of Jewish refugees, looking at how politicians, the press, civil servants and many others tried to put obstacles in the way of countless Jews desperately attempting to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe, how traumatic Internment on the Isle of Man was after the Fall of France and how much antisemitism there was in Britain, before, during and after the war.
And what about other immigrant or refugee communities? Have they called for their own equivalent to The Thank You Britain Fund? Historians of Empire and Slavery like David Olusoga have argued that slavery is a stain on the history of Britain. Writing in The Guardian in 2023 Olusoga wrote that slavery is a startling absence in many accounts of British history. Our traditional history, he wrote, “marginalises the histories of slavery and empire… It creates firewalls that neatly compartmentalise history, rendering almost invisible the great flows of money, raw materials, people and ideas that moved, back and forth, between distant plantations on colonial frontiers and the imperial mother country”. Last month, Sir Lenny Henry called for the payment of slavery reparations to all black British people. Writing in a new book called The Big Payback, he argues that Britain should give £18 trillion in compensatory payments.
Recently, there have been attacks on Britain’s policy towards West Indian immigrants during and after Windrush. And there is no denying that much of post-war British life was marked by terrible racism from the Notting Hill Riots to attacks on Asian immigrants from the 1970s to heated debates about Islamophobia today.
The dominant tone is increasingly one of recrimination. What is striking is the absence of a celebratory tone, though there is much to celebrate for many Black Britons. So many successful careers and distinguished contributions to British life, from literature, drama and music to sports and entertainment, from the architect Sir David Adjaye and Professor Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, nurse, health care administrator of professor of Nursing to the politician and activist Simon Woolley, Baron Woolley of Woodford, and the poet Benjamin Zephaniah. The Conservative Party now has its first Black leader, Kemi Badenoch, and the deputy prime minister David Lammy was right to speak proudly of being the first Black politician to take questions at PMQs. Perhaps the cultural critic Paul Gilroy might consider changing the title of one of his best-known books, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack?
There is a similar record of achievement among British Asians. From actors like Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar to writers like Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali and Salman Rushdie, from politicians like Sajid Javid and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to Labour’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, from figures in the arts like Anish Kapoor and Indhu Rubasingham, the new director of The National Theatre, to Samir Shah, Chair of the BBC, there is much to celebrate despite all the years of racism and prejudice. At least enough, perhaps, for leading British Muslims to ask angry demonstrators, like those in Tower Hamlets and outside Villa Park recently, to wave the British flag more than the Palestinian flag?
Whether immigrants or refugees, many will recall the worst moments of British racism over the past decades. But many might also feel there is much to be grateful for. Perhaps one day some of the more famous first- and second-generation immigrants of colour might feel the time has come for their own equivalent to The Thank You Britain Fund or some similar expression of gratitude. That would indeed be a landmark in post-war British history.
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