The largest influx of refugees in British history happened during the First World War – 250,000 Belgians fled to Britain during the conflict after Germany invaded.
But what became of those who made the journey? Researchers have worked to uncover the stories of these people and their experiences.
Alison Fell: “I'm Alison Fell. I'm a professor of French cultural history at the University of Leeds and I'm the principal investigator of our project, which is tracing the Belgian refugees funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The Belgians who came in the First World War was the largest ever displacement of populations into the UK, but it's largely forgotten now.”
Dr Christophe Declercq: “Tracing the Belgian refugees was established as a project to make the story of the Belgian refugees in Britain more widely known, but also to take it to the wider audience. Not an academic exercise as such, but really have local people, local historians, local history groups, people with links to the Belgian refugees to put in data into what we have delivered is this database for the project.”
Alison Fell: “The aims of our research project are to crowdsource in order to gather together some of the information about the 250,000 Belgian refugees who came to the UK during the First World War.”
Dr Philippa Read: “Over the last couple of years, we've been looking at Belgian refugees in the UK but we've hosted several workshops, for example in Wales and Scotland in England, bringing people together to discuss Belgian refugees.”
Alison Fell: “So, the reception of the refugees 100 years ago was largely positive. They were seen as allies. It was seen as part of doing your bit for the war effort by welcoming the Belgian refugees, whereas perhaps attitudes today are different, so I think we can learn a lot from the response 100 years ago from how we respond today.”
Dr Philippa Read: “The database is a crowd sourced resource. It's hosted online on our website. It's free to use, anybody can use it, and anybody can enter any information they have about a Belgian refugee.”
Dr Christophe Declercq: “If we're looking at today's society, the media attention of what is in fact a humanitarian crisis often gets scoped down with a label called a refugee crisis, and then the people are labelled refugees or migrants. But all of this is not that black and white. There's much more involved in any of these labels, and we should be really wary about using those.”
Alison Fell: “One of the major impacts of the First World War right across the globe was displacement of populations, and I think that is a legacy of the war that hasn't been looked at as much and one that speaks to us across the decades. Because there are so many things we can learn for looking at how populations coped, how people settled, how refugees adapted or didn't adapt, how they were received in their host nations that has enormous resonance for people today. And understanding some of those experiences, some of the impacts of the nation's responses, I think can help us plan, perhaps policy today on how to cope with the displacement of people. It is always going to be a consequence of war and conflict.”
Dr Christophe Declercq: “What's a Belgian refugee? There's people who arrived here and stayed here for only a few weeks, and then they travelled on to France and the Netherlands. There’s people who stayed here for the full, full four years or beyond 1918. Most of them went back to Belgium in 1919, that is true. About 10,000 stayed, maybe less. We don't have clear figures for that. But those who returned to Belgium had lots of difficulties in finding their own homes again, establishing the prior the life they had prior to fleeing, not least of which was the bad sentiments within their own environment, because they were the ones that fled, whereas the others stayed and were experiencing the hardship of occupation. And as an extension to that, you actually see hundreds, if not more going back to Britain in the 1920s, so an entire history of the Belgian refugees in the First World War continues well after the end of the war.”
Alison Fell: “The next steps with our project is we're hoping to continue to grow the database by asking and helping people to put more details of Belgian refugees into the database. And we're also hoping to work more closely with some Belgian archives and Belgian museums who we know have more details of refugees in their archives, but which haven't been looked at closely or digitised.”
Dr Philippa Read: “All we really need is a name, so even if somebody just has a name, it's worth entering that and creating a record for that person, because who knows how many more stories we can uncover there and how many more records might be created in our database.”
Tracing the Belgian Refugees is a public history project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with researchers from Universities of Leeds, Leuven and UCL.
The project explores the stories of Belgian refugees in the UK during the First World War and includes an online database where people can learn more. In this video, some of the team involved explain what they’ve discovered.
For more information about the research projects featured in Refugees: Forced to Flee, explore this guide from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.
About the exhibition
War turns people's worlds upside down, from the First World War to the present day, countless lives have been affected by conflict. Ordinary people are forced to make extraordinary decisions – should they stay or go?
Refugees: Forced to Flee at IWM London explored a century of refugee experiences, from Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews and the Kindertransport, to the Calais Jungle and the treacherous Mediterranean crossings.
