Three waves of Polish emigration to the UK.

Each one different, each one coming to Britain for different reasons. World War 2, Martial Law, EU Accession. The first wave and their children have learnt to get on with the second wave, some intermarrying. Both are unsettled at the effect the third, massive, post-EU Accession wave is having. The ripples of the first and second waves have by now spread far and wide; the third wave has arrived Britain like a huge rock thrown into a smallish pond. The first and second wave of Polish migrants are worried; worried that their good name – 60 years of keeping their collective noses clean – will be sullied by a vast unwashed army of Areks, Sebeks and Sylweks, swearing, drinking and urinating in the streets, getting into trouble with the locals and with the police. The “Poles go home” graffiti at the toilets at Luton airport does not to distinguish between first, second and third wave of Polish immigrants, much to the chagrin and unease of the earlier immigrants and their British-born children and grandchildren.

Before WW2, Polish migrants in the UK were numbered in their hundreds. Novelist Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent) was one of them. There were Jews who’d fled the pogroms in Polish cities such as Łódź or Radom, but that was when eastern Poland was under Russian rule and the Cossacks were the oppressors. For the first real ‘wave’ of mass migration from Poland, Britain had to wait until WW2.

Poles fought valiantly alongside the British from the first day of the war to the last. In the air (Polish pilots were instrumental in the defeating the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain), at sea (Narvik, Battle of the Atlantic, Murmansk convoys) and on land (Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Falaise, Arnhem), Poles gave a first rate account of themselves as warriors. Yet the war that they fought for – a war to restore Poland’s freedom – they lost. In 1945 Poland was under the Soviet yoke and would remain so for another 45 years.

The 200,000 servicemen washed up on the British Isles after World War II were the first wave of Polish mass migration. This group was predominantly male, although both my mother and mother-in-law were among the female minority that found themselves in Britain in 1945. Although another 80,000 Poles returned to Poland after the war, they were actively harassed by the Stalinist authorities. Most were persecuted to some extent, many imprisoned, scores were executed on trumped-up spying charges. The 200,000 Poles who remained in the UK after the war were political émigrés, refugees. They were not economic migrants. This was their badge of pride, which set them apart from the Poles who went to America, France or Belgium in the 1920s and ‘30s, ‘za chlebem’ (‘after bread’). My parents’ generation resented the term ‘Polonia’, which they said applied exclusively to Poland’s economic diaspora – and not to them, political refugees.

The UK Census of 1951 showed that Poles were the largest ethnic group in the United Kingdom after the Irish.

The second wave came more gradually. Unlike the first and third wave, the second wave migrated over a period of 48 years, from 1956, when Stalinist communism began thawing out, to May 2004, when Poland joined the EU. In the middle of this period came Martial Law, when General Jaruzelski and his tanks clamped down on a brief period of relative freedom during the Solidarity era (August 1980 to December 1981). After Martial Law, thousands of Poles studying, working or visiting the UK decided to stay, many received ‘exceptional leave to remain’ from the British government.

After 1956, when Stalinism was replaced by a less-repressive form of communism, family members who ended up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain were reluctantly allowed out of People’s Poland. Many of my friends’ mothers were part of this wave. The late ‘50s through to the mid ‘60s saw the largest numbers of Anglo-Poles born to ex-servicemen and their wives. This was my generation; my wife, my brother, many of my friends. The majority of this generation Poles, born in the UK, would grow up to assimilate and intermarry. Most of my friends from Polish school and Polish scouts have non-Polish spouses. The second wave of Polish migrants reached a crescendo after Martial Law, which was imposed by the communists in December 1981 to crack down on the Solidarity trade union, which to Moscow was looking more and more like an independence movement.

Thousands of Polish students in Britain at the time did not wish to return home, and sought Exceptional Leave to Remain, which many got. For us Anglo-Poles, their presence, their political awareness, their direct contacts with the homeland, their current knowledge of popular Polish culture, was a breath of fresh air. The Polish Students’ and Graduates’ Association in Great Britain became more politically focused; meetings with dissidents replaced folk-dancing.

At first, there were conflicts between the post-war Poles, who feel they had single-handedly built the Polish community infrastructure across Britain, at odds with the new Solidarity Poles. But 25 years on, the first two waves are united against the third – by far the biggest – the Poles who turned up on the doorstep when the UK opened its labour market to them in May 2004.

My post-war generation of Anglo-Poles was brought up in the Swinging Sixties. The gulf between us and our parents was unimaginable. A friend’s father told him when he was 17: “When I was your age, I was shooting Germans. You are watching Top of the Pops”. This beautiful observation brilliantly encapsulates the difference in mindset between our parents’ generation and ourselves. For them, the six years from 1939 to 1945, horrendous beyond our comprehension, were the defining point in their lives, the bloodshed and loss leavened with pride and honour.

How could we as teenagers, with our long hair and our Pink Floyd albums, ever hope to find a common tongue with our parents?

I never, ever, experienced any discrimination or ‘racism’ on account of my Polishness during the 40 years I lived in the UK. When I started Oaklands Road Primary School in Hanwell, London W7, I had no idea of how unusual I was. After a while, I asked my first friend from school, Gary Clark, a rather intimate question. “Gary, when you’re at home with your parents, do you speak… er… Polish?” Gary was completely taken aback by the question. “What do you mean?” “Well,” I continued, “There’s these two language thingies, one you speak at school, in the streets, in the shops – the other you speak at home…” I could tell he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. It was only then – and I must have been six at the time – that I realised I was different from the other children. Having said that, Oaklands was rapidly becoming multicultural; by 1969, my class was one-third migrant – four boys from the West Indies, three Asian girls from East Africa, a Yugoslavian girl, a Greek girl, a boy who’s father was from Lithuania, and me. Because my mother’s older sister had settled in Canada after the war, during the school Commonwealth Day procession I used to carry the Canadian flag round the school playground. Somehow Polishness was not an issue on weekdays.

But weekends were different. Saturday mornings were spent in Polish school, which I attended from kindergarten through to A-Level. Four hours of Polish grammar, literature, geography and history cemented the narrative and rooted the myths of nationhood. On Saturday afternoon it was Polish scouts, an organisation with a distinctively paramilitary flavour. Again, talks about our shared history and martial feats were an important part of the proceedings, along with drill, field craft and singing of patriotic military songs. Sunday mornings were Polish church. I felt I knew everyone there, half by name, the other half by sight. My classmates from Polish school, friends from scouts, their siblings, children of my parents’ friends – lots of familiar faces.

Today, they’ve all gone. I visited our church in July 2006 for the 10.15 am Mass, one of eight (there were just three in my day) Holy Masses celebrated each Sunday at the Ealing parish. From among the entire congregation, which must have numbered around 600, I knew just two faces from my childhood. The rest were the new migrants and their children. My generation has moved on. A few, like me, fulfilling the destiny of those Saturday classes and patriotic scout meetings, moved to Poland. The majority have moved out of West London. My brother lives in a picturesque Derbyshire village. My old friends from Polish school live in agreeable Bucks, Berks, Herts, Kent, Surrey or have emigrated. Most have English spouses. Most of their children speak little or no Polish, especially if they have Polish surnames (English mum). Where the surname’s English, there’s still some chance our third-generation Pole still speaks some Polish (second-generation Polish mum).

At the end of every Mass, we’d sing ‘Boże Coś Polskę’, an intensely patriotic hymn, the very thought of which makes my eyes mist over. The final lines – sung by Poles in exile the world over – went “Ojczyznę wolną/Racz nam wrócić Panie” – “O Lord, let us return to a free fatherland”. It occurred to me, during the depths of the Cold War, that if enough people believe what they are singing, it will happen. You can petition the Lord with prayer.

Nature or nurture: What makes Poles Poles?

A key question that I will return to again and again in this blog is Nature or Nurture. Genetic or environmental factors. Are Poles the way they are because of their history – or is Polish history the way it is because of the Poles? Although Poland became a nation state in the tenth century, its history has been one of triumphs and reversals, expansion, contraction, disappearance and rebirth, continual wars fought with many neighbours to the west, north, east (and to a more limited degree) south. It has been a history of alliances and betrayals, glories and national tragedies. The question I pose is to what degree can the downturns of Polish history be laid at the hands of negative character traits visible in Poles today – an inability to form a common front in face of threat, continual wrangling about trivial issues while greater dangers grow unchecked, the partitioning of a father’s land (or kingdom) among his many sons (or princes), the arrogance of a small rich elite indifferent to nation’s plight or the poverty of the masses.

Why have so many come to England after the UK labour market was opened on 1 May 2004? The scale of the migration is staggering. In the 34 years between 1880 and 1914, some 300,000 Jews fled the Pogroms in Russia, migrating to western Europe and the USA, shaping the cultures of their host countries for decades to come. Here, we’re talking of two to three times that number of Poles migrating to just one country in just three years. Why so many? They appear seduced by the British way of life. When will they return to Poland? Will they ever return? Will they assimilate with the Brits? If they return, will they bring with them British ideals – fair play, reasonableness, a gentleman’s word and his bond? Or will they bring with them a new set of bling values acquired from chavs in the UK? Will they demand higher standards of governance from the Polish state? Better laws?


At the heart of it, are Poles like Brits or different? If they are different, what are the causes of the difference? History or genetics? Watch this space, post your opinions.

Creating the Polish stereotype

To make the world around them less complicated, the British have – as indeed all peoples – devised simple stereotypes to help them understand their neighbours and other foreigners. The Frenchman has perennially been portrayed with his striped jersey, beret, Gauloise dangling from lip, string of onions, bicycle. The German, pompous, in lederhosen, intent on invading other countries or nabbing the sun beds. The lustful yet jealous Italian lover, the American tourist totting multiple cameras, the shifty work-shy Arab. Yet there is no stereotypical Pole in British popular culture. No Manuel from Faulty Towers. No René from ‘Ello, ‘ello. No Crocodile Dundee. The sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of Poles spread evenly across the towns and cities of the United Kingdom must undoubtedly result in a new stereotype being created.

What will it be? Is it indeed possible for Britons to have positive stereotypes of other nations? Prickly Poles? Impatient Poles? Complaining Poles? Poles taking umbrage all too easily? Poles making no attempt to disguise their hypocrisies?

Oliver Pratchett’s ‘Honest guv, we’re not your cowboyskis’ (Sunday Telegraph, 27 August 2006), is the first article I’ve seen in the British press attempting to create a recognisable Polish stereotype. Pratchett’s Polish builders are over-qualified (one’s a gynaecologist, one’s an economic adviser, one’s a former foreign minister, the fourth’s actually the Archbishop of Warsaw); they are homesick (for Łódź, Katowice, the Carpathian Mountains); they miss Polish food (goose, carp), and haven’t caught on to local ways (dumping rubble in neighbour’s skip, dismantling motorbikes in the bathroom). Accurate? Partially. Humorous? Very. Indeed, were Fawlty Towers to be remade today, Manuel, Polly, O’Reilly (the jerry-builder) and Stubbs (the reliable builder) would all be Polish.

If anything, Poland in the British mind has been a drab, post-communist country of grey tower blocks, crumbling soot-stained heavy industry, toothless peasants, a vodka-swilling people who may or may not have once been part of the Soviet Union. Or Russian Empire. Or something. Ah yes, Lech Walęsa and Pope John Paul II.

But an older stereotype of Poles lingers from WW2 days;the dashing, courageous yet ultimately tragic fighter, doomed to an émigré’s existence, forever dwelling on a lost fatherland.

Layer upon layer, the British will construct a new and viable stereotype, I just hope it's rich and not one-dimensional.