Two-way traffic: arrivals and departures

Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600
by Eric Richards
Hambledon & London, £19.95, pp. 388, ISBN 1852854413

In the middle of the 19th century, Londoners grumbled about the number of Italian urchins grinding barrel organs on street corners. Criminals and people-traffickers had brought many of them to Britain and their melody- making was becoming a nuisance. Charles Babbage complained that their racket was disrupting his concentration while he was trying to build his calculating machine. The Times got equally huffy. With a change to the law making life more difficult for the grinders, the money, such as it was, fell out of the barrel-organ market. The boys grew up and went into the next big thing — ice cream-vending. A century and a half later, some of their descendants, still discernibly of Italian origin, remain here, scooping dollops of ‘Mr Whippy’ from vans that announce their presence with an irritating jingle that is the ancestral voice of their organ-grinding forebears.

What would British café life in the second half of the 20th century have been like without its Italian community? Would the City of London be a world financial centre had Jews and Dutchmen never come over to offer their expertise? What new Jerusalem would have risen without Irishmen in the building trade? Robert Winder’s new book Bloody Foreigners (the title is meant to be ironic) celebrates the waves of unknown hopefuls who arrived here and whose struggles and legacy have been forgotten. It is also a compendium of those celebrated immigrants who have so enhanced our national life that their foreign origins have been overlooked. He makes no apology for using their example to promote the case for a more welcoming attitude towards immigration to Britain today.