Authors

Discussion

In 1942, 320,000 Polish prisoners were released from Siberia. Of this cohort, 120,000 arrived in Iran, less than a year after Operation Countenance. Many of these refugees resettled in Great Britain in the late 1940s, after spending time in other countries with historic connections to the British Empire. Of the 162,339 Poles registered in the 1951 UK census, it is estimated that over 60% had some contact with British Imperialism during the 1940s.

Increasingly, the Polish exile community are being included in the historiography of the Windrush generation, the term given to the grouping who migrated to post-war Britain largely as a consequence of the 1948 British Nationality Act. While the arrival of Commonwealth migrants and European refugees were broadly coterminous, and there were some similarities in terms of the way in which both groupings were viewed as a source of cheap and available labour, there were a myriad of differences between these two cohorts. The most apparent differences were their motivation for migration and the presence of colourism within the host society. Consequently, many Polish exiles failed to see the parallels observed within the recent historiography.

In this paper I will attempt to position the Polish exile community within Britain’s moment of post-war migration, considering whether the Polish exiles’ experience of Imperialism impacted their resettlement into British society.