Special Collections & Archives

Snapshot from the Archives: Refugees at Roehampton

Snapshot from the Archives: Refugees at Roehampton

June 19th to 25th 2023 is Refugee Week, when we celebrate the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary from conflict, persecution or climate disaster. Here at Roehampton we have many reasons to celebrate the contribution of refugees to our culture.

In 2019, Southlands College honoured alumna Vera Löwyova Schaufeld MBE with an honorary doctorate in recognition of her services to education. Vera was born in 1930 in a small town in what was then Czechoslovakia, where  her father was the head of the Jewish community. When the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, Vera’s parents made the difficult decision to send her to England on the Kindertransport. She settled with an English family who had a daughter her age, with whom she attended boarding school. Tragically, after the war she discovered that none of her family had survived the Holocaust, so, homeless and orphaned, she remained in Britain where she studied at Southlands, and qualified as an English teacher in 1950.

In 1972, Vera joined the Language Service in Brent, teaching English to recently arrived Asian immigrants, particularly refugees from Uganda. She is also dedicated to the cause of Holocaust education, and helped to write a children’s book, Our Lonely Journey,  about her experience of arriving on the Kindertransport as a young child, alone, with no knowledge of England, its language or culture. This book can be found, along with much more Holocaust related material, in our Jewish Resource Centre Collection (one of the Library’s Special Collections on the second floor). Vera was recently interviewed on the BBC about her experiences; the programme is available to view on YouTube. 

Froebel College also played a part in helping Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Correspondence held in the Froebel Archive (reference FACS/10/5) shows that the then Principal, Eglantyne Jebb, who was Jewish herself, went to some trouble to try to accommodate Jewish girls at the College who were escaping Nazi persecution. It seems that although none were actually enrolled here, Jebb’s contacts ensured that some of them were able to escape to England and attend school here. Some letters show that the Home Office Immigration Department were as obstructive then as they can be now, regarding the need for refugees to be sponsored by a British citizen and not permitted to take up paid employment. However, some had positive outcomes. For example, Jebb’s friend Miss Tanner, headmistress of the prestigious Roedean School in Brighton, writes in February 1939:

Dear Miss Jebb,

I am exceedingly sorry but I am afraid that we have nothing we can offer to the German Jewish girl about whom you write.

The Council has given me permission to take a certain number of refugees into the school. For this term one of these places was vacant; and owing to letters having crossed I find myself with two people for the one place and, as I cannot bear to disappoint either of them, I am taking both and getting myself whitewashed by the Council afterwards. I am afraid I could not take also the girl about whom you write. If I can think of anything that is suitable for her I will let you know at once.

Yours sincerely,

E. M. Tanner.

This letter refers to 17-year-old Ilse Stern of Frankfurt, who was just too young to be offered a place at Froebel but was eventually admitted to Winchester Secondary Girls’ School where she apparently thrived, and settled as an adult in New York. The correspondence includes a letter from Ilse herself, and one from the family with whom she is to be living, the Bedfords, who express concern to Miss Jebb regarding what they should provide for her in terms of Jewish food and culture.

The 1939 letter from Ilse Stern held in the Froebel Archive

In another letter, Miss Jebb refers to the fund set up by former students in memory of her close friend Claude Montefiore, leader of the Liberal Jewish Movement and Chairman of Froebel Institute. She writes of the alumni’s desire to help a Jewish student by funding a College place for them in his memory.

Whitelands College also played a part in helping refugees during the Second World War, from bombed out local families to five hundred evacuees from Gibraltar.  The Whitelands Annuals held in the Archives record that, in 1940: “The College has been used these last two months as a rest centre for homeless people. For nearly ten days we housed about 150 refugees from a badly damaged Battersea area: their ages ranged from 2 week to 73 years.” (p.5). The 1941 Annual states: “Our own buildings at Putney are fully occupied by Spanish refugees from Gibraltar. There are five hundred of them, men, women and children.” (p.4). In 1944, their sanctuary suffered badly from the Blitz bombing raids on London: “You all know how severely the College suffered from incendiaries in the air-raids last February. The Gibraltar evacuees who had been housed there were moved to other premises as, with no roof to the central block and the domestic water and electric services cut, the building was not habitable….” (p.3).

Roehampton community House Journal entry recording the arrival of the RSCJ sisters from Spain

Digby Stuart College, in its former incarnation as the Society of the Sacred Heart community and teacher training college in West Kensington, had taken in some refugees even before the Second World War. In 1938, several Spanish Sisters of the Society of the Sacred Heart (or RSCJ: Réligieuses du Sacré Coeur de Jésus), came to England to escape the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). They had been stranded in Barcelona, but escaped on a ship organised by then-U.S. Ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy Senior, who at that time had three daughters (Eunice, Pat and Jean Kennedy, sisters of John F Kennedy) at the Sacred Heart school in Roehampton. Once here, they joined the Society’s teacher training college in West Kensington - later relocated to Roehampton as Digby Stuart College.  

Of these sisters, Josefina Bernaldez (1862-1950) was 75 when she was evacuated to England. She returned to Madrid to teach French and English from 1939 until her death in 1950, aged 91. Elvira Maria Luzarraga y Urrutia (1881-1960) was teaching in Barcelona when the Civil War drove her to seek safety in London. Maria Teresa Rojas (1893-1972) was another of the 28 religious Sisters stranded in the Spring of 1938 in Barcelona who came to Roehampton. After a year in England she returned to Spain, where she helped supervise the work of rebuilding the Sacred Heart Convent at Pontevedra.

Sadly, the need to support refugees is as great today as it was at the time of these snapshots from our College Archives. Various academic schemes are in place today to support those in need, such as Science for Ukraine and CARA, the Council for At-Risk Academics.

With thanks to the Archivists of each College for their help with supplying content for this post.