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Chinese seamen at a hostel in Liverpool in May 1942. Photograph: Bert Hardy/Getty Images
Letters
Fri 28 May 2021 11.15 EDT
Last modified on Fri 28 May 2021 11.38 EDT
We congratulate Dan Hancox, and the family campaigners who helped him, for bringing into the open at last the story of the Chinese seamen secretly rounded up and forcibly deported from Liverpool as soon as their services were no longer required for the war effort (The secret deportations: how Britain betrayed the Chinese men who served the country in the war, 25 May). Nothing can compensate for the suffering inflicted on them, and on the wives and children from whom they were so cruelly separated with neither explanation nor farewell.
O
n 19 October 1945, 13 men gathered in Whitehall for a secret meeting. It was chaired by Courtenay Denis Carew Robinson, a senior Home Office official, and he was joined by representatives of the Foreign Office, the Ministry of War Transport, and the Liverpool police and immigration inspectorate. After the meeting, the Home Office’s aliens department opened a new file, designated HO/213/926. Its contents were not to be discussed in the House of Commons or the Lords, or with the press, or acknowledged to the public. It was titled “Compulsory repatriation of undesirable Chinese seamen”.
As the vast process of post-second world war reconstruction creaked into action, this deportation programme was, for the Home Office and Clement Attlee’s new government, just one tiny component. The country was devastated – hundreds of thousands were dead, millions were homeless, unemployment and inflation were soaring. The cost of the war had been so great that the UK would not finish payi