Hard Labour: The Forgotten Voices of Latvian Migrant 'Volunteer' Workers

Linda McDowell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781844720200
• eBook ISBN: 9781134057214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Although the Second World War ended sixty years ago, there are still untold stories waiting to be heard: stories not only of diplomats and soldiers but also of refugees, camp inmates and ordinary people living in occupied territories, stories of women's and children's lives as well as those of men.

In Hard Labour the forgotten voices of a group of young women who left Latvia in 1944 are captured, telling the story of their flight from the advancing Soviet Army, their difficult journeys across central Europe, their lives as displaced people in Allied camps in Germany and finally their refuge in Britain.

Hard work is at the centre of these stories, as the women became 'volunteer' workers, first for the Nazi war effort and then as labourers in the British post-war reconstruction plan. In what has been described as a 'venemous postscript' to the War, the fit and able amongst the vast homeless and often stateless population that fetched up in camps run by the Allies in war-devastated Germany were recruited by western states as labourers. Great Britain was the first nation to recruit displaced persons, offering jobs in hospitals and private homes as domestic workers and in the textile industry to young single women (and later men) from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and other once independent states. Many of these women spent the rest of their lives in Britain, longing to return to their homelands but independence came too late for many of them.

At the centre of Hard Labour are the lives of twenty-five now elderly Latvia women who came to Britain between 1946 and 1949. Their memories are placed in the context of recent work in feminist history, illuminating debates about displacement and loss as well as the transformation of women's lives in post-war Britain.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION:
LOOKING BACK TO THE 1940S AND 1950S

One of the great pleasures of being a feminist scholar writing about women's post-war lives in contemporary Britain is the freedom it allows to investigate a range of issues that have personal resonance. It is noticeable that as the generation of second wave feminist theorists who have been so influential in changing the nature of social science in the last three decades has aged so too has their empirical focus shifted from an interest in childbirth, housework and employment to an emphasis on ageing (see, for example, Greer 1985, 1992; Oakley 1974a, 1974b; Rowbotham 1989). A related feature of this shifting focus has been the recent interest among feminist scholars and others in their childhood memories of the early post-war period. One of the most vivid of the memoirs that has appeared in the last few years is Lorna Sage's (2000) moving story of her upbringing in rural Wales in the 1950s – Bad Blood – in which she explored some of the implications of her own spatial and social mobility as she moved to the north of England as a first generation university student and then into the middle classes as a university lecturer after a strange and lonely childhood. I too was a child in the 1950s and these various memoirs and reflections awoke only half-hidden memories. Alison Pressley's (1999) foreword to her book of personal reflections The Best of Times: Growing up in Britain in the 1950s took me straight back to those years:

You remember Liberty bodices, suspender belts, nylons, roll-on girdles, papernylon petticoats, winkle-picker shoes, crisp packets with little blue waxed paper twists of salt inside, Duffel coats, black Bakelite telephones with exchange names and simple numbers …

You are a Baby Boomer, born after World War II ended, just in time to enjoy the innocent, secure, never-had-it-so-good fifties.

I was born at the tail end of the 1940s and started school in 1954, growing up as post-war severity was gradually transformed into a more affluent society. I had already read with interest a whole series of recollections on the era, including Elizabeth Wilson's (1980) Half way to Paradise, Sara Maitland's (1988) Very Heaven and Liz Heron's (1985) Truth, Dare or Promise about girls growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. However, as well as my growing interest in the lives of women of my own age – the baby boomers – I found I was becoming increasingly curious about the lives of an earlier generation: those women, including my own mother, who were young adults in the late 1940s and 1950s, having their sons and daughters as part of the post-war baby boom and often perhaps moving into a life of domesticity after more active working lives during the war. I had long suspected that the stories about domesticity in the 1950s and women's supposed lack of political activity concealed more differences between women than they captured similarities. What about the women who remained in the labour market, combining domesticity, motherhood and employment in the immediately post-war era? How did they feel? Did their identity as workers conflict with their ideal of motherhood? And how were their home and working lives altered by new technology and growing affluence during the golden years of Fordist production, new consumer goods and more comfortable homes?

The publication in 1998 of Wendy Webster's study of the first two post-war decades – Imagining Home: gender, ‘race’ and national identity, 1945–64 – revitalised my interest in these questions. Webster's main focus was a comparison of white ‘native’ women with in-migrants from the Caribbean, assessing the ways in which the social construction and regulation of motherhood excluded women of colour. I have a similar aim: reimagining those years from the perspective of women for whom paid work was a necessity and, in the early post-war years for the migrant women who are the focus on this book, a legal requirement. Instead of looking at the Irish and Caribbean women who met a significant part of the post-war demand for female workers, the focus here is on an earlier group of migrant women: women from the Baltic States who came to Britain as displaced persons. They entered the UK as ‘European Volunteer Workers’ (EVWs) at the end of the war and their presence and experiences are less well documented than those of other groups of migrants, despite the fact that about 20,000 women from the Baltic states and other parts of Eastern Europe entered Britain between 1946 and 1950.

The European Volunteer Workers scheme was introduced by the British government in 1946 to recruit single young women in displaced persons’ camps in Germany to meet the labour shortages in female-dominated sectors in the UK economy. At the end of the war there were about seven million homeless people in Europe, many of them living in the camps in German and former German territories that the Department of Labour officials began to visit from late 1945. The camps housed a diverse group of people from many nations and former nations in eastern and northern Europe. Not all these displaced people were victims of the Nazi regime. Indeed, some of them had looked to the Nazis for assistance as they fled the approach of the Russian front westwards in the closing phases of the war. Among these people were several thousand former residents of the Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – as well as people of German descent who had moved from what had been Polish territory back into the German heartland. Although many of these stateless refugees chose to return to the territories of their birth and others were forcibly repatriated at the close of hostilities, others decided to remain in the camps, hoping that the allies might allow them to enter one of the victorious countries as refugees and asylum seekers. While agreeing to their entry, in most cases, the allied nations took a strictly utilitarian view of their potential new citizens, seeing them not in humanitarian terms as deserving respect and recompense for wartime disruption but instead as labouring bodies, as potential workers to aid in the post-war efforts of reconstruction. Consequently, educational qualifications and employment skills, but above all, a fit and healthy body became an essential prerequisite for displaced persons hoping to continue to move westwards. The old, the unfit, the disabled and infirm were left behind. For women prospective migrants, an additional consideration was their suitability as potential wives and mothers of the new nation. The significance of a common European heritage and the physical suitability of the potential migrants were emphasised: stock and blood were common terms in Cabinet discussions, for example, and as Kathleen Paul (1987, p 88) has argued ‘at a time of perceived demographic crisis, the United Kingdom could only benefit from an infusion of the right kind of stock, both male and female’. Male recruits might rectify labour shortages; women would also, it was argued, boost the general birth-rate.

This story of embodiment and labouring, of feminine respectability and purity, and the roles played by western governments in recruiting these women workers is not well known, and the opinions and later lives of the relatively fortunate camp occupants who were regarded as acceptable for employment in Britain has not been told, or at least not in their own words. In this book I begin to correct this lacuna, telling the stories of 25 women who came to Britain in the immediately post-war years as ‘volunteer workers’, at least in the eyes of the British government, if not in their own. Instead they regarded themselves as seeking refuge from the brutality of the Soviet regime that had, in their opinion, illegally seized their homeland. This was a view which they refused to modify over many decades of residence in Britain until, in 1991, Latvia once again became a nation state and their long belief in Latvia's right to self-determination was vindicated. By this time, however, it was too late for these women. Despite their long-held desire to go ‘home’, they found that age, family connections and relative poverty tied them to Britain, although some of them were able to return to Latvia as holiday makers and temporary visitors and one or two successfully reclaimed property that their families had owned in the inter-war period.

The women whose voices are heard in this book were recruited by officials from the British Ministry of Labour between 1946 and 1949. Under the auspices of two schemes, rather fancifully termed the Baltic Cygnet Scheme and Westward Ho!, fit, young and single women with no dependants were selected to fill job vacancies in Britain. At the end of the war, hit by labour shortages in many industries despite demobilisation, the British State decided, in the teeth of trade union opposition, to look outside the country for workers to replace the older workers and women who withdrew from employment in 1945. It was assumed by the government that women would perhaps be less unacceptable to the male-dominated union movement than male workers (although men were in fact recruited under the second scheme, Westward Ho!, and in larger numbers than women). As many women were initially recruited into forms of employment with tied housing, it was also argued that these migrant workers would not be in competition with British families for scarce accommodation, again reducing the potential resistance to the recruitment of foreign workers.

The women from the former Baltic republics and elsewhere who were recruited under these schemes were brought to Britain and allocated employment, in the main as domestic workers in institutions, especially hospitals, and in private homes, as well as industrial work in the textile industry. The history of these women's working lives in Britain has been left untold, despite the fact that it challenges the assumptions about women's withdrawal from the labour market in the early post-war years. The recruitment of the EVWs also more than doubled the foreign-born population of the UK at that time and preceded the more well known migrations from the Caribbean (Kay and Miles 1992, Paul 1997) and so is a significant element in the changing nature of the British population through in-migration in the post-war period.

Thus, while these women's lives and their wartime experiences as they fled the Soviet front advancing westwards are intrinsically interesting, adding a new dimension to our understanding of the position of women in the Second World War, their lives also provide an invaluable insight into contemporary attitudes, beliefs and behaviour about migrants in post-war Britain. A focus on the EVW schemes, therefore, provides a way into broader questions about both British immigration policy and the reconstruction of identity and community among diasporic peoples, as these ‘volunteer workers’ challenge many conventional assumptions and distinctions in the debates about migration into the UK. Their position as a hybrid or ‘in-between’ category in post-war Britain makes them unique, so providing a counter-focus to conventional assumptions about the post-war period.

Migration and identity: hybrid migrants

This ‘betweenness’ or uniqueness of the late 1940s European migrants to Britain lies in several areas. First, women were the initial migrants, entering the UK in advance of male recruits of the same nationalities and so reversing the common trend in migration flows. They also challenge conventional distinctions in both migration theories and policies between refugees and economic migrants, as in their own eyes the displaced people were refugees and asylum seekers, but in official policy they were designated as economic migrants or EVWs. Furthermore, these women were distinguishable from the other main categories of migrant workers into the UK, especially those from the Caribbean and from Eire, by their class, skin colour, religion and alien status. Thus, these women occupied an interesting hybrid location in post-war Britain, neither (or both) refugees nor migrant workers, women but not mothers, often middle class by origin but required to accept manual employment, alien and yet European, with no previous attachments to the UK, unlike Irish and Caribbean women, and unable to return to their homeland, which disappeared as an independent entity until the early 1990s when these former EVWs were, in the majority, too elderly to return. Unlike Irish and Caribbean migrants, with a history of attachment to and connections with the UK, these Baltic women had ended up in Britain through an accident of history and the trauma of wartime dislocation and yet, despite the disappearance of their homelands, they continued to wish for and organise around Baltic independence during their long ‘exile’.

Their lives thus provide a fascinating comparison with other post-war migrants and an interesting study of how and why the British State chose to recruit them initially and how it constructed them as particularly desirable workers. Indeed, considerable efforts were made to present these women as suitable Britons in what might now be regarded as eugenicist terms. They were, for example, described in official documents as superior to rural Polish women and as potential marriage partners for British men. For this, and perhaps other reasons, Baltic refugees were treated comparatively leniently by the allies despite the Yalta Agreement in 1945 under which citizens of countries by then under Soviet domination were expected to be returned to the Soviet Union. These women, therefore, also occupied an ambivalent position as post-war survivors. They had lived in German-occupied territory during the war and sometimes they or their families had been active participants in German domination, albeit often on an involuntary basis. And there is a complex and contested history of Latvian collaboration with the Nazis, which has resulted in the post-war period in a number of expulsions from Britain of men originally from the Baltic States.

These women also provide a lens into the social construction of femininity in post-war Britain as, unlike many British women, especially those of a similar class background, they were required to participate in the labour market in the early post-war years. There is an interesting and expanding literature that is beginning to examine the diversity of women's lives in both the pre- and post-war decades, drawing both on historical records and on the testaments of elderly women (see, for example, Glucksmann 2000). This work documents the ways in which women's labour market participation is connected to and conflicts with their domestic responsibilities, a conflict that was largely unrecognised, or rather ignored, in the post-war rhetoric about women's dual roles. Focusing on migrant women in the post-war period also allows us to question official ideologies of femininity in the 1940s and 1950s when the mark of a ‘good woman’ and of domestic respectability was, above all, motherhood and withdrawal from the labour market. The lives of migrant women challenged this association. Furthermore, these women's working lives provide an insight into the opportunities for and extent of social mobility as British society began to change from the 1950s onwards. For many of them, their lives were marked by downward social mobility, in contrast to the ‘native’ population, for whom, both women and men, the post-war decades seemed to be ones of increasing affluence and opportunity.

Leaving Latvia

The women whose voices and lives fill these pages are all from Latvia, a country that was occupied and incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940, then occupied by Germany from June 1941 and reoccupied by the Soviet Union in the last stages of the war. It was, as Anthill (1958, p ix) noted, ‘a small nation crushed between two leviathans’. During their short-lived initial occupation, the Soviet authorities arrested and deported or killed 15,000 Latvian citizens over a single night –15 June 1941 – and were later to repeat the exercise in 1949 when 10% of the rural population of Latvia was deported to facilitate the collectivisation of farmland. During their occupation, Nazis had also arrested and exported thousands of Latvian citizens to forced labour camps in Germany, as well as conscripting many young men, ostensibly into a Latvian regiment but de facto into the German Army. When the German armed forces surrendered in the East in 1944–45, about 125,000 Latvians left for mainland Western Europe and the Scandinavian countries, fearful of their fate once the Soviet Union took over again, following their compatriots who had left, most of them for Sweden, in the early 1940s. Many of the second wave migrants ended up in Germany, fleeing the Soviet expansion westwards to find refuge, eventually, in the American and British occupation zones. Once there, these refugees were first placed in camps and later offered passages to other nation states, often with conditions attached, under a range of different schemes to recruit migrant workers as part of post-war reconstruction efforts. This flight and wartime dislocation, followed by obligatory participation as labourers for the by then faltering Nazi war effort, and then by life in the relative calm of the displaced persons camps is the subject matter of Chapters 3 and 4. In Nazi Germany these young women were directed to undertake a range of tasks, including sorting coal, manufacturing munitions, street cleaning and agricultural and domestic work. In the displaced persons’ camps, the Allies also put some of them to work, although the youngest among these women attended school classes. Here too, those who worked undertook a range of manual jobs, as well as clerical labour: in all, hard tasks for teenaged girls and young women who were often from a middle class background.

Only a small number of books and articles about ‘displaced’ peoples have been published so far in English. In the 1950s, the main focus was on the Polish troops demobilised in the UK, although in 1958 JA Tannahill wrote a book about the European Voluntary Workers (EVWs) programme, outlining the origins of the participants and their early lives in Britain. After that date, nothing was published in Britain until 1992, when Diana Kay and Robert Miles published their reevaluation of these schemes. However, almost nowhere in this tiny British literature do the distinctive voices of the workers themselves appear, apart from in a small number of archived interviews from the late 1970s, in the Bradford Sound Archives.

At the centre of this book, therefore, are the voices of elderly Baltic women, originally recruited as EVWs. During 2000 and 2001, I talked to and recorded oral narratives from 25 women, then in their 70s and 80s, who fled from Latvia in 1944 in the face of the advancing Russian front. Women from Latvia were the majority among the women from the Baltic who became EVWs and continue to be perhaps the most well organised as a community in the UK. Latvians who decided to leave escaped by ship, landing in Danzig (now Gdan´ sk in Poland) and journeyed westwards by train or on foot through the winter of 1944–45, one of the most severe winters of the century. As I noted in the preface, the story of one of these Baltic crossings has recently, and controversially become the subject of a novel by Gunter Grass but, in general, relatively little has been written about the 1944 migration from the Baltic States, and about the particular experiences of young women in this movement. Even less is known of their experiences as workers in the German war effort. In part my book helps to counter these absences.

Structure of the book

As women's work is the focus of this book, feminist scholarship has been a key influence. One of the great strengths of this work has been to question the key theoretical distinctions that have dominated our understanding of society, in particular the distinction between the public and the private spheres. Feminists have challenged the taken-for-granted associations of men with the former arena and women with the latter location, documenting not only the reasons for this association but its complexity in practice. One of the implications of this challenge was a rethinking of the definition of work, recognising the connections between work undertaken in different locations, especially unpaid work in the home and paid work in the workplace, its associations with women and with men respectively and so its differential value and, concomitantly, unequal financial rewards. Domestic labour was rescued from what might be termed the enormous condescension of history and instituted as a proper focus for academic attention. The British feminist scholar, Ann Oakley (1974a, 1974b) provided an invaluable spur to think again about the nature of women's unpaid work in the home. There has been a parallel and stimulating debate about women's position in the labour market, seeking explanations of their segregation in a limited range of occupation and their unequal financial rewards compared with the wages earned by men (see, for example, Bradley 1989; Walby 1986, 1997). Thus, the gendered attributes of different types of work have been examined, revealing the ways in which men and women have been employed in the post-war e...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Deidcation
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Introduction: Looking Back to the 1940s and 1950s
• 2 Thinking Through Gender: Theorising Migration, Memory and Identity
• 3 Disciplining Bodies: Exile and Involuntary Labour
• 4 Life in the Camps: From Foreign Workers to Displaced Persons
• 5 Becoming EVWs: From Displaced Persons to Economic Migrants
• 6 Survival Strategies: Women's Dual Roles in Post-War Britain
• 7 Place, Locality and Gendered Local Cultures
• 8 Yearning for ‘Home’: Narratives of Belonging and Imagined Community
• 9 Conclusions: Memory, Identity and Translation
• Bibliography
• Index