The last refuge

 I don’t think we are very good at supporting refugees in this country. Only last week there was a story in the news about how we had crowded lots of asylum seekers into an old military barracks, with the inevitable result that hundreds of them caught Covid. You only have to look at the tenor of debate, with discussions about who is “deserving” and who is a “migrant” to get the sense that the whole emphasis is on refugees proving they are genuine. This isn’t a new thing either. I listened to a podcast just last week where a woman told the story of how her Jewish parents were “lucky” to have had high-ranking connections within the British scientific establishment, allowing them to be granted safe haven in Britain and escape persecution from Nazi Germany.

Before you go all Daily Mail on me, and start thinking how generous we are, just consider how long it is since we have had a genuine crisis on our own little island, that necessitated large numbers of people fleeing from harm in genuine fear for their lives. I’ll wait.

The last genuine battle on our shores, if you discount the conflict in Ireland (which I have written about before), and being bombed from the air, or terrorist atrocities, or civil riots, was in 1746, the Battle of Culloden in the north of Scotland. The last rites of the Jacobite cause was played out on a heathland near Inverness, and was followed by a crackdown on the supporters of the exiled Stuart pretenders. Some of them left for America, or France,  and there was undoubtedly a cultural genocide of sorts, but it would barely have touched the cultural memory of the English.

If you discount the two-day invasion by the French in Fishguard (really an extension of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen’s rebellion) in 1797, you have to go back to 1216 since there has been a genuine invasion of England. That was really a war of ruling elites, each set with landed interests all over Europe, and though their would have been collateral damage, it would not have touched the populace in the way modern wars do.

Oh, 1066 you say? The Norman yoke? Umm, that is nearly a thousand years ago, and of course the native nobility were dispossessed at the time, and the nature of our laws and culture were altered, but again it’s not in our cultural DNA anymore, too much has happened to dilute and wash away its societal impact.

In my opinion I think part of the reasons for our lack of compassion and empathy towards refugees is that we just don’t know what it is like or how it could possibly feel. Without experiencing something it’s very hard to know what it really is like, no matter how empathic you are. Readers and friends will be familiar with me making comments about my French ancestry and the fact that I have a remote link to Huguenots who fled the south of France in the 17th century.

My recent absence from riding has enabled me to delve into their history a bit more, and as well as drawing up that branch of my family tree, I have also read some academic histories of the period and the location. I had long-known that my ancestor, and 8x Great grandfather, Daniel Camroux left Nimes in 1685 after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and settled in Berlin. His grandson Jean Simon Camroux and his wife, Susanne Devaux, subsequently came to London in the late 1740s.  Two generations later the family was giving its children English first names, and by the early 1800s were marrying outside the historic French community. My 3x Great Grandfather Thomas Andrew Camroux was one of the first official Police force established by Robert Peel, and you don’t get more English than that.

I had always imagined Daniel had left Nimes in search of religious liberty and tolerance, but I now suspect that is only part of the story. That intolerance had been building for decades in a time when religion was much more important in shaping your life than it is now in our secular culture in Britain. But with the official law changed, making it illegal to be a Protestant in France, open season was declared. Many villages in the area were eradicated, their inhabitants massacred, men, women and children all. Even those forced to convert at the end of the barrel of a gun were still denied jobs or suffered ongoing persecution. 

Twenty years later there was an uprising of local Protestants that had stayed, the Camisard revolt, desperate to assert their liberty and practice their religion without being murdered. As is the way of things there were atrocities committed by both sides, until a pragmatic peace was agreed. My relatives were long-gone from the area, but obviously I like to think there’s a bit of that resistance to authority in my DNA.

That inter-communal violence, murder and mayhem seems like it belongs to another world. But it’s the kind of thing that still happens the world over today, indeed it happened in the Balkans barely 30 years ago. It’s the fear of persecution, torture and death that forces people to make those desperate journeys in search of a better life. Trekking over the Alps to Switzerland and Germany in the 17th century is the equivalent of precarious boat trips across the channel today.

Given the speed with which I now know Daniel left I now feel it’s likely he was in fear for his life. Maybe his grandson was an economic migrant, but I’m sure London welcomed him into the community in Shoreditch, thankful for his skills and industry in what had become a thriving French community by 1750.

Lockdowns and pandemics permitting, one day I will visit Nimes from whence Daniel fled, as well as the hamlet of Goussargues where other Camroux came from in the 17th century. I also hope to go to the nearby village of Lussan, from where the family originated in the Middle Ages. I know I have up to 30% of my DNA from France, so I suspect there are other migrants or refugees lurking in the ancestry. There’s even some Spanish and Nordic in there too. Who knows what made them all travel from their place of origin.

I like living in Somerset, it’s quiet, peaceful, beautiful. But if one day some band of thugs, or heaven forbid, government soldiers, descended on Winscombe and started killing everyone, I’d like to think that some fellow humans, maybe from as far away as Minehead would take us in. Or maybe we’d have to flee to France or Ireland. You can’t imagine it can you, it couldn’t happen here, could it? 

You can of course retreat to your certainties and search for your quiet life. I’d always balked against that because I had a principled objection to it. But now, well it seems all very personal.