Shipping the Color Line: Migration and Transport Policy in the British Empire, 1943–51

Abstract

This article looks again at the history of British migration policy in the 1940s and 1950s by centering international and imperial politics, and by drawing on archives related to shipping. These sources suggest that the British government sought to reactivate a system of race-segregated mobility across the Empire-Commonwealth after the Second World War. This involved subsidizing fares for emigrants bound for Australia, transporting migrants from Europe to the UK, and withdrawing shipping from routes that connected the Caribbean to the UK. Very soon, however, these policies came under strain. There were not enough deep-sea ships to meet demand for berths to Australia or to bring over recruited European migrants. Then the Australian government found new ways to ship migrants from continental Europe by signing a deal with the International Refugee Organization, challenging UK policy to keep Australian immigration British. Meanwhile, new routes were opened up from the Caribbean and South Asia to the UK. These trends raised a host of dilemmas for policymakers and all related to transport infrastructure. Thinking about transport can deepen our understanding of migration history, and the article's conclusion suggests some of the ways that taking such an approach can contribute to existing explanations for the government's fateful decision to amend the UK's nationality and citizenship legislation during the 1960s.

If “mobility was the life-blood of empires” then shipping was the beating heart of Britain's.¹ The Royal Navy was the Empire's “great defensive and offensive weapon” during the nineteenth century and remained so until the outbreak of the Second World War.² Shipping was also the means by which almost all of Britain's international and intra-imperial migration was carried until the 1950s. We cannot understand the scale and direction of these migrant flows except in relation to the world's merchant marine, whose most important networks were maintained by British firms and whose major sea lanes were patrolled by British warships.³ In these ways and more, ships and shipping lay at the center of Britain's global power, and shipping, in turn, bore the “imprint of the empire of which the industry was so integral a part.”⁴

It was the Second World War, according to the historian Paul Kennedy, that shattered Britain's maritime hegemony and thus “the collapse” of its “independent national power.”⁵ This argument should be treated cautiously as an example of the much-maligned literature of “declinism.”⁶ But a realization that Britain's financial and military supremacy had waned repeatedly confronted the postwar Labour government and taught them “that sovereignty did not imply power over the external world.”⁷ When we look at maritime and migration policy we see similar dynamics at play.

After 1945 the British government attempted to rearticulate a longstanding system of race-segregated mobility across the Empire-Commonwealth that I have elsewhere called the UK's “emigration state.”⁸ The government's intention was to restart emigration to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Southern Rhodesia, while limiting migration from the Caribbean, South Asia, and West Africa to the UK. But a lack of ships, competing priorities between migration and trade, and the emergence of the International Refugee Organization as a major force in migrant shipping soon degraded the British state's capacity to control mobility within the Empire-Commonwealth. This put great strain on Britain's maritime-based migration policy during the 1950s and raised new political dilemmas as that decade wore on.

Setting British migration policy in this context takes a different tack to much existing scholarship. Most historians of migration to and from Britain in the twentieth century focus on the legal and political histories of changes to UK statute law, from the 1905 Aliens Act to the present.⁹ These histories often consider the 1960s as a turning point because, until then, all subjects of the British Empire-Commonwealth had the right to migrate to, and work in, the UK. This contrasted with the rights of foreign born “aliens,” whose mobility was first limited from 1905 and then strictly controlled after the First World War.¹⁰ Yet, as decades of research has shown, the legal right of British subjects to migrate within the Empire was curtailed for racialized and minoritized populations by extra-legal restrictions and controls.¹¹ Passport officers and government officials split British subjects into “separate spheres” according to race and nationality, and they often refused to issue travel documents as a means to affect migration by “informal and generally invisible methods of regulation.”¹² The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act turned this “informal and invisible” discrimination into statutory inequality by imposing quotas and work vouchers on UK and Commonwealth citizens seeking to travel to Britain in ways that were well understood by contemporaries to be spurred by racism.

Looking beyond legal histories and domestic politics to international and imperial contexts, and drawing on sources related to shipping and transport, help us get closer to the way informed contemporaries understood the connection between shipping and migration policy.¹³ For instance, according to a contemporary text on British shipping:

In these days every country in the world insists upon the closest control over the entry of foreigners, and governments adopt the simple and brutal method of making the unfortunate shipowner responsible for carrying out their innumerable regulations.¹⁴

Ships should thus be understood as the “infrastructure” that undergirded migration policy: the “connective tissue” of a vast “socio-technical system” that “reside[d] in a naturalized background, as ordinary and unremarkable […] as trees, daylight, and dirt.”¹⁵ Focusing on shipping also connects modern British studies to a wider historiographical turn seeking to combine political history, mobilities, and transport history.¹⁶ Taking such a turn leads to three arguments about British migration policy in the immediate postwar decade. First, shipping formed a hitherto underappreciated part of the extensively studied “informal and invisible” migration controls of the 1940s and 1950s. Second, these “invisible” controls affected both immigration and emigration. Third, the breakdown of these “informal and invisible” regulations had knock-on effects on both immigration and emigration policies during the 1950s. These arguments support Kathleen Paul's contention that Britain's postwar migration policy is best understood through a comparative analysis of the treatment of emigrants destined for the Commonwealth, immigrants recruited from Europe, and British subjects travelling from the Commonwealth to Great Britain.¹⁷ An important part of Paul's analysis that is not studied here is migration from Ireland. Instead, my focus is mainly on long-distance transport and intra-imperial citizenship.

Comparing mobility to and from Britain, and from the perspective of shipping, challenges the assertion that the British state's attitude to Commonwealth migration in the 1940s and 1950s was marked by “exceptional liberality and expansiveness” before taking a sharp turn to restriction in the 1960s.¹⁸ Too much focus on the universalist language of the British Nationality Act of 1948 gives a false impression that Britain's political elite possessed a “liberal” attitude to migration that treated passengers transiting through the Empire equally. When we look at the workings of the maritime migration system and government interventions in it, it becomes clear that British officials treated British subjects unequally, assigning higher value to those travelling from the UK to the Commonwealth and lower value to Black and Asian subjects and citizens travelling to the UK. Counting ships and comparing their deployment thus adds additional empirical ballast to Kathleen Paul's conclusions, demonstrating how contemporary discourses of race and nation were articulated via what the sociologist Michael Mann calls “infrastructural power.”¹⁹

Inequalities in shipping capacity were a core part of Britain's postwar migration policy. The migrant routes and migration policies discussed in this article are represented in Figure 1 above. Each section of the article that follows begins by highlighting one aspect of this schematic diagram (Figures 2, 6, 8, 9, 11), representing which part of the greater whole is being described. These visualizations are designed to help readers compare different migrant routes through the Empire-Commonwealth and to understand that it was the addition of new routes from Europe to Australia and from the Empire-Commonwealth to the UK via third countries during the 1950s that led to new policy dilemmas for the British government. These new routes meant that hitherto invisible and informal controls on mobility were unable to sustain the imperial hierarchies of race and nation that the British government desired to uphold in the Empire-Commonwealth. The article's conclusion will suggest that these new migrant routes resulted in a renewed commitment by the British government both to fund emigration to Australia and to curb the mobility of Commonwealth citizens coming to Britain.

Figure 1. Principle long-distance migrant flows, 1945–51.

Figure 2. Subsidizing the migrant route to Australia.

Figure 3. “A Troopdeck” by Edward Ardizzone (1942). Images of troopdeck life are hard to find. Official propaganda photographers do not seem to have taken any troopdeck photographs, nor do we hear much about them apart from the snippets of information in the memoirs of officers. Source: © Imperial War Museum, Art.IWM ART LD 2713. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/572.

Figure 4. This photograph was taken by Major Wilfred Herbert James Sale on board the troopship Orion. It is labelled ‘Troop deck. Blanket airing’ and shows men resting on deck, ventilating their bedding, and trying to get some sleep away from the confines of the troopdeck. Source: © National Army Museum, https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1975-03-63-4-201.

Figure 5. UK government expenditure on ticket subsidies to Australia (in pounds). Source: First Annual Report of the Oversea Migration Board (London, 1954).

Figure 6. Subsidized and unsubsidized migration to the Dominions.

Figure 7. Comparison of prewar and postwar Australian migrant fleets. Source: Calculated from TNA: MT 73/19, “Ships employed on UK–Australia Route.”

Figure 8. Adding friction to shipping from the Caribbean and creating new migrant routes from Europe.

Figure 9. Shipping DPs to Australia.

Figure 10. Migration of DPs from occupied Germany. Source: Holborn, The International Refugee Organisation, 442, Annex 43.

Figure 11. Passage to the UK via international, rather than intra-imperial, routes.

The Wartime Background, 1943–45

To explain the development of Britain's postwar migration policy we first need to understand the government's desire to subsidize passage to the Dominions—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa—during the Second World War.²⁰ The wisdom of such a policy seemed spectacularly confirmed when the Dominions sent troops to defend the Empire at the outbreak of hostilities. Even as war raged, the British government began looking to postwar planning to keep the Dominions strong and populated by loyalists via subsidized emigration.²¹ In 1943 Clement Attlee, the future prime minister, was Secretary of State for the Dominions and in that role sent a message to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and also to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) asking whether their governments would welcome mass immigration from Britain. The British government would pay for the transport of demobilized troops, Attlee proposed, if the colonies would agree to find them jobs and accommodation.

Responses to Attlee's inquiry were varied. The Canadian and South African governments welcomed British migrants, but they were not keen on subsidies, which they associated with lower skilled and lower class migrants, a pattern that was familiar to British officials from before 1939.²² The New Zealand government also rejected UK subsidies, but desired an agreement by which they could pay for their own recruits.²³ The Southern Rhodesian and Australian governments responded positively to Attlee's proposal for subsidized immigration, although ultimately only Australia enacted a free passage scheme for veterans after the war. In fact, the Australian government went a step further, requesting a cost-shared program to assist whole families to migrate from the UK.²⁴

This huge demand for immigration in Australia was driven by wartime fears of invasion from Japan. The Australian political elite worried that they needed to build up their industrial base and increase their population to aid national defense.²⁵ The Australian government agreed on a target of 1 percent population growth per annum from immigration. This meant a planned intake of seventy thousand immigrants a year, with a majority expected to come from the UK (about ten Britons for every one non-Briton, the government hoped).²⁶ This preference for British migrants lent on Anglo-Australian “race patriotism” and on historic patterns of migration: 79.2 percent of those born overseas in the 1901 Australian census came from Britain and Ireland and 72.7 percent in 1947.²⁷ This preponderance of UK and Irish migrants was itself part of a longstanding “White Australia” policy of ethnically exclusivist immigration control.

The desire to maintain and defend “White Australia” pulled on British migration policy as if by a magnetic attraction. But British policy was also propelled by forces internal to British politics about empire loyalty.²⁸ An important 1938 government report by the Overseas Settlement Board argued that the British state should pursue subsidized emigration for the sake of imperial unity: the strength of the Empire must be enhanced by British settlers even if that meant a loss of skilled workers.²⁹ Such positive ideas about emigration were taken to further extremes after the war by a small minority who proposed the transplantation of whole industries to ensure the survival of the “British race” in any future nuclear war.³⁰ That was never Attlee's policy. Yet he did want to kickstart emigration after the cessation of hostilities, to get migrant flows back up and running, and to strengthen political connections with the settler states then becoming known as the “old Commonwealth.” This policy was always also about race, nation, and empire. Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary in Attlee's Labour government, thought emigration must be subsidized to “maintain the race in Australia.”³¹ By the end of the war, this connection between race and emigration was widely approved of in the Cabinet and in both Houses of Parliament.³²

An immediate problem faced civil servants responding to such political directives to restart emigration: there were almost no suitable ships for carrying migrants from Britain to the Empire-Commonwealth. The primary cause of such scarcity was wartime damage to the merchant navy. Forty percent of the berths available to migrants bound for Australia in 1937 had been on ships that had sunk, sold, or scrapped by the end of the war.³³ Of those passenger liners that survived, all had been requisitioned by the government and converted into troopships or civilian transports.³⁴ Over the course of the war these ships had been physically transformed.³⁵ Recreation, exercise, and washing facilities were removed to make room for more troops on board; spartan troopdeck conditions were created down below, in which non-commissioned men slept in hammocks with no partitions or privacy.³⁶ The result was what one memoirist described as “garbage-can life.”³⁷ Re-converting the surviving vessels back to their prewar role as civilian liners was a major project that required refitting and reconditioning. Thus, when Australian government representatives demanded in December 1944 that migrant ships should be sailing within six months of the war's end, British officials responded that this would be “unlikely.”³⁸ To send any migrants at all required the British government to prioritize emigration over other shipping needs.

The other issue was cost. The Australian government wanted migrants to pay only ten pounds out of their own pockets (about two weeks wages for the average UK worker in industry).³⁹ This led these migrants to eventually be dubbed the “ten pound poms.”⁴⁰ Yet, the expectation amongst civil servants was that the market rate for the cheapest assisted emigrant tickets would rise above seventy pounds after the war—almost double what a ticket had cost before 1939, leaving the remainder to be split between the Australian and British governments. Figure 5 shows the eventual cost to the British government of both the free veterans scheme and the assisted passage scheme between 1946 and 1951. There were substantial indirect costs as well. Every migrant who left the UK was a worker, potential worker, or provided domestic support for those that labored and was thus a loss to the British economy. This added costs in terms of taxation and productive capacity for every emigrant, over and above the ticket subsidy.

This caused alarm in the UK's Treasury, forcing Dominions Office officials to reassert the authority of the 1938 report that stressed Empire unity was to be put ahead of national economic interest in the case of emigration.⁴¹ This did not mean that the British government as a whole agreed that emigration should be prioritized above all else. Attlee's migration policy contained a number of difficult trade-offs, especially between empire loyalty and national economic recovery. Indeed, the defense ramifications of using postwar shipping for emigration remained contentious. Every possible migrant ship was at that stage still being used as a troopship or civilian transport. Converting each one back would have to be subtracted from the, as yet unknown, quantity of troopships the military would require for demobilization and redeployment of forces. As with other forms of government planning during the Attlee administration, this meant that officials had to become adept at the “management of scarcity.”⁴² The way the government responded to such scarcity is vital evidence for historians seeking to reconstruct Whitehall's prioritization of some forms of intra-imperial mobility over others.

Adding Tonnage to the Migrant Fleet: Autumn 1945 to Spring 1947

Scarcity of shipping was inevitable because of the finite number of ships and the many roles demanded of them, not least military demobilization, which tied up troopships into 1946.⁴³ Nevertheless, high-level planning for emigration went ahead and the British and Australian governments signed an agreement for an assisted and a free passage scheme on 5 March 1946. Unbeknownst to either the Australian or British governments, however, two of the companies that would eventually ship the emigrants—the Orient Line and P&O—were not planning to make available nearly as much space on their vessels as the Australians had hoped. The crucial figures for the Australian and British governments were the numbers of assisted emigrants the lines intended to carry: 3,000, 13,000, and 15,000 in 1947, 1948, and 1949 respectively—far fewer than the 70,000 the Australians wanted each year and as soon as possible.⁴⁴ At a meeting on 22 March 1946 the shipping lines met with Australian officials and shared the bad news.⁴⁵

More bad news began to pile up. Not only would the numbers carried be relatively small, but the start date of mass migration to Australia had to be delayed. Considerable shipyard setbacks were affecting the reconversion of troopships into civilian liners because of a lack of materials and skilled labor.⁴⁶ By August 1946 the Ministry of Transport had sent only two ships bound for Australia to shipyards for reconditioning: the Orion (with 1,252 berths, owned by Orient Line—the ship in Figure 4 above) and the Stratheden (with 980 berths, owned by P&O).⁴⁷ In the face of all these problems, the Liner Release Programme at the Ministry of Transport became a key administrative choke point in the whole business of British migration policy.

Delays in liner release left the Australian government increasingly frustrated and also annoyed South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts.⁴⁸ The South Africans had not asked for British government subsidies, but they did want to pursue their own immigration policy; for this, of course, they needed ships.⁴⁹ In autumn 1946, the South African government asked that at least two unconverted troopships be released immediately. The owners, the Union Castle Line, agreed. Two ships got under way soon afterwards, with a third vessel added at a later date.⁵⁰ Berths were harder to find on the Australian route, mainly because of the longer route to the Antipodes (and thus fewer possible round trips a year) and because weeks spent sailing through very hot weather between the tropics meant that the troopdecks would be dangerous for small children and offered no privacy or washing facilities for families.⁵¹

Australian frustration at such a lack of shipping was palpable. Things came to a head in December 1946 when the Australian prime minister Ben Chifley sent a telegram directly to King George VI and to Clement Attlee, thus breaking the diplomatic convention of communicating via high commissioners. He pleaded for more shipping and signed off with a subtle warning about sourcing migrants outside of Britain: “[you] will appreciate the importance from the Empire aspect of rendering assistance to us in our desire that our migration plans for 1947 should provide for a substantial quota of our kinsfolk from the United Kingdom.”⁵² The worry in Australia, Britain's high commissioner explained, was that the British government was “cooling off” on the idea of emigration now that it was clear that tens (even hundreds) of thousands of potential emigrants had registered to travel to Australia amidst the worsening economic situation in the UK.⁵³

If the Australians did reduce the “substantial quota” of Britons, this would pose a serious challenge to the premises of British migration policy, which Chifley called its “Empire aspect”. From the 1938 Overseas Settlement Board report on emigration, to Attlee's 1943 letter, to the 1946 agreement on free and assisted passages, British government policy was designed to keep the Dominions geopolitically close to Britain via migration. That imperial connection was deemed so important as to trump national economic and demographic interests. The suggestion in winter 1946 that the Australians might look beyond Britain for immigrants thus posed a direct challenge to the British government.

But Chifley's warning must have seemed like an empty threat. On whose ships would these hypothetical migrants travel to Australia? Even after war damage, British shipowners possessed a fleet of large passenger liners that was orders of magnitude greater than those of any other country (barring the complicating factor of laid-up US troopships).⁵⁴ The Australian government was stuck with no means to move any migrants at all, because, as Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell explained in the Australian House of Representatives, “the Government does not own so much as a single nail in a ship.”⁵⁵ Without a fundamental change in the shipping situation, the Australian government was left with their only option: to appeal to the King, to the British prime minister, and to the British public through the press.

Some members of Britain's Labour administration were in fact pleased by the Australians’ transport woes. The prime minister's personal assistant, William Gorell Barnes, wrote in a memo for Attlee:

In my view it is very fortunate if, as Mr Chiffley [sic] states, the number of berths available may limit assisted migrants during 1947 to under 10,000; and, even if our commitments prevent us from going back on the general policy, I suggest that we ought not to go out of our way to remove these fortunate shipping difficulties.⁵⁶

The leader of the opposition, Winston Churchill, also made a plea on the BBC in 1947 directed at the tens of thousands signing up with the Australian government as potential emigrants imploring that “those who wish to leave this country [… should] stay here and fight it out.”⁵⁷

Attlee, however, had different ideas. Recall that he had supported subsidized emigration when he was Secretary of State for the Dominions in 1943. Now as prime minister he replied to Chifley on 11 January 1947 stating that, while emigration required difficult trade-offs at a time of such economic weakness, he still supported the policy.⁵⁸ On the crucial issue of transport, Attlee agreed that the estimate of around 3,500 migrants for 1947 “is a disappointing figure” and he was “therefore arranging for the existing plans to be further examined, in the hope that at any rate some increase in the number of migrant passages above the present estimate may prove possible.”⁵⁹

Migrant shipping, which had hitherto been discussed by Ministry of Transport civil servants in terms of shipyard reconditioning and ticket costs, now reached the highest spheres of inter-imperial governance. Perhaps some government officials, such as Gorell Barnes, were quietly relieved that shipping scarcity meant so few British migrants would travel to Australia. But if that view was held in private it was defeated in public when officials in the Ministry of Transport received instructions to find more shipping. In 1947, Attlee thus decisively turned British state power towards the increase of what mobility scholars term “motive force”—the force that makes persons and things move.⁶⁰

To carry out Attlee's instructions, Ministry of Transport officials consulted a list drawn up in 1946 of older, slower pre-war liners converted during the war into troopships that they were doubtful the shipping companies would wish returned: Ormonde, Ranchi, Chitral, Orbita, Mooltan, Maloja, Almanzora, Esperance Bay, Moreton Bay, Cameronia, Dorsetshire, and Somersetshire—186,023 tons of shipping in all.⁶¹ Six days after Attlee's reply to Chifley, Ministry of Transport officials decided to release three ships from their list as soon as possible—Ormonde, Ranchi, and Chitral, as well as the hospital ship Atlantis. Attlee's demand for “motive force” was transformed into increased migrant berths by raising these vessels from the bottom of the list for reconversion in August 1946 right to the top in January 1947. If they could begin sailing towards the end of the year, the 1947 figure for assisted migrants would increase from around 3,500 to 5,200 and the 1948 figure from 13,000 to 16,300.⁶²

Officials did not add maximal motive force to Australian migration, however. Another vessel civil servants considered at this time was the huge liner Aquitania, a 45,000-ton behemoth. She was currently on a trans-Atlantic route carrying migrants and large volumes of goods for trade. Redeploying her for Australian migration would have more than doubled the projected figures for 1947 and 1948 to 12,000 and 24,000 respectively. But this would have been incredibly costly: Aquitania's owners, Cunard, were slated to make an estimated two- and-half-million in profit over the next two years.⁶³ This made Aquitania strategically important to the British government amid a balance of payments crisis in which profits from shipping were understood to be valuable “invisible” exports.⁶⁴ Prioritizing migrants to Australia over cargo and migrants to Canada and the USA—and the valuable dollar trade represented by the latter—might further add to Britain's economic woes.

Opposition to the idea of chartering Aquitania had reached the Cabinet by late February 1947.⁶⁵ However, the Australians did not know this and news soon spread of government negotiations with Cunard. Through January and February Australian newspapers ran more than three stories a day about the Aquitania, excitedly touting the impending arrival of the ship with British settlers on board.⁶⁶ Once the Australian press finally heard of the Cabinet's decision not to use the Aquitania on 17 March 1947, the story ran in twenty-three of the nation's newspapers, including on twelve publications’ front pages.⁶⁷ Arthur Calwell's brief as both Minister of Immigration and Minister of Information helps to explain this extraordinary level of press interest and the strain on his nerves seems to have been immense: “he [Calwell] lays awake half the night trying to think of some way of improving the situation,” wrote one of his colleagues in the wake of the Aquitania affair.⁶⁸

The Cabinet's refusal to charter the Aquitania arguably reveals that the British government's national needs trumped the imperial connection to Australia. It would be more accurate, however, to argue that imperial-national profit—combining Canadian emigration and trade plus US trade—trumped Australian emigration in the hierarchy of British government priorities. The case of the Aquitania, even more clearly than Attlee's telegram to Chifley, reveals that empire and nation existed not as binary opposites in policy terms but on a continuum, and that ‘empire’ was itself a complex and contested field of politics involving multiple different axes for politicians to consider.⁶⁹ Even without the Aquitania, the government's chartering of three vessels for emigration in early 1947 is striking, especially so given the economic context of the coal crisis of the preceding winter and as a loan negotiated with the USA a little over a year earlier was draining away.⁷⁰ This commitment to emigration needs to be set in an imperial context, too. The Attlee administration was seeking to strengthen ties with the “old Commonwealth” just as straitened finances in 1946–47 drove the government to withdraw from military commitments in the eastern Mediterranean and to decolonize India.

The cost of effectively nationalizing migrant shipping was well understood to threaten other government shipping priorities and alarmed Gorell Barnes, who had been so satisfied by the scarcity of ships only two months earlier. He now wrote a worried memo restating his general opposition to the costs of mass emigration.⁷¹ He also warned that the use of spare shipping capacity for Australian migration would remove the government's ability to respond flexibly to any subsequent crises, especially given the new commitment to bringing migrants from Europe to the UK. Attlee does not appear to have shared all his assistant's worries: over subsequent years his government chartered seven further ships in addition to the original three, many of them the older liners on the list drawn up by the Ministry of Transport.⁷² Figure 7 reveals that it was government spending on these charters, rather than private sector investment in new ships, that kept the postwar migrant figures to Australia above the prewar benchmark.

This is clear evidence of the state's addition of motive force to emigration and that shipping thus formed a significant part of the government's “informal and invisible” controls in the late 1940s. As with immigration control, so too must the government's efforts regarding emigration be understood in the contexts of race and national identity. Emigration had, for decades, been a way for the British government to uphold the “global color line” at the empire's margins,⁷³ as Bevin's remarks about “maintain[ing] the race” in Australia suggest. Shipping was one significant means by which this policy was enacted.

Displaced Persons, Caribbeans, and British Shipping: Spring 1947 to Summer 1947

At least one of the same ships that took emigrants to Australia also brought British subjects from the Caribbean to the UK. This ship was the Ormonde, which received instructions to sail to the UK for reconditioning as an emigrant-only vessel in February 1947.⁷⁴ The Ormonde was at this time sailing in the Caribbean demobilizing troops. On its return journey to the UK, shipping agents released cheap tickets for fare-paying passengers on the unconverted troopdeck. At least one hundred British subjects travelled onboard, making her the first ship of the so-called “Windrush” era of postwar Empire-Commonwealth migration.⁷⁵

This unintended consequence came as a profound shock to the British government and officials sent a telegram to the governor of Jamaica asking how British subjects born in the Caribbean could have travelled on board Ormonde. There were officially no opportunities to travel for work from the Caribbean to the UK. In fact, in summer 1947 a government-appointed committee noted that there were not even enough ships to get British businessmen and administrators out to the West Indies regularly.⁷⁶ So when the Ormonde docked in Jamaica and Trinidad with berths on offer for twenty-eight pounds, these tickets were valuable and rare, yet still within financial reach of at least some British subjects. Sam King, who travelled to Britain a year later on another troopship, the Empire Windrush, recalled that his family had to sell three cows to raise the twenty-eight pounds ten shillings for his ticket as “the average man did not have that amount at that time.”⁷⁷

The governor of Jamaica's response to the British government's telegram was to write back that they need not worry about a mass exodus of British subjects from the Caribbean, despite growing demand for tickets. Lack of shipping meant very few potential migrants would ever be able to travel, but, the governor wrote, if supply did improve “there will be a considerable influx of Jamaican labourers if and when cheap passage become[s] available.”⁷⁸ The accuracy of that analysis was borne out over the next two years, when five more troopships offered tickets to sail to the UK. These included the Almanzora later in 1947, the Empire Windrush in 1948, as well as the Orbita and the Reina del Pacifico that same year. The final troopship with affordable berths, the Georgic, sailed in 1949.⁷⁹

These few ships confirmed the governor's point, both about the demand to travel to the UK and the scarcity of transport supply. One important thing to note is how few “Windrush” ships sailed for the UK and how little space on each was sold at a rate that was affordable. The total number of berths on the six troopships that British subjects and UK and Colonies citizens born in the Caribbean used to travel to the UK between 1947 and 1949 (not including stowaways) has been estimated by one historian as 1,216.⁸⁰ This amounted to, in six sailings over two years, only 164 more passengers arriving from the West Indies in the UK than travelled on a single trip of the reconverted Ormonde to Australia. Such scarcity of transport was well understood by the government. The Secretary of State for the Colonies wrote in a memo for the Cabinet in advance of the arrival of Windrush: “I do not think that a similar mass movement will take place again because the transport is unlikely to be available, though we shall be faced with a steady trickle, which, however, can be dealt with without difficulty.”⁸¹

As is now well known, “dealing with” British subjects and citizens arriving from the Caribbean in the late 1940s involved a great deal of government attention. On arrival, Ministry of Labour officials worked with Colonial Office officials to find temporary housing, jobs via labor exchanges, and internal transport within the UK in aid of a policy of “dispersal” around the country.⁸² Just as important was the policy put in place in anticipation of arrivals to keep numbers at what the Colonial Secretary called a “steady trickle.”⁸³ Even though officials understood that the number of British subjects and citizens travelling from the Caribbean on British ships would remain very small during the 1940s, they added what mobility scholars call “friction” (the force that acts to slow or stop mobilities) to their routes.⁸⁴ Officials moved swiftly to stop troopships terminating in the Caribbean. They also asked officials in the colonies to slow down the issuance of travel documents to make it onerous or impossible for British subjects and citizens to leave their islands of birth and travel to the UK (although many officials did not comply with that request). The Ministry of Transport then focused on controlling ports and dockside access to make entrance onto and exit off ships more secure so that stowaways could be more easily apprehended.⁸⁵ This combination of policies, the British government hoped, would make it unaffordable as well as time consuming for most aspiring passengers to travel legally to the UK and impossible to stow away.⁸⁶

This addition of “friction” when compared with the “motive force” added to Australian emigration provides clear evidence of the British state's construction of what Paul has called “separate spheres” of citizenship.⁸⁷ Despite the fact that all subjects/citizens of the Empire-Commonwealth had notionally equal rights to live and work in the UK, if the government could make sure imperial citizens from the Caribbean had few opportunities to actually land in the UK, then they could not, after all, stake such a claim. As Paul has argued, government officials understood there to be hierarchies of Britishness that depended on nationality and racial “stock.”⁸⁸ If it was the government's aim, to adopt another widely used contemporary metaphor, that “blood” should flow from the UK to the Dominions such as Australia, officials were equally concerned that too much Caribbean, African, South Asian, and Jewish “blood” should not enter Britain.⁸⁹

The financing and subsidy of shipping reveals how these discourses were translated into practice and thus how shipping upheld the color line. The Ormonde is a good example. One group of British subjects each paid twenty-eight pounds to sleep in a hammock on the “garbage can” of the unconverted Ormonde's troopdeck, which left the Caribbean in February 1947. This raised such alarm in Whitehall that officials requested information from the governor of Jamaica before adding “friction” to subsequent sailings from the Caribbean. In October, another group of British subjects stepped on board the Ormonde, this time UK-origin migrants bound for Australia. The ship was vastly improved, with reconditioned facilities, including dining rooms, space for recreation, and creches for children. These migrants from the UK paid only ten pounds for the comparatively much longer route to Australia; the rest of the one-hundred-and-ten-pound charter cost per head was subsidized. Class intersected with race here: the British state sought to subsidize the working-class incomes of emigrants in order to strengthen the Britishness and whiteness of the Empire-Commonwealth and so maintain Australia's loyalty. Meanwhile, working-class British subjects in the Caribbean were priced out of berths on the few troopships sailing to the UK in the late 1940s.

The Personnel Shipping Review of Spring 1947 further demonstrates how maritime transport intersected with migration policy. This was the result of an interdepartmental effort to allocate shipping to all arms of the British government.⁹⁰ Australian emigrants were assigned shipping, but British subjects wishing to travel from the Caribbean to the UK were not. This was because the migration of the latter population was to be hindered by the government, not helped. The largest planned migration for 1947–48, greater even than the emigrants destined for Australia, were one hundred thousand immigrants bound for Britain from Germany, with an eventual target of fifteen thousand arrivals a month.

Far less well represented than the “Windrush” arrivals in public history are the roughly eighty thousand to one hundred thousand European immigrants who were recruited by the British government between 1947 and 1948 under a scheme known as Westward Ho!⁹¹ This was seventy-one times the number of self-funded “Windrush” passengers from the Caribbean over the same period. This scheme brought people known at the time as Displaced Persons (often abbreviated to DPs)—from refugee camps in occupied Germany and Austria—to the UK to work on strictly controlled contracts in under-resourced industries. Tens of thousands of vacancies needed filling to lift the British economy out of its postwar balance of payments crisis. In the late 1940s, Europeans, not imperial citizens from the Caribbean or South Asia, were recruited to plug these gaps.⁹²

When the topic of DP migration was discussed in the House of Commons on 14 February 1947 MPs welcomed the scheme and urged the government to hurry up with recruitment. One parliamentarian argued that this was the natural corollary to government-supported colonial emigration schemes: “it would, of course, be a most terrible thing,” Martin Lindsay MP declared, “if we ever had to do anything to discourage emigration to our own Empire, but I do not believe we can afford the loss of this vigorous young blood of our nation unless we replace it by something comparable,” by which he meant DPs.⁹³ It was well understood that such a desire to recruit DPs entered the British government in a race against other countries who also wanted them for their labor force.⁹⁴ In an ugly turn of phrase, officials worried that what they called “the ‘cream’ would be ‘skimmed off’ if the UK did not act fast.”⁹⁵ When thinking about DPs, British officials and politicians tended to fall back on national stereotypes, ethnic and racial thinking, and a long tradition of eugenic ideas about “fitness” and “assimilability.” In short, these migrants were imagined in government and parliament to be what Paul calls “potential Britons.”⁹⁶

By the beginning of 1947, officials considered “Balts” from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to be the most valuable DPs.⁹⁷ In retrospect, this approbation seems extraordinary given contemporary evidence of collaboration in the Baltic states with the Nazi regime (even to the extent that some recruited DPs were known to be former members of the Waffen SS).⁹⁸ By contrast, the desperate plight of Jewish DPs, many of whom were survivors of the Holocaust, did not lead to humanitarian arguments for their inclusion in the British government's immigration scheme.⁹⁹ In fact, Jewishness seems to have been a mark against inclusion in Westward Ho! because the government worried that if they sponsored Jewish immigration they would prompt further antisemitism in Britain—a striking continuity with prewar policy, now expressed in the context of terrorist violence in the British Mandate in Palestine.¹⁰⁰

Recruiting DPs thus had an indirect intra-imperial dimension, and it was DPs, not British subjects from the West Indies, that Martin Lindsay MP and others sought to encourage to travel to the UK for work. Recall that it was it was in early 1947, when parliamentarians spoke out in support of recruiting DPs, that the arrival of Ormonde caused consternation in Whitehall. This was also the moment when the Australians were threatening to pull back on their pro-British migrant policy and recruit more European immigrants, including DPs. For these reasons, British government policy has been likened to another “triangular trade: continental aliens were brought to Britain so that they would not go to Australia, and the in-migration facilitated the out-migration of UK residents to the dominions.”¹⁰¹

Sea transport proved to be the necessary precondition for supporting all three sides of this triangle. Ships took migrants from the UK to Australia and from Europe to the UK, and scarcity of shipping from Europe to Australia ensured that Australian immigration remained preponderately British. For their part in this huge project of demographic engineering, planners in the Ministry of Labour were confident that they could move eighty thousand to one hundred thousand DPs from refugee camps in Germany starting in April 1947 by employing five troopships between Britain and the north German ports of Cuxhaven and Hamburg.¹⁰² The Australians, meanwhile, were stuck without any ships to move DPs to the Antipodes, or so the British thought.

However, the Ministry of Labour's transport plans soon hit the hard limits of postwar shipping scarcity. The five troopships the Ministry of Labour planned to use were not, in fact, owned by the British government. These were some of the last ships on charter from the USA as part of wartime Lend-Lease agreements and were well overdue for return.¹⁰³ The British government was forced into returning them in spring 1947, precisely when the Ministry of Labour wanted to use those ships for their migration policy. Consequently, the DPs remained stranded in refugee camps through the spring and early summer. This threatened the British government's ability to get the “cream” of the DPs and by early May the Foreign Office was making “high level representations” within government for any available shipping from northern Germany.¹⁰⁴ But, of course, there were no ships available. The Personnel Shipping Review had already assigned every passenger ship then under government control in a complex web of journeys across the world in order to return prisoners of war and to demobilize and redeploy troops. In his memo to Attlee in February of 1947, Gorell Barnes foresaw such scarcity and identified the impact of the government's new DP migration scheme on shipping resources.¹⁰⁵ The interdepartmental apparatus of migration policy devolved yet again to the Ministry of Transport. It took months, but Ministry officials finally devised a new route for the DPs from August 1947 onwards, five months later than planned. The DPs were rerouted to travel by train from Germany over the border to the Netherlands, where they embarked on two ageing channel ferries, the Manxman and Biarritz, and then on to the port of Harwich.¹⁰⁶ In this fashion, the British government was able to recruit and transport over eighty thousand DPs within a year without relying on deep-water ships.

The British state thus projected its infrastructural power via shipping to control immigration as well as emigration. Policymakers added “friction” to what they considered undesirable mobility from the Caribbean and “motive force” via shipping to migration from Europe. In this way they converted the “separate spheres” of citizenship delineated by Kathleen Paul from a discourse about race and nationality into concrete practices. This relied on British control over ships amid a worldwide shortage, a situation that would soon change.

The International Refugee Organization and the Remaking of Australian Migration Policy: Spring 1947 to Winter 1949

Whereas Britain's own migration policy was proceeding largely as planned by early 1947, Australia's was in disarray. The Australian immigration minister Arthur Calwell was under significant domestic political pressure about his government's lack of progress towards its ambitious target for seventy thousand immigrants a year and his officials had to negotiate every berth from a subordinate position with those who did own the ships: Britain's Ministry of Transport and the British shipping companies. Privately, P&O were delighted by such huge demand: one executive wrote that the Australian and British governments were “for political reasons […] prepared to pay almost anything to increase the migrant lift.”¹⁰⁷

This massive demand should have alerted the shipping companies to the Australians’ potential willingness to circumvent British shipping. The Australian government requested the use of Royal Navy aircraft carriers—a practically and legally fanciful plan, which nevertheless occupied a lot of civil servants’ time. They also proposed the construction of new, purpose-built, government-subsidized “fast ferry” liners with very little cargo space.¹⁰⁸ The British government balked at the cost. The Australians also looked beyond Britain for any ships that they might buy or charter.¹⁰⁹ But because they lacked the expertise to enter into negotiations with brokers and owners themselves, Australian officials had to bring each proposal to Britain's Ministry of Transport, whose officials ruled out almost all of their suggestions as impractical or too costly. Thus, even as they looked beyond the UK to solve their shipping troubles, the Australian government was still reliant on the British government.

With such a dearth of shipping available from the UK, Australian officials turned to other sources. The organization that seemed able break the shipping deadlock was the International Refugee Organization (IRO), a United Nations agency.¹¹⁰ The IRO had been set up to ship DPs out of Europe to countries that would receive them. Calwell traveled to the UK in 1947 to lobby the British government to speed up their liner reconditioning program and then made a trip to Geneva to meet with IRO officials. The Australian Cabinet had decided to join the IRO and Calwell signed a deal to recruit DPs on 21 July 1947 in large part because of promises about available shipping.¹¹¹ If the Australian government could convince themselves and the Australian public to overcome their xenophobia and accept that European migrants would become worthy new citizens, then they could get the IRO to ship tens of thousands of migrants from Europe for as little as ten pounds a head—considerably cheaper than from the UK.¹¹²

Like the British, the Australians also likened these potential citizens to the “cream,” which they worried might be “skimmed from the surface by other governments.”¹¹³ “Unless we act quickly we may lose our opportunity of securing migrants on selection basis,” Calwell wrote to Chifley.¹¹⁴ The Australians similarly ranked “Balts” at the top of their list of most favored DPs.¹¹⁵ They prioritized migrants who could do manual labor and farm work, leaving those with disabilities or of ethnicities that officials deemed undesirable, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, stranded in camps or having to arrange their own passage via non-governmental organizations.¹¹⁶

With their selection process beginning to operate in 1947, the Australians agreed to receive four thousand DPs in the first year and twelve thousand over the subsequent three. Yet calculations began to change once the US troopship General Stuart Heintzelman steamed into Freemantle Harbor in Western Australia with DPs on board on 29 October 1947. Three more US troopships then arrived carrying IRO migrants early in 1948. With the IRO now able to commandeer US troopships as well as an increasing number of private charters, the worldwide scarcity of migrant shipping seemed finally to be over and in July 1948 Calwell dramatically announced that Australia would take two hundred thousand DPs and he wanted them shipped as quickly as possible.¹¹⁷

That goal was never reached, but Australia did become the second largest destination for IRO migrants after the USA, receiving 182,159 DPs, 24.25 per cent of them arriving on US military vessels.¹¹⁸ The rest of the DPs arrived on a motley assortment of other ships, six of these that Britain's Ministry of Transport had advised the Australians not to buy or charter because they were too old and uneconomical.¹¹⁹ The IRO clearly had less stringent ideas about seaworthiness and were much less worried about economy: they had truly vast amounts of money to spend on charters, as much as $105,000,000.¹²⁰ These dollars meant that finally the Australians had a way to circumvent the British government.

IRO shipping ultimately upended the policy of keeping Australian immigration preponderantly British. Figure 10 shows that British policy held good through 1947 and into 1948. This was because of the huge advantage the British government had in shipping DPs due to its ability to use the channel ferries Manxman and Biarritz. There was then a reversal of fortunes from mid-1948 onwards once the IRO deployed its tens of millions of dollars and the US military lent its ships to the cause.

This new supply of ships meant that in only a few years the Australian government's migration policy underwent a revolution. In 1946, the Australian government had stated that they would prefer a ratio of ten Britons to every one European migrant. By 1947, the Australians had, in frustration, given up on that policy. Yet, because of shipping scarcity, through early 1948 British immigrants still outnumbered non-British immigrants: almost ten thousand European DPs arrived in Australia, compared with 15,900 free and assisted British emigrants—a ratio of roughly 1:1.5. Then, in 1949, 75,500 DPs outnumbered 38,000 British immigrants, a ratio of almost 2:1.¹²¹ In the next decade, between 1949 and 1959, only 33.5 percent of Australian immigrants came from Britain and Ireland.¹²² This still made them the largest single group from 1949 to 2000 (31.6 percent), but a minority compared to all other nationalities counted as a bloc, a profound change from earlier in the century.

The beginning of this huge shift was not well understood by British shipping companies. P&O's directors did not see how IRO funding and US military shipping were transforming the relationship between shipping supply and migrant demand. One P&O director wrote in September 1949, right in the middle of the mass transfer of DPs to Australia: “I find it difficult to believe that without some form of Government assistance in the matter of passage money there will be enough southern Europeans who can out of their own pockets pay fares say in the region of £90.”¹²³ The P&O directors clearly did not know that it was not a national government but the IRO that was paying such fares and that they were doing so with tens of millions of US dollars and US troopships. Their mention of “southern Europeans” is almost certainly a misunderstanding. Naples may have been the main embarkation point for IRO charters to Australia, but the DPs were largely Central and Eastern Europeans.

The impact of the IRO on British imperial migration policy reveals one way in which “international society” and the UN reshaped global politics after 1945.¹²⁴ Internationalism, Patricia Clavin and Glenda Sluga write, was “central to the major political questions and themes of the twentieth century: war and peace, imperialism and nationalism, states and state-building.”¹²⁵ In the case of IRO shipping, it was imperialism and state-building (via migration) that were of central importance. Further archival research is needed to tell whether the US State Department understood their contributions to the IRO's migrant fleet to be part of their general wariness about renewed British imperialism after 1945.¹²⁶ Whatever the intentions of the US government, as in so many other aspects of foreign and domestic policy, postwar US hegemony meant the relative, if not always absolute, decline of British imperial power.¹²⁷

Into the 1950s: Commonwealth Emigration and Commonwealth Immigration

Up to 1950 British government officials thought that they could control and direct passenger shipping within the British Empire-Commonwealth and so affect migration policy in order to uphold longstanding imperial hierarchies of race and nation. This was to be achieved through adding “friction” to British subjects seeking passage from the Caribbean to the UK and by adding “motive force” to emigration from the UK to the Empire-Commonwealth. A new component of migration policy emerged in the desire to bring workers from continental Europe to Britain after 1945. The government sought to enact these migration policies via British passenger ships that were still under wartime controls. Once back in private hands, civil servants and ministers subsequently thought that they could influence British shipping companies through financial incentives and gentlemen's agreements. This nexus of shipping policy and migration policy was one of the myriad “informal and invisible” means by which migration control was enacted between 1943 and 1951—means that affected not only immigration but emigration, too.

The founding of the IRO broke these assumptions by adding a new source of shipping to the Antipodes. Then, matters were made worse for the British government when the Australian government made unilateral assisted passage agreements with the Netherlands and Italy in the 1950s. P&O somehow managed to get hold of a copy of Australia's agreement with Italy and the directors’ response was one of disbelief: “the thing that strikes me about it is that the Commonwealth Government seem entirely to have forgotten that one of their jobs is to protect the interests of British shipping.”¹²⁸ This claim reveals the discombobulated attitude of shipping company directors who had done their business through the heyday of the British Empire. It also says much about the geopolitical context of the 1950s, when the Australian and other Dominion governments were pulling away from Britain's imperial embrace.¹²⁹

This turn of events and its impact on migration policy did not go unremarked in Britain. Even the 1949 Royal Commission on Population, which warned of shortages in the current and future labor market, had refused to oppose subsidized emigration given its role in forging intra-imperial solidarity.¹³⁰ The connection between British emigration and imperial power was further explained in a government report written in the mid-1950s, which concluded that in order to “maintain the British connection [with Australia…] a scheme subsidising migration must continue to exist alongside the machinery subsidising with dollars emigration from the rest of Europe.”¹³¹ This political argument about the necessity of maintaining imperial loyalty via British migration was one major reason why the British government kept subsidizing emigration to Australia until 1972.¹³²

IRO shipping also put strain on another aspect of Britain's “invisible” migration policy: control of travel from the Commonwealth to the UK. Until 1949, the British government had attempted to remove opportunities for British subjects to travel on troopships like the Ormonde and Windrush from the Caribbean such that it would, in the words of the colonial secretary in 1948 cited above, be reduced to a “trickle.” This did nothing to dent the pent-up demand for travel that only grew after 1952 when the US government passed the McCarran Walter Act, dramatically reducing the immigration quota available for Britain's Caribbean colonies. This meant that those seeking jobs in a difficult postwar economy looked to other destinations, principally the UK.¹³³

For the vast majority of these passengers, supply of transport was the crucial factor that enabled or limited choices to migrate and, once again, international organizations, like the IRO, were at the heart of the story. By 1950, the IRO fleet was not only sailing to Australia; it was also sending vessels from Italy to South America via the Caribbean. Already heavily subsidized by the IRO and, after 1952, one of its successor organizations, the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, ships bound for South America began carrying UK and Colonies citizens from the Caribbean on the return leg to Italy during the 1950s, making huge profits.¹³⁴ This trade picked up dramatically after 1955. In 1954, two Italian emigrant ships made six journeys from Italy to South America via Jamaica. Their owners must have realized what a business opportunity they had uncovered, because the next year eight Italian ships sailed via the Caribbean thirty-one times—carrying presumably tens of thousands of passengers.¹³⁵ On arrival in Italy, UK and Colonies citizens then typically travelled from Genoa via train to northern France and then by ferry to England, arriving in Victoria Station or Waterloo on “boat trains.”¹³⁶ The effect of this increased availability of Italian shipping was dramatic.¹³⁷

After 1951, the Caribbean-born population in Britain grew from an estimated 17,218 to 173,659 by 1961.¹³⁸ Some of these men and women were sponsored by the NHS, London Transport and the British hotel industry, perhaps 3,680 in all. But this was a minority amongst a mass migration of mostly self-funded individuals.¹³⁹ Most “Windrush migrants” did not arrive on British ships like the Windrush itself. The vast majority must have travelled on Italian and other European ships which added tens of thousands of berths for British subjects and citizens to travel to the UK (see Figure 12 below). To British shipping companies this lost passenger trade represented a huge opportunity, and the industry press lamented the fact that British companies were losing out to international competition on such lucrative business.¹⁴⁰

Figure 12. British and Italian shipping from Jamaica to the UK. Source: Roberts and Mills, “Study of External Migration Affecting Jamaica: 1953–1955,” 7, Table 1b.

At this time, air travel was also being revolutionized by faster, larger aircraft. In the mid-1950s, British Overseas Airways Corporation ran a route on one of their new Boeing Stratocruisers from Kingston, Jamaica, stopping over in the Bahamas and leaving Bermuda before flying overnight to London Airport next day.¹⁴¹ Because this would have been such an expensive route, enterprising travel agents, like the Jamaican Freddie Martin, found cheaper ways to circumvent scarce British shipping by booking passengers on flights from Jamaica via New York and then on via US ships across the Atlantic. The route by ship via Genoa in 1955 cost sixty-seven pounds, while Martin's route cost ninety pounds.¹⁴² Direct air travel to the UK from the West Indies was less common in the mid-1950s but became the dominant mode of transport to Britain by 1960–61.¹⁴³

Air travel also had an impact on passage to Britain from other parts of the Commonwealth. As new, larger intercontinental passenger planes entered the market in the mid-1950s, the governments of India and Pakistan began to relax their previous opposition to issuing passports to UK-bound passengers. Travel agents then pieced together itineraries via air, land, and sea that brought tens of thousands of Commonwealth citizens from South Asia to the UK from the mid-1950s onwards.¹⁴⁴ All this meant that by 1962, London Airport had become the largest port of entry into the UK.¹⁴⁵

These trends fatally undermined the government's migration policy. In particular, travel via third countries outside the Empire-Commonwealth (like Italy and the USA) meant that passengers met the government's “invisible” regulations en masse within the UK as international, not intra-imperial, travelers.¹⁴⁶ This meant a marked change from the intention of the government's maritime migration controls of the late 1940s, which had relied on offshore means of stopping passengers from arriving in the UK, removing ships from regular lines, refusing to subsidize fares, and agreeing with colonial officials to stop issuing travel documents. By the 1950s, new actors, postcolonial states with their own passport offices, non-British ships, and new airplanes revealed the limits of such a maritime-oriented migration policy.¹⁴⁷ Like the directors of the P&O who were so shocked during the 1950s by Australian shipping policy, so British policymakers were caught unawares in the mid-1950s by British subjects and citizens in the Commonwealth who might seek other sources of transport to make new routes to Britain.¹⁴⁸

As is now well documented, the arrival of large numbers of UK citizens from the Empire-Commonwealth after 1955 led to disquiet in the British government.¹⁴⁹ By the end of the decade, government anxiety about arrivals from the Commonwealth, combined with alarm at racist attacks on Black Britons in Notting Hill and Nottingham, led ministers to consider implementing legislative changes to citizenship and immigration law rather than to confront widespread racism in British society by addressing unequal access to social services, education, housing, employment, and healthcare.¹⁵⁰ At the same time, some prominent Conservative ministers began to look favorably on EEC accession over and above the Empire and Commonwealth connection, increasing their willingness to curtail free movement from the Empire-Commonwealth to the UK.¹⁵¹ This context, combined with the transport histories explained in this article, provoked powerful impulses towards legislative, rather than “invisible and informal,” restrictions on Empire and Commonwealth mobility by the early 1960s.

Over the following decade, both major political parties did what previous governments had resisted since the war: they rewrote British citizenship law to break apart the legal fiction that all citizens of the Empire-Commonwealth were entitled to the same rights to work and reside in the UK. Until the 1950s, long-held assumptions still persisted that Britain's merchant navy could control migration within the British Empire-Commonwealth and that colonial governors could slow issuance of travel documents to control mobility into Britain. Because of this, there was no need to write into British nationality law the inequalities of race, class, and ethnicity that had for so long undergirded imperialism. Once Britain's supremacy at sea was challenged, airplane technology was revolutionized, and new routes to the UK and the Antipodes were opened up, parliamentarians responded by closing the long chapter of British imperial history that had maintained the fiction that all subjects of the British Crown were equal under British law. Transport infrastructure had been crucial to the construction of that system, which combined de jure universality with de facto discrimination, and it played a hitherto unacknowledged part in its undoing.