Migrants of the British diaspora since the 1960s: Stories from modern nomads

By A. James Hammerton

This is the first social history to explore experiences of British emigrants from the peak years of the 1960s to the emigration resurgence of the turn of the twentieth century. It explores migrant experiences in Australia, Canada and New Zealand alongside other countries. The book charts the gradual reinvention of the ‘British diaspora’ from a postwar migration of austerity to a modern migration of prosperity. It offers a different way of writing migration history, based on life histories but exploring mentalities as well as experiences, against a setting of deep social and economic change. Key moments are the 1970s loss of Britons’ privilege in Commonwealth destination countries, ‘Thatcher’s refugees’ in the 1980s and shifting attitudes to cosmopolitanism and global citizenship by the 1990s. It charts a long process of change from the 1960s to patterns of discretionary and nomadic migration, which became more common practice from the end of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526116598

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Migrants of the British diaspora since the 1960s

Migrants of the British diaspora since the 1960s

Stories from modern nomads

A. James Hammerton

Manchester University Press

Copyright © A. James Hammerton 2017

The right of A. James Hammerton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 1657 4 hardback

First published 2017

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Marion

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction: the modern drive to emigrate

Part I:  Migration from austerity to prosperity

1  Postwar pioneers of modern mobility: the 1940s to the 1960s

2  The decline of British privilege: migrants of the 1970s

3  Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries: discretionary migration in the 1980s

4  Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’ from the 1990s

Part II:  Life stories of modern migration

5  Migration and career stories: work in an age of mobility

6  Family, love, marriage and migration: the push and pull of private life

7  The quest for new lifestyles: migration, treechange and grey nomads

8  Changing faces of modern migration

Appendix: Tables 1–8

Bibliography

Index

List of figures

1  Jenny Janes (Armati) ‘Chelsea girl’ window dresser, London, 1970. Image Jenny Armati

2  Susan and Theo Charles-Jones before leaving for Australia reported in the News, Portsmouth, October 1970. With permission of the News, Portsmouth

3  Susan Charles-Jones and family with animals, at home in Yackandandah, Victoria, Australia, 1978. Image Susan Charles-Jones

4  Maurice Bassindale in bachelor quarters at Riyadh compound, 1978. Image Maurice Bassindale

5  Communal barbecue at Maurice Bassindale’s Riyadh compound, 1978. Image Maurice Bassindale

6  Maurice Bassindale on Sydney Harbour, 1986. Image Maurice Bassindale

7  Aspiring migrants queuing in the rain for an Australian information day, Manchester, March 1981. Image Barry Pollitt

8  Barbara Ingram-Monk’s husband, Graham, at Blairlogie, New Zealand, feeding alpacas, March 2003. Image Barbara Ingram-Monk

9  Barbara Ingram-Monk at Blairlogie, New Zealand, painting house, April 2003. Image Barbara Ingram-Monk

10  Barbara Ingram-Monk at Kina, near Nelson, New Zealand, with alpacas, December 2004. Image Barbara Ingram-Monk

11  Judy Higgs with children, meeting Queen Mother at the Royal Herbert hospital, London, in 1972. Image Judy Higgs

12  Beth McIntosh at home in Byron Bay, 2006. Image Beth McIntosh

13  Jennie Christie in Toronto, 1972. Image Jennie Christie

14  Jennie Christie and Victor with campervan in Darwin, 2016. Image Jennie Christie

15  Book cover of Eunice Gardner’s The world at our feet, 1957. With permission of Random House

16  Eunice Gardner and Diana Williams ‘on the road’, waving to a Malayan pearl cutter, near Broome, Western Australia, c. 1954. With permission of Random House

17  Julie Watts family farewell to son Daniel to London at Melbourne airport, 1996. Image Julie Watts

18  Stephanie Hayward at Ashes cricket match with England’s ‘Barmy Army’, Perth, 2006. Image Stephanie Hayward

19  Stephanie Hayward, with husband and daughter, at Australian citizenship ceremony. Perth, 2007. Image Stephanie Hayward

20  Best of British shop front, Floreat, Western Australia. Image Anne Howe

21  Anne Howe in Best of British TV interview for birth of Prince George, 2 June 2013. Image Anne Howe

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

List of tables

All tables appear in the Appendix, p. 241

1  Emigrants over 15 living in OECD countries by selected country of birth, 2010–11

2  Emigration destinations, select years to select countries, British citizens from UK

3  Estimates of British citizens registered living abroad, over 12 months, by country of residence, 2000–7, top 13 countries

4  British migrants to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, select years

5  Gender of interviewees

6  Social class of interviewees by occupation classifications (percentages)

7  British region of origin of emigrants and population (percentages)

8  Last residence of interviewees

Acknowledgements

Any large oral history project owes its first debt to those who volunteer to tell their stories. For this book some two hundred contributors offered their assistance, many with extensive written accounts. From these I selected 121 for interview, including fourteen couples, drawing in 135 interviewees across seven countries. Their engagement with the project, their frank and detailed testimony, often venturing into surprisingly intimate territory, helped to shape the book into the kind of social history of modern migration I hoped to write. Most needed little prompting, and their enthusiastic testimony, written and spoken, was in the best traditions of storytelling, sharpened by their awareness of the personal impact of mobility. Every interview, every written story, played its part in the book’s writing; unfortunately not all of them could appear in the text but they are listed in the bibliography. In different ways they are all the stars of the book.

Original funding for the project came from the Australian Research Council in 2005 and from the then Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University. I am grateful to both.

I have been fortunate to benefit throughout the writing from exceptionally frank and supportive advice from friends and colleagues. Most importantly, over several years the members of the ‘Melbourne life-writers group’ scrutinised each chapter in forensic detail, usually leaving me utterly drained but the chapters immeasurably improved. Over several years Ian Britain, Barbara Caine, Donna Dening, Susan Foley, Ruth Ford, Katie Holmes, the late Rhys Isaac, Jim Mitchell, John Rickard, Charles Sowerwine, Alistair Thomson and Christina Twomey provided a depth of intense collegial support that might inspire the envy of countless scholars. I enjoyed similar levels of support, discussion and occasional hospitality from colleagues and friends around the world, including Marilyn Barber, Tony Barta, Judith Brett, Richard Broome, John Cashmere, Nigel Dalziel, Anna Davin, the late John Hirst, Chris and Pam Jowle, Angela and Peter Lamb, Andree Levesque, Philippa Levine, John Mackenzie, Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes, Eric Richards, the late John Salmond, Ken Seymour, Gwenda Tavan, John Tosh, Murray Watson and Jim and Pierrette Winter. The project would never have found its way without the indispensable support of a talented team of research assistants, particularly in the technical realms beyond my capacity, like database programme setup and thematic coding of transcripts. Marina Larsson was on top of the project from the start, followed by Janine Rizzetti and Marion Jones. As ever, Mandy Rooke performed sterling transcription work. My partner, Marion White, has been a consistent – and patient – source of intellectual and emotional support, an astute critic and prose-watcher; in a small measure of appreciation I dedicate the book to her.

Abbreviations

Introduction: the modern drive to emigrate

Jenny Armati’s global migration story

In 1971, Jenny Janes, 26, single and ‘with forty pounds in my pocket’, left London for Sydney, ‘just to have an adventure’, paying her own way to avoid the restrictive conditions of an assisted passage. Her impulse followed nearly a decade of work in fashion retail, designing window displays as ‘an art form’. ‘For ten years in swinging sixties London that’s what I did, forging a career in fashion retail that would take me around the world.’

The pay was low. At times she took a second job to make ends meet, but her emigration decision was not in the conventional mould of economic migrants, rather a diversion from personal dissatisfactions. Her thriving career had followed a turbulent, often dysfunctional, family life, with communist-inclined parents often at war with each other and never enough money, despite her father being an accomplished electrical engineer with London Underground. Still, together with her two brothers, she absorbed a strong parental work ethic, though not parental politics; her aesthetic interests in ‘nice things, nice clothes, nice houses’ always rankled with her mother. Living alone in 1960s London – Earls Court, surrounded by Australians – was not, though, all rosy, and she suffered from periods of depression, at one point sinking into a nervous breakdown for about three months. A working holiday in Sydney, ‘just to go and see’, seemed to offer a welcome break.¹

After an exciting three-month sojourn in Hong Kong Jenny found her feet rapidly in Sydney; she had welcoming friends to stay with and plentiful job opportunities, promptly leading to stimulating work with the peak department store. The contrast with her poor paying job in London seemed stunning. ‘My first job there paid three times as much and the cost of living was much less. In short I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’ Two years later she continued to thrive, was in a serious though volatile relationship with an Englishman, Barry, and both decided to return to England, mainly driven by Jenny’s feelings of guilt about leaving her now divorced mother. But a brief stay in Perth en route turned into a four-year stopover, where, again, she flourished in stimulating work and, apart from her increasingly unstable relationship, enjoyed the small city atmosphere of Perth. Finally, in 1977 they returned to London, but return to her old job, the turbulent ‘on and off’ relationship, very few friends and living with her mother led to another spate of depression, only ending when she resolved, after about 18 months, ‘that Australia was the place for me’. They returned in 1979.

1 Jenny Janes (Armati) ‘Chelsea girl’ window dresser, London. 1970

An intended brief stay in Perth before moving on to Sydney again turned into long-term residence. Her relationship finally ended soon after arrival. Jenny summarises her next decade or more in Perth as an increasingly settled migrant:

I was immediately offered my own job back. I ended up staying for [12] years, getting married, changing careers to fashion, homes and food journalism, opening a restaurant and food manufacturing business, becoming a food photographer and stylist and doing lots of different things. I found Australia to be much more receptive to new ideas.

Jenny’s migration showed all the signs of becoming a stunning success story, soon marked by purchase of a house. But marriage in 1982 to Douglas Armati, an Australian entrepreneur and writer, was to shift her story again into unanticipated directions. Douglas had had two previous marriages and two young children, with access to them on weekends, which involved Jenny in a degree of childcare. Her work continued to flourish, apart from a temporary setback through a ‘huge loss’ on a promising house purchase when the property market collapsed.

By 1991 they were seeking fresh pastures, and with Jenny’s brother established in Antibes, France, they jumped at his offer to join him, resettle and run their business ventures in Europe. For Douglas this was his second migration, following an earlier extended period in London and Spain, for Jenny it was another move in her ongoing adventure, as her continuing part in the British diaspora intersected with Douglas’s in the Australian diaspora. While Douglas continued to work on promising computer software projects, it was Jenny’s work which drove the move, combined with a romantic dream. ‘I was going to write cookbooks, take photographs, and live a romantic life in Provence. … That was the whole notion, and Douglas was going to be promoting the cookbooks. … I was in my forties and I was still living in a dream world, you know.’ The dream world failed to materialise. While they stayed for three years the publishing contracts and other ventures never took off, but they survived by finding casual work, for Jenny cooking in Monte Carlo and on charter boats, for Douglas running a boat-building company. Looking back, Jenny insisted that ‘I absolutely loved it, I wouldn’t have not done it’. But their continuing poor language skills and difficulties negotiating the challenges of ‘getting through daily life’, ultimately forced another change, back to the Anglosphere in 1991, back to England and another coastal idyll in rural Suffolk.

The hard times persisted back on home ground, with Jenny putting in long hours cooking to support them while Douglas did IT research for his book project, which, they both believed, had exciting potential. Slowly their circumstances began to improve. Douglas augmented their income through consulting, then published his book advancing innovative ideas on intellectual property in electronic environments, which led to a job offer from an American company, eventually requiring a move to California. She describes the moment that changed their lives:

I got the phone call at midnight, after having cooked for twelve hours that day, saying that he’d been offered this fantastic job, and it was like winning the lottery, it was absolutely unbelievable. … It was a very exciting time because the whole IT boom was on, he was getting shares in this American company as well as this nice big salary.

Anxious about her mother, Jenny stayed behind and continued to work. Douglas faced frequent travel, so while Jenny eventually gave up cooking, she stayed in England, ‘commuting’ between Suffolk and Palo Alto, ten trips a year funded by the company. At this stage too, with an eye on her mother, she was unwilling to embark on another permanent migration. She was particularly reluctant to live in America indefinitely, but ‘emotionally, I didn’t really want to have another move, so I just thought I’d keep both, a foot in both camps’. Legally unable to work during her California sojourns, she turned to her old hobby of painting, which soon took off into a lucrative pursuit – ‘the beginning of my new career’ – as her transcontinental ‘commuting’ continued.

At this stage Jenny was, tentatively, becoming a contented return migrant, with diminishing desire to return to Australia. A further boost in their fortunes seemed to seal her resolve. Douglas’s company went public, enabling him to cash in valuable share options, then a profitable resignation and return to England.

Our life was turned around overnight. … No, we never intended to come back to Australia. We bought a fabulous big house in Suffolk and he finished working for the company, and we were planning to stay in Suffolk. … We did a bit of property developing for a while, and we were very happy there.

After nine years in England family matters intervened. Jenny’s mother died in 2002, then a visit to Australia confirmed to both of them that they should return to Perth, enabling Douglas, finally, to be closer to his two children, by then in their twenties. Now they could afford a comfortable re-entry, and ultimately acquired a large house in the north-east hills and a small apartment in the city centre. Leaving Suffolk was ‘the biggest wrench, I’ve ever had, … and Douglas was actually happier there, even than me I think, he really liked it there, and he was the Australian sort of made good in England’. But for Jenny, at least, the Australian re-entry was relatively painless; it ‘felt like coming home’ and she easily renewed contact with old friends.

Although Jenny insisted that ‘I could go and live anywhere, I think, as long as it had some aesthetic about it’, this seemed to bring her serial migration journey to an end, with comfortable settlement in Perth and easy access to international travel. By 2013, though, with the children grown up, they both confessed to feeling ‘restless’, considered a move to Melbourne but finally found another handsome residence in Hobart, attractively for them both, off the ‘beaten track’, since neither was attracted to big-city living. The ease of even this move testified to Jenny’s continuing comfort with mobility, which had reinforced her strong antipathy to patriotic enthusiasms. She had acquired Australian citizenship in 1986 after marrying Douglas, largely for convenience of travel, but insisted that, while she considered herself an Australian and had never felt a sense of British patriotism, ‘I’ve always thought of myself as a global person’. Well settled in Hobart, her secure ‘citizen of the world’ identity was the product of over 30 years of global movement, and illustrated multiple ways that British migration, and British migrants, had changed since the 1960s.

Jenny’s migration experience was untypical of the great majority of modern British migrants in her unforeseen dramatic financial fortune in middle age. But in other respects she was representative of a changing generation of nomadic migrants from the 1960s onwards, and brings something different to our understanding of modern migration. Her youthful desire to emigrate alone for ‘adventure’, her entrepreneurial determination to forge ahead, whether in England, Australia, France or California, her simultaneous experience of geographical and social mobility and her casual adoption of a mobile persona and ‘citizen of the world’ identity all point to something new and widespread in late twentieth-century migration experience. At the same time the intermittent impact of family ties on her movements underlines deep continuities with older patterns of family-oriented migration.

What seems most unique is the casual attitude of these modern, often ‘serial’ migrants to global mobility, which, not so long before, would have been momentous for most people. While it is particularly striking among single women, it was no less common among single men and couples, with or without children. Rob and Beth Hamson’s travels began with a one-year teaching exchange contract for Rob to Canada in 1983, which infected them with a degree of ‘restlessness’. After five unsatisfactory years of teaching for Rob and nursing for Beth back in England, Rob upgraded his qualifications deliberately to facilitate mobility: he trained as a teacher of English as a foreign language and they considered expatriate posts in Bahrain, Canada and New Zealand. It was Beth’s nursing qualification which first led to their acceptance in 1989 as migrants to Australia, now with two children, but for Rob it eventually led to a university teaching position in Melbourne. This translated into permanent migration, but it was punctuated by frequent overseas travel, ‘regular round the world trips back to England’ to visit family and an openness to at least a temporary return to England if family circumstances dictated it. Contented with their fulfilling settlement in Melbourne, Rob saw their frequent readiness to enjoy global travel as a product of earlier mobility, something which distinguished them from their less travelled friends in England.² It also set them apart from their forebears a generation earlier, who could rarely afford to think so casually of their past and future mobility.

The scale of modern mobility

This book is about people like Jenny Armati and the Hamsons, a new generation of migrants who, from the late 1960s, began to encounter a shifting set of global conditions for their mobility. Some of the new conditions, like tighter visa requirements, were designed to restrict entry in receiving countries to the more highly qualified, but failed to discourage the British from emigrating in numbers below the mid-century peaks but still very substantial. Over the period of a half century, as travel became easier and cheaper and education standards lifted, migrants’ attitudes to their movements shifted too, for many in the casual direction adopted by Jenny and the Hamsons. Easier access to travel could readily translate into greater openness to migration as a temporary or permanent option; even return migration need not mean an end to a life of mobility.

The results of this apparent revolution in migration and mobility are evident in most developed countries in the early decades of the twenty-first century, though in stark contrast to the highly visible desperation of global refugees on the move, with few clear destinations easily available as developed countries erect increasingly severe restrictions. While it is true, still, that most people do not emigrate, there are few who would not have close knowledge of friends or relatives who do. Parents endure long absences from their grown children on overseas backpacking working holidays and longer periods of expatriate employment, for some an opening to permanent migration. Regular visits of parents to their mobile children expose them to the realities and promise of living overseas in later life. And return migrants, often wearing the ‘badge’ of expatriate experience, as more worldly wise ‘citizens of the world’, look upon their country of birth with fresh eyes, from critical to admiring, and might remain open to prospects of further movement.

While we take this new mobility for granted, the changes over half a century, in both migrant practices and mentalities, have developed gradually, against the background of deeper changes in modern society. Postwar Britain, for example, went through successive stages of austerity up to the early 1960s, and the emigration of the period was itself one of austerity. By contrast, the succeeding decades, with some interruptions, ushered in a relative age of prosperity and affluence, and from the 1970s a decline of income differentials between Britain and receiving countries.³ The changes heralded a gradual shift to a migration of prosperity, best exemplified by the discretionary choices migrants faced when they moved, not just for better employment opportunities but in search of preferred lifestyles, ‘adventure’ or the dictates of family or marital dynamics.

The motivations and contexts for this migration are familiar ones that we associate with late twentieth-century modernity more generally, similar in most developed countries. They include intense social mobility, particularly into the middle class, stimulated by the dramatic increase in tertiary education from the 1960s, and rising dominance of educated professional and business migrants; these were often new university graduates in their twenties seeking their first or second job at the time of migration. The rise of mass travel in jumbo jets facilitated their global mobility. Associated with educational expansion and access, the revolution in gender norms enhanced the opportunities for women, especially single women, to pursue migration opportunities independently.

From Britain particularly, on the shoulders of its long history of emigration, the early assisted postwar migration projects had established a critical mass of recent, mostly settled migrants, who continued to foster later streams of new family chain migrants, especially to Australia, for the rest of the century and later. The rise of corporate expatriate employment practices fostered the easy transformation from expats to serial migrants. Mass tourism generally, but particularly of the backpacking revolution, served as a catalyst for many to become migrants, often serial migrants moving from one country to another with ease, invariably with an emphasis on the quest for a new ‘lifestyle’ as the driving motivation. Other new motivating factors which came into play included desires for global adventure, long-distance love interests and, among self-styled ‘citizens of the world’ – comprising family as well as single migrants – a realisation of cosmopolitan identities. These might first develop during university years or extended European travel. For some – well-educated, cosmopolitan and adaptable – the meaning of a migrant identity and cultural difference could become elastic and of diminishing importance, so that old migration stereotypes of persecution and complaint came to have decreasing relevance, particularly for itinerant serial migrants. These are complex motivations and contexts, coexisting with continuities of some traditional migration patterns, although mediated by new restrictions in the receiving countries. The seamless privileged immigration to postwar Australia of unskilled and semi-skilled British workers, for example, was firmly at an end.

While this process is common to most developed countries, there are cogent reasons for exploring it through the British experience. Despite the intensity of all global migration since the 1970s, the British remain among the most numerous in their propensity to emigrate voluntarily and to live abroad permanently.⁴ On numbers alone, therefore, the continuing British diaspora deserves close investigation. The most powerful reasons for the large numbers are historical, stemming from the inheritance of the British Empire, which continued to exert its influence on settlement patterns long after it ceased to exist. The ‘colonial dividend’ bequeathed a global lingua franca of English in former colonies and beyond, making migration in countries of the ‘old Commonwealth’, essentially Australia, Canada and New Zealand, a much simpler process than for those forced to navigate a second language. The privilege of linguistic mobility was shared with citizens of the former colonies, including the United States, but the British have continued to be the most emigration-minded among them.

On the global stage the British diaspora, proportionate to its population, remains one of the largest. While emigration statistics are imperfect, for comparative purposes the OECD provides the most reliable and revealing counts of ‘emigrant populations’ – the native-born over 15 years old residing permanently in OECD countries.⁵ Table 1 indicates the extent of permanent British overseas settlement as well as the high rate of emigration, over 6 per cent of its population.⁶ Comparisons with foreign settlement from other large emigration countries underline the British position. The slightly higher number of overseas Chinese is small compared to its population, with a tiny emigration rate of less than one per cent. The much larger quantity and proportion of Mexican emigrants stems from the large and controversial numbers living in the United States. Smaller countries, like Ireland and Poland, have high absolute numbers and high rates stemming from special economic and political conditions, in Poland’s case its recent admission to the European Union. The figures for the United States, Canada and Australia suggest that the British are unique among anglophone countries for their high propensity to emigrate; here the Canadian and USA figures are inflated by the substantial rate of cross-border mobility. The figures for tertiary educated emigrants underlines the uniquely high rate of professional and business migration from Britain, seen by governments as a problematic ‘brain drain’.

Unlike some of the other countries’ emigrant totals listed in Table 1, the high British number and rate are the product of many decades of settlement rather than a recent crisis-ridden mass exodus. Since the Second World War these have fluctuated substantially but have been consistently high compared to most other countries. Table 2 provides an indication of this since the mid-twentieth century, and charts the most significant shifts in destinations.⁷ While numbers to the traditional main destinations of the ‘old Commonwealth’ countries have diminished somewhat from the 1970s and there has been a modest but stable flow to the United States, the shift to European country destinations since the 1980s has been dramatic; it will be explored more fully in Chapter 8.

There have also been continuing fluctuations between migrant flows to the three main ‘old Commonwealth’ countries: Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Table 3 indicates that the longer-term product of migration, British citizens ‘living abroad’ permanently at the time of counting, is a clear majority in Australia, followed closely by the United States and Spain.⁸ Table 4 shows that the Australian majority, annually, in the postwar years was not always so obvious.⁹ For most of the 1950s more Britons moved to Canada than Australia, but by 1958 the trend had reversed as the subsidised ‘ten pound Pom’ scheme became more widely known, and Australian numbers continued to exceed the steadily diminishing numbers to Canada. Reasons for this include earlier and more rigorous Canadian entry restrictions and quotas, the cumulative influence of greater numbers of family chain migrants encouraged by earlier settlers and the greater importance of motivating factors like climate and lifestyle, favouring Australia, in a context of a more discretionary migration of prosperity.

It would seem appropriate that the large scale and dispersal of this continuing population exodus out of Britain should be called a diaspora, and some historians have taken this application of the label for granted.¹⁰ In per capita and absolute terms it has been and remains one of the world’s largest permanent migrations and is truly global in its spread. But among historians, sociologists and demographers the diaspora label has become contentious. The traditional definition confines it exclusively to those who experienced ‘dispersion’, usually forcible but at times voluntary, from their homeland, and who for generations maintained their culture, and degrees of loyalty, grievances and longing to return. The classic model is that of the Jews exiled, reluctantly, from ancient Israel.¹¹ Adherents to this view among modern British migration historians underplay forcible expulsion, tend to focus on sub-national and regional groupings, particularly the Scots, English and Welsh, and look to evidence of ethnic, national or other group cultural consciousness. This can be shown through ‘associationalism’, meaning commitment to ethnically based clubs and societies like the St George’s societies for the English and Caledonian and Burns clubs for the Scottish. According to Tanja Bueltmann, a strong exponent of this view, these ‘clubbing’ structures support the ‘maintenance of a diaspora’, which is then shaped by ‘continuous orientation’ to the homeland. Most of this work is based on settler colonies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where evidence of durable cultural cohesion and ethnic identity among the various groups in institutions is strong.¹² But consensus remains partial, and the case for a ‘diaspora’, resting on those demonstrating homeland loyalty and cohesion, says little about those who did not subscribe to it, whether from hostility or from indifference.¹³ Donald Akenson has argued for a looser definition, based largely on the idea of population ‘dispersal’, recognising that ‘most diaspora groups have several rival views of their own history, group consciousness, and political-moral commitments’.¹⁴ Collective identities and orientation to the homeland thus become marginal to a diaspora, especially in the modern period. This is particularly appropriate to this book, a study of the literal dispersal of the British to multiple destinations, who, in modern times, are more likely to subscribe to international identities than homeland or national ones. On these grounds the modern British undoubtedly qualify as a diaspora. This is particularly apt since one of the more striking variations on the theme of the modern diaspora is the readiness of many modern migrants not just to engage in a single move to one country but to continue moving as serial migrants. The various statistics noted above provide useful snapshots of numbers moving to and settling in particular countries at particular times, but they cannot capture the more continuous, return and circular movements of the kind we saw in Jenny Armati’s and the Hamsons’ migration stories. These modern ‘nomads’ add richer meaning to the understanding of a British diaspora, their residences including countries as various as Brunei, Saudi Arabia, Papua New Guinea, Zambia, Hong Kong and Tanganyika (later Tanzania) as well as the more mainstream destinations.

South Africa played a particularly important role in the serial migration process, partly because of its historical role as a mainstream destination for British migrants since the nineteenth century. Its attraction to potential migrants continued but waned in the later twentieth century, as it left the Commonwealth and violence escalated over apartheid and the struggle for majority rule. By the 1970s many British South Africans were reconsidering their settlement decision, for various reasons, and either returning to Britain or moving on to third countries, with Australia one of the most popular destinations. Racial issues, including the flight from apartheid, fear of black rule and the associated security fears were prime motivations. From the 1970s the serial migration conduit from Britain to South Africa and later to Australia became an important element in the wider diaspora experience. Ros Smith’s story echoes others we will see in later chapters. Her single move in 1972 to Cape Town, for an intended ‘little adventure’ became permanent when she married a former South African boyfriend she had met in England, had two children and, after difficult adjustment as a migrant wife, came to enjoy the lifestyle. But within a decade the violent clash between an oppressive apartheid regime and the majority rule campaign began to loom large in their lives. Her husband was a leftist journalist with the Rand Daily Mail, well known to the regime and routinely at risk of arrest; she feared that her son would eventually be conscripted into the army to fight the black insurgency, insisting ‘I didn’t have a son to have him go and kill somebody’; and security fears seemed to loom ever larger. So in 1982 they emigrated to Melbourne, where, years later, she celebrated the personal growth stimulated by her mobility, and the greater marital harmony that followed when both she and her South African husband enjoyed the greater mutual understanding that flowed from a shared migrant identity.¹⁵ Her story raises complex questions about motivations for migration, migrant identities, serial migration and even migration and marriage, none of which could be hinted at by her simple appearance in the statistics as a British citizen settling in South Africa in 1972 and Australia in 1982.

Life stories and modern mobility

This book follows the practice of a growing body of recent migration histories by drawing primarily on individual life stories from direct personal testimony, like those of Jenny Armati, the Hamsons and Ros Smith.¹⁶ In Ten pound Poms: Australia’s invisible migrants, co-authored with Alistair Thomson in 2005, we drew on a very large collection of solicited written accounts to select a substantial proportion of volunteers for interview. Similarly, I have drawn here on a collection of 182 written accounts to conduct 121 interviews, including 14 of couples, which provided 135 interviewees. I found volunteers through a range of strategies: responses to public advertising and press releases, appeals during media interviews and on websites aimed