A time when Britain welcomed those fleeing for their lives

A red-white-and-green Hungarian flag came out of the train window first, a hole in its centre where the communist emblem had been cut out. Then the doors opened and shabby, exhausted men and women began to step down to the platform. The first thing I noticed was that some of them were still wearing blood-stained bandages.

There was a reason for that. They had been brought straight to Britain from the battlefields, as Russian troops crushed the remnants of the great Hungarian uprising of 1956.

READ MORE: Vladimir Putin and his yes men show a problem in British culture

Nobody had made them wait for visas, or carried out security checks on their identity, or demanded any pre-entry paperwork. 
The British government of the day – ironically, the very same government which had carried out the crime of the Suez invasion a few weeks before – had ordered all immigration rules to be suspended for the Hungarian refugees.  

Selwyn Lloyd, the foreign secretary, spoke in the House of Commons as the first contingent arrived: “Perhaps our most important contribution has been to allow 11,5000 refugees to enter this country without preliminary examination. This is a greater number than any other country except Austria has been able to take.”

The frontier with neutral Austria was the most obvious escape route from Hungary, although there were minefields and Russian patrols to contend with. Once across, the fugitives were gathered into temporary camps.
And there British volunteers from non-government organisations – the WVS, the British Red Cross, the Refugee Council – were waiting. Of the Home Office, with today’s stalls in Lviv or Calais telling desperate families they have not brought the right forms or must go to another country to apply for a visa, there was no trace. 

Instead, as one 1956 arrival remembered, there was a woman in smart Red Cross uniform shouting down the hut: “All those who want to come to Britain, line up behind me over here!” Then it was straight into the buses, straight to the airfield and into this weird, unheated but friendly country a couple of hours later. Another Hungarian, then a boy, recalled how he was spoken to by a British volunteer in Austria: “Listen, young man, if you want to come to Britain we will give you pocket money and a job.”

Something over 20,000 would eventually arrive from Hungary. 

But more than half of them made it clear that they hoped to move on, almost all heading for Canada or the United States where they had relatives in the large Hungarian communities. 

In contrast to the displaced Ukrainians today, well over half of the refugees were male, with very few children. This was because the fighting in Hungary was almost over, and young men who looked as if they might have fought in the uprising were being dragged before firing squads by the thousand.

A very few arrivals were crooks. The revolution had opened the jails to free political prisoners but others also took the chance to walk. 
Of those who chose to stay in the UK, a surprising number turned out to be ambitious and successful intellectuals. Universities rushed to offer them bursaries, and many would galvanise British higher education.  

Today, it’s a different story. The British Government has authorised more than 20,000 visas to Ukrainians with relatives in the UK, but the actual issue of the visas is so slow that some families have returned to Ukraine in despair. For the rest, only 2700 visas had been issued by the end of March under the Homes for Ukraine scheme, in spite of the enormous response of would-be sponsors (and the Scottish Government’s decision to bypass that delay by acting as a collective sponsor). 

Meanwhile, in the cold and darkness of Kyiv cellars, or on the floors of Warsaw churches, Ukrainian women with children stare at page after page of bewildering identity-proving questions in English.  

Since 1956, Britain – and not just the British state – has grown uglier. Under attack from shocked critics, the Home Office sulks: after all, it is only doing what has become its default duty: to keep foreigners out, especially poor ones. 

All recent experiences show that the “hostile environment” policy, though officially repealed, has lodged permanently in British  Government culture. That’s unfair to the thousands eager to share their homes with Ukrainians who have lost everything. 

But as another 1956 survivor muses: “People were incredibly friendly then and journalism was very different. The press was very positive about migrants. I think it must be horrible now.”