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Refugees

Many people came to Britain as refugees, often from religious and political persecution. In the sixteenth century protestant German and French refugees came into England. In the 1570s, and again in the 1680s, the French protestant Huguenots fled here in large numbers. During the French revolution, émigrés fled to the Channel Islands and England. In the nineteenth century Russian and Polish Jews escaping the pogroms of Tsarist Russia came into the country. In the twentieth century, there was a temporary influx of Belgian refugees during the First World War, and Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the thirties. After the Second World War, many Poles chose to resettle in Britain rather than return to a communist Poland.