Eleanor Rathbone was the Independent Member of Parliament for the Combined English Universities from 1929 until her death in 1946, and the most sustained parliamentary advocate for European Jewish refugees in the Britain of the late 1930s and the war years. She used her parliamentary position, her access to ministers, her substantial international network through the National Council for Equal Citizenship and her own personal funds to press successive British governments on refugee policy from 1933 onwards. Her record is the record of someone who got less done than she wanted but more done than the British government would have done without her.
The pre-war years
Rathbone was sixty-one in 1933 when the Nazi regime took power in Germany. She had been in parliament for four years at that point, the third woman elected to the Commons under the universities franchise (which gave votes to graduates of the older universities), and was already a substantial political figure through her sustained earlier work on Indian women’s rights, on family allowances and on the Liverpool women’s suffrage movement. Her response to the regime was immediate. By the autumn of 1933 she was raising parliamentary questions on the position of German Jews and on British refugee admissions. By 1934 she was a founding member of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia and the Parliamentary Committee on Refugees, the cross-party body that pressed the British government on admissions.
Her pre-war record on the Kindertransport was substantial. She personally raised £6,000 in 1938 and 1939 (around £400,000 in 2026 money) towards the financial guarantees the British government required for child refugees, and she sponsored individual cases through her own resources. She visited the German-occupied territories in 1938 to investigate refugee conditions on the ground, returning to Britain with a detailed brief that she pressed on the Foreign Office over the following months.
The wartime years
Rathbone’s wartime parliamentary work was the principal sustained pressure on the British government on Jewish refugee policy from 1939 to 1945. She raised parliamentary questions on the slow pace of refugee admissions, on the conditions of internment of refugees who had reached Britain, on the Palestine Mandate restrictions, on the treatment of refugee ships turned away from Palestine, and on the broader question of what the British government was doing about the substantial information reaching it from 1942 onwards about the systematic murder of European Jewry.
Her pamphlet of February 1943, Rescue the Perishing, was the most substantial single piece of British public advocacy on Jewish rescue published during the war. The pamphlet set out a twelve-point plan for substantially expanded British and Allied rescue operations, including the temporary admission of refugees to British colonial territories, the negotiation with neutral countries for transit visas, the bombing of railway lines to the killing centres, and the dropping of food and supplies to Jewish populations in occupied Europe. The plan was substantially adopted by the parliamentary lobby that Rathbone led; it was substantially not adopted by the British government.
The Bermuda Conference of April 1943, the joint Anglo-American conference on refugee policy, produced almost nothing because the British and American governments had agreed in advance not to raise their own quotas or to commit substantial resources. Rathbone’s Commons speech of 19 May 1943 in response to the Bermuda outcome was one of the most quoted parliamentary speeches of the war on the refugee question:
If we now refuse to do what we can, we shall be guilty of a crime against humanity which will sear our consciences forever. We have it in our power to save thousands of human lives if only we have the will. The question is not whether we can; it is whether we will.
What she got done
Rathbone’s documented achievements on Jewish refugee policy include the substantial expansion of the Kindertransport in late 1938 and early 1939 (her parliamentary pressure was a major factor in the Chamberlain government’s eventual willingness to admit child refugees on the scale the operation reached), the establishment of the Mauritius transit arrangement in 1940 (under which around 1,500 Jewish refugees who had been turned away from Palestine were instead admitted to British Mauritius for the duration of the war), and the substantial pressure on the British government in 1944 that contributed to the late-war Allied diplomatic interventions over the Hungarian deportations.
What she did not get done included the substantial expansion of British admissions, the modification of the Palestine Mandate restrictions, the bombing of the railway lines, and the broader change of British government priorities that her pamphlets and speeches had pressed for. She died on 2 January 1946 at the age of seventy-three, six months after VE Day, and is buried at Tunbridge Wells.
Her papers are at the University of Liverpool. The Eleanor Rathbone Building at Liverpool, opened in 1971, houses the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology. The Rathbone refugee charity in her name continues to operate.
See also
- The Kindertransport
- The British Dimension
- Churchill and the Holocaust
- Anthony Eden and the Commons Statement December 1942
Sources
- Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience, Yale University Press, 2004 (the standard biography)
- Mary D. Stocks, Eleanor Rathbone: A Biography, Victor Gollancz, 1949 (the contemporary biography by her parliamentary colleague)
- Eleanor F. Rathbone, Rescue the Perishing: A Summary of the Position Regarding the Nazi Massacres of Jewish and Other Victims and Plan for Their Rescue, National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror, 1943
- Eleanor F. Rathbone, The Case for Family Allowances, Penguin Special, 1940 (her principal social-policy work, included for biographical context)
- Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, Oxford University Press, 1979 (revised edition 1999)
- Hansard, House of Commons debates 1933-1945, particularly the refugee-policy debates of November 1938, March 1943 and May 1943
- Eleanor Rathbone Papers, University of Liverpool Library Special Collections
- Rathbone Trust, https://www.rathbonesociety.org.uk