Liverpool’s Eurasians

Anglo-Chinese family 1930s – ‘Although the numbers were falling by the 1930s, Liverpool’s Anglo-Chinese community had by no means disappeared’

Anglo-Chinese wedding WWII – ‘The men who came in World War Two married into a long-established Anglo-Chinese community’

Brian – ‘One of the hundreds of children whose father was forced to leave the UK after World War Two’

Eurasian child and mother 1930s – ‘Although most Eurasians married into the surrounding white society, others married Chinese. This lady, herself of mixed race, chose to marry a Chinese seamen in the 1930s’

Dragons in Liverpool – ‘A group of those whose Chinese fathers were made to leave after World War Two pictured with one of the now elderly men brought to the UK by a British shipping firm in the late 1940s’

At the end of the nineteenth century Chinese seamen started to come ashore in the ports of London and Liverpool and settle down with local women. By the early years of the twentieth century, whilst London had the largest number of Chinese at any one time, it was Liverpool that had the larger permanent settlement.

Soon, the city had what was probably Europe’s largest Eurasian community. A community whose children inter-married with the larger white society. A community that ran almost in parallel with a much smaller set of all-Chinese families living largely in isolation of the society around them.

During World War One approximately 6,000 Chinese seamen were based in the city and there are many in Liverpool who can trace their Chinese ancestry to this time. However, after the War the Government took action to force the Chinese out of the country. As happened after the Second World War, men with families who had long been settled in Liverpool were made to leave.

With few Chinese coming to the city between the Wars and settling there, Liverpool’s Chinese and Eurasian community began to decline. By the 1930s it seemed that inter-marriage with the local community would ensure its end. Then came the Second World War.

It was the years of World War Two that saw the greatest increase in Liverpool’s Eurasian population. Up to 20,000 Chinese mariners were based in the city, many coming from Shanghai and the surrounding area. Hundreds settled down with British women and started families.

Paid about a third of the British seamen’s rate, the Chinese received no War Risk Bonus. A sum that was large enough to virtually double the British seamen’s pay. In February 1942 the Chinese went on strike for equality of treatment. The strike lasted until April of that year being settled only when the Chinese were given a small increase in pay and the same War Risk Bonus as their white colleagues.

But the dispute meant that for the duration of the War the Chinese were labelled as ‘troublemakers’. In particular, the men from Shanghai. At the end of the conflict the Government determined to rid Liverpool of what they saw as an ‘undesirable element’. The then City Council wanted the properties they occupied and the shipowners were anxious to rid themselves of the Shanghai militants.

Hundreds were forcibly repatriated. Prevented from getting shore jobs, their pay cut by more than half, they were made to take one-way voyages back to China. A small number of the men may have taken their wives to with them to China but it seems that most of the men hoped to be able to return to their families in Liverpool. But having left them behind, many found themselves blacklisted by the shipowners when they got to China. Unable to get a ship back to Britain, few were ever to see their families again.

The records indicate that over three hundred women and approximately a thousand Eurasian children were left in destitution when the men were driven out. Some put their children up for adoption. Others worked at two or more jobs to keep them. Many remarried but in some cases the women and their new partners resented the children as reminders of a past they wanted to forget.

A few Hong Kong seamen did settle in the city in the 1940s and 1950s giving a small boost to the Eurasian population. But from the late 1950s onwards, complete families began to arrive from Hong Kong’s rural New Territories. The Chinese population of Liverpool started to change dramatically and to form a truly separate entity, something that it had never been to that time.

Now Liverpool’s Chinese community is a diverse mixture of those who came from Hong Kong and their descendants, incomers from Malaysia and Singapore plus more recent immigrants from Mainland China.

As the fully Chinese community has grown, the original Anglo-Chinese population has begun to disappear from the public’s memory. And as their children have reached adulthood and married into the local population, the Eurasian community that was Chinatown has faded into the community at large.

Eurasian boy in China – ‘Some Chinese fathers in Liverpool sent their eldest son back to China for their education. This practice continued for many years’

Eurasian children – ‘There were probably more Eurasian children in Liverpool in the 1950s than at any other time but many had to grow up without their fathers’

Jean’s father, a Chinese seamen who was able to stay after World War Two. His children helped him shell and roast the peanuts he sold around the pubs of Liverpool

Liverpool Eurasian boys who appeared in the movie The Inn of the Sixth Happiness in 1957 with Ingrid Bergmann. Their voices were dubbed to hide their Liverpool accents

Seamen’s aliens card – ‘Every Chinese seamen married to a British woman had to carry an Identify Card. And so did his wife who lost her British citizenship when she married him’