Exclusive: secret deportations campaign, which separated families, was racially inflected, report says

Chinese seafarers with British wives and children were “coerced” into boats leaving Liverpool after the second world war in a “racially inflected” secret government programme, the Home Office has admitted.

After responding to calls to serve in the British merchant navy in the Battle of the Atlantic, about 2,000 Chinese seamen remained in Liverpool at the end of the war. They were subject to a secret Home Office campaign in 1945-46 to round up and ship them back east in the cargo holds of British ships.

A significant number had married British women and had children with them in the final years of the war. After boarding ships docked in the Mersey bound for Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore, they were never seen by their families again.

After decades of silence, the Home Office and the Labour party – which was in power at the time under Clement Attlee – have now expressed their regret for a policy that the latter said had done lasting damage to families, leaving “scars that have run deep through several generations”.

The deportations were shrouded in secrecy for most of the 20th century, until the declassification in the 1990s of a tranche of Home Office files entitled “Compulsory repatriation of undesirable Chinese seamen” prompted a handful of their Liverpool-born descendants to begin campaigning for justice.

After questions asked in parliament by the Liverpool Riverside MP, Kim Johnson, on behalf of her constituents, and an investigation in the Guardian, the immigration minister, Kevin Foster, agreed to launch an internal investigation in July last year.

The 22-page report, seen exclusively by the Guardian, uses shipping manifests, Home Office documents and marriage records to build a picture of the secret deportations campaign commenced in 1945, and identifies some of the married Chinese seamen who were repatriated.

Until now the Home Office has consistently maintained there was no enforced repatriation of married men, in spite of its own memos to Liverpool’s police and immigration officers making reference to “roundups” and describing a de facto manhunt.

The report admits for the first time that there was a racial dimension to the campaign – a “willingness to countenance wide-scale coercion” of Chinese merchant seamen that was absent from similar discussions of the demobilisation of European Allied troops.

“The language used to explain and justify the proposed operation to repatriate surplus members of the Chinese pool is clearly racially inflected and prejudicial,” the Home Office report concludes. “Negative racial stereotyping is evident throughout these discussions: Chinese seamen … are characterised sui generis as not merely an employment problem but as members of a criminal underclass.”

Yvonne Foley, 76, whose Shanghai-born father, Nan Young, was a ship’s engineer and was repatriated in 1946, said the report was “very well balanced” and its findings vindicated her own years of campaigning and research in archives around the world.

Foster, in a letter to Johnson, stopped short of a full apology for the Home Office’s historic actions, but said: “I very much regret some of those who served in the merchant navy during WW2 were treated in this way.”

He pledged that the story of the deportation of the Chinese seamen would be used to train Home Office staff on the history of race and migration in Britain, to help them “understand the potential impact of immigration policies”.

Johnson welcomed the report, saying it “paints a damning picture of the British treatment of Chinese seafarers in Liverpool, with families brutally ripped apart despite their service to our country during the war”.

She said: “It leaves no doubt that the Chinese community received racist and coercive treatment at the hands of the state. These events are a stain on our history and unfortunately there are still many parallels with the way minoritised and migrant workers are treated in our country today.”

A Labour party spokesperson said: “The Labour party deeply regrets the policy of the 1945 British government that saw the repatriation of an unquantified number of Chinese seafarers who had supported the war effort and in doing so fathered children in the UK. The policy of repatriation caused lasting damage to families, and scars that have run deep through several generations.”

While the Home Office investigation has brought some new details to light, it has not turned up a central record of all the repatriated seamen, and the report concedes that a great deal of information is still missing.

Missing files include those belonging to special branch, whose officers carried out covert raids on private homes and boarding houses in Liverpool after the war to investigate the “genuineness” of the marriages. “No trace of these [special branch] investigations remains,” the report says.

Further gaps in the record can be attributed to the fact that many thousands of Chinese seamen were repatriated on ships on which their names were never recorded. One handwritten shipping manifest found by the Guardian, for the SS Diomed’s departure on 8 December 1945, read simply: “100 Chinese seamen shipped by the Home Office. Manifest prepared by HM Immigration Office.”

If they made it to mainland China, the seamen would have arrived back to a nation erupting into full-scale civil war, making a return to Britain all but impossible.