Brexit: Who Do We Think We Are?

I’ve been a keen family genealogist for the best part of thirty-five years now, and putting everything I know together, from paper and more recent online and DNA research it seems that my ancestral background is Flemish, Scottish and Kentish, with a dash of Scandinavian. My identifications through my original, pre-marriage surname are Scottish (McCartney- originally Mac Artaine or ‘son of the brave’) and Huguenot (Crouch- anglicised from La Croix, ‘the Cross’).

So, a significant percentage of my genes descend from a 16th century Flemish Protestant sect who claimed asylum in England to escape religious persecution in Roman Catholic France, with another 30% bequeathed by Scottish Presbyterians from Renfrew and Edinburgh who arrived in England in the mid-19^th Century as economic migrants. My married name, Jarvis, is also of French origin (Gervase- ‘spearman’ or ‘soldier’), possibly Norman or possibly Huguenot. This means that if my children ever choose to get their DNA analysed they are likely to have even more continental European ancestors than I do. 

Britain entered the modern European project in 1975 when I was still at school, when my knowledge of my Scottish and Huguenot ancestry was located within the stories that my grandmother had told me. Later on, as I found out more, I found interesting overlaps between the social narratives of Presbyterian Covenantor ancestors on one side and Calvinist Huguenots on another. In more recent history, a branch of my family originating within the Norfolk Danelaw area (possibly providing my splash of Scandinavian DNA) brought their indomitable Viking spirit into mid-19^th century London branches of the Independent Labour, Trade Union and Co-operative movements. It was here that they intersected with Scots who had arrived at a similar point in history, and the descendants of Huguenots who had arrived in London several centuries earlier, leading to my birth in Camberwell in the latter half of the twentieth century which (arguably) makes me a genuine cockney.  

For all of my adult life, I have been very comfortable describing myself as ‘British’ and ‘European’ (although my Scottish heritage has always made me a little uncomfortable with ‘English’). And, in terms of this genetic mixture, I am very typical of the majority of the white British population; the only thing that may be a little unusual about me is that, as an historian, I have been so active in detecting the specific history of my ancestors.

My own life events brought me to Yorkshire in my mid-20s, and in that sense I would describe myself as ‘made in London, honed in Yorkshire’, particularly as all but one of my direct descendants thus far are most definitely Yorkshire lads and lasses. All these strands sit together in a cohesive identity, which hasn’t given me much occasion for concentrated thought until recently, when immigration was raised as a major factor in the analysis around the EU referendum result. Since the majority vote to leave I have increasingly felt that not only do the English people need to seek unity between ourselves, but also within our own identities; to become more in touch with our own genetic histories.

My ancestors were welcomed to England, some fleeing persecution and some seeking a better life for themselves and their children; in this they had very similar motivations to contemporary migrants. And some of the people who graciously received them were also my ancestors, of course. Those people who welcomed my Scottish and Flemish ancestors to London across several centuries set in train the events that led to my own birth in that same city, many years later. And this is not just my story, but the story of the English population in general; most of us only need to go back two or three generations to find at least one immigrant ancestor; many of us will find more immigrant ancestors than English ones.

How then do we now feel able to act in the ways that we have done recently, for example towards the Windrush generation who made a huge contribution to building the contemporary UK, and towards those fleeing persecution in their own countries and who, like the Huguenot refugees fleeing France in the 16^th Century, stand to be in grave danger if returned to their original location? Miep Gies, one of the Dutch people who hid and sustained Anne Frank and her family commented 'we did our duty as human beings; helping people in need'. Is this a duty that, only two generations later, we have completely forgotten? Poignantly, I have recently learned that the word ‘refugee’ was brought into the English language by the Huguenot diaspora. 

With all things ancestral considered, I have determined to spend Brexit week (25-31^st January 2020) remembering those ancestors welcomed to England by strangers, by taking my own, unanglicised surname as my twitter name. This is not intended as a protest- a majority in England has clearly voted to leave the EU. It is a personal reflection on where we are currently in our national journey, where we have been in the past, and whether we might aspire to be in a more humanitarian place in the future. I’d love to see others joining me in this contemplation.