Homeward Bound: Return Migration from Ireland and India at the End of the British Empire. By Niamh Dillon

Abstract

What might it mean to return ‘home’ if home is a place one has not been before? This was the question facing Betty Gascoyne and her family when Indian independence forced a relocation to Britain. Gascoyne had been born in Jubbulpore in 1925, she was educated in British schools in India and when she left finishing school at 17, she joined the Fourteenth Army. Her immediate family had never been to Britain; her maternal family had been in India since 1796 (p. 21). And yet, as she described in her oral history interview, in her family, Britain was considered home. When she came to Britain in the late 1940s, with her husband Fred, who struggled to find work and three young children, staying in her mother-in-law’s one bedroom flat in East London, she described that ‘“It was like walking out of a colour photograph into a black and white one.”’ (p. 118). Adjusting to ‘home’ life was much more difficult than she anticipated, given her sense of cultural and emotional affiliation with Britain.