British Passport Research Articles

James Arthur Briggs

When Arthur arrived in Europe as a member of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra in 1919, he was just twenty years of age. For the rest of his life he worked on the Old Continent with but one single trip back to the United States in 1930. Admired for his technical ability and clear tone, he recorded extensively and influenced generations of European jazz musicians. Although he had no firsthand experience in American jazz, he managed to keep abreast with developments in the States through records he obtained in stores in every country he visited: I had most of Fletcher Henderson's records and the Wolverines at that time and Frankie Trumbauer (Goddard 1979, 287). (1) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Arthur himself has always been vague, even contradictory about the place and date of his birth. On more than one occasion he claimed to be a United States citizen: I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the 10th of April 1901. My parents were from Grenada, Mississippi. (2) In actual fact he was born in St. George's on the Caribbean island of Grenada on April 9, 1899, the youngest of ten children of a father from St. George's and a mother from Barbados. According to the passenger list of the British and Burmese Steam Navigation's liner SS Maraval, James Arthur Briggs, musician, eighteen years and six months old, arrived from Grenada in New York on November 22, 1917. He gave his address as the home of his mother, Louisa Briggs, on Green Street, St. George's, Grenada. She had paid for the travel, and stated that he was going to stay with his sister, Mrs. Inez Hall, in New York City. According to the immigration authorities, was a West Indian and traveled on a British passport. also declared that he had not been in the States before. Briggs's sister Inez, a seamstress, had arrived with her twenty-five-year-old sister Olive, a domestic servant, on June 6,1913, aboard the SS Maracas from St. George's to New York. On arrival they gave their father's name as James and stated that they were bound for a friend, Thomas Hall, whom the nearly-nineteen-year-old Inez was to marry the same year. On August 1, 1917, Edith Inez Hall arrived in New York from Grenada aboard the SS Mayaro and stated that she was twenty-four years of age and on her way to rejoin her husband Thomas, and that she had previously resided in New York from 1913 to 1916. (3) Upon his arrival in the United States in November 1917 Arthur stated that he followed the occupation of musician. Perhaps he had undergone some musical training in his hometown of St. George's, training which was available either through the Boy Scouts' drum-and-fife bands, one of the British colonial police bands, the Salvation Army, or private study. John Chilton's Who's Who of Jazz claims that the legendary trumpeter William Smith (1881-1947)--New York's Buddy Bolden--was Briggs's uncle (Chilton 1985, 307). If this were true, Crickett should have been the brother of Briggs's mother Louisa (whose birth name is not known). But according to his 1919 passport application, Smith was born at Emporia, Kansas, on February 8, 1881. His father, French C. Smith, was born at Memphis, Tennessee, and by 1919 was living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There seems to be no relationship between Smith and Briggs, and it is probably safe to assume that this is part of Briggs's construction of his ancestry as an African American. According to Chilton, Pete (ca. 1900-1970s) was a distant relative of Arthur Briggs (Chilton 1985, 46). The tuba and string bass player from Charleston, South Carolina, who became known for his work with Carroll Dickerson, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Noone, Edgar Hayes, Jell Roll Morton, and Herman Autrey, was in fact a cousin of his. volunteered that he had lived on Green Street in Charleston. He knew all about the Jenkins Orphanage at Franklin Street and its founder, the Reverend Jenkins (1861-1937), so perhaps had briefly lived in Charleston around 1917 or 1918; there is no evidence that he ever was a pupil there (Chilton 1985, 46). …

Giving Things Their Proper Names: Carl Linnaeus and W. H. Auden

Giving Things Their Proper Names: Carl Linnaeus and W. H. Auden

The Effects of Transformations: The Case of George Tabori's Mutters Courage

George Tabori's work as playwright and director has helped transform contemporary theatre in the German-speaking world. Moreover, his oeuvre has profoundly challenged ideas central to German cultural production, philosophical and epistemological concepts at the core of Western culture per se, and so-called Holocaust literature. This influence has not gone unnoticed outside the community of theatre practitioners as reflected in numerous recent works on Tabori (e.g. Bayerdorffer; Feinberg; Hoyng; Strumpel). This article will contribute to this discussion of Tabori's influence and status by exploring the nexus between transnationality and media transformation in his work, using as a specific case of this connection his Mutters Courage, a work that exists in various versions and in different media – as a dramatic text (MC), a novella (MC-E), a radio play (MC-R), and, last but not least, as a film directed by Michael Verhoeven (MCF).' It will propose that Tabori's exploration of different media is motivated by his transnational position as an artist and also reinforces this position as intentionality. It will demonstrate that through playing – ein Spielen (Hoyng, word 3; Tabori, Hamlet 119) – Tabori creates media effects that address a core philosophical idea of his oeuvre, probing all-too-neatly conceived victimperpetrator constellations in innovative and evolving ways, namely by exploiting the tension between German-Jewish symbiosis and transnationality. A Hungarian-born, Jewish holder of a British passport (Feinberg, Embodied ix), Tabori ranks among the most prolific stage directors and playwrights of the German-speaking world today. He has carved out this position since 1972, when he permanently relocated to Europe after twelve years of exile in Britain (1935-1947) and nearly twenty years in the United States (1947-1968). The latter years were marked by mixed success as an author of screenplays and modest beginnings as a novelist, by productive collaborations with Lee Strasberg's Actors

Touching the Language of Citizenship in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

Sandeep Sanghera, in her paper Touching the Language of Citizenship in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost discusses questions which make Ondaatje's novel a text about postmodern identity: who is this woman Anil who lives mostly in the West, travels on a British passport, works for an international organization, and no longer has any real ties to her first home? In the paper, these questions are examined via the languages Anil adopts and abandons in the novel. Sanghera elaborates on the question of foreign-ness represented by the protagonist of the novel; however, this foreign-ness is examined in the particular context concerning the substance of family and kinship as well as language and nation. Sanghera's analysis represents the questions and thoughts of readers who are themselves migrants between languages and homes. Sandeep Sanghera, Touching the Language of Citizenship in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost page 2 of 7 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.3 (2004):

BELIEVING WITHOUT BELONGING? SOME REFLECTIONS

have been asked to reflect on the various discussions that have gone on during this consultation, and to respond with some personal thoughts from the perspective of my work in mission, and what has been termed the process of inculturation of the church in India. This process, which was set in motion by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, addressed a new situation that had arisen after the second world war with the disintegration of important colonial empires and the rise of many new nation states. India was one significant example of this new. phenomenon. am myself very much a child of this independent India; was born in 1944 towards the end of the war, and just before India gained its freedom. The church in India had been very much associated with the colonial period. The typical church styles that we find in different places reflect the prevailing cultural forms of the colonialists. Thus, we have the Baroque style of the Portuguese churches in Goa, the imitation Gothic style which was favoured by the French in Pondicherry, or the typical British architecture which copied models designed in London by the architect Christopher Wren. There was very little to be found in the culture of Indian Christians that drew from artistic forms related to the great tradition of Indian art and architecture. In fact, the missionaries had rejected Indian imagery and visual symbolism as pagan or idolatrous. It is incarnational theology that underlies the idea of inculturation. The church, like the divine Word, has to be incarnated through a process of translation. However, there is also the idea of transfiguration, i.e. a risen Christ who, freed from the limitations of his Jewish cultural identity, can walk with his disciples to distant lands. The Christ who appears to India is the Jesus of history, but a cosmic Lord who transcends all cultural and historical limitations, and is on this account able to enter into all spiritual traditions. The problem that we are continually debating is one of identity. Who am I? This question relates only to my own personal, historical narrative but also, at a more profound level, to not I, but the Christ who lives in The questions which am asked are: Why do you represent Christ as an Was Jesus an These same questions were poignantly put in a somewhat different way by a Hindu who was scandalized by Peter Brooke's famous representation of the Mahabharata. There, a British person acted the lead role of Krishna. How is this possible? demanded my Hindu friend, who was living in Leicester, England at the time, Krishna was an Indian, a British national! This brought me with a jolt to my own identity. Am an Indian? True, have an Indian passport and an Indian name. But my Indian friend in Leicester, who worships the Lord Krishna, has a British passport. Some of us struggle with the question of whether we are Christian Hindus or Hindu Christians. Interestingly, there is nothing in Hinduism that would deny either possibility. Hinduism is defined by any credal formula. Even the Indian constitution does understand Hinduism as a confessional belief expressed in some creed. A Hindu is a person who belongs to India. remember the occasion when visited the sanctum sanctorum of the Madhurai temple, one of the greatest temples of South India. went with my father, and was anxious to see the central icons of the temple. The priest who stood at the door of this inner locus of the mystery asked, Are you a Hindu? My father immediately answered, I am a Hindu from Panjab, and this is my son. It was an important moment for me. had never been defined like that before, especially by my own father. Of course, he was speaking his truth and the Hindu priest was entirely satisfied. He was concerned with my personal God -- my Ishta Devata, or God of my choic e. He was even concerned with my family God, or Kula Devata. …

THE KENYAN ASIANS, BRITISH POLITICS, AND THE COMMONWEALTH IMMIGRANTS ACT, 1968

The article examines the 1966–70 Labour government's decision to withdraw the right of entry from Asians with British passports who were driven out of Kenya by its ‘Africanization’ policies. It examines the decision within the context of three issues: first, the existence and status of a pledge, allegedly made by Macmillan's last Conservative government, that the Asians' right to enter the UK would be respected; second, a decline in both major parties' commitment to the Commonwealth; and, third, competing ideological strains within the Labour party. The article concentrates on the first of these issues, focusing on an as-yet-unresolved debate between Duncan Sandys and Iain Macleod, both Conservative Colonial Secretaries. Macleod argued that a solemn pledge had been given to the Asians, while Sandys and the Conservative party adamantly denied the claim. In the light of new archival evidence, the article argues that the Asians' exemption from immigration controls, which had been applied to the whole of the Commonwealth, did not result from an explicit commitment by the British government; it was rather the unintended result of the mechanism chosen to restrict Commonwealth immigration in 1962. It was a consequence, however, that was recognized by civil servants at the time of the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962, and accepted by key figures in the British cabinet, including Duncan Sandys himself. The position taken by Sandys and the majority of the Conservative party in 1968 was, behind the safety of the Official Secrets Act, a betrayal of commitments made and pledges given only a few years earlier. The article concludes by suggesting that the Kenyan Asians' crisis represented both a shift, in the two parties, away from previous commitments to the Commonwealth and, in the Labour party, the triumph of James Callaghan's strand of Labour ideology – nationalist, anti-intellectual, indifferent to arguments about international law and obligation, and firmly in touch with the social conservatism of middle- and working-class England.

Toynbee and Ibn Khaldun

In the years before the First World War the Orient Express used to run a daily train de luxe between London and Vienna. From Vienna there were trains every Monday and Thursday (first class only) to Constantinople. The journey took 75 hours and cost ?22 and 11 shillings. In those palmy days the train travelled from empire to empire and British travellers customarily travelled without a passport. By 1921 everything had changed. British passports came in with the Defence of the Realm Act of 1915 and papers were frequently demanded on the route to Istanbul. The Orient Express passed through nation states with uncertain futures towards a Turkey which was fighting to become a nation. It was on the Orient Express, on the line between Nish and Adrianople in September 1921, that Arnold Toynbee, in a moment of creative vision, first sketched the plan of his massive A Study of History, the writing of which was to occupy him for the next 40 years.2 Arnold Toynbee was born in 1889 and educated at Winchester and Balliol. (As an undergraduate Toynbee became friendly with the Arabist D.S. Margoliouth. The latter told Toynbee that he made a custom of reading the Quran in Arabic once a year. This commanded Toynbee's admiration 'for the Quran is appreciably longer than the Bible'. This reminiscence suggests that Toynbee never actually looked at the Quran, for it is in fact shorter than the New Testament.)3 During the First World War Toynbee

Preliminary Observations on Globalisation and the Migration of Sport Labour

Focusing on sport labour migration, several broader issues regarding labour migration and globalisation are highlighted. The observations made, and the connections drawn, will be somewhat preliminary in nature. Several dimensions and issues of sport labour migration and globalisation are examined. A range of sports in different societies and across continents are also considered. This migration must be viewed as part of other global cultural flows. Discussion of these flows precedes the case study that focuses on the role of, and the resistance to, American sport labour migrants in the commodification of English basketball over the past two decades, the paper concludes by drawing together the strands of sport migration and global sport development. It's still England against Scotland, no matter who's playing, but the rivalry is born into the British lads. The Canadians tell you they're British when they get a British passport. That might be so but it doesn't make them English or Scottish. The Guardian, 29th January 1993, p. 15.

Perfidious Albion: The Abandonment of Hong Kong 1997

When Britain agreed to restore Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China in 1984, British spokesmen explained that the Communist Chinese were reforming and would allow Hong Kong to continue its dynamic capitalist ways. But the brutal suppression of the Chinese student protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989 made it clear that totalitarian Beijing does not tolerate even potentially rival centers of power. William McGurn examines the background of the 1984 agreement and the current plight of Hong Kong's 5.8 million citizens. Although they hold British passports, the British government has refused to allow most of them in. McGurn urges the United States and other nations to open their doors to those who want to leave Hong Kong, not only as a humanitarian act but to infuse their own societies with talent and dynamism.

British Passports and the Right to Travel

British Passports and the Right to Travel

Joyce v. Director of Public Prosecutions.

Jurisdiction — Jurisdiction over Aliens Abroad — Alien Holding British Passport — Enjoyment of Protection whilst Abroad — Corresponding Duty of Allegiance — Treason — Adherence to King’s Enemies — Broadcast Propaganda from Enemy Territory.

Criminal law—Treason—Allegiance of alien holding British passport abroad—Adhering to the King's enemies without the realm

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