HISTORY: BRITAIN'S WAR SHAME

THE Sunday afternoons when rows of Italian ice cream vans lined the street outside the house, when there were freshly made bowls of pasta for dinner followed by singing and laughter are the ones that Rudy Muir prefers to remember.

They were the days when his father, a handsome artisan whose fine terrazzo and marble work adorned the foyers of many Edinburgh public buildings, would cook for his ice-cream vendor visitors: folk just like him with dark hair, swarthy Mediterranean complexions and an expressive, melodic language.

It was the late 1930s, before war, and everything in the young Rudy's life was good.

Back then he was Rudolph Cianfarani, son of Deodato, a hardworking, talented Italian who came to Britain seeking a better life, who married an English girl in Newcastle and made their family home in Edinburgh.

But within five years, Deodato - like many Italian immigrants in Britain at the time - would be arrested as an enemy of the state and interned in the Isle of Wight.

Bad enough, but when he was finally freed, the joy of his homecoming was soured by the discovery that his wife, left penniless and desperate by the sudden arrest of her husband, already had another man to take his place.

It meant that for the young Rudy, the first time he saw his father after years apart, was also the last time he'd ever see him.

To this day he has no idea whatever became of the kind-natured, highly skilled, loving father who used to post comics containing a 6d postal order from his prisoner of war camp in the Isle of Man to the Humbie children's home where the evacuated young Rudy spent the war. And he knows nothing of his father's Italian family or what drove him to leave Italy to start a new and ultimately doomed life in Scotland.

He's now an 83-year-old grandfather, but the memories of what happened when Britain imposed internment on Italian men in 1940 still prompts tears of bitter regret.

"It was the government," he says quietly. "They were wholly ignorant of any danger the Italian community at that time posed.

"It was a botched job. They didn't do their homework and they made so many people suffer.

"I feel for the hundreds and thousands of people that were affected by that one decision.

"And I feel for that one man: my father."

For decades he has kept his thoughts to himself. Now as the 70th anniversary of the government's decision to impose internment on the country's Italian male population looms in June, he's chosen to recall the very personal impact of that one decision in the hope his story might help prompt official recognition for the plight of those it affected.

And he is supporting calls for either an apology or a memorial to mark the 70th anniversary of Italian internment - before the generation still affected by it are gone forever.

"My father was a very skilled man," recalls Rudy. "A gentler and more peaceful man you'd be hard put to find. But he suffered more than any man should have because of politicians."

Rudy was 12 years old when men came to arrest his father one day in early summer 1940.

"They were men dressed in dark suits. I was out playing with my mates, and they asked what was happening with my dad and we laughed it off.

"But there was this strange feeling of foreboding that something not right was happening, that this was something serious.

"I could only stand and watch while they put him in the van. My dad had a kind of puzzled look on his face, as if he was wondering what was happening."

Days earlier Churchill had given his "collar the lot" order, the result of Italian leader Mussolini's decision to enter the war on Hitler's side. For a generation of Italian immigrants who brought to Britain artistic skills like Rudy's father, who opened cafes and ice-cream parlours, or simply laboured hard to make ends meet, it heralded the beginning of years under arrest without trial.

Other nationalities were affected too: Austrian and Germans, ironically many of them Jews who had fled the Nazi uprising.

Some were deported: hundreds perished when the vessel taking them to internment in Canada, the Arandora Star, was torpedoed by a U-boat and sunk just off Ireland.

And some, like Rudy's father, were sent to the Isle of Man camps - within bed-and-breakfast or hotel accommodation, others in sprawling compounds of wooden huts originally used for internment during World War One - surrounded by barbed wire and under constant guard.

Internees dealt with the boredom by setting up artistic and educational projects - one camp boasted a university, another had a drama group and a library. There were lectures, concerts even camp newspapers.

While Rudy's father languished under arrest, his mother, Jean, faced her own challenges.

With one son and four daughters to look after and no income, the once lavish family meals of pasta, mince and tatties, casseroles and home baking were replaced with two slices of bread fried in lard.

Soon she recognised the benefits of having Rudy and his two younger sisters evacuated to the countryside - for a start, it meant fewer mouths to feed.

While his sisters Veronica and Yolanda went to Middleton near Gorebridge, Rudy was sent alone to Humbie in East Lothian where, ironically, the skies overhead saw the early action of the war take place, with the first German bomber to be shot down in Britain coming down in the Lammermuir Hills watched by the evacuees.

Sadly Rudy was out of sight and out of mind. His mother, caught up in her own life in Edinburgh, visited only once, bringing with her the man who would eventually take Rudy's father's place.

"Visitors were allowed once a month, but after a couple of months I realised nobody was coming for me," he recalls. "Post times were exciting, but the same thing happened, not for me.

"I would take myself into the woods and have a good cry."

His interned father, however, kept Rudy in mind. Occasionally a rolled up comic with an Isle of Man stamp would arrive, tucked inside would be a 6d postal order.

After around three years, Rudy went home. He was outside the family home in Loganlea Drive - scene of those pre-war gatherings now home to his mother's new man - when he saw a familiar figure walking towards him.

"It was a Saturday evening," recalls Rudy. "My father just appeared from nowhere, he came towards me with this smile on his face. He was a very handsome man. He gave me a hug and said 'how are you?'

"Then he said he'd go inside and see how my mum was and then we'd go to the pictures together.

"I was very apprehensive as I knew my mother had a new partner - and he was in the house."

What followed might have been laughable if not ultimately so tragic. Rudy watched as the man who would later become his stepfather and whose name he'd eventually adopt - Muir seemed at the time a better option than Cianfarani - leapt in panic from a window wearing only his shirt and socks and ran from the house.

"I never found out what was said," he recalls. "I only know my father came out of the house, spoke with me for a while then said goodbye.

"I never ever saw him again."

Rudy never found out what happened to his father. "I think there was one or two registered letters with money in them that came from Stornoway or Orkney which showed that he was a caring man who didn't want to think of his family being in need if he could help.

"But I've never found out anything else," he sighs.

Churchill's "collar the lot" order was perhaps made with the country's interests at heart but, argues Rudy, "scarred us all for life."

"Looking back on these times all of 70 years ago sometimes feels like a nightmare, a horror story," he says.

"This was a very traumatic experience for a young boy, maybe just old enough to understand why this should be happening.

"When you think how today in modern times we embrace all cultures with care and affection, it seemed so very cruel that this should take place in Great Britain, of all places.

"My father was a very unlucky man. We were a very unlucky family . . .

"Child casualties of war."

IMMIGRANTS' FALL FROM GRACE

THEY came to Scotland seeking a better life. Edinburgh welcomed Italian immigrants and fell in love with their ice cream, food, and Continental ways.

But as war raged across Europe, attitudes began to change. And when Mussolini entered the war on Hitler's side in June 1940, fears that Italians living here could be a potential security threat to the nation reached fever pitch. There were at least 20,000 Italians in Britain and Churchill wanted them rounded up - including those who had lived here for decades.

People turned on the Italian families they had once welcomed and their shops were often attacked.

Amid the shocking scenes there was kindness. Some Italians were looked after by locals, their businesses kept running and returned to them after the war.
Edinburgh Evening News April 14, 2010
*****




I had to fight to stay out of Land Army


The deaths of her grandfather and father when Italians were interred made Sylvia De Luca a conscientious objector In 1940, as Italy joined Hitler in the war, thousands of innocent Italians here were imprisoned or deported. As calls for an official apology are made, Sandra Dick speaks to families who are still haunted by the events of 70 years ago, in the second of our series

THEY journeyed across countries by foot and over sea by tug boat to a destination they knew little about other than it might offer them a better life than the one they had.

It was just around 1900 when Anthony Tartagli and his wife Theresa completed their journey to arrive at their new home at the heart of Scotland's capital.

They left behind the sun-drenched hillsides of Atina, an ancient town once conquered by the Romans, near Cassino, where Anthony had tended sheep, and Theresa worked as a maid.

Together they dreamed that Scotland would offer them and their future children a life that Atina never could.

Today their granddaughter Sylvia is in her late 80s but recalls with pride the determination of her ancestors and with bitterness the fate that would befall them.

For the Tartagli family - like thousands of hardworking Italian immigrants who came here in search of a better life - would find themselves innocent victims of wartime prejudices which helped cost two of them their lives.

As for Sylvia, who watched helplessly as wartime internment destroyed her grandfather and father's health, there would be a personal battle as she railed against the authorities.

Her grandparents arrived with only a few lira in their pockets and made their home in the poverty-stricken Grassmarket.

Starting with an ice-cream cart, they developed a small chain of fish restaurants under the name Tarry's.

"My grandparents managed to raise five children. They were very, very poor when they came here but they gave their children a good education and they worked hard.

"But Mussolini came along, and they became pawns in a game of chess played by politicians."

It was the Italian leader's decision to enter the war on Hitler's side that changed the lives of thousands of innocent immigrant families. Germans and Austrians in Britain were already regarded as "enemy aliens". Now it was the Italians' turn to be rounded up and imprisoned without trial.

Anthony, by then in his 60s, and his eldest son Ralph - Sylvia's Edinburgh-born father who was desperately ill from tuberculosis - were among those to be interned. "My father had TB, my mother looked after him as best she could but he was a dying man," says Sylvia, who ran Little Women boutique in Newington until she retired four years ago at the age of 84. "What threat did he pose to anyone?"

Sylvia's father had met her mother Theresa while on a family holiday home to Atina. It was love at first sight for the Scots-Italian and the young nurse.

Together they ran the thriving Tarry's fish restaurant near the family's Sighthill home, raising a family of four, until illness prevented him from working and Theresa combined caring for him with running the business.

Ralph was already sick when officers arrived to arrest him under internment laws in 1940.

"They sent him to Saughton Prison which initially was OK because it was near and we could visit him," recalls Sylvia. "He was chronically ill, but for some reason they decided to send him to York to stay in disused stables.

"Imagine a man with that illness in a damp atmosphere like an old stables," she sighs. "Of course it was not long before he was sent home to die. He was only 40."

A dreadful fate awaited her grandfather Anthony too. "He was 60 years old but he was sent to the Isle of Man. The police that came to arrest him were in tears. One said, 'Mr Tarry, this is the worst job I have ever had to do'."

He was sent to an internment camp but the trauma of the situation shattered his health and he suffered a heart attack.

"He died within seven months," says Sylvia, who lives in Baberton Park, Juniper Green.

Sylvia, then 19, was further enraged by the treatment meted out to her ageing grandmother.

Internment meant wives of "enemy aliens" were expected to move away from cities to the countryside - and her grandmother was sent to Innerleithen and Peebles.

"What for?" asks Sylvia. "These women didn't have guns in the house, they weren't going to commit some terrorist act. They were just ordinary working folk."

Her anger at the injustice of internment meant that when Sylvia was approached to 'do her bit for the war effort' and serve her country, she refused, declaring herself to be a conscientious objector.

It was a stance that led to legal hearings - reported at the time in the Evening News - to establish her grounds for refusal before a Tribunal for Conscientious Objectors led by Lord Elphinstone.

"I'm only 5ft tall and Lord Elphinstone was sitting high up as the presiding judge, but I was determined," she remembers.

"I understood it was wartime and that everything was in upset. But my grandfather died of a broken heart and my desperately ill father was treated very badly.

"They wanted me to go into the Land Army and I thought: 'Why should I?'"

Internment left its mark on every Italian family in Britain, she adds. Her English-born husband Peter De Luca was turned down by the RAF because of his Italian background and sent to the Pioneer Corps - the army unit often dubbed "The King's Most Loyal Enemy Aliens" because its ranks included so many British Italians and European Jews - while his younger brother William - then just 16 and born in Italy - was arrested and interned.

Now as the 70th anniversary of internment approaches, Sylvia believes the time has passed for apologies and memorials.

"What is an apology? Saying sorry doesn't cancel out the heartbreak, it can't turn back time.

"And a memorial won't change what happened.

"War is war," she adds. "It's uncivilised and doesn't do any good at all."

CASE STUDY

'We knew the man who took father away'

"THE man who came for my father was a policeman. We all knew him, he was friendly. But he had to take him away."

When Sperino Guerri was seized from his family's two-bedroom flat in St Mary's Street, the life his daughter Gloria, her sisters Alice, Maria and Marcella and brother Elario had known in the Old Town ended.

Not just because Sperino ended up in an internment camp on the Isle of Man, with only an occasional heavily-censored letter home to his wife to let her know he was still alive.

Nor that they suffered the violent prejudice many other Italian families did, after Churchill delivered his decision to round up their men as potential enemies.

As Maria, recalls: "We were lucky because people liked my daddy. There was terrible poverty in Canongate at the time, but the people were good. They never smashed our windows."

But the nightmare wasn't to end with Sperino's arrest. With the family's thriving fish and chip shop in Canongate abandoned, the future looked uncertain for Sperino's wife, Assunta, and her children.

Gloria was sent to boarding school in North Berwick. But as an Italian national Assunta was considered a potential risk - and rules meant she had to move at least 28 miles from the city.

Maria, now 76, recalls: "The local fishmonger, Mr Croan and his wife, were listening to the news. He said to mum, 'Get your things, I will get a van and I will take you somewhere'.

"He took us to a farm in Lauder in Berwickshire and we stayed there right up until daddy came home."

The farm was safe, but the area wasn't immune from prejudice and fear. The Guerri children were allowed to attend the local school but barred from travelling there by bus. Maria remembers walking a mile and a half to school in horrible weather, taunted by the children passing them in the bus.

"We were regarded as 'aliens'," she says. "The other children made faces at us out of the back window of the bus. I was just five, but I was very conscious that we were different from them.

"Mother would give us four pence for a mince pie and a cup of Bovril for lunch at the bakers because we weren't allowed to eat with the other children in the school dining hall.

"There was kindness too, though. The farmer's wife would give my mother fresh eggs, milk and butter that she churned herself.

"But the farm workers were unhappy about that and threatened to go on strike. So the farmer's wife used to hide it all in a haystack, wrapping the butter in a dock leaf, for my mother to find at night."

Gloria, at boarding school in North Berwick, endured her own nightmare. Visits from her mother were rare - simply leaving the farm meant she had to have a visa stamped at each town she passed through - and her schooldays were a tearful affair spent pining for her family.

Eventually internment conditions were relaxed and Maria, who now lives in Hastings, and Gloria, of Newtongrange, were reunited with their father.

"You could see the bus at the road end, away in the distance," Maria recalls. "There was a man coming up the road with a cap on.

"My mother recognised him straight away."

Within weeks the family had returned to St Mary's Street and their chip shop business as if nothing untoward had happened.

But the couple never forgot their Italian roots.

Years later, once their family had grown up and their marriage was approaching its 50th year, Sperino and Assunta left Edinburgh to spend their final days together in Roccapelago the small village in the northern Italian Province of Modena, where they were both born.


Edinburgh Evening News April 15, 2010



Call to heal the open wound of Italians' treatment

THEY came to Scotland seeking a better future, bringing with them a flavour of European cafe life.

But 70 years ago this summer, to be Italian was to be an enemy of the state. On the orders of Winston Churchill, Italian men were dragged from their homes in handcuffs, interned in Saughton Prison and other Scottish jails, and even deported.

Now one of Edinburgh's best-known Italian figures is leading calls for official recognition of their plight and a government apology.

Arts impresario Richard Demarco wants the Scottish Parliament to take a lead and apologise for the internment and help ensure a memorial is created to mark one of the most tragic incidents in Scots-Italian history.

A total of 446 Italians were among 700 people who died when the Arandora Star was torpedoed by a U-boat as it took more than 1,500 deported Italians and Germans to Canada in 1940.

Mr Demarco said: "This is a subject that is on my mind every single day: why were the Italians treated like rubbish?

"The Scottish Government should do what Westminster has never done - issue an apology and even compensation to pay for the suffering that has gone on for a generation.

"Imagine, in the middle of the night police officers come and they take away your husband, your father, your grandfather. And some were never seen again.

"But if people had taken a moment to think, they would have realised it was madness. These people couldn't be the enemy, they were much-loved members of the community, they had businesses here."

Among those interned and deported were members of some of the city's best-known Italian families, including those behind the celebrated Valvona & Crolla delicatessen in Elm Row.

Former lord provost Eric Milligan today backed the call for official recognition of the suffering of a generation of Scots-Italians.

"These were good, law-abiding people who were highly valued members of the community and who became 'enemies of the state' overnight because of Mussolini," he said.

"That opened a wound that has never satisfactorily been healed.

"Perhaps it is time to revisit the events that took place, and consider some form of recognition for what took place."

However, neither the Scottish Parliament nor the city council currently has any plans to mark the occasion.

Because the internment was ordered by the Westminster government, officials suggested it was unlikely Scottish ministers would feel they were in a position to offer an apology.

Edinburgh Evening News March 10 2010

Sorry seems to be the hardest word


Stage show on 'father of pop art' sparks fresh debate over whether Italians deserve an apology for wartime internment

IT WAS midsummer 1940 when government officials came calling at the Paolozzi family's ice cream parlour and sweet shop in Leith.

They weren't terribly interested in the teenage lad: prison would be good enough for Eduardo Paolozzi for the time being. But for his father, ageing grandfather and uncle who'd come to Scotland seeking a better life for their loved ones, their fate was sealed.

As the men sent by the government to round up these undesirable aliens in wartime Britain departed, angry crowds gathered to ransack the family's shop. Further up Leith Walk, it was a similar scene at Valvona and Crolla. The menfolk were dragged away and the shop which had brought a delightful flavour of the continent to Edinburgh became the target for a violent mob.

Stones shattered the shop windows, showering glass on the Elm Row pavement. The women left behind, bewildered by the dramatic loss of their men, cleared it away and partly drew the shop's steel shutters.

At fish and chip shops, cafes, ice cream parlours, barbers, indeed anywhere hard-working Italian families were striving to make a living, June 1940 brought the same horrors.

Mussolini had entered the war on Hitler's side and Churchill had issued his internment order: "Collar the lot."

Italian men who had left poverty for a better future in Scotland - Edinburgh families with names like Crolla and Demarco, Pacitti, Coppola, Di Ciacca, Di Rollo, Pelosi and Rossi - were rounded up. The lucky ones were imprisoned, the rest were put on board the Arandora Star bound for deportation to Canada and doomed to be hit by a U-boat torpedo.

Now, as the 70th anniversary of internment looms, debate is under way over whether the time has come for Britain to apologise to a generation of Scots Italians.

It's been partly sparked by a new play at the Traverse, The Shattered Head, which has attempted to unravel the links between what happened to the young "father of pop art" Eduardo Paolozzi and his work.

Yesterday saw calls from another of Edinburgh's leading artistic figures, impresario Richard Demarco - who was also caught up in the episode as a child - for a national apology and memorial to the Italian community affected.

"There should be a memorial, a little statement, something to bring comfort for the relations of those who died. They still live and breathe and suffer this every single day," he said.

He was just ten years old at the time, yet he recalls suffering abuse and beatings as anti-Italian feeling festered. "I remember being attacked by a group of much older boys at the public baths in Portobello. I remember the blood streaming down my face and having stones thrown at me."

Eduardo Paolozzi was 16 at the time and just old enough to be thrown in Saughton alongside hundreds of fellow Italians.

A few years older and he might have joined the male members of his family on board the Arandora Star, sailing to their deaths.

The Blue Star Line leisure cruiser had been previously used to take troops across the Atlantic. In July 1940, however, she was overflowing with 1,500 prisoners, mostly Italians, and 400 troops guarding them.

As she passed the north-west of Donegal, she proved too big a temptation for the captain of a German U-boat.

Nearly 700 prisoners and 200 soldiers perished. When desperate captives tried to clamber into lifeboats to save themselves from drowning, the British shot holes in the lifeboats.

The truth of what happened and why is contained in government documents, some of which have yet to be released.

That concerns Mary Contini, director of Valvona and Crolla, whose grandfather Cesidio Di Ciacca died on the vessel, while her father Johnny was interned on the Isle of Man. Her husband Philip's grandfather Alfonso Crolla also drowned, while his uncle Victor languished in Saughton.

"A lot of the information surrounding what happened has not been released," she says. "I would like all these files to be opened and access available for everyone to find out what happened.

"The Italian community's attitude is this was war, Dunkirk had just happened and it must have been a horrendously difficult time. No-one feels anger, but it would be a testament to openness and honesty to find out what happened."

As for Paolozzi, few of the visitors to the Dean Gallery at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art or the pedestrians who dodge his giant foot and hand sculptures - part of his The Manuscript of Monte Cassino trio of works - outside St Mary's Cathedral might even be aware he was once considered a potential enemy.

According to former lord provost Eric Milligan, Paolozzi found it "ironic that the city of his birth, which during his formative years viewed him with suspicion, later went on to establish a gallery dedicated to his work. But there was never resentment".

Yet Paolozzi's daughter, Anna, believes the episode left a scar on her father. "I think it brutalised him," she says. "The last time he saw his father was when he was dragged off in handcuffs.

"His dad, his grandfather and his uncle were on the Arandora Star. To lose that amount of people . . . it's impossible to think that it wouldn't brutalise someone.

"He was given the choice of staying in prison or being sent to the front line. He didn't want either, so he headed to the library to read up on mental illness.

"He pretended he was schizophrenic and ended up in a mental hospital. Once there, he asked if he could go to art school. It was an incredibly clever way of surviving the war."

As The Shattered Head writer and director Graeme Eatough points out, Scots Italians like Paolozzi had done nothing wrong except for being Italian, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"You can understand why it could still be a sore point," he says. "People were rounded up and imprisoned or deported - often their families were not told where they were being sent.

"Paolozzi's family ended up on the Arandora Star, fenced in by barbed wire. The ship was twice as full as it should have been.

"Tragically, the British decided not to mark it as a civilian ship."

The Shattered Head is at the Traverse until Saturday, at 1pm.

LASTING MEMORIAL

TODAY it is recognised as being possibly the finest Italian deli in the UK. But 70 years ago, Valvona and Crolla was under violent attack.

Director Mary Contini's grandfather was lost on board the Arandora Star and her Scots-born uncle was arrested and slammed in jail alongside Eduardo Paolozzi.

"As a child I was only told that my grandfather had drowned."

Internment, she recalls,

"was done as a sweep during the night, which makes it all the worse.

Then there was rioting and the windows were smashed."

The steel shutters were put in place to prevent further attacks. They've never moved since.

"They are left as they are as a memorial to the family," she adds.

Edinburgh Evening News March 11, 2010.