Collar the Lot

Collar the Lot!
Language	English
Genre(s)	Documentary
Publisher	Quartet Books
Publication date	1980
Media type	Print (book)
Pages	352
ISBN	0704334089

Collar the Lot! How Britain Interned & Expelled its Wartime Refugees, by Peter Gillman and Leni Gillman

This tells the detailed story of internment in Britain during the Second World War. At first the British government took a relaxed attitude to the tens of thousands of "enemy aliens," most of them refugees who had found sanctuary in Britain from the Nazis. But a panic following the fall of France and the invasion scare in May/June 1940 led to a mass round-up of most Germans in Britain, pro- and anti-Nazi alike. When Italy joined the war thousands of Italians were rounded up too, irrespective of their political allegiances or how long they had lived in Britain. It was at this time that Winston Churchill, so the cabinet minutes record, issued the order: "Collar the Lot".

MI5 was supposed to be making sensible assessments but in fact contributed to the panic and misjudgement. The authors consider that both the Home Office and the Foreign Office took a more liberal line and would have liked to leave most of the refugees free.

The book records the tragic tale of the Arandora Star in which 1500 internees were being deported to Canada. It was sunk by a German U-boat and two-thirds of those on board were drowned. The authors, Peter and Leni Gillman, interviewed survivors in Britain, the US, and Australia. Many of those who survived the sinking were deported on a second liner, the Dunera, to Australia. During the voyage the Dunera narrowly survived another U-boat attack. There were two more deportation voyages to Canada before the outcry over the Arandora Star led the British government to revise its policy. From that point the internees were gradually released from their holding camps in Britain, leaving only a hard core of confirmed Nazis and Fascists.

The book won very favourable reviews when it was published and remained the standard work, along with the wartime Internment of Aliens by Francois Lafite, until a new burst of interest in the topics in the 2000s.