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Sanctum amid the Spires

Chris Baraniuk investigates the University’s role in introducing refugees to higher learning in both past and present.

In 1983, at the height of the Troubles, my Dad jumped a Polish ship docking in Belfast and defected, successfully, from the cagey ‘Eastern Block’ of Europe and the confines of a Communist era.As the ship faded into the background, he made his way, presumably with much difficulty, to Northern Irish authorities by the harbour, where he deployed his only full phrase of English, “I am seeking political asylum”. The reception he got from a Troubles-worn cohort of the Royal Ulster Constabulary was one of astonishment (and, initially, laughter).

His original plan had been to defect in Liverpool, but the ship had to change its course at the last moment and as such he was forced to take a massive risk and make a getaway in Belfast. The fact that I’m here writing this feature will probably reassure you that everything, in the end, did go pretty well. Indeed, Dad was able to study for a degree and a few years ago received a PhD from the University of Ulster. What this piece of anecdotal family history brings to mind, I think, is situations where refugees or asylum seekers, taking a risk in a place they’re completely alien to, have been more than willing to knuckle down and make the best of things with the help of their new foster-state.Oxford has a vibrant and deeply interesting history full of similar cases where academics, fleeing war-torn regions or imminent political revolution, have sought a haven in Oxford’s quiet quadrangles and ancient libraries. You could call it, ‘educational asylum’ – instances where individuals have used their academic potential to start anew in a foreign, but accommodating university city.

Records and archives show ready examples of colleges offering generous financial support to asylum seekers. Merton College’s documents provide a number of intriguing details on refugees in Oxford, such as the Fellows’ decision in July 1916 to allow use of the college garden “for the entertainment of Belgian School Children and their teachers” who were fleeing the effects of the First World War.

And there are plenty of notable individuals whose experiences at Oxford as refugee scholars clearly paved the way for later successes. Take, for example, Nicholas Kurti. Kurti was a gifted physicist of Hungarian origin who studied in Berlin among the finest scientific minds of the twentieth century – from Einstein to Planck and Nernst. Being, as many of these scientists were, a Jewish academic, Kurti was prompted to flee Berlin as Hitler’s rise to power became ever clearer.

Forced to leave in 1933, Kurti arrived in Oxford in September. He once described his arrival in the city, coming over Magdalen bridge on the back of a motorbike and greeted by sun lighting up the college sandstone.A speech he made in Oxford, recorded in an old volume of the Brazen Nose (Brasenose College Magazine), described his evacuation in frank terms: “It was one of many traumatic emigrations. We fled a bloody terror.” In the same speech, Kurti honours the vibrancy of Jewish academic life that had been dispersed from Berlin in the advent of Hitler’s regime.

Kurti’s success at Oxford is particularly noteworthy. Although working for a few years in America, he returned to Oxford in 1945, was made a university demonstrator in physics that year before being elected to a senior research fellowship at Brasenose College two years after that. Kurti is well-known among physicists for his “successful adiabatic demagnetization of nuclear spins under temperatures of one millionth of a degree kelvin” – and this particular achievement in low-temperature physics procured an early appearance on Tomorrow’s World. Oddly, Kurti was well known and loved among his students and fellow academics at Brasenose for his passion for cooking. He had a penchant for live-cookery demonstrations and even organised a series of workshops on scientific gastronomy during the 90s which were attended by internationally-known chefs and scientists.

You may recognise this quotation, which is a Kurti original:“I think it is a sad reflection on our civilisation that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés.”Elizabeth Boardman, archivist at Brasenose, remembers Kurti as “a lovely and engaging man” who has been missed since his death in 1998 at the age of 90.Unsurprisingly, Kurti wasn’t the only academic who came to Oxford during the 1930s in an attempt to avoid the changing political situation in Germany and Austria. Schrödinger (of philosophical cat fame) was a teacher of Kurti’s and came to Magdalen College in the same year that he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno too came during the 1930s, to Merton College, and became an exceptionally distinguished philosopher and music critic after continuing his career in America. But the wave of academics escaping Hitler’s grasp faced the danger of inflaming the dictator’s anger at defection.

A recently published book, Invasion 1940: The Nazi Invasion Plan for Britain, contains (along with less interesting statistics about England’s road network and urbanisation) a ‘wanted’ list of 2,820 people thought to be at large in Britain by the SS. If a Nazi invasion of the British Isles were to come to fruition, these individuals were to be arrested and placed in ‘protective custody’ once the Nazis had taken over British institutions and universities. The list includes a number of academics enjoying fledgling careers at Oxford, two of which were Nicholas Kurti and Otto Khan-Freund.

Both men were relatively unknown in 1940 but would become Fellows of Brasenose College after the War. Similar to Kurti, Kahn-Freund integrated well within British culture and left a profound effect on those who knew him. His friend, Dr J H C Morris, described Kahn-Freund during a memorial service in the University Church of St Mary in 1979, saying:

“I was immediately impressed not only by his immense learning, but, even more, by the stimulating quality of his mind and his wonderful sense of humour. To spend an evening with Otto was an invigorating experience from which one derived fresh insights into many things – law, and politics, and life itself.”

The period between 1930 and 1945 is far from the only time when Oxford helped gifted political refugees. An earlier example may be found in Dragomir Militchévitch, a Serbian national who studied at Merton between 1916 and 1920. The college archives reveal that Governing Body granted him a three-year placement, for free, “provided that he satisfies the Warden of his intention to study”.

This was later extended and Militchévitch achieved a 2nd Class Honours degree in Modern History in 1920. He does not appear to have become as famous as Kurti, and it is unclear what happened to him during the Second World War, but he should be noted for becoming Secretary to the Chamber of Commerce in Yugoslavia in 1935.Moving towards the mid-twentieth century, we find a large group of political refugees coming to the United Kingdom as the Hungarian Uprising takes place in 1956. Another Mertonian, Laszlo Heltay, had begun his work on music in Budapest under Zoltán Kodály and was granted academic support at Oxford from 1957-62, as a student studying for a B.Litt in music. It is not clear whether he was a ‘refugee’ as such, but political events certainly seem to have inspired his decision to leave Hungary. His experiences in England clearly bolstered his career as he conducted the Oxford University Musical Club and Union and founded the Kodály Choir at Merton in 1957.

These engagements led him on to a role as conductor of the Leicestershire Schools Orchestra which has since had other famous conductors at the helm. The orchestra recorded many examples of contemporary composer Brian Havergel’s music under Heltay. Later, the Hungarian musician would become the founding chorus master of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in 1975. He went on to conduct Desden, London and Budapest Philharmonics as well as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and worked with classical stars such as Andre Previn, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Yehudi Menuhin. Other refugees of Hungarian roots in 1956 include Laszlo Antal, who came to Keble College.

A successful Oxford don, Antal wrote to The Times on the 50th Anniversary of the uprising in Hungary along with Heltay and 48 other academics in order to thank British institutions and the British people for making them welcome after having to flee their Hungarian homeland. 11 of the 50 academics who put their names to the public letter had fellowships or emeritus fellowships at Oxford when it was published. In the letter the Hungarian-born academics acknowledge the opportunity they received in Britain and indicate that they felt a responsibility to put what they gained from the country back into its own students and institutions: “On our arrival we were received with compassion by the staff and students of universities and other higher education institutions.

They opened their doors and offered us the chance to complete our studies in this country … More than 300 Hungarian students received their first degrees here and many of us were encouraged and supported in completing postgraduate studies. … It is our hope that we have been able to repay some of the magnanimous support we received, during our working lives.”Examples of Oxford’s generosity to international scholars aren’t confined to the history books, though.

In Michaelmas 2007, Cherwell reported on the case of Sholeem Griffin who has had status as a political asylum seeker in the UK since her family left Pakistan in 2003. She is currently studying biochemistry in her first-year at St John’s College, which has agreed to waive her £10,000 per annum tuition fees. At the time of the report, Sholeem told Cherwell, “I knew the fees were high for an international student and that it would be difficult.

The alternative was sitting at home since I couldn’t really go further with my education because at every university it was the same story.”Oxford continues to offer support for asylum seekers in ways it appears to have done for many years now. There are however, unsurprisingly, no Admissions Office guides published for political refugees and no obvious information available on what one might do if they found themselves in a situation like Nicholas Kurti in 1933.

Although the people I have mentioned, and hundreds like them, were aided by organizations like The Society for the Preservation of Science and Learning, in finding places at Oxford, It seems to have been the autonomy of college Governing Bodies that was at the root of many decisions to help asylum seekers. Having a lot of cash and logistical flexibility obviously helps too, but we should probably most remember the generosity of Oxford as manifesting itself in the future careers of its refugee scholars – careers which were often highly-successful. The thank-you letter to The Times indicates just how much British institutions were happy to nurture young arrivals from all over the world, and send them back again, should they wish to go, with no questions asked.

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