AS part of a work project, I’ve been researching Italian immigrants in the UK and particularly their experiences between the wars.

In World War I, Italy was an ally and many UK-based Italian citizens, who had arrived here towards the end of the 19th Century or the beginning of the 20th, served either in our armed services or that of Italy.

That they were fully integrated into British society is probably an overstatement. If there hadn’t been a low-level “othering”, it would have been harder for Mussolini to exploit their craving for a sense of national identity through the network of fasci clubs his government funded.

Still, their cafes and fish and chip shops were popular and, if some of them seemed dazzled by Italy’s strongman Prime Minister, so too was Winston Churchill, at least until the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935.

In the late 1930s into 1940, though, as the homeland they had left decades before began to ally itself with Germany, the narrative shifted. Suddenly, these men and women who had lived peaceably alongside their neighbours – whose businesses were a mainstay of their communities – found themselves portrayed – by politicians, by newspapers – as shady characters: potential fifth columnists, exploiting their adopted country’s goodwill.

Here is an excerpt from the Daily Mirror in April 1940 which shows how racism was being fomented against people who, until then, had posed no problem whatsoever.

“The London Italian is an indigestible unit of population,” the journalist wrote. “He often avoids employing British labour. It is much cheaper to bring a few relations into England from the hometown. And so the boats unload all kinds of brown-eyed Francescas and Marias, beetle-browed Ginos and Titos and Marios. Every Italian colony in Great Britain and America is a seething cauldron of smoking Italian politics.”

According to writer and academic Maria Serena Balestracci, these fears were not at – at this point anyway – shared by the British public, only one in a........

© Herald Scotland