By sixty, chef Robert Banner was ready to swap long hours in the professional kitchen for cloudless skies on the campo of southern Spain with his wife Jan. Emigrating in 2001, and speaking two years later to a sociologist studying British migrants in Andalucia, the couple described the lure of mild winters and a relaxed pace of life. ‘It’s lovely’, Jan said, showing her visitor the citrus trees dotting the villa’s grounds. ‘We have got everything we need and I don’t miss England. I’m not one of those. I don’t miss grey, damp days, and every day the same.’ This enviable lifestyle was funded, the couple explained, by three rental properties that they owned elsewhere in Spain, plus Jan’s part-time work, which she conducted through the new innovation of email.
After a while, the conversation circled back to the couple’s reasons for leaving Britain and the mood abruptly changed. ‘Too many blacks’, was Robert’s curt summary. ‘I had a lot of trouble. I’m not racist, but the blacks, we’ve had thefts, stabbings, muggings. The crime has got out of control, and they don’t care.’ Jan agreed: ‘Where we lived there were more and more asylum seekers and they were beginning to be a bit of a nuisance. They get everything, a house, social security, sometimes even a car, but they don’t give anything back.’ The final straw came when Robert was obliged to employ three black men as part of a youth opportunities scheme. ‘I had to give them a job when there’s plenty of our young people without jobs’, he complained, ‘and these three couldn’t even read and write!’ Robert fired one for being ‘hopeless’ and recounted what happened next with outrage. ‘Before we were even back at work after the weekend, he had managed to call his solicitor to put in a complaint. And on Monday morning they were on at me about unfair dismissal!’Footnote 1
Notwithstanding Jan’s telling elision of ‘blacks’ with ‘asylum seekers’, Robert’s three employees might very well have been the British-born children or grandchildren of Commonwealth migrants – individuals like Jean Popeau, a Dominican by birth who, around the time that the Banners took the plunge by relocating to Spain, was plotting his own escape from the UK. Popeau had arrived in London as a child in 1957, living on the Isle of Dogs and attending a local school where he encountered ‘the usual racist remarks from the children and also from the teachers’. Pursuing his interest in Caribbean culture through evening classes and part-time study, Popeau visited Dominica in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, at which point he resolved to return for good. ‘It starts as a vague wish and then you have to keep questioning yourself and think how am I going to do this’, he told an oral history interviewer. In 2002, Popeau started buying land and, six years later aged sixty-two, said his final farewells, content to leave Britain’s materialist values and polluted cities behind. ‘I always felt a lack of an authentic relationship with nature in England’, he reflected, ‘you always feel a bit out of place. So I think I see my return here as spiritually uplifting. . . . The alternative of living in England in retirement would not have suited me – this has been a much more dynamic retirement.’Footnote 2
Robert and Jan Banner and Jean Popeau were different faces of a new phenomenon taking root across the Global North in the late millennium. Emigration, long assumed to be the preserve of younger age groups, was increasingly the choice of the recently or soon-to-be retired. Quantifying this movement is difficult due to the patchiness of data and the fluid status of older migrants, who have been counted and categorised in multiple ways. It remained the case that the old were less likely to emigrate than the young; if retirement prompted a move, most relocated within their nation-states.Footnote 3 Nevertheless, the uptick in transnational mobility was significant and the favoured destinations for Britons, who form the focus of this article, were changing. One imperfect but indicative measure is the number of British state pensions paid to recipients abroad. This rose sharply across the 1980s and totalled 763,000 by 1997.Footnote 4 A decade later, the figure was over one million.Footnote 5 The largest populations of British pensioners were found in the ‘old’ Commonwealth countries of Australia and Canada, followed by the United States; yet growth was fastest in southern Europe, where British retirees, alongside their German, Dutch and Scandinavian counterparts, were snapping up French cottages, Tuscan farmhouses and villas on the Costa del Sol.Footnote 6 In Spain alone, the number of British pensioners more than doubled between 1997 and 2005 from 34,000 to 71,000, rising to nearly 100,000 by the end of the decade. Britain’s former colonial territories also fed this trend. In Jamaica, there were more than 22,000 British pensioners in 1997, the majority having retired after working lives in the UK. A decade on, close to two and a half thousand British pensioners were living in Bangladesh and twice that number in India and Pakistan apiece.Footnote 7
This picture of transnational movement from or within the Global North points to the ways in which ageing as a dynamic process forged new migrant experiences in the later twentieth century, confirming anthropologist Megha Amrith’s observation that ‘people do not stop living, aspiring, moving, and changing in the later phases of their lives’.Footnote 8 The first part of this article explores the historical forces that brought the dream of retiring in the sun within reach of ever greater numbers of Britons. Overseas migration became a ‘retirement imaginary’: a lens through which individuals could envisage future selves unburdened by the pressures of paid work.Footnote 9 While older ethnic minority citizens often lacked the forms of wealth that facilitated moves abroad, the evidence shows that this was not universally the case. As well as acquiring property and pension rights in the UK, some black and South Asian Britons purchased or inherited land in their countries of origin, facilitating a comfortable retirement in parts of the world where the cost of living was comparatively cheap, a factor that also lured many white Europeans to the Mediterranean coast.
Yet if the expansion of retirement migration turned fantasy into reality for many, it did so in ways that reveal processes of racialisation at work, and it is these that the rest of the article brings into focus. The mobilities of white retirees and of black and South Asian returnees in this period have been studied separately, obscuring the historically specific, racialised connections between them. In the 1990s and 2000s, scholars interested in the movement of older migrants to southern Europe conceptualised their subject as one of ‘lifestyle’ or ‘amenity’ retirement. Karen O’Reilly, author of a pioneering ethnography of the British in Spain (and the sociologist who interviewed the Banners in Andalucia), defined lifestyle migration as ‘the relocation of people within the developed world searching for a better way of life’.Footnote 10 For such migrants, consumption and leisure, rather than production and labour, took centre stage, with sunshine providing the essential backdrop.Footnote 11 Britain’s loss of empire and membership of the European Community from 1973 were recognised as important contexts for these transnational movements of mostly white people; yet this scholarship rarely, if ever, paid attention to the motives and situations of older black and South Asian citizens who were leaving the UK in the same historical moment.Footnote 12
Instead, these latter groups were studied by scholars of race and diaspora, who took their cue from Muhammad Anwar’s classic 1979 work, The Myth of Return. Anwar showed how Pakistani migrants nurtured a vision of permanent and prosperous return to the ‘homeland’ following an interval of earning and saving in the UK.Footnote 13 Versions of this story, in which the country of birth always hovers in view, calling the migrant back from his or her sojourn, have been crafted by other diasporic communities across Europe, nurturing a sense, as Clair Wills puts it, of living ‘in a third space’ or dwelling ‘in several places at once’.Footnote 14 For most, the myth of return was never realised, but some ageing black and South Asian Britons, as noted, did choose to uproot one more time, and their experiences attracted scholarly attention.Footnote 15 This work drew on concepts of circular migration, in which the post-war move to Britain became a transitory phase of a longer journey that curved irresistibly back to the homeland. Margaret Byron subtitled her 1994 book on Nevisians in Leicester The Unfinished Cycle.Footnote 16 Hasmita Ramji used a similar framing in her early 2000s study of London-based Gujarati returnees, for whom ‘the point of original departure was sought . . . as the point of end settlement’.Footnote 17
Given these very different contexts for leaving Britain, why put the later-life mobilities of the white retiree and the black or South Asian returnee in the same analytical frame? One answer has already been suggested in the aspirational character of overseas migration as a shared retirement imaginary. For another, let us return to Robert Banner’s complaint about there being ‘too many blacks’ in Britain and Jan’s racialised fear of crime. Few stated the matter as baldly as the Banners, yet, as the analysis below will show, anxieties about muggings, burglaries and even murder were frequently expressed by white Britons when asked to account for their decision to migrate. Accompanying such statements were contrasts drawn between the self-sufficient, uncomplaining British migrant in Europe and the undesirable foreigner sponging off the welfare state at home. As Stuart Hall wrote of an earlier moment in which ‘coloured immigration’ became a symbol of national disorder:
Race is the lens through which people come to perceive that a crisis is developing. It is the framework though which the crisis is experienced. It is the means by which the crisis is to be resolved – ‘send it away’.Footnote 18
Luke de Noronha uses this passage to shine critical light onto the criminalisation and deportation of young Jamaican men under the ‘hostile environment’ policies of the Coalition government in the 2010s.Footnote 19 I borrow Hall’s words to reveal the racialised dynamics of the retirement migration of the preceding decades. To ‘send it away’, I suggest, could involve one’s own voluntary removal to a place of greater safety, where the dangers of the multiracial inner city have retreated and the elderly still command respect.
For white Britons, Europe – or rather, an idealised version of it encountered through leisure travel – came to represent such a place. We might read this as expressive of the ‘postcolonial melancholia’ that Paul Gilroy identified as a major current within British culture around the turn of the millennium: a pathological failure to deal collectively with the nation’s violent imperial past and ‘the irreversible fact of multiculture’ in the present.Footnote 20 Yet dreams of escape filled the retirement imaginaries of black and South Asian returnees too. They also feared growing old in a society disordered by modernity, but they configured it differently in terms of racist violence and white hostility, from which they sought their own safe havens. Disenchantment with Britain was also a push factor for younger emigrants.Footnote 21 Nonetheless, ageing offers a crucial analytical lens onto these mobilities because escape carries different stakes at fifty-five or sixty than it does at twenty-five or thirty, involving decisions about where to spend one’s final years: where, potentially, to die.Footnote 22
As the final section of the article reveals, retirees did not find the resolution that they longed for in leaving Britain behind. Migration meant becoming a foreigner in someone else’s country, an uncomfortable experience for many older Britons in Europe and one that took returnees by surprise, believing themselves to be coming ‘home’. Affluent migrants often found themselves targeted by criminals, a situation prompting collective organisation by returnees in Jamaica and Barbados, and complex discursive strategies by white Britons to defend the aspirational retirement narrative in which they were emotionally invested. To ‘send it away’ by taking oneself away did not resolve the crisis because ‘the crisis’, it turned out, was everywhere.
The article recovers the worlds of the migrant retiree through a critical reading of qualitative data produced by social scientists, published oral histories and ethnographic studies and press and media sources. The available material slants towards the two most prominent groups of globally mobile British retirees: those bound for Spain and for the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. For these migrants the article offers the fullest analysis, while providing comparisons and contrasts with other groups whose mobilities deserve deeper research. Although centring Britons, the analysis brings into focus intersections of migration, ageing and racialisation that speak to how European societies have more broadly been remade by mass immigration, demographic change and ‘neoliberal’ welfare states in the past half-century.Footnote 23 The concluding section offers some reflections on where historians might take this agenda in the future.
The Overseas Retirement Imaginary
‘Thanks to the jet plane, better roads, the free frontiers of the sixties’, journalist Cecil Chisholm wrote in his 1961 handbook, Retire into the Sun, ‘you can now look further afield for a “paradise” for your later years’.Footnote 24 Andalusia in Spain, the Eastern Riviera and Languedoc of France, Portugal, the Spanish Canaries and the Channel Islands offered, in Chisholm’s view, ‘most of what the average Anglo-Saxon retirer wants’.Footnote 25 Chisholm’s target readership was the middle or lower-middle classes for whom relocation in retirement might have ordinarily meant a rural cottage or bungalow by the sea. With growing coverage of occupational pensions and home ownership amongst these groups, such migrations turned coastal towns including Bournemouth, Bexhill, Morecombe and Llandudno into retirement hotspots during the post-war years.Footnote 26 In such places, the proportion of over–sixty-fives topped a third by the early 1970s, nearly three times the national average.Footnote 27 Despite Chisholm’s encouraging words, these domestic destinations did not face serious competition from overseas alternatives. While there were savings to be made from living cheaply on the continent, acquiring property abroad was fraught with bureaucratic difficulty, including strict currency controls. Those responding to Chisholm’s call were for the most part a select group of the well educated and much travelled, which included the ‘small British colony of ex-generals, masters of hounds and City men’ buying up holiday homes in the Portuguese Algarve, and professionals like Derek, a surgeon who ‘fell in love’ with Chianti in Italy during a business trip and quickly acquired a ‘ruin’ to renovate and retire to.Footnote 28
This picture began to change through the interaction of several factors, the first of which was the dramatic growth of mass overseas tourism. Just as fond memories of family holidays drew retirees to domestic seaside resorts, so did Mediterranean package tours nurture visions of sun-kissed retirements amongst those approaching older age.Footnote 29 Alongside their north European counterparts, five million Britons holidayed abroad in the mid-1960s, with Spanish coastal resorts leading the market.Footnote 30 Travel operators and hoteliers competed to attract singles, young couples and families, while making provision for older holidaymakers, who could take advantage of off-season discounts, especially after the lifting of licensing restrictions in 1971.Footnote 31 With a month in winter costing just £28 for flight, bed and board, one retirement expert observed that ‘it almost pays for you to go on holiday to Spain or Majorca’.Footnote 32 Companies specialising in travel for the over-sixties flourished. Founded in the 1950s at a seaside hotel in Folkstone, SAGA was whisking a quarter of a million British pensioners off on overseas tours by the 1980s. ‘It is still an expanding market and we have barely scratched the surface’, the company’s founder, Sidney de Haan, told Choice, a magazine aimed at retirees.Footnote 33 The British photographer Trevor Clark captured his compatriots at play during the early era of package holidays to Spain. Amongst colourful images of families by the pool and tanned twenty-somethings on the beach are striking portraits of older holidaymakers raising a glass in the bar or enjoying a turn on the dance floor.Footnote 34
A holiday break under the Spanish sun was, of course, a very different proposition from long-term relocation, and this gathered force as a result of two further, dynamically interrelated developments: the growing affluence of a large section of older Britons and the greater affordability of overseas property. When Chisholm wrote his 1961 handbook, the majority of working-class retirees were scraping by on small state pensions, occasionally supplemented by an employer-provided pension or tiny savings that were quickly exhausted.Footnote 35 The sociologist Peter Townsend estimated that as many as one in five of Britain’s older population was living in poverty in the late 1970s, and another two-fifths were on the margins of it, including many widows with inferior or non-existent pension rights.Footnote 36 Yet as younger cohorts – post-war beneficiaries of full employment, rising wages and opportunities for home ownership – entered retirement, the political economy of old age shifted. By the early 1990s, nearly two-thirds of those aged between sixty-six and seventy were homeowners, while three-fifths of pensioner households received income from private pensions.Footnote 37 Across the period 1977 to 2016, the mean gross income of retired households tripled in real terms, with private pensions accounting for more than half of the growth.Footnote 38 While relative poverty remained a persistent problem, significant numbers of working-class retirees evaded it, including millions of public sector workers covered by secure, inflation-proofed pension schemes. The Right to Buy policy introduced by the Conservative government in 1980 made it easier for council tenants to purchase their homes with market discounts, which some older Britons did using lumps sums from a relatively generous redundancy or early retirement package.
As a result, more retirees found themselves in possession of a significant asset that might, in principle, finance an overseas move, the costs of which fell as new developments sprouted along the Mediterranean coast and rural depopulation in France and Italy made ‘ruins’ like the one snapped up by Derek in Chianti ever more affordable. Spain’s rapid modernisation after the death of dictator Franco in 1975 fuelled further tourism and boosted numbers of foreign homeowners, of which there were 1.3 million in 1990.Footnote 39 A similar pattern occurred in Portugal after the return of democratic elections in 1976, following the military coup staged two years earlier.Footnote 40 Buying and selling property was also eased by the creation of the internal market within the European Economic Community (EEC), which Britain joined in 1973, followed by Greece (1981), Spain and Portugal (1986). Retirement migration to southern Europe was highly sensitive to fluctuations in the UK housing market, with a short-term lull during the recession of the early 1990s, when falling property prices prevented some would-be migrants from financing a desired move.Footnote 41 Attentive readers could track these movements through the expanding overseas property sections of newspapers, or take the bolder step of signing up for an inspection tour laid on by developers free of charge. With the rise of ‘no frills’ airlines following deregulation of European civil aviation in the early 1990s, it became even simpler to book a cheap flight and check out your potential future home unaided.
As noted, no data source maps the scale of the retirement migration phenomenon precisely. According to the International Passenger Survey, the annual figure of British emigrants of pensionable or late working age averaged 24,500 across the 1980s and early 1990s.Footnote 42 State pension data reveals hundreds of thousands of British pensioners living overseas in these decades, although it is not possible to disaggregate from these figures those who migrated at an earlier life-stage or foreign nationals with pension rights accrued from periods of employment in Britain. It seems likely that such groups comprised a significant proportion of pensioner populations in the United States, Australia, Canada and Ireland, where retirement migration from Britain did not appear to be occurring on a large scale in the later twentieth century.Footnote 43
By contrast, there is little doubt that southern Europe became a key destination for retirees, although even here the statistical picture is complicated by varied residential patterns and high rates of non-registration with local authorities. The European Commission’s official count found that 86,000 Britons (of all ages) were living permanently in Spain in 1991, whereas the British Embassy’s estimate for 1995 – using the more capacious category of anyone living in Spain for at least part of the year – topped 300,000, of which approximately half were aged fifty or older.Footnote 44 King et al.’s major study of retirement migration, Sunset Lives (2000), calculated the size of the British population in the Portuguese Algarve at 10,000 and in Tuscany at 4,000 in the mid-nineties, about half of whom were of retirement age.Footnote 45
As the scale of retirement migration expanded, so too did the socio-economic profile of the retiree population broaden. Making an overseas move did not, by any means, become a choice available to all. Two-thirds of the migrants surveyed in Sunset Lives had held professional or managerial jobs and fewer than one in ten had retired from manual occupations.Footnote 46 In fieldwork with Britons living in south-west France, Michaela Benson noted how ‘the economic capital to leave Britain and purchase property elsewhere’ was a crucial prerequisite for mobility, although she also emphasised how the ‘symbolic capital’ that they had accumulated as members of the British middle classes gave these better-off migrants confidence that their life projects would succeed.Footnote 47 Ethnographic studies supply ample evidence of retirees asserting distinction through the location and style of their homes, and through performative efforts to integrate with the customs of the host country (a theme to which the article returns). But this kind of cultural work was arguably more necessary by the 1990s because of the ways in which travel and migration within Europe had been democratised. While only a minority of King et al.’s sample were manual labourers at the point of retirement, a full half had left school at or before fourteen, suggesting that many were beneficiaries of post-war social mobility, moving into white-collar jobs over the course of working life.Footnote 48
The increasingly mixed social character of British overseas communities caught the attention of journalists, dramatists and television producers, for whom the retiree migrant offered a novel and intriguing subject. A Radio 4 afternoon play broadcast in 1983 featured as its protagonist a former Windmill Theatre showgirl who decides to retire to Spain.Footnote 49 The BBC television drama Eldorado, which ran for one series in 1992–3, was devised by the team behind long-running soap Eastenders and, in a similar fashion, depicted a tightly knit working-class community newly emplaced on the Costa del Sol. Channel 4’s property show, A Place in the Sun, featured Britons from across the social spectrum pursuing lives overseas in the early 2000s. They included Bill Gilroy, a former cabbie from east London, and wife Linda, a retired secretary, who were seeking an ‘olde worlde’ home in the Spanish Algarve.Footnote 50 Another episode followed former pub landlords Bob and Ann Wall as they hunted for an apartment on the Costa del Sol, meeting Gina and Tony, retired bus-drivers from Bournemouth and newly resident in Malaga, along the way.Footnote 51
Shows like Eldorado and A Place in the Sun carved a space for overseas migration in the retirement imaginary of Britons in the late twentieth century. The vision of spending your golden years abroad acquired a cultural throw that reached far beyond the fraction of the population who actually made such a move.Footnote 52 There was undoubtedly a voyeuristic element at work. Britons could witness the drama of uprooting in one’s sixties playing out in other people’s lives and ask themselves whether they would be brave, or foolish, enough to do the same. Media depictions were not universally upbeat, frequently dwelling upon the tragedy of financial misfortune or disappointed hopes. The BBC consumer affairs show Watchdog ran a special report in 1989, when the housing market was moving into recession, on Brits in the Costa Brava ‘who sold up for a sunny retirement and now stand to lose their only home’.Footnote 53 Four years later, the Times featured the story of Dennis and Kathleen Horn from Barnsley, who were having ‘an awful time’ in Los Bolichos, where the value of their pensions and property had fallen precipitously following a plunge in exchange rates.Footnote 54 A more nuanced picture was presented in Coast of Dreams, a 1992 television documentary about the British on the Costa del Sol, which depicted the mixed emotions of a retired couple, Ernest and Doreen, as they moved from the thrill of feeling ‘like film stars’ in their new apartment complex to teary-eyed homesickness and eventual recognition that they would need to learn Spanish and make a greater effort to integrate with local residents.Footnote 55
These images of later-life migration fed the wider cultural discourses of active ageing, which were reframing older age in terms of opportunity and choice by the millennium.Footnote 56 Such ideas had been incubated from the 1950s by self-styled ‘pre-retirement’ experts and advice literature of the kind penned by Chisholm, but they found fullest expression in the late-twentieth century concept of the ‘Third Age’.Footnote 57 Popularised in Britain by such figures as the historian Peter Laslett, the Third Age became a shorthand for the ways in which improvements in health, material security and education were transforming the lives of older people. Laslett’s influential book, A Fresh Map of Life, described the Third Age as ‘an era of personal fulfilment’, arrived at following the first age of childhood socialisation and the second age of employment and family formation.Footnote 58 It was marked by freedom, creativity and self-actualisation, values animating the University of the Third Age (U3A), a participatory adult education organisation which Laslett cofounded in 1981.Footnote 59 The adventurous and aspirational outlook of the overseas retiree dovetailed perfectly with the Third Age ethos. The authors of Sunset Lives described the ‘innovative residential settings and lifestyles’ of the migrant retiree as proof of ‘new, positive and developmental ambitions among older people’ across a broad social spectrum.Footnote 60 One migrant interviewed by O’Reilly enthused about the U3A branch in Marbella, where she was learning Spanish and studying Egyptology.Footnote 61
The Myth of Return
If the profile of Britons retiring to southern Europe became increasingly mixed in terms of social class, the same could not be said of race. In part, this reflected post-war patterns of leisure travel: black and South Asian Britons, if they could afford to make overseas trips, were more likely to visit family in the homeland than book a package to Majorca or a gîte in the Dordogne.Footnote 62 This would begin to change in the 2010s, when younger, likely British-born, black and South Asian Britons, including mixed-race couples, appeared on A Place in the Sun seeking homes in Spain and Italy.Footnote 63 Their parents and grandparents, by contrast, nursed dreams of returning to their countries of birth, now newly independent former colonies, a phenomenon that barely featured in the advice literature or media representations of later life mobility described above.Footnote 64 Quite how seriously this desire was felt amongst this generation of ethnic minority citizens is hard to judge. As widely documented in studies of Commonwealth migration, most of those arriving in Britain in the post-war decades expected to return long before reaching old age. ‘People thought England was paved with gold’, recalled Frankly George, one of Jean Popeau’s Dominican compatriots. ‘We thought we’d go for five years, make our kill and come back home.’Footnote 65 Yet for most, things did not work out that way. As Nancy Foner observed in her early 1970s study of Jamaicans in London, migrants did not want ‘to return as “they come”’, and many struggled to build the capital necessary to invest in land, property or a small business in the homeland.Footnote 66 Racial discrimination in labour markets locked workers of colour out of better-paid jobs and put them at higher risk of unemployment.Footnote 67 What earnings they made were quickly exhausted by exploitatively high rents and an obligation to send regular remittances, including to grandparents caring for children at home.Footnote 68
For many, this pushed plans to return into older age, where disadvantages experienced during working life were compounded in retirement. Research carried out by Age Concern and the Runnymede Trust from the 1980s revealed that few Commonwealth citizens qualified for the full state pension and a much higher proportion relied on supplementary benefits than was the case for their white counterparts.Footnote 69 Later studies noted how high rates of self-employment put Pakistanis and Bangladeshis at a particular disadvantage as regards access to secure pension income.Footnote 70 In the early 2000s, weekly pensioner incomes amongst ethnic minority groups were still around a fifth lower than those of white pensioners.Footnote 71 These economic risks interacted with racialised health inequalities, placing a triumphant return to the homeland even further out of reach for many. High rates of chronic ill-health were found amongst some South Asian groups, exacerbated by decades of heavy manual labour and poor housing conditions.Footnote 72 Despite the racism often encountered from staff and the lack of culturally sensitive service provision, ethnic minority citizens were reluctant to lose access to the National Health Service (NHS), conscious of the inferiority or high costs of healthcare in their countries of birth. In some cases, returnees reversed their decision for this reason. Charlotte retired to Jamaica in 1994 but ‘found it difficult to go to be paying doctors’ bills for medication’, prompting a move back to the UK.Footnote 73 British migrants in Europe experienced similar anxieties, and some did return when serious illness struck.Footnote 74 Yet as EU citizens, they were entitled to use the modern healthcare systems of their host countries and could, if they preferred, travel regularly to Britain to use NHS services. O’Reilly noted that non-registration with local authorities in Spain was often motivated by a desire to retain access to the NHS.Footnote 75 In the 1990s, Guiana-born Labour MP Bernie Grant sought to tackle this inequality through a controversial proposal for financial assistance from the British state, covering health and social care, to help older Jamaicans to return to their island of birth.Footnote 76
Geographical proximity and ease of travel put British retirees in Europe at a further advantage, as children and grandchildren were never far away. ‘In my mind, I’m that near to that airport there and I can be there in two and half hours’, one woman told O’Reilly. ‘If something happened and somebody rang today I could be back by tomorrow.’Footnote 77 Larger properties were purchased with a view to hosting regular visitors, while the wealthiest migrants maintained houses in both countries and moved freely between them. It was not impossible, as we will shortly see, for Commonwealth returnees to do the same. Yet ethnic minority Britons were more fearful about ageing without family at hand, and it was this consideration that convinced many to give up on their hopes of return. Nevisians in Leicester told Byron that relatives in the homeland could not be expected to provide eldercare after such a long absence. ‘Those young ones don’t know us and won’t feel bound to help old people who were not around to look out for them when they were kids. We are best staying here where our children are.’Footnote 78 Older South Asians clung hardest of all to the belief that children in Britain would provide informal care. Pakistani-born Baba Quyuum, living in Oldham, declared: ‘home is where your family is. Most of my family are here, why do I want to go and live there? Yes of course I miss my land, but then what are we to do?’Footnote 79
Affluent Returnees
Despite these considerable economic, physical and emotional barriers, a minority of Commonwealth migrants did realise the dream of return in later life. As with Britons in Europe, their numbers are difficult to map precisely. Allowing for deaths, Byron estimated that Britain’s Caribbean-born population declined by 27,000, or roughly 9 per cent, between 1981 and 1991, likely accounted for by return migration.Footnote 80 The Jamaican government started counting returning residents from 1993, in which year almost a thousand citizens arrived from Britain, and some 7,800 had returned by 2001, the majority making the move as retirees.Footnote 81 In its 2008 Global Brit report, the IPPR think-tank estimated that sixteen to eighteen thousand Indian-born Britons lived at least part of the year in their country of birth, in addition to the twelve thousand or so British pensioners based permanently in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.Footnote 82
These returnees were distinguished by their relative affluence, achieved through a combination of purposefully pursued economic strategies, public sector pensions and family wealth. Some of the earliest Caribbean returnees included older migrants travelling home with recently acquired capital to buy land and build houses. Chatting to passengers on a ship headed to Jamaica in 1968, researcher Orlando Patterson met two men in their fifties who were each planning to establish farms, having spent six and eight years respectively earning in Britain.Footnote 83 Men without (or unaccompanied by) families could economise on housing costs and live frugally, allowing savings to accumulate. One Jamaican was questioned by his British workmates as to why he did not own a car: ‘Why have a car? To look at? I keep my money and hold it’, was his reply.Footnote 84 Janet Heath, a Dominican returnee, recalled how her father did ‘lots of odd jobs’ on arriving in London in the 1950s and was able to buy two houses to rent to fellow migrants before sending for his family to join him.Footnote 85 Purchasing property was often enabled by community-based systems of credit leading to joint ownership, although it was not impossible for those with stable salaries to obtain mortgages from banks.Footnote 86 The quality of the properties available was generally poor, comprising cramped terraced dwellings in run-down inner-city areas, and much of the drive to buy amongst migrants was the result of exclusion from better-maintained rented council housing.Footnote 87 By the mid-1990s, ethnic minority Britons were still less likely to own homes: 55 per cent of white pensioners were owner-occupiers, compared to 42 per cent of Indians, 39 per cent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and 33 per cent of Caribbeans.Footnote 88 Nonetheless, as house prices shot up in the late 1980s and the market rose again from the mid-1990s, even small inner-city homes, in many cases improved and extended, became significant assets, giving ethnic minority retirees greater choices.
Occupational pensions extended that choice further for a sizeable minority. Thirty-two per cent of Caribbean retirees were in receipt of such pensions in the mid-1990s, mostly acquired through well-unionised public sector employment, and over half of all working-age Caribbeans were covered by such schemes.Footnote 89 Because they were likely to be working full- rather than part-time, membership of pension schemes amongst black women was higher than for white women and nearly matched the level achieved by white men.Footnote 90 Some post-war migrants specifically sought jobs with good pensions – ‘that’s why I ended up with London Transport’, explained one Dominican returnee – and stayed in them until retirement or an attractive redundancy package came along.Footnote 91 Another Dominican, Francis Edwards, started with Ford motors at the age of twenty-six and left at sixty-four – ‘when I got the handshake’ – using his retirement lump sum to build a house on the piece of land where he grew up.Footnote 92 Byron met two Barbadians who invested their early retirement payouts from a British airline in luxury holiday rentals, producing a useful income stream for old age.Footnote 93 Mike and Annie, a Trinidadian-born couple interviewed in the mid-1990s, encapsulated this affluent returnee trajectory. As well as owning houses in north London and Trinidad, both had good pensions – Mike’s from teaching, Annie’s from nursing – and a further property inherited by Annie that they rented out. Mike was four years retired and had recently purchased land not far from the beach on which he had built a house, planted coconut trees and was growing crops of tomatoes for sale. With some justification, Mike called this place his ‘Happy Hill’.Footnote 94
Escaping the Multiracial City
By placing British retirees to Europe in the same analytical frame as Commonwealth returnees, we gain a more complete picture of how ageing was reshaping patterns of global mobility in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Crucially, it becomes possible to see how black and South Asian Britons, although relatively disadvantaged, shared with their white counterparts aspirational imaginaries of later life, while an affluent minority helped to drive the new political economy of old age. Centring these experiences helps to expand the domain of the ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ within histories of race and migration and better integrate racialised minorities into wider narratives of social change in European societies.Footnote 95
Retirement migration was, nonetheless, a profoundly racialised phenomenon; indeed, it functioned as a site upon which processes of racialisation played out in particular ways. These sharpen in our vision as we shift the focus away from the positive allure of retiring into the sun and consider instead the array of negative forces compelling older people to quit Britain in these decades.
Foremost amongst these stood the desire to escape a country believed to be in moral decline, an idea articulated by white retirees through recurring narratives of urban danger. Despite a well-documented drop in crime rates across the nineties and noughties, stories of repeated burglaries and assaults appear frequently in the ethnographic sources.Footnote 96 One man told O’Reilly that he chose to migrate ‘because he was mugged, and a week before that he had seen someone else be mugged in a supermarket and everyone just walked past and ignored it’.Footnote 97 In her study of south-west France, Benson reported the experience of retiree Vivian, who had been ‘afraid to venture out into the streets at night’ and whose home in Britain had been repeatedly vandalised. Another couple described being broken into three times.Footnote 98 That crime was getting worse fed a broader ‘bad Britain’ discourse that O’Reilly found to be much favoured by Britons in Spain, who dwelt excessively on negative news stories in the British press, such as the shocking murder of toddler James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys in 1993.Footnote 99 A woman from Bristol tracked crime in her home city via satellite television reports, telling O’Reilly: ‘my God, you wouldn’t believe it. One guy just went round stabbing people for the sake of it. People ended up in hospital and all they were doing was sitting in their car.’Footnote 100 Given that public concern about crime was generally decreasing at this time in line with crime rates, these findings suggest that migrant retirees as a group were unusually exercised by this issue.Footnote 101
As Peter Mandler notes, ‘narratives of urban threat did not go away’ as gentrifying cities became safer, more highly securitised places, and those narratives were racialised.Footnote 102 The Banners, with whose story this article began, were unusual in directly naming the threat as ‘the blacks’. Yet racially coded tropes of criminal disorder abounded in mainstream media and political discourse in Britain, as first explored by Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s.Footnote 103 This discourse frequently elided distinctions between Commonwealth migrants, their British-born children and later arrivals grouped under the catch-all banner of ‘asylum seekers’, a term that came to connote illegality, as it did in other European nations.Footnote 104 Beginning with Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, in which a pensioner is terrorised daily by immigrants who have taken over her street, the white elderly were framed as especially vulnerable targets for these dangerous outsiders. It was telling that Deborah Moggach chose to portray a violent mugging perpetrated by two black youths against Muriel, one of the characters in her popular 2004 novel These Foolish Things, on which the hit 2011 film about white British retirees in India, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, was based.Footnote 105
It is in the light of such widely available cultural scripts that the racialised undertones of retiree claims about fleeing crime-ridden British cities become legible. Against a picture of domestic decline and disorder, Spain and rural France were imagined as ‘traditional’ societies in which communities remained cohesive and law-abiding. As one man told Benson: ‘It’s like stepping back into an England that you do remember as a child; it’s very much like 1950s/1960s England, our social and cultural norms . . . there’s more respect for the elderly built into the children’s culture . . . France represents something we’ve lost.’Footnote 106 Benson theorised such sentiments as reflecting ‘a racialized desire for the countryside, consolidated in the first place by the recognisable whiteness of the British countryside’.Footnote 107 One might push this analysis further, finding in her subject’s statement a coded description of an idealised England before multiculturalism: a plea, in Gilroy’s terms, for ‘a more manageable scale of community and social life’ and an impulse ‘to get back to the place or moment before the country lost its moral and cultural bearings’.Footnote 108
The considerable cognitive work involved in squaring this circle – of getting back by taking oneself away – emerged more explicitly when white Britons were asked to reflect on their own status as migrants in a foreign land. O’Reilly recorded a revealing conversation between a group of older women, one of whom argued that the Spanish authorities should provide more help to those who could speak only English. ‘Do they do that in England when Spanish people move there?’ her companion asked. ‘Well, I say no’, the first woman replied, ‘but if you’re Bangladeshi . . . they’ll offer services. In the cities’. ‘But we’re not immigrants’, the second woman said, ‘we choose to live here’, adding, less decidedly, ‘we’re not political refugees or . . .’ A third woman weighed in, agreeing that the British should provide their own translators. ‘We should take someone along to help us and be prepared to pay for it. It’s down to us really.’Footnote 109 This implicit contrast – between the self-sufficient Briton abroad and the undesirable foreigner sponging off the state at home – surfaced in other testimonies, such as that of Dan, a slightly younger migrant who had relocated to Fuengirola from Bradford, where ‘they were letting too many immigrants in, and giving them money’. By contrast, ‘I don’t ask for anything’, Dan insisted, taking the opportunity to vent his frustration at Spanish bureaucracy. ‘Now we go the other way in England, we translate everything into every bloody language.’ Dan’s wife was hoping to return some day, but not to Bradford. ‘The immigrants are causing problems and a lot of it is to do with drugs’, she said. ‘It’s just a typical city really.’Footnote 110
This picture of a British state bending over backwards to meet the needs of immigrants was deeply at odds with the realities of life for black and South Asian Britons, who had their own reasons for wishing to escape the dangerous city. Violence, or the threat of it, was never far away. As Stephen Brooke has shown, Bangladeshi residents of London council estates in the 1980s faced daily harassment, imprisoning women in their homes and forcing men to hire taxis and shop in large groups.Footnote 111 Police authorities failed to protect minoritised communities from racist and fascist thugs, or to bring the perpetrators of racially motivated murders, such as that of Kelso Cochrane in 1959 and Stephen Lawrence in 1993, to justice.Footnote 112 Given the context of what Kennetta Perry has described as ‘anti-Black state violence’ with roots planted deep in histories of imperial domination, it is not surprising that many older ethnic minority Britons longed for the familiar, welcoming places that they remembered from childhood.Footnote 113 For one of Ramji’s Gujarati interviewees, the homeland was ‘where I can walk home in the dark and not be scared of encountering gangs of white, drunken hooligans’, a striking counter-racialisation that identified Britain’s moral decline with disordered whiteness.Footnote 114 Bernie Grant drew a similar connection while fighting for his ‘Operation Safe Return’ scheme. Older Caribbean citizens who were ‘nervous about racists and fascists’ and who saw no future for their children except ‘the dole queue prison and the drug scene’ should be assisted, Grant argued, in pursuing their dreams of return.Footnote 115 Many ‘feel trapped in unhappy circumstances in the UK’, a later briefing spelled out, and it was ‘natural and common’ for older people to wish to spend what years they had left in their countries of birth.Footnote 116
Grant’s scheme foundered, probably due to a combination of the costs involved and opposition from Labour party colleagues and Black rights organisations, who accused him of playing into the hands of anti-immigration opinion. Repatriation was, after all, the official policy of the National Front and the British National Party, which gained its first council seat in 1993 in Millwall, an area of Bangladeshi settlement. Yet, as previously shown, tens of thousands of black and South Asian Britons staged their own exits, drawn by enticing visions of sunshine and comfort but driven too by fears of ageing in Britain. Just as white Britons conjured nostalgic visions of fifties England, returnees idealised their countries of birth as places of greater safety. It was common, one study of Caribbean returnees noted, for migrants ‘to develop and propagate myths of the Caribbean as a place with economic and racial equality, with a deep sense of community caring and civic pride where everyone knows everyone and everybody looks out for everybody.’Footnote 117 Such migrants were also seeking to ‘get back’ to a place beyond the troubling modernity of multiracial Britain, where retirement would be ‘spiritually uplifting’, to borrow Jean Popeau’s phrase. The reality, as migrant retirees soon discovered, was rather more complicated.
The English Abroad
Britons retired abroad for a multitude of reasons. Racialised visions of escape moved in and out of focus in the retirement imaginary alongside aspirations for a better way of life. But whatever the exact balance between these push-and-pull factors, older Britons who uprooted by moving abroad were keen to present the decision to migrate as a resounding success: to researchers, to other migrants and perhaps also to themselves. This required discursive strategies. As a corollary to the ‘bad Britain’ trope, O’Reilly detected a reluctance amongst her interviewees to admit to any negative thoughts about their adoptive country, especially in the company of fellow Britons. She was told repeatedly of how Spain was ‘a happy place to be because of the wonderful Spanish people with their friendly natures, their ready acceptance of foreigners, the importance they give to family and responsibility, the way they respect their elderly, and their obvious love of children’.Footnote 118 Evidence to the contrary was not much dwelt upon. Despite well-publicised warnings about burglaries and car theft targeting tourists and holiday homeowners, O’Reilly’s trio of older women identified crime as a problem mostly existing elsewhere, in mass tourists spots such as Torrevieja, and with outsiders – ‘a lot of Middle Eastern’, as one of the three put it – largely to blame.Footnote 119 The Bristol woman fixated by stabbings back home laughed at how her neighbours in Spain had ‘everything locked and bolted’ and rationalised a compatriot’s experience of losing his tools after leaving them unattended in the street. ‘But you can’t wonder at that can you?’ she mused. ‘I mean that was just careless. Someone had just lifted them.’Footnote 120
Where conflict arose between Brits and Spanish locals, migrants tended to hold short-term holidayers responsible, from whom they differentiated themselves by attaching negative class signifiers to these disruptive visitors, such as the wearing of ‘kiss me quick’ hats or the frequenting of fish and chip shops.Footnote 121 Some expressed concerns that the ‘wrong type’ of foreigners were coming to Spain: people with tattoos who sat drinking in the street and allowed their children to run wild. ‘Some of them are just bums you know’, as one interviewee put it.Footnote 122 Migrants, by contrast, were held to be respectful towards Spanish culture and made serious efforts to integrate. A retired couple, Adrian and Rose, explained to O’Reilly how they established a multilingual performing arts society shortly after the arrest in 2003 of a British man, Tony King, for the murder of two young women in Malaga. Their aim was to encourage greater mixing and enrich the cultural life of the town, ‘cos you just felt you really wanted to do something’, said Rose, ‘and say it’s not us’, added Adrian.Footnote 123
Nonetheless, initiatives of this kind were relatively rare. Instead, Britons in Spain created their own inward-looking communities centred on English language newspapers, satellite television, pubs and annual events such as Remembrance Sunday.Footnote 124 One of O’Reilly’s slightly younger interviewees, forty-six-year-old Sarah, expressed incredulity over the gardening club run by Brits in her town: ‘I mean, how English can you get? . . . These people seem to just want to create what they had back at home. It makes you wonder why they come really.’Footnote 125 Yet Sarah admitted that she hardly mixed with Spanish people outside of work and had made little progress in learning the language, a story much repeated in O’Reilly’s transcripts. Jan Banner had taken classes when she first arrived, but these were now paused while the house renovations were ongoing. ‘Most of us have come here later in life, and we don’t even know what a verb is!’ Jan joked. ‘I’ll get back to it when things calm down a bit.’Footnote 126
The situation of returnees was different insofar as most were relocating to countries familiar from childhood and holidays, where they retained nationality and full rights to reside. The governments of Jamaica and Barbados, independent from Britain since the 1960s and keen to diversify their economies and attract investment, set up units to provide services to returning residents and took a generous approach in offering citizenship to spouses and children born in Britain.Footnote 127 Yet those arriving home to the Caribbean after an extended absence found that they were regarded, if not quite as foreigners, then not quite as locals either, dubbed ‘the English’ by their compatriots. In Dominica, Jean Popeau received this treatment: ‘it’s shorthand for saying you don’t belong. They seem to recognise you’re English from your walk, your appearance. I’ve been called English in town without even opening my mouth.’ He added, ‘It’s a widely held view that you’re much better off – and that somehow you should be paying more.’Footnote 128
This was a common experience. Returnee testimonies are awash with complaints about customs duties and accounts of being swindled by tradespeople or tapped by family members for cash.Footnote 129 A study of Barbadian returnees found much discontent over their treatment by relatives and friends, who seemed only interested in gifts and fancy goods brought over from Britain.Footnote 130 ‘I think a lot of people in Dominica have this false idea that because you live in England you have tons of money’, commented Alexandra Sorhaindo, who moved back in 1989. ‘They don’t know that when in England you have to work very, very, very hard for every penny.’Footnote 131
In ways not dissimilar to the turning inward of British communities in Spain, this lack of understanding prompted many returnees to seek out each other’s company, organising around their status as returning residents by forming associations, of which some thirty local branches were active in Jamaica in the early noughties.Footnote 132 It was easier to socialise with people who understood ‘the work, the tribulations, the racism we experienced’, as Frankly Georges put it, as well as the returnee’s aspiration to live a better life. ‘Why should I go to England’, Georges asked, ‘live 46 years there, achieve a certain life and come back to Dominica and live in a shack, and lower my standard of living in order to be identified as a Dominican?’Footnote 133 Domestic comfort and privacy were highly prized, as reflected in the spacious steel and concrete houses that dotted the landscape around Mandeville, a ‘prosperous ghetto’ attracting many returning Jamaicans in the 1990s.Footnote 134 This stood in stark contrast to the dilapidated shanty towns in poorer areas and the slums of Kingston.Footnote 135 Despite their dislike of the ‘English’ label, Mandeville newcomers imported habits acquired in Britain, from tending neat lawns to tea-drinking in the afternoons.Footnote 136 Returning residents associations created spaces for the expression of hybrid identities acquired through long sojourns abroad. For Byron’s Barbadian interviewees, meeting together was like visiting ‘a pub or the Bingo back in England’.Footnote 137
A final, less cosy, sign of the returnee’s semi-outsider status was their targeting by criminals. The dream of retiring to a place of greater safety was rudely shattered for many newly returned Jamaicans, who found parts of their island overrun with gun-crime and gang warfare, fuelled by rising political corruption and drug trafficking in the decades since independence.Footnote 138 The Gleaner newspaper carried regular reports of violent attacks on returnees, in some instances occurring just hours after arrival on the island.Footnote 139 In Manchester parish, where Mandeville was located, fifteen murders occurred in the first six months of 2004, while 209 returnees, according to the president of the Returning Residents Association, were killed between 2000 and 2007.Footnote 140
Unlike the British in Spain, Jamaican returnees did not minimise their concern or conceal their disappointment. Joyce Cullen, a retired dressmaker, told the Gleaner that ‘constant fear of violence’ drove her back to London, a move delayed by problems selling her house due to crime in the neighbourhood.Footnote 141 The Association led calls for stronger police action, warning that high crime rates would deter Jamaicans overseas from bringing much needed skills, savings and pension wealth to the island.Footnote 142 In this conspicuous performance of respectability, returnees more closely resembled their counterparts in Spain. Just as British migrants sought distinction from the ‘wrong’ type of compatriot, so did returnees differentiate themselves from the ‘undesirables’ engaging in crime in Jamaica and abroad, the latter being deported in ever greater numbers from the UK and United States in the early 2000s.Footnote 143 Whatever the nature of the threat, escape, it seemed, was a never-ending process.
Conclusion
In analysing the experiences of white retirees and black and South Asian Britons together, the purpose of this article has been not to flatten out differences but rather to construct a fuller, more deeply historicised picture of later-life mobility in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It has sought to connect phenomena – retirement migration to southern Europe and Commonwealth return migration – that have been largely studied separately, making visible the forces reshaping old age in welfare-capitalist states such as Britain, as well as the ageing society’s profoundly racialised formations. More research is needed to tell this story in full, fleshing out the experiences of differently minoritised groups and following retirees to destinations only briefly noted here.Footnote 144
Nonetheless, the present article can offer some fresh ways to think about Britain’s identity as a post-imperial nation and the place of migration in Europe’s recent global history. Historians have studied the practices of exclusion and coercion underpinning European statehood at home and abroad over the long durée, as war, conquest and trade redrew maps and moved bodies across space. Since the nineteenth century, ‘bordering’ regimes and ‘emigration states’ have managed these transnational flows in ways that project state power and serve state goals. In the British imperial context, they have typically targeted the mobilities of bodies racialised as black or brown, while whiteness has enjoyed the privilege of unimpeded movement.Footnote 145 This dynamic was perpetuated by post-war immigration controls and Britain’s membership of ‘Fortress Europe’ from the 1990s, a decade in which Islamophobia surged across the continent.Footnote 146 The Windrush Scandal, which saw more than 160 black British citizens wrongfully detained or deported and hundreds more denied access to state benefits and medical care, is only the latest chapter of this story, born of the crude ‘hostile environment’ policies of the Coalition government.Footnote 147
The analysis presented in this article complicates this narrative by bringing into focus the agency of those wishing to get out of Britain, rather than to get in (and stay). While politicians were embedding new ‘processes of illegalization’ to protect the country’s borders in the 1990s and 2000s, older Britons were quietly leaving.Footnote 148 As demonstrated, retirement mobilities were by no means frictionless, but older bodies – black and brown, as well as white – appear to have pursued their overseas life projects without the active encouragement of states and relatively unhindered by exclusionary immigration regimes. Bringing retirees into histories of global Europe does not falsify the picture familiar from the established literature but instead nuances it in important ways, allowing us to see in sharper outline the social, cultural and economic processes that incubated the aspiration to be mobile – and not just for youthful or elite actors pursuing ‘cosmopolitan’ lifestyles via Erasmus schemes or Eurostar trains.Footnote 149 Ageing was a significant force in the movements of people within and beyond Europe in the late twentieth century, and one to which historians should attend more closely.
The Grey Escape did not end in the 2010s, but the particular version of it narrated in these pages acquired new features. Scholars studying the phenomenon began to place greater emphasis on migration as an economic strategy for later life, noting increasing flows from Britain to destinations in the global south, including Thailand and Malaysia.Footnote 150 The quest for a cheaper cost of living had exercised retirees before, but worries about financial risk – to private pension pots, housing assets and investments – were more frequently articulated, reflecting the mounting sense of precarity experienced by affluent older people in the wake of the 2007–8 Great Financial Crisis.Footnote 151 British retirees in Spain, whose numbers continued to grow, shared these financial fears, to which Brexit added fresh anxieties: about the falling pound; access to healthcare; and reciprocal arrangements that had allowed EU-dwelling Britons to receive uprated state pensions.Footnote 152
Meanwhile, the dream of return pursued by ageing Commonwealth migrants in the later twentieth century was reconfigured by their children in the twenty-first. Attachments fostered through extended holidays, handed-down family stories or examples set by returnee parents drew some of the younger generation to the ‘homeland’ long before retirement. Britain’s sluggish economy, inflated housing market and persistent racism ensured that many would not look back.Footnote 153 Perhaps the young man fired from Richard Banner’s kitchen in 2001 was amongst them. At whatever stage it occurred in the life-course, and from whichever racialised subject position, escape promised individuals a different future. This article is one attempt to understand its complex past.
Acknowledgements
I extend my grateful thanks to Michael Collins, Kieran Connell, Freddy Foks, Jean Smith and seminar audiences at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Oxford for their perceptive commentary on earlier versions of this paper, and to the journal’s editors and reviewers for further valuable feedback.
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