“A shameful, and nakedly racist, episode in our country's and city's history”
Since retiring, the 79-year-old makes the trip across the river and occasionally spends the day walking along the promenade at Seacombe. On a Monday afternoon crossing, while sitting in his usual seat tucked away in the corner on the lower deck, he looks out onto the Liverpool shoreline where he says his dad was forcibly deported in 1946.
Despite their efforts through the war, secret plans were drawn up in Whitehall in 1945 for the “compulsory repatriation of undesirable Chinese seamen”. Between 1945 and 1946, men were rounded up from boarding houses across the city or coerced onto ships berthed in the same Liverpool docks that can still be seen from the ferry crossing.
He was only two when his dad's deportation took place. He had believed his father had done a “runner” from he and his mum, Eleanor, when they were still living in Liverpool 8. “I thought he had disappeared,” he says, “my mum didn’t know what had happened to him.” Alongside figures like Yvonne Foley, he collated research about what happened to the deported Chinese Seamen and helped to raise the profile of the injustice Liverpool families experienced. He has been a prominent voice in calls for an apology from the Home Office in recent years but the battle to shed light on the truth appears to have been arduous.
As the campaign to uncover the truth went on, many steps in the journey can be traced through the paperwork in the boot of Peter Foo's car. Inside are folders filled with documents, interspersed with pictures of his dad and plans for a memorial garden, relating to Liverpool’s Chinese Seamen along with correspondence from multiple former Liverpool MPs, including Luciana Berger and Stephen Twigg.
“Although there is this great injustice that happened to these people's fathers,” says filmmaker Tom St John Gray, speaking to the ECHO, “there is hope still out there, hope that these people who are still on the search for understanding of where their family members have gone to. There is this possibility of finding extended family.
Until July 1946, a marriage to a British-born woman that had taken place during the war did not provide foreign men with a route to settlement in the UK, the report states. It added: "Chinese seamen were targeted for repatriation because their presence in Liverpool was seen at the time as disruptive because there was pressure to man ships for war operations in the Far East, and because this supported shipping companies’ ability to maintain a pool of cheap labour.
In October Judy will speak at a fringe event at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. The address will highlight the issue more widely among Labour Party members, while drawing on her Judy's own experience. Judy’s father, Chang Au Chiang, was one of those rounded up. She recalls conversations that were passed down to her from the wives and partners who were left in disarray.
Few pieces of information were also forthcoming from her mum. Many of the wives and partners left behind reportedly struggled to talk about what happened, instead carrying the pain of not knowing what happened. Judy is hopeful the truth may still emerge. There is also a desire to see a permanent memorial somewhere in the city which honestly reflects this part of the city’s past.
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