Liverpool’s Chinese Seamen — The Forced Deportations of 1946

Liverpool’s Chinese maritime community

Liverpool’s Chinese community had grown from the city’s nineteenth-century trading connections with China.

The opening of regular shipping routes between Liverpool, Shanghai, Hong Kong and other Asian ports brought increasing numbers of Chinese sailors to the Mersey. Alfred Holt & Company, established in Liverpool in 1866, and its Blue Funnel Line became particularly important to this connection.

Chinese-run boarding houses, laundries, shops, cafés, restaurants and other businesses appeared around Pitt Street, Frederick Street, Nelson Street and Great George Square.

Some sailors stayed only while waiting for their next ship. Others made Liverpool their permanent home.

They married local women, raised children and became part of the multicultural dockside population that developed around the south docks. Liverpool’s Chinatown became recognised as the oldest established Chinese community in Europe.

When the Second World War began, Britain’s dependence on merchant shipping made Chinese crews more important than ever.

Serving Britain during the war

Thousands of Chinese merchant seamen sailed from Liverpool during the war.

They worked aboard vessels carrying oil, food, ammunition and other essential supplies. These ships crossed seas threatened by German U-boats, mines and aircraft.

Many Chinese crew members worked below deck in engine rooms, boiler rooms, kitchens and laundries. If a ship was torpedoed, the men below deck often had less chance of escaping than those working above.

Despite facing the same dangers, Chinese seamen were employed on significantly worse terms than their British counterparts.

Government research found that Chinese and other Asian seamen could initially receive between 25 per cent and half the pay of British sailors employed on British articles. Chinese crews were also denied the full standard war-risk bonus paid to British seamen.

In early 1942, members of the Liverpool Chinese Seamen’s Union went on strike over these inequalities.

A settlement that April brought a significant wage increase and entitlement to the standard war-risk bonus. However, Chinese seamen still did not achieve complete equality with British crews.

Their willingness to organise and challenge the shipping companies would later contribute to officials portraying sections of the community as troublesome or undesirable.

The meeting that changed everything

On 19 October 1945, shortly after the war had ended, government representatives met in Whitehall to discuss the future of Chinese seamen living in Liverpool.

Those present represented the Home Office, Foreign Office, Ministry of War Transport, Liverpool police and Liverpool’s immigration authorities.

The resulting Home Office file was given the chilling title:

“Compulsory repatriation of undesirable Chinese seamen.”

Its National Archives reference is HO 213/926.

The language recorded in official documents was openly prejudicial. Chinese seamen were described as a problem to be removed now that ports in China and elsewhere in the Far East had reopened.

The operation was driven by several overlapping interests.

The Government wanted foreign wartime workers and servicemen repatriated. The Ministry of War Transport still needed crews for ships travelling to the Far East. Shipping companies wanted to restore their pre-war system of recruiting Chinese sailors on lower overseas wage rates.

Alfred Holt proposed replacing the existing Liverpool crews with new recruits obtained in Hong Kong and Shanghai at considerably lower wages.

Removing Chinese seamen from Liverpool helped restore that cheaper labour system.

How the men were made to leave

The programme did not rely solely on formal deportation orders.

Relatively few Chinese sailors were deported through the full legal process. Instead, officials and shipping companies used several other methods to force or pressure men into leaving.

The landing conditions written on their immigration papers could be altered, requiring them to depart Britain by a particular date or aboard a specified ship.

Men who refused could then be threatened with a deportation order for breaching those conditions.

Plans were also made for Liverpool police to “round up” men who failed to report voluntarily. Surviving accounts describe searches of boarding houses and men being taken from Liverpool to waiting ships.

Other sailors were denied the right to work ashore or removed from the shipping companies’ employment pools.

Without work, they could not support themselves or their families.

Some were encouraged or ordered to sign on as crew aboard vessels travelling to China, Hong Kong, Singapore and other Asian ports. Once there, their contracts ended and they were discharged thousands of miles from Liverpool.

The Government-commissioned historical report later concluded that threats of deportation and deliberate lack of employment were forms of coercion.

It also found that the refusal of the main shipping companies to employ married Chinese men on British ships became another means of pressuring them to leave.

What do the numbers tell us?

The surviving records do not provide one complete list of everyone affected.

Some government files were destroyed. Company archives are incomplete. Passenger and crew lists used different spellings and transliterations of Chinese names.

No agency involved created a reliable master list of the men selected for repatriation or of those permitted to remain.

Home Office figures from July 1946 recorded 1,362 Chinese seamen repatriated as passengers and another 3,569 signed on as crew for discharge in the Far East.

That produces a total of 4,931 recorded departures by that point.

These figures must be treated carefully. They do not show that every man was physically seized or legally deported. Many sailors wanted to return home after years of dangerous wartime service.

However, they also do not show how many men agreed to leave only after losing their jobs, being threatened with deportation or being told that they had no future in Britain.

The later government report concluded that claiming every departure was voluntary would be disingenuous.

The Liverpool families left behind

Officials knew that some Chinese seamen had British wives, partners and children.

Liverpool marriage registers identify 197 marriages between Chinese seamen and British women from September 1939 to December 1946.

That figure cannot represent every affected family.

Many couples were unmarried, while others may have married outside Liverpool or after the period covered by the research. Their relationships and children were rarely recorded in official files.

Contemporary estimates suggested that between 150 and 200 women and their dependants may have been affected.

Marriage did not automatically give a foreign husband the right to remain in Britain. Under the nationality law of the time, a British woman who married a foreign man could also lose her British nationality and be expected to adopt her husband’s nationality.

In July 1946, the Home Secretary changed the policy so that foreign men who had married British-born women during the war could be considered for settlement, provided officials regarded them as suitable immigrants.

For some Liverpool families, that decision came too late.

Officials acknowledged that married men who might have qualified under the revised policy had already been sent away. No systematic attempt was made to identify them, contact them or help them return.

Fathers who appeared to vanish

Many wives were given no proper explanation for what had happened.

Some men left clothing, possessions and unpaid bills behind, suggesting that they had not planned to disappear permanently. Families continued waiting for letters or news that never arrived.

The resulting silence created the belief that the men had simply walked away.

Women who had lost their main source of income struggled to support their children. Some faced rejection from their own families because they had married Chinese men. Others experienced poverty, racism and social isolation.

A number of children were placed in care or adopted.

The emotional consequences continued throughout their lives. Children grew up angry with fathers they believed had abandoned them, only to discover decades later that those fathers may have been prevented from returning.

Yvonne Foley and the search for the truth

Yvonne Foley was born in Liverpool in February 1946.

Her biological father was Nan Young, a Shanghai-born ship’s engineer. He disappeared before he had the opportunity to meet his daughter.

For much of her life, Yvonne knew very little about what had happened to him.

The broadcast of the BBC North West documentary Shanghai’d in 2002 encouraged descendants to investigate the disappearance of Liverpool’s Chinese seamen.

Yvonne began studying records held at the Public Record Office—now The National Archives—and discovered the Home Office correspondence surrounding the repatriation programme.

Her research developed into a long search across government archives, shipping records, marriage registers and documents held in Britain, China, Australia, the Netherlands and the United States.

Other descendants joined the search.

Together they began reconstructing the histories of the missing men and the Liverpool families they had left behind. Their work revealed that what had appeared to be hundreds of individual family disappearances formed part of a coordinated official programme.

Yet many questions remain unanswered.

Incomplete records, inconsistent versions of Chinese names and the destruction of individual case files mean that some descendants may never learn exactly what happened to their fathers or grandfathers.

Recognition without a full apology

A memorial to the Chinese merchant seamen and their families was unveiled at Liverpool’s Pier Head on 23 January 2006.

Its inscription remembers the men who served Britain during both world wars, those who lost their lives and those who were required to leave after the wars. It also remembers the wives, partners and children who were left without answers.

In 2015, Liverpool City Council unanimously recognised the removals as a “profound injustice” and called upon the Government to acknowledge what had happened and issue an apology.

Following pressure in Parliament, the Home Office commissioned further historical research. That report confirmed that coercion had been used, including threatened deportation, altered landing conditions and the deliberate denial of employment.

It also acknowledged that some married men were made to leave and that no effort was made to help eligible men return after the rules changed in July 1946.

On 5 March 2026, Liverpool Riverside MP Kim Johnson again raised the issue in the House of Commons.

She called for a full debate, complete transparency, an unreserved apology and support for descendants still searching for information about their relatives.

The parliamentary response encouraged her to seek a further debate but did not announce the apology the families had requested.

Liverpool remembers

The Chinese merchant seamen were not temporary figures who existed outside Liverpool’s history.

They worked from its docks, lived in its streets, married local women and raised Liverpool-born children. During the war, they risked their lives helping to keep Britain supplied.

When their labour was no longer required on the same terms, official policy treated them as a problem to be removed.

The result was not simply the movement of workers from one port to another.

Families were separated. Children lost their fathers. Women were left without answers. A false story of abandonment survived for generations because the truth had been hidden inside official records.

The descendants have spent decades rebuilding that history.

They did not begin their search for revenge. They began because they wanted to know what happened to their fathers.

The remaining question is whether acknowledgement without an unreserved apology can ever be enough.