Italians in Wales and Their Cultural Representations: 1920s-2010s
by Bruna Chezzi
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, £41.90)

IN WALES there are fond memories of Italian cafes and ice-cream parlours. The Bracchis, Servinis, Sidolis and Gambarinis from Bardi in northern Italy were attracted to the coalmines and heavy industries of south Wales around the turn of the 19th century and those cafes and ice-cream parlours became a part of the valleys’ landscape.

They were popular meeting places for those with no wish to frequent pubs, “debating clubs” where a lemonade or hot cordial lasted a whole evening while the problems of the world were discussed. They provided a valuable service, surviving and even thriving through the 1930s depression.

Yet those positive contributions are tempered by a shocking episode which casts a shadow over Bruna Chezzi’s book. An Italian academic at Cardiff University, she is a founder member of the Arandora Star Memorial Fund for Wales which has been set up to keep historical memory alive.

After Mussolini brought Italy into the war on Hitler’s side in June 1940, Churchill ordered an indiscriminate round-up of Italians and Germans living in Britain.

On July 1 that year, the SS Arandora Star, an ex-passenger liner painted to look like a battleship, set sail. It was armed and, contrary to the Geneva Convention, bore no insignia indicating that it carried civilians. It left Liverpool for Canada with Italian and German internees, with the rest of the passengers officers, crew and military guards.

The following day it was sunk by a German U-boat with the loss of 805 lives, 470 of them Italians and 175 German.

Among them were 53 Welsh Italians, men from families who had migrated to Wales nearly a century earlier. It became the “unmentionable incident,” to the nations involved and doubtless it embarrassed the British authorities. But the deaths, humiliation, resentment and voluntary repression of events were traumatic to the Italian immigrant community.

The authorities, through such papers as the Western Mail and South Wales Echo, made their excuses by whipping up racist anti-Italian propaganda. The Italians were subjected to police brutality and their cafes attacked, looted and vandalised by neighbours, customers and “friends.”

Thus this book is much more than the story of the Arandora Star and its psychological effects on a community. More disturbingly, it lays bare the irrational racism that is the legacy of war.

Review by Gwyn Griffiths