Marriage or nationality, but not both!

My mother's choice, when I was born.

My mother was insistent that I should be born in England. She wasn’t married at the time, so in one way it was the only choice for her. I think she was more concerned at the time about her nationality if she married an alien and what would be my nationality if I was born abroad, married or not. From my mother’s point of view, her British nationality would give us stability, being born in England would entitle me to British nationality and being brought up speaking English would give me an important world language. She also perhaps wasn’t ready to get married and follow my father to who knows where. There was a story that they had some informal wedding ceremony in the Brussels Town Hall, which I always look at fondly when I am in Brussels.

She had rushed across the Channel to say goodbye to him. According to his Polish travel document (issued by the Polish Embassy in Brussels, valid for only a year from 27 June 1946), he had to emigrate, either to Palestine (meaning Israel in 1946/7) or Brazil, but it wasn’t valid for return to Poland. Palestine was apparently out of the question for him. There were several false alarms about his departure, when he thought he had found a boat, but eventually he was successful. (another episode about that coming soon).

In the meantime she had some time to clarify the legal situation about marriage to him. The legal situation was fortuitously just changing with regard to British nationality, and the previous law (1914) was being redrafted.

The 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens (BNSA) Act stated that “the wife of a British subject shall be deemed to be a British subject, and the wife of an alien shall be deemed to be an alien.” By this reenactment of an 1870 law, a British woman who married an alien became an alien herself, losing the rights and privileges accorded to British nationality.

The redrafted legislation passed by the United Kingdom was the British Nationality Act 1948. It marked the first time that married British women gained independent nationality, regardless of the citizenship of their spouses. The law came into force on 1 January 1949. She must have been aware of this, as she prepared with this affidavit to get my father a visa to come to England in September 1947.

This was clearly of vital importance to my mother, as my father’s nationality was written as “apatride” (stateless) and “doit emigrer” (must emigrate) in his Belgian papers in July 1947.

So until the 1948 Act came into force, if she married she would also become stateless. So it became a question of marrying in Belgium to become “a respectable woman” but losing her nationality, or remaining British and becoming an unmarried mother. Being a well-qualified nurse offered her access to good medical advice, though of course she had to leave her work, when the pregnancy was obvious.

So when I was born in November 1947, I was registered under my mother’s surname of Bridge. My father (who had returned from Brazil in the meantime) finally got a visa to come to the UK in February 1948, and they were married shortly afterwards, on 23 February 1948.

Although it was only for two months in the first case, he managed to extend it, with a permanent work permit by 1954, as this Aliens Certificate shows.

I got a new birth certificate in July that year, changing my surname to Kosmyryk, and showing my parents were married.

As a teenager (when we argued a lot) I always felt that my father had intended to escape to Brazil, and somehow my mother’s pregnancy had trapped him into returning to a very uncertain future. However, amongst the bundle of letters exchanged between my parents, my mother asks for a proposed name, and my father proposes the name of his mother (Helene). We also found the telegram to him announcing my birth (put in the proverbial safe place, and since disappeared), which he had kept safely till his death. After that, I felt reassured that he had wanted to return to Brussels and marry my mother in England.

However, he never naturalised, and kept his alien documentation. As a result, for some time, we had a regular visit from the police to check whether he was still living at the address. This made us different from the local kids in yet another way.

He travelled on a British travel document, which functioned like a passport for crossing borders and for returning to the UK, but with fewer and fewer rights as immigration got tougher. Perhaps he felt marriage and asylum was more important than nationality at the time. But I think he always felt more at home in Europe than in Britain.