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Susan Cohen
University of Southampton
‘A British woman’s mission abroad
Doreen Warriner and the British Co
for Refugees from Czechoslovakia,

:
mmittee
1938 - 1939
This article, which combines war memory and
biography, provides an insight into the refugee work
undertaken in Prague between October 1938 and April
1939, by an English academic, Miss Doreen Warriner. The
starting point is Warriner’s decision, in the autumn of
1938 following the signing of the Munich agreement, to
abandon her academic travel plans and instead undertake
an unspecified humanitarian mission in Czechoslovakia.
Her role quickly became one of refugee activist, working
alongside like-minded people from Britain and elsewhere,
including many Quakers. zThis article describes the nature
of her work in organising the escape of political and other
refugees, and it highlights the personal risks she took as
well as some of the journeys she made. Most importantly
it recalls how she came to be appointed representative of
the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia
in December 1938, and of the support she received
from Robert Stopford, the British Treasury official in
Prague. Her personal recollections of this time, which
she recorded immediately upon her return to Britain in
April 1939, remained unpublished until some years after
her death in 1972. Had it not been for the persistence of
devoted friends and her sister-in-law, who ensured that
her short memoir was published in 1984, the story of
this woman who was responsible for saving the lives of
untold numbers of refugees, would have remained in the
shadows. 1
1 D.Warriner ‘Winter in Prague’, Slavonic and East European
Review (62) April 1984, 209-39
Article
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In October 1938, 34 year old Doreen Warriner,
anassistant lecturer in Economics at University
College, London decided to abandon her eagerly
awaited research project in Jamaica, in favour of
a humanitarian mission in Prague. She had no
clear idea of what she would do or find there. All
she knew was that, at a political level, she was
ashamed of Britain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia
as a result of
the Munich
agreement, signed
between Hitler
and Chamberlain
on September 30,
1938. The resulting
occupation of
the Sudetenland,
the areas of
Czechoslovakia
b o r d e r i n g
Germany that were
in part German
speaking, resulted
in thousands of
refugees, Jews
and political
opponents, fleeing
the occupation.
In the search for
refuge and escape, Prague became the focus
of this movement. Warriner was not alone in
considering that Britain had a responsibility
towards these displaced people, but it was
not until early 1939 that any official financial
help was made available to Czech refugees by
way of the so-called ‘Czech loan’. Meanwhile
several voluntary funds were launched for
Czech refugees, including the Lord Mayor of
London’s Fund in September 1938, and by the
Trades Union Congress, the Labour Party, the
News Chronicle and the Manchester Guardian.
Acting intuitively, Warriner felt that her intimate
knowledge of Eastern Europe and its people,
acquired from having travelled extensively in
the rural areas with the support of a Rockefeller
Travelling Fellowship, could be put to good use
in this time of crisis.
With £300 from family and friends, £20 from
the Royal Institute of International Affairs for
her fare and expenses in return for the promise
of reports, and £150 pounds from the Save
the Children Fund, she flew out to Prague on
October 13, 1938. After establishing herself
in the Hotel Alcron, right in the heart of the
city, she quickly made contact with a number
of Quakers, including Tessa Rowntree (nee
Cadbury), Jean Rowntree and Mary Penman,
all of whom were there to undertake voluntary
relief work. Any vague notions Warriner had
of soup kitchens and helping destitute refugee
children were soon dispelled when she realised
that the people in the gravest danger were
the ‘politicals’; Sudeten German communists
and Social Democrat leaders who opposed
Hitler and who urgently sought political asylum
abroad. Penman soon introduced her to Wenzel
Jaksch, the leader of the Sudeten German Social
Democrats, and to representatives of the British
Labour Party, including the MP David Grenfell,
who were trying to secure visas from Britain to
get the political refugees out of the country. 1
Her Labour Party contacts introduced her to
people at the British Legation and to the Passport
Control Officer, who all realised the urgency of
1 For Grenfell’s involvement with Czechoslovakia
see Susan Cohen, Rescue the Perishing. Eleanor
Rathbone and the Refugees (Middlesex: Vallentine
Mitchell, 2010) 115, 120

the situation. Grenfell soon secured Doreen’s
assistance, urging her to stay and help organise
transports for refugees, whilst he returned to
Britain to secure the necessary documents. 2
There he had the support of activists including
the Independent MP, Eleanor Rathbone, who,
since the Munich crisis, had been spearheading
a vigorous campaign to get the government to
expedite financial aid and to issue visas for the
endangered Czech refugees. 3
In late October Doreen was put in charge of
arranging the transport of 250 Sudeten Social
democrats for whom short-stay visas had
eventually, but somewhat grudgingly, been
granted. She was soon accompanying a group
of twenty men on the lengthy and dangerous
escape route by train to Poland. She recalled:
Full of qualms, and with flu, I set off with twenty
men, on the 25th of October.
It was a long journey, all night by slow train into
the depths of Slovakia, then
by a motor train, passing the ruins of Ostrava
Castle, up over a pass in the
mountains to the tiny border post of Sucha
Hora….here we had to wait a whole
day in this poor Slovak village….at last, at night,
another tiny train appeared on
the Polish side, we walked over the frontier….
After that mission, Warriner made the
journey back to Prague via Warsaw, arriving by
midday on October 27th, ready to repeat the
whole exercise. Most of the 250 men were led
to safety by November 9th, but this left vast
numbers of men, women and children still in
danger. The refugee problem became especially
clear to Warriner when she began to visit the
camps – schools, castles and village halls -
housing around 5000 thousand Social Democrat
men. She described the worst of these, a
seventeenth century castle uninhabited for years
2 Re: visa agreement see Sir Walter Layton to
Halifax, enclosing memo, `Emigration of refugees
from Czecho-slovakia’, 28 October 1938, NA
T160/1324/F13577/05/1
3 Cohen, Rescue the Perishing, 101-27; L. London,
Whitehall and the Jews 1933-1948. British
Immigration Policy and the Holocuast (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000) 147-67
as ‘ filthy, walls covered in fungus, floors and
walls cracking, windows broken.’ Typically there
were no washing facilities and very little food.
With £ 300 of the money she had brought from
London she purchased and began to distribute
blankets and medicals supplies. In desperation,
she wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph and the
Manchester Guardian, highlighting the desperate
need for ‘visas, not chocolate’. This letter would
cause trouble with the Lord Mayor’s Fund and
prevent a large amount of money from being
given to the British Committee for Refugees
from Czechoslovakia (BCRC) for refugee support.
She was then told to not make any more such
pronouncements.
The BCRC had been established in
October, mainly to arrange hospitality for
refugees when they arrived in Britain. Despite
Warriner’s faux pas, she was asked, in December
1938, to become their representative in Prague.
The job came to mean much more than this
under Warriner’s watch as she used her position
to aid the rescue of refugees. She had an
unexpected ally in Robert Stopford, the Treasury
representative sent out to Prague in early
November 1938 to supervise the Czech’s use of
the British financial aid. He had a sympathetic
attitude towards the refugees, and his ability to
manage the Germans after March 1939 proved
invaluable in getting endangered people out of
Czechoslovakia and into Britain. Warriner was
soon accompanying another group to safety,
this time it was 150 women and children who
were taken across the German border en route
to rejoin their menfolk in Britain. She recalled
leaving on the eleven o’clock train to Ostrava,
after which the train had to go though two strips
of German territory, with illuminated Swastikas
on either side of the line. Despite the impending
danger of them being turned back at the border,
they crossed the frontier safely, and she handed
the refugees over to the courier and returned to
Prague. It was somewhat of understatement for
her to comment later that ‘…This episode was
rather nerve-racking because it showed how
the work –which depended on speed – could be
held up by the business interests of the travel
companies.’
In her memoir Warriner did write about fifteen
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children she had living in the YMCA for whom
she had already found homes in England but
for whom she could not get visas. What she
failed to mention were the hundreds of other
children who she did help.
John Eden, who, aged 13,
recalled how his mother and
Warriner rented two extra
flats in the apartment block
where he lived, specifically
to house children for a few
weeks, before their escape
to England. In all, some 109
‘official’ children, children of
Sudeten refugees, as well as
those of German or Austrian
origin, and more than 100
unregistered children passed
through the flat from the end
of
1938. 4 As Doreen’s work was
primarily dealing with the
escape of political refugees,
she was very pleased to
be able to hand over the actual emigration
of children to Nicholas Winton and Martin
Blake in late December 1938. 5 Winton could
not have succeeded in his mission without
Warriner’s’s help and that of the BCRC, where
they would appoint him ‘Honorary Organising
Secretary of the Children’s Section of the
BCRC’, a wholly fictitious department which
nevertheless gave him the ‘official ‘status he
needed. While he worked tirelessly in England
initiating arrangements and finding guarantors
for children, Warriner worked closely with his
people on the ground in Prague compiling lists of
children for him, matching names with sponsors,
and providing safe houses for them. Her YMCA
children left on a special Winton plane in early
March 1939. 6
Warriner would use any means at her
4Author’s correspondence with John Eden, May
2008.
5 M.Emanuel & V.Gissing, Nicholas Winton and
the Rescued Generation (Middlesex: Vallentine
Mitchell, 2001)
6 Stopford papers RJS 2/2/2/3 Imperial War
Museum. London (IWM)
disposal, however unconventional, in her pursuit
of freedom for refugees. Having discovered the
Polish consul was a collector of rare postage
stamps, she bribed him with some in order to
get refugees out of Czechoslovakia by the only
safe route. On another occasion she persuaded
a ticket collector to keep her compartment door
locked and even helped herself to the visiting
card of a senior general that she noticed while
waiting for an appointment with a minister. That
card, as Jean Rowntree recalled, got them into a
lot of places whose doors would otherwise have
remained firmly shut. Stopford had no doubt that
Warriner had a connection with the elaborate
underground organisation which helped those
people in the gravest danger who could not get
official permission to escape. 7 At this time she
and some of her staff had been given an office in
a room next to Stopford’s in the Legation, and he
would tell her of any such cases, and then turn a
blind eye to what she did with the information.
He considered this to be an unfair division of
risk, but accepted that it could not be avoided if
he was to maintain his legitimate work .
Warriner persuaded Eleanor Rathbone to
make a five –day visit to Prague in mid January
1939 to assess the situation for herself, and to
7 My thanks to Sybil Oldfield for passing on Jean
Rowntree’s recollections