Abstract
When the Polish born, English language novelist Joseph Conrad referred to himself as a ‘b … y furriner’1 he was satirising himself, his own pronunciation of English, censorship rules that frowned on the word ‘bloody’, and general British attitudes to foreigners. That was in 1898, at the height of the British Empire, when ‘bloody foreigners’ were considered a necessary nuisance in the world. Some people would argue that the same view existed in, and has continued since, 1960.
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Chapter 6 ‘b … y furriners’
G. Jean-Aubrey, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (London: William Heinemann, 1927) p. 221.
Leslie Stone, ‘Britain and the World’, in David McKie and Chris Cook (eds), The Decade of Disillusion: British Politics in the Sixties (London: Macmillan, 1972) p. 122.
Joseph Frankel, British Foreign Policy, 1945–1973 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 137.
Kenneth Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History 1945–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) p. 407.
Lawrence Freedman, Britain and the Falklands War (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) p. 29.
Edgar Wilson, A Very British Miracle (London: Pluto Press, 1992) p. 130.
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: Harper Collins, 1993) p. 215.
Michael Charlton, The Little Platoon (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) p. 209.
L. J. Macfarlane, Issues in British Politics since 1945 (London: Longman, 1986) pp. 124–5.
Tony Benn, Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977–80, edited by Ruth Winstone (London: Arrow, 1990) p. 561.
Alan Sked and Chris Cook, Post-War Britain (Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1993) p. 540.
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© 1995 Brian Spittles
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Spittles, B. (1995). ‘b … y furriners’. In: Britain since 1960. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24271-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24271-9_7
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