7 immigrant women who made history in the UK
Many women who have changed Britain for the better weren’t originally from our shores. Here are the stories of just some of those inspirational immigrants.
Image: Princess w:Sophia Duleep Singh selling subscriptions for the Suffragette newspaper | Public Domain
It’s not hard to reel off a lengthy list of British-born women who changed the world. In tragic contrast, women who made their mark in Britain after arriving from elsewhere can often be unjustly overlooked.
Below, Sky HISTORY highlight just some of those female immigrants to have left a long-lasting positive impact.
1. Mary Seacole
In 1853, the Crimean War broke out between Russia and a coalition of European powers, including Britain. The Jamaican-born Mary Seacole subsequently travelled to the UK. This was initially to check her gold investments, but she also soon offered the British War Office her services as a nurse.
To her surprise, she was turned down, leading her to fund her own trip to Crimea. There, she set up her ‘British Hotel’ – essentially a resting place and canteen for soldiers. Seacole also visited the battlefield to treat the wounded.
2. Mary Prince
What was life like for enslaved black people in the early 19th century? Mary Prince provided her own account in The History of Mary Prince, published in 1831. Her shocking recollections in the book fuelled the anti-slavery movement.
Prince was born around 1788 in Bermuda and, over the first three decades of her life, passed from one enslaver to another. One, John Adams Wood, brought her to England in 1828. Though Woods had no intention of freeing Prince, she escaped his clutches and stayed in England as a freed woman.
3. Noor Inayat Khan
During World War II, the UK’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) planted secret agents in Nazi-occupied territories. One of those agents was Noor Inayat Khan. Having been born in Moscow and raised in Paris, she only arrived in Britain in 1940, after France’s fall to the Nazis.
However, her fluency in the French language and skills as a wireless operator made her an asset to the SOE. In the summer of 1943, her superiors sent her to France, where she transmitted intelligence back to Britain.
Khan was eventually discovered by the Gestapo in late 1943 and executed in September 1944 at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
4. Nancy Astor
Contrary to what you may have heard elsewhere, Nancy Astor was not the first female MP elected to the House of Commons. That honour instead goes to Constance Markiewicz, who was elected in 1918 but, unlike Astor, did not actually sit in the Westminster Parliament.
Astor was the first woman to do so, after winning a by-election in 1919. She was born in the US state of Virginia in 1879 but emigrated to England in 1905. Astor served as MP for Plymouth Sutton from 1919 to 1945, along the way supporting Winston Churchill’s rise to the top of British politics.
5. Princess Catherine of Braganza
Like many 17th-century princesses, Catherine of Bragazina was married off for political reasons. In this instance, it was to form an alliance between Portugal – Catherine’s native country – and England, her new adopted country.
The groom was King Charles II, who became notorious for his many mistresses. However, while Charles did have children, it was always out of wedlock. The royal marriage remained barren, leading Charles’ brother James II to succeed him as English king in 1685.
James’ pro-Catholic policies alienated Parliament. This tension eventually boiled over into the Glorious Revolution, with the ardently Protestant William III and his wife Mary II supplanting James on the throne.
6. Sophia Duleep Singh
When the suffragettes were campaigning to get the vote for British women, they must have been stunned when an Indian princess joined the cause.
Sophia Duleep Singh was a daughter of Duleep Singh, the last ruler of the Sikh Empire. After British imperialists seized his Punjab lands in 1849, the Singhs were exiled to India but remained on friendly terms with Queen Victoria.
Sophia’s feminist activities included joining the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and selling The Suffragette newspaper. In 1928, the UK government finally granted women the same voting rights as men.
7. Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz
Charlotte was born on 19th May 1744 in the northern German duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, at that time part of the Holy Roman Empire. She was aged only 17 when she arrived in Great Britain to get hitched to King George III.
Queen Charlotte gave Britain its first-ever Christmas tree – a tradition she brought over from her German homeland. A highly fictionalised depiction of Charlotte (portrayed by actress Golda Rosheuvel) also features heavily in the hit Netflix period drama Bridgerton.
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