OUT AND ABOUT WITH SIR BOB RUSSELL: Refugees once made Colchester wealthy

It was in 1565, with the approval of Queen Elizabeth I, that Colchester welcomed the first of 11 families – a total of 55 refugees – fleeing religious persecution in the Low Countries ( today’s Belgium and parts of Holland and France).

In the following two decades, more arrived. By 1586 they totalled 1,291, making up a significant proportion of Colchester’s then population of about 10,000.

To put that into perspective, it would be the equivalent today of 13,000 refugees out of the town’s population of 100,000.

They settled in area to the north of the High Street, which became known by the secondhalf of the 19th century as the Dutch Quarter.

Most of them were not Dutch – it just seems to be the word used by Colcestrians to describe all foreigners who arrived as refugees at that time.

More than 60 of the homes built by the refugees in the Dutch Quarter still exist. They look more like the buildings you’ll in Flanders than the English construction of the period.

Many more have been lost, but the ones we see now are there thanks to Colchester Council and the Civic Trust, which saved them from demolition in the early Fifties, when they were in poor condition.

Examples can be seen in West Stockwell Street, East Stockwell Street, Northgate Street (formerly called Dutch Lane) and Maidenburgh Street.

The were owned by the council, though under “right to buy” most have now been sold.

A few remain in council ownership and have retained their traditional appearance, with doors and other woodwork painted red and green, white window frames and the rendered walls a light green.

The refugees were Protestants facing persecution by their Spanish Catholic rulers, but they arrived in an England which has also seen religious turmoil.

The refugees got here just seven years after the last of 23 Protestants were had been burned at the stake in the town, as Queen Mary sought to re-impose the Catholic beliefs her late father, Henry VIII, had abandoned at the Reformation.

Queen Elizabeth succeeded her half-sister in 1558, and returned England to Protestantism, making Protestant Colchester a safe haven for the refugees.

Historian Patrick Denney’s Colchester History and Guide (first published in 2004) states one positive outcome of the religious upheavals of the 16th century was the revitalisation of Colchester’s ailing cloth trade.

Those who fled here from the Low Countries were, Denney says: “No ordinary refugees, but rather people who knew a thing or two about clothmaking.”

He describes their particular expertise in cloth-making producing “a superior lightweight cloth of the best quality, and in a far higher league than that being made by the English clothiers...known as bays, says and perpetuanas, although it was the manufacture of bays that was to predominate in Colchester.”

The refugee community quickly became established as a major economic force in the town, with a quality-control system and its own Dutch Bay Hall at the western end of the High Street, where the Fire Office is now.

They also had their own church. The town, as a whole, prospered because of the wealth generated by those who found refuge in Colchester. The term, Colchester bays, became a byword for quality cloth at home and abroad.

This special period in Colchester’s history is commemorated in a stained glass window in the council chamber at the Town Hall.

It depicts the first refugees being welcomed by St Helena, the town’s patron saint, and shows a clothing workshop scene.

An inscription reads: “To keep in remembrance the hospitality extended by the town of Colchester to the Huguenot refugees in the 16th and 17th centuries and the establishment by them of the manufacture of ‘bays and says’ which flourished for more than two hundred years to the great advantage of the inhabitants, this window was presented by Wilson Marriage, Portreeve of Colchester, AD 1901”.

Even today Colchester’s longest-established families can claim ancestry from the refugees who arrived in the 16th century.

However, as with others who have settled over the past twomillienia, there is no separate national identity: All are British; all are Colcestrians.

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