Passage 6/15

simon66 — 3 years ago

In the decade following the end of the Second World War, a mass migration of Italian workers came to the United Kingdom to be employed in Britain’s factories and mines. Amongst these, many were single women aged between 21 and 30 years. Thanks to official recruitment schemes drafted by the British and Italian governments of the time, young women left Italy in their thousands, to be employed as domestic workers or in factories, especially in the textile districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Here, they joined other migrants recruited through the EVW scheme, a government-led operation aimed at sourcing manpower from mainland Europe. The official Italian Scheme was one of such recruitments, but one of the least investigated. Gasperetti, F, 2012 With the recruitment of young Italian women for British industries, around 2,000 Italian women came to be employed by the textile manufactures of Lancashire and Yorkshire just in the years 1949-51, and continued throughout the 1950’s.