Interview with George Mangar MBE

"There was one thing else that you had to do, coming to England. You see, people don’t realise racism is not something new, right. We had to get something called a police clearance to come to England. I have mine still. You had to go to the police headquarters – although I was a police officer – I went to the police headquarters with a picture and a thumbprint, everything you had to put on this thing and you brought that to England with you, with your passport. We had to have vaccination certificates: yellow fever, smallpox, everything under the sun, you had to have all that done, typhoid, all that done. And then it was always recommended that you get a letter or reference about your character, and I got mine from a doctor and a lawyer and various people, a judge wrote mine. So we had that, but they never asked to see it when we arrived here, but we were told there that you must have it to come to England. I think it was a way of trying to say to people, if you misbehaved when you were younger, don’t bother to go, that sort of thing. That’s what I think now, I never thought of it then."