It is surprising to learn that at first only 150 Hungarian students were admitted to British institutions of higher education. During the months that followed the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution, with a flood of refugees seeking safe havens all over Europe and overseas, this number was increased to several hundred. Eleven years after the end of World War II, Great Britain’s economic recovery was not complete; thrift was still the watchword of everyday life, and the stipends and scholarships offered even by the great British universities were modest. Yet the Hungarian refugee students in time discovered that compared to the Continent, life in England in the 1950s was not only more staid and insular, but more civilized as well. Indeed, it was this aspect of Britain that attracted them to the island nation in the first place.
We learn from Magda Czigány’s book that as in other Western countries, the outpouring of sympathy for Hungarian refugees and the desire to lend them material and moral support could be felt in every walk of life and emanated from all segments of British society. What is more, when it came to evaluating Hungarian refugee students and placing them in British universities, the actions taken were swifter and the programmes devised by university administrators better organized and more efficiently carried out than similar endeavours in other countries. As early as the middle of November, 1956, a three-men team was dispatched to Vienna to interview newly arrived prospective students. A number of prominent British scholars and experts on Hungary and Eastern Europe, as well as young academics who would later become important in the field—people such as C.A. Macartney, Hugh Seton-Watson, Max Hayward, G.F. Cushing, Denis Sinor and D. Mervyn Jones—were actively involved in setting up Englishlanguage classes for the newcomers, at times becoming language instructors themselves, and finding the right school and department for individual candidates. (One young lecturer in classics at Oxford, Mervyn Jones, who was recruited as a language tutor, became so fascinated by the Hungarian language that he took it up and turned with great interest to Hungarian literature as well. His book, Five Hungarian Writers [1966], is a thoroughgoing and novel examination of aspects of nineteenth-century Hungarian literature.)
Czigány offers a great many facts and figures on operations aimed at helping students find their bearings in their new

academic environment and in the process reveals more about the financial aspects of the various programmes, about allocations, budgets and funds than the general reader would care to know. More interesting than dry statistics are individual experiences—the human side of a momentous transition and transformation, which is the true subject of this book. The author provides us with details of her own background to suggest what she was up against in Communist Hungary and how her experiences affected the adjustment to her new life in England. Magda Czigány came from a provincial middle-class family with strong Catholic roots. Both she and her parents knew that these were two strikes against her if she wanted to continue her education. Her punishment for being a “class alien” was particularly harsh even for those times: at age fourteen she was denied entry in the local secondary school. But through the kindness of teachers and friends with some pull, she did complete high school, with distinction, in 1954 and shortly thereafter entered the University of Szeged.
Magda Czigány remained more conservative in her new home than many of her fellow refugees who, while passionately hating the totalitarian régime of Mátyás Rákosi, retained their leftist ideals and sympathies in England. Czigány, too, realized of course that class divisions were still a fact of English life. The University of London’s Westfield College, where she became a student in 1957, was a “ladies’ college”, and most of the young women enrolled there came from upper middle-class homes. Students who were not part of this elite formed a club called the “plebs” and made Magda Czigány an honorary member. Although she didn’t agree with the club members’ enthusiastic support of the Labour Party and tried to explain to them that “socialist ideology was not compatible with human nature,” she felt comfortable in their midst, the friendships forged there have lasted. Half a century later, the former “plebs” still meet once a year. Czigány also takes issue with the view, expressed by many former refugees as well as chroniclers of Hungarian migrations, that the majority of the 1956 escapees, especially those of university age, left Hungary not necessarily because they participated in the revolution and therefore felt threatened, but because they thought this was their chance to start a new life in freedom and take advantage of opportunities that were not available to them in their woebegone homeland.