Cwl Cymru and Dr Huppert

Dr Huppert...not on the list of medical refugees in Wales


Suddenly Wales is cool.

Who says so? Well, “The Times”newspaper yesterday and they ask : How did this happen?

Well, some of us have known for the best part of ten years that there was a Welsh Renaissance taking place. Tony Jones, ( North Wales) former Head of Glasgow School of Art, now President of the School of the Art Institute in Chicago made a documentary nine years ago on this very theme.

Now the recent musical and sporting successes have merely brought brought this to the attention of the English.

Lets hope that part of this new found confidence will extend to acknowledging the past , and filling in those lost bits of Welsh history - like “the children of Craig-y-nos” which until now have been quietly erased from the collective cultural memory.


Even Dr Huppert is not on the official records of Medical Refugees in Wales!

This is something that Dr Carole Reeves, Outreach Historian with The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London has discovered.

She says:

"I recently met up with Professor Paul Weindling, Wellcome Trust Research
Professor in the History of Medicine, Oxford Brookes University. He has
worked extensively on European Medical Refugees in Great Britain, 1930s to
50s. This research is based on a database of nearly 4800 medical refugees,
as well as textual archives held in the Centre for Health, Medicine and
Society at Oxford Brookes. The aim is to evaluate the place of the refugees
in the overall context of the modernisation of British medicine. The records
cover medical researchers, medical practitioners, dental surgeons,
psychoanalysts, psychologists, nurses, and all other health-related
occupations. Children are included who came as refugees to the UK.

I asked him if he could find out anything about Dr Hubbard (Huppert) other
than what I'd managed to glean from the Medical Directories of the 1940s and
1950s. I also sent him some of her images for identification purposes. I've
just received his reply:

"Dear Carole, I am really very grateful for the information about Dr
Huppert. In contrast to some other medical refugees I know very little about
her.

I know that she was naturalised in 1947 (there is a certificate at the
National Archives) and that she died in 1973. Maybe there is a death
certificate. Some medical refugees have an Aliens file at Kew.

I also do not know when she came to the UK. I do not think there is a
property expropriation document in Vienna either.

The paper that I published with Pam is:

'Medical Refugees in Wales 1930s-50s', Pamela Michael and Charles Webster
(eds), Health and Society in Twentieth Century Wales (Cardiff: University of
Wales Press, 2006), 183-200.

But I missed Dr Huppert."


Dr Reeves adds:
“Seems like Dr Hubbard was able to 'get lost' in Wales! I just checked the
National Archives online catalogue and found an entry for M P Huppert (her
name was Margaret Pauline) in the Home Office Naturalisation files. It gives
her date of birth as 16 August 1893, and covers the period 1938 to 1947. The
file is closed under the 100 year ruling but might be able to be accessed
under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. I'll see if this is possible. “