Murray Watson uses oral history interviews to try to explain the many and varied reasaons people had for emigrating from Britain after World War II.

When I was invited to write this article about postwar emigration from the UK my first action was to Google the search term ‘postwar emigration from the UK’. I wanted to ensure that I consulted the latest research. This step was to prove a disappointing exercise. In the first 100 search results I found only 14 websites about emigration, with the remaining 80 odd being about immigration. Had the search engine’s algorithms failed to differentiate between emigration and immigration?...