My friend Louise London, who has died of cancer aged 78, had an unshakable commitment to human rights, which she pursued as a solicitor on behalf of the disadvantaged, as a historian and as a volunteer team member helping asylum seekers.
Her acclaimed book Whitehall and the Jews, 1933-1948 (2000) remains, in the words of the historian Tony Kushner, “the standard book on British governmental responses to the refugee crisis, the Holocaust and after”.
Louise’s parents were Jewish refugees who had fled nazism in the 1930s and met in the UK, having been interned on the Isle of Man. Her father, Heinz London, a physicist from Bonn who joined the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, and her mother, Lucie (nee Meissner), a piano teacher from Vienna, settled in Oxford, where Louise and her three younger siblings, Norah, Martin and Fred, were born.
Louise went to Oxford high school then studied English at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1970. After completing a law conversion course she worked at Camden and Hackney law centres, primarily assisting residents of council housing and helping in eviction cases, including that of the Huntley Street squatters in 1978. She then joined a legal aid firm and developed an expertise in immigration law, working with, among others, Tamil refugees from the civil war in Sri Lanka.
This experience of dealing with the governmental restrictions refugees faced deepened Louise’s interest in 20th-century British immigration policies, and led to her doing a PhD at Queen Mary University of London (1992). While developing her thesis, which won the Ernst Fraenkel prize, into her book Whitehall and the Jews, she taught courses at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London, and Royal Holloway, University of London.
From 2000, Louise worked at the Ministry of Justice, as a casework lawyer in the Criminal Appeal Office, until 2010, when she left to focus on her work as a historian, publishing numerous articles on post-Holocaust refugee policies. She also volunteered during this time as a solicitor for the charity Zacchaeus 2000 Trust. In 2017, she became an honorary research fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.
Louise married Andrew McDonald, at the time head of government services at the Public Records Office, in 1992, and they adopted a child, Ju, from China. They divorced in 2017 but remained friends, and Louise helped to care for Andrew before his death in 2021.
Loyal, generous, modest, with a wonderful sense of humour, Louise undertook all her endeavours with passion and integrity. This was evident in her work, in her friendships and in her engagement in the arts – including as a member of the Barts choir and as a graphic artist whose work was selected for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.
Ju survives her, as do her siblings.
