The British Invasion--L.A. Style

They call themselves the ‘Brits’--a sizable community of natives of the United Kingdom who have made their homes in Southern California. They are a diverse community--defying identification as a specific entity--and yet in the last 15 years their presence has increased, spawning shops, newspapers, clubs and pubs designed specifically to serve them.

Except for the United Kingdom, more British natives probably live in Greater Los Angeles than in any other urban area in the world. And despite a long history in the region, evidence of the British presence never has been more visible.

Within the last 15 years, dozens of shops have sprung up catering to the Brits, as they call themselves. Newspapers are published for them. Pubs thrive as never before because of the persistence of Brits’ indigenous thirsts and appetites.

And consider this: One importer whose sales multiply by 20% every year distributes, among a warehouse of other old country specialties, 1,000 pounds of bangers (British sausages) weekly to Los Angeles area retailers.

Or just wander about and listen for the accent. You probably will not travel far nor wait long to hear it.

Yet, of all the nationalities that make up the ethnic stew of Los Angeles, Brits are the most difficult to define as a separate entity--their exact numbers here impossible to know. They are rarely considered a minority as are, say, immigrants of Asian and Mexican descent who also arrived here in great numbers after World War II, nor are they typecast as to interests, politics, occupations or residential enclaves.

Writing recently in the Sunday Times Magazine, the London publication’s New York-based Will Ellsworth-Jones observed, with perhaps a slight but illustrative exaggeration:

“In Los Angeles you can find Chinatown, or, just around the corner from the British Consulate, Koreatown or Japantown. But despite their numbers, there is no cantonment for the British. . . . There is no British bloc and no identifiably British politician--although in the unlikely event of all Brits voting for one man, they could elect their own mayor. For the most part, the Brits have simply gone underground, blending into the new scenery remarkably quickly.”

“Nobody knows how many first-generation British live in Southern California,” said London-born Brian Clewer, a Los Angeles radio personality and travel agency owner who has lived here for 25 years. “The reason nobody knows, I’ve always said, is because it’s like strawberry jam--the Brits are spread all over the place.”

John Houlton, British vice consul in charge of information here, suggests that “a safe figure” for Southern California might be “a quarter of a million.” But other Brits dispute that, saying that Houlton’s estimate is far too conservative. Some calculate that the number of British-born living between the Mexican border and Santa Barbara may run as high as half a million, with the greatest number living in the Santa Monica-West Los Angeles area and the next largest in the San Fernando Valley.

No matter.

Santa Monica, with its several pubs and tearooms and a long tradition as a base where Brits first light when they come to Southern California, indisputably remains the most popular home of U.K. emigres.

“British people, when they can, gravitate toward the ocean,” observed Trevor Valentine, executive director of the 30-year-old 400-member British American Chamber of Commerce. “Remember, in Britain it is impossible to live more than 200 miles from the sea and most live much closer than that.”

Nevertheless, Chatsworth attorney Al Coombes, who publishes True Brit in addition to lawyering, said the greatest market for his 6-year-old monthly tabloid has turned out to be the San Fernando Valley.

“My research shows that’s where the established Brits are, the ones who settled in once they became acclimated--the families with money in the bank, children in college and two cars,” he said.

The San Fernando Valley also is where the biggest of Los Angeles’ many British social clubs, the Mayflower Club, exists--in a former synagogue on Victory Boulevard in North Hollywood. Eileen Selby, 61, who founded it in 1961, said it has upwards of 5,000 members.

Those who join the Mayflower and other British social clubs principally are members of that generation that arrived here in massive numbers between the mid-1950s and the mid-’60s.

“For the mom-and-pop types, (membership in a club) is like living in a cocoon amongst their own people with whom they feel very comfortable,” Valentine said. “These are the people who would run down to Wilshire Boulevard to see the queen and wave the flag.”

“Walking bits of Britain” is how another expatriate described them.

Jeremy Painting, director of sales in the western United States for Trusthouse Forte Hotels and a Los Angeles resident for 18 months, said: “You find a number of what I call professional Brits who try to live like they are in a Britain that never was, who take a nostalgic view. But if you told them, ‘You have to go back,’ you’d take them kicking and screaming.”

But said Selby, who has lived in the Valley since 1953, “Most of my friends are British. When you come to my house, it looks like an English house. It’s an English house; an English person lives there.”

Still, not all the Brits here are like Selby and her fellow joiners.

In fact, even Selby conceded, that the split is about half and half between nostalgic souls who nourish ties to their past and those who disavow any need to burnish the memory of a homeland many so eagerly left.

Clewer insisted: “If you took the total membership of all those clubs, it would nowhere nearly represent the number of first-generation British here. There are far more here than those who wallow in the British atmosphere.”

He speaks with some expertise. For 17 years on KFAC, Clewer has conducted a Sunday morning radio show that exploits the nostalgia. The program’s content is a two-hour run of British music and humor that Clewer selects from a personal collection of recordings dating to 1895. He estimates that he reaches about a third of a million listeners weekly.

Said Sandra Pearlmutter, a sales secretary at British Airways in Century City, who has lived here nine years: “I can’t stand British expatriates who cling together. They’re so clannish. I think most of the younger generation here feels that way.”

History suggests that Los Angeles long has exerted a pull on weather-obsessed Britons. But attempting to determine the identity of the first U.K. expatriate to arrive in the region is a dismal business. Although Brits certainly settled here when the pueblo still was part of Mexico, “. . .little tracking of the British here ever has been done,” said Bill Mason, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

Mason said there is ample evidence that the first significant numbers of Brits began moving to Southern California just after the Civil War.

A co-founder of Santa Monica was an English-born U.S. senator from Nevada, John Percival Jones, Mason added.

Attracted by Film Industry

But it remained for the movie industry to attract the first great wave of British immigrants, said Jerry Pam, longtime Hollywood publicist and himself British-born. “When they came, they brought a piece of England with them.”

Music hall comics Charles Chaplin and Stan Laurel arrived before World War I.

With the coming of sound in movies, British actors began to arrive in regiments. In a 1983 book, Sheridan Morley analyzed why early “talkie” makers found British actors such a precious commodity.

“It became abundantly clear” that the imports “possessed something of a remarkable and commercial artistic worth: a clearly intelligible speaking voice, often stage trained,” he wrote. Besides, “films about the Empire . . . the England of Kipling or Queen Victoria were a staple of the Hollywood film industry . . . and the Brits thrived and prospered by re-creating a world that had already vanished.”

“British Hollywood” peaked in the ‘30s and ‘40s and its conspicuous members like C. Aubrey Smith, Ronald Colman and Basil Rathbone, to mention only three, and the writers and directors who followed them to Southern California “wore their British like a badge in those days,” as John Clark, manager-husband of actress Lynn Redgrave, put it. Today, Clark said, nothing resembling a colony of British entertainers exists.

‘British Were Absorbed’

“By 1950,” said actor Stewart Granger, which was the year he arrived here from England, “it was over. The British were absorbed by Americans.” British-born actors living here now cultivate neutral speech that allows them to play a broad range of roles and their number constitutes a mere segment of the local British population. His wife, said Clark of Redgrave, “prefers to be known as an American actress.” The Clarks have lived here six years.

Still, the influx of Britons connected with the movie industry was piddling compared to what happened after World War II. It was then that U.S. firms in need of special skills, particularly in the fledgling aerospace industry, looked to Britain, not only for gifted scientists and engineers but for trained technicians.

According to David Sentance, 33, a Westwood financial consultant and more recent transplant, “America was expanding while Britain was trying to recover. Years of being on rations was no fun.”

“Here, your background doesn’t matter. If you can do a job, you’ll get the job. That is not necessarily true in England,” said Richard Dunsmore, a Nottingham-born Lockheed Corp. engineer.

Dunsmore and Southampton-born Derek Buckle, 52, also an engineer at Lockheed’s Burbank plant, were among those who succumbed to an appeal to leave for Southern California. American firms “took full-page ads in the papers offering free beer and a dog and pony show telling about how wonderful life is in California,” Dunsmore recalled. “I came with the idea that it would be a temporary job. . . .”

‘Best of Both Worlds’

Said Buckle: “I think we (his generation of expatriates) have the best of both worlds. We lived half of our lives in Britain and brought with us all the things we liked and left behind the things we didn’t like. Here we’ve got the things we like about America and can reject what we don’t like.”

The dash to this area of the Buckles and the Dunsmores and other Brits with highly prized skills--including doctors and professors--was something of a scandal in the homeland. It was ominously spoken of as the “brain drain” and, Clewer said, “it was an emotional issue in Britain.” It also, he noted, “made the average salaried person aware of immigration possibilities.”

Britons of all stripes joined the mid-century exodus, including carpenters, plumbers and secretaries, the latter being in keen demand by Los Angeles executives. “Snob appeal,” British Vice Consul Houlton said. “Bosses wanted to have a British voice answering the phone.”

The expatriates, in time, brought relatives. “For every one person who came here to work, the multiplications brought in an average of six to seven persons,” Clewer said.

“In my view, living as much as I have overseas,” said Painting, who has worked throughout the world since leaving England 18 years ago, “immigrants from any country are the best and the brightest.

“Whether it be medical, legal or accounting, you scratch any of those professional firms in Los Angeles and you’ll turn up a British partner. Of all the immigrants to the U.S., the Brits probably are the best educated and the most quickly assimilable because they speak the same language. They’re looked up to. While, for the most part, other immigrants are looked down on. To be British is almost a cachet here.”

In 1965, U.S. authorities turned the spigot off by introducing regulations that have made it tougher and tougher for Brits and other aliens to gain permanent admission. But the allure of the United States and the Los Angeles area for Brits is an abiding one.

So great remains this area’s appeal for Britons that a thriving speciality in the legal profession is devoted to satisfying it: Lawyers and paralegals poke through the maze of restrictive laws seeking ways to keep British clients in this country.

Because of complexion and language, they have little difficulty blending in, and those who remain when visas expire are a dickens to ferret out, conceded Orville Charles, assistant director for examinations and inspections of the Immigration and Naturalization Service here.

Houlton said the consulate deals “at most” with only 10 detainees a year.

Decline Has Begun

Still, although the number of British-born living here is at its peak, the decline is beginning. In two more decades, because many who came here during the peak migration are in their 50s, 60s, even 70s and because of the tight immigration rules limiting new arrivals, few will be around. “You know, one week I went to five funerals,” Selby said. “In one month we had, that I know of, 14 deaths in (the Mayflower Club).”

And the consensus is that the sons and daughters of Brits do not identify much with the traditions.

“To my kids, English heritage probably will be only a historical footnote,” said Ian Brodie, publisher of the British Weekly.

“People always are telling me,” Valentine said, “ ‘my kids are Americans. They play baseball, basketball and football. They are totally assimilated into the American way of life.’ ”

“My daughter thinks I talk funny,” Pam said.