Belgian-mad

De Britten waren even Belgian-mad. Belgianitis.





https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/refugees-europe-on-the-move

In 1914-15 Belgian refugees arrived in France and the Netherlands in large numbers. Around 160,000 refugees found shelter in the UK, where the government kept a close watch on them. At the outset wartime photographs and paintings depicted them as desperate people in need of emergency assistance, but also stoic victims of German aggression, as in Nora Neilson Gray’s portrait of The Belgian Refugee.[2] In Britain more than 2,500 committees provided charitable relief to Belgian refugees. However, when the refugees gave no sign of going home, complaints began to surface that they made intolerable demands on host communities and were insufficiently grateful – in Kent, the Farningham War Refugee Committee criticised ‘individuals who tended to take [charitable donations] as a right and expect a higher standard of living than we felt justified in providing’.[3] The committee in Crediton, Devon complained that ‘many refugees seemed to have the impression that because they had helped England, they had the right to indefinite support from the English’.[4] A newspaper article bemoaned the fact that one refugee ‘won’t work but goes about as if he was a duke’.[5] An English diarist noted that ‘everyone was Belgian-mad for a time’ but that ‘Belgianitis has quite abated’ as a result of refugees’ perceived ingratitude.[6]