Play sparks debate over whether Italians deserve apology for wartime internment

They weren't terribly interested in the teenage lad: prison would be good enough for Eduardo Paolozzi for the time being. But for his father, ageing grandfather and uncle who'd come to Scotland seeking a better life for their loved ones, their fate was sealed.

As the men sent by the government to round up these undesirable aliens in wartime Britain departed, angry crowds gathered to ransack the family's shop. Further up Leith Walk, it was a similar scene at Valvona and Crolla. The menfolk were dragged away and the shop which had brought a delightful flavour of the continent to Edinburgh became the target for a violent mob.

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Stones shattered the shop windows, showering glass on the Elm Row pavement. The women left behind, bewildered by the dramatic loss of their men, cleared it away and partly drew the shop's steel shutters.

At fish and chip shops, cafes, ice cream parlours, barbers, indeed anywhere hard-working Italian families were striving to make a living, June 1940 brought the same horrors.

Mussolini had entered the war on Hitler's side and Churchill had issued his internment order: "Collar the lot."

Italian men who had left poverty for a better future in Scotland – Edinburgh families with names like Crolla and Demarco, Pacitti, Coppola, Di Ciacca, Di Rollo, Pelosi and Rossi – were rounded up. The lucky ones were imprisoned, the rest were put on board the Arandora Star bound for deportation to Canada and doomed to be hit by a U-boat torpedo.

Now, as the 70th anniversary of internment looms, debate is under way over whether the time has come for Britain to apologise to a generation of Scots Italians.

It's been partly sparked by a new play at the Traverse, The Shattered Head, which has attempted to unravel the links between what happened to the young "father of pop art" Eduardo Paolozzi and his work.

Yesterday saw calls from another of Edinburgh's leading artistic figures, impresario Richard Demarco – who was also caught up in the episode as a child – for a national apology and memorial to the Italian community affected.

"There should be a memorial, a little statement, something to bring comfort for the relations of those who died. They still live and breathe and suffer this every single day," he said.

He was just ten years old at the time, yet he recalls suffering abuse and beatings as anti-Italian feeling festered. "I remember being attacked by a group of much older boys at the public baths in Portobello. I remember the blood streaming down my face and having stones thrown at me."

Eduardo Paolozzi was 16 at the time and just old enough to be thrown in Saughton alongside hundreds of fellow Italians.

A few years older and he might have joined the male members of his family on board the Arandora Star, sailing to their deaths.

The Blue Star Line leisure cruiser had been previously used to take troops across the Atlantic. In July 1940, however, she was overflowing with 1,500 prisoners, mostly Italians, and 400 troops guarding them.

As she passed the north-west of Donegal, she proved too big a temptation for the captain of a German U-boat.

Nearly 700 prisoners and 200 soldiers perished. When desperate captives tried to clamber into lifeboats to save themselves from drowning, the British shot holes in the lifeboats.

The truth of what happened and why is contained in government documents, some of which have yet to be released.

That concerns Mary Contini, director of Valvona and Crolla, whose grandfather Cesidio Di Ciacca died on the vessel, while her father Johnny was interned on the Isle of Man. Her husband Philip's grandfather Alfonso Crolla also drowned, while his uncle Victor languished in Saughton.

"A lot of the information surrounding what happened has not been released," she says. "I would like all these files to be opened and access available for everyone to find out what happened.

"The Italian community's attitude is this was war, Dunkirk had just happened and it must have been a horrendously difficult time. No-one feels anger, but it would be a testament to openness and honesty to find out what happened."

As for Paolozzi, few of the visitors to the Dean Gallery at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art or the pedestrians who dodge his giant foot and hand sculptures – part of his The Manuscript of Monte Cassino trio of works – outside St Mary's Cathedral might even be aware he was once considered a potential enemy.

According to former lord provost Eric Milligan, Paolozzi found it "ironic that the city of his birth, which during his formative years viewed him with suspicion, later went on to establish a gallery dedicated to his work. But there was never resentment".

Yet Paolozzi's daughter, Anna, believes the episode left a scar on her father. "I think it brutalised him," she says. "The last time he saw his father was when he was dragged off in handcuffs.

"His dad, his grandfather and his uncle were on the Arandora Star. To lose that amount of people . . . it's impossible to think that it wouldn't brutalise someone.

"He was given the choice of staying in prison or being sent to the front line. He didn't want either, so he headed to the library to read up on mental illness.

"He pretended he was schizophrenic and ended up in a mental hospital. Once there, he asked if he could go to art school. It was an incredibly clever way of surviving the war."

As The Shattered Head writer and director Graeme Eatough points out, Scots Italians like Paolozzi had done nothing wrong except for being Italian, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"You can understand why it could still be a sore point," he says. "People were rounded up and imprisoned or deported – often their families were not told where they were being sent.

"Paolozzi's family ended up on the Arandora Star, fenced in by barbed wire. The ship was twice as full as it should have been.

"Tragically, the British decided not to mark it as a civilian ship."

The Shattered Head is at the Traverse until Saturday, at 1pm.

LASTING MEMORIAL

TODAY it is recognised as being possibly the finest Italian deli in the UK. But 70 years ago, Valvona and Crolla was under violent attack.

Director Mary Contini's grandfather was lost on board the Arandora Star and her Scots-born uncle was arrested and slammed in jail alongside Eduardo Paolozzi.

"As a child I was only told that my grandfather had drowned."

Internment, she recalls,

"was done as a sweep during the night, which makes it all the worse.

Then there was rioting and the windows were smashed."

The steel shutters were put in place to prevent further attacks. They've never moved since.

"They are left as they are as a memorial to the family," she adds.