Eastbourne’s Belgian Refugees: A Forgotten WWI Story

Flight from Belgium

When Germany invaded neutral Belgium in August 1914, it triggered not only Britain’s entry into the First World War but also one of the great humanitarian crises of the age. As towns were shelled and reports of atrocities against civilians spread, well over a million Belgians fled their country. The majority crossed into the neutral Netherlands, but around 250,000 made their way to Britain — the largest arrival of refugees the country had ever seen.

Most crossed the Channel to the ports of Kent and the south-east. After the fall of Antwerp in early October 1914, some 11,000 refugees are said to have disembarked at Folkestone in a single day, with tens of thousands more following after the fall of Ostend. From these landing points, the exhausted and often destitute arrivals were dispersed to towns across the country — including Eastbourne, just along the coast.

The hospitality of the nation

In September 1914 the British government formally offered Belgium’s people “the hospitality of the British nation,” taking responsibility for the reception, maintenance and registration of the refugees while calling on local authorities and ordinary citizens to help house them. The response was overwhelming. Across the country more than 2,000 official relief committees sprang up, and over 100,000 people came forward to offer accommodation, money and clothing — one of the largest voluntary relief efforts in British history.

For a period, offers of hospitality actually outstripped the number of refugees needing homes. Sussex, lying so close to the Belgian coast, was at the front line of this effort, with committees and communities the length of the county — from Folkestone and Tunbridge Wells to Bexhill and Eastbourne — organising to receive the new arrivals.

Refugees in Eastbourne

Because of the short distance between East Sussex and the Belgian coast, a significant number of refugees who landed in the nearby Channel ports made their way to Eastbourne and settled here. It was not an easy situation for anyone. The Belgians had fled a war-torn homeland with few possessions and nowhere to go; the town’s residents, in turn, were asked to find rooms and food for strangers who spoke a different language, at least in the short term.

Yet the arrangement worked. Refugee families were taken into ordinary Eastbourne homes and lodgings, becoming part of the fabric of the town for the duration of the war. The town’s newspapers — the Eastbourne Gazette and Eastbourne Chronicle, both still published today under familiar local titles — followed the story as it unfolded, recording the arrivals and the daily life of a south-coast town continuing under the shadow of a war just across the water.

The Monu family

Among the Belgians who found refuge in Eastbourne were Constance and Edouard Monu. Local records show that the couple had arrived in the town by May 1916, when their second daughter, Paula, was born, and that they were living at 5 Elms Buildings, Seaside Road — an ordinary Eastbourne address that, for a few years, became a Belgian family’s home in exile.

It is details like these — a street, a family name, the birth of a child far from home — that make the story so human. Behind the vast national statistics of a quarter of a million refugees lie thousands of individual families like the Monus, rebuilding fragments of normal life in unfamiliar towns while their own country was fought over. Eastbourne, for a time, was where their story continued.

The Poirot connection

The Belgian refugees left a mark on British culture in an unexpected way. When Agatha Christie created her most famous detective, Hercule Poirot, she made him a Belgian refugee of the First World War — a fictional character with a backstory that would have been instantly recognisable to her readers, so familiar had the presence of Belgian refugees become across the country.

Christie had encountered real Belgian refugees in her home town, and their dignified, displaced presence clearly stayed with her. Today Poirot is remembered for solving intricate murders, but he began life as a small, quiet tribute to a very real wave of people — the same wave that brought families to the streets of Eastbourne.

Departure and gratitude

When the war ended in November 1918, the vast majority of Belgian refugees chose to return home to help rebuild their shattered country, and over the following months most left Britain. The Monu family and many other Belgians duly departed Eastbourne, their years of exile at an end.

The relationship was remembered with real warmth on both sides. The British authorities were anxious not to spoil “the good feeling and harmonious relations built up since their reception as refugees in 1914,” and Belgium’s own gratitude found lasting form — most grandly in the Anglo-Belgian Memorial unveiled on London’s Victoria Embankment in 1920, dedicated “to the British nation from the grateful people of Belgium.” In Eastbourne, that gratitude survives in a treasured local record, a Book of Gratitude now held by Eastbourne Library — a quiet reminder of the years when the town opened its doors to strangers in need.

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