via Iran, to the Near East, subsequently fighting in campaigns there and in North Africa, Italy, and northwest Europe. Some Second Corps personnel transferred from the Near East into Polish Armed Services units in the UK. At war's end, many of the Poles were transported to, and stayed in, camps in the United Kingdom. In order to ease their transition from a Polish-British military environment to British civilian life, a satisfactory means of demobilisation was sought by British authorities. This took the form of a Polish Resettlement Corps (PRC), as an integral corps of the British Army, into which the Poles who wished to stay in the UK could enlist for the transitional period of their demobilisation. The PRC was formed in 1946 (Army Order 96 of 1946) and was disbanded after fulfilling its purpose in 1949 (Army Order 2 of 1950). Polish Resettlement Act 1947 When the Second World War ended, a communist government was installed in Poland. Most Poles felt betrayed by their wartime allies and declined to "return to Poland" either because their homeland had become a hostile foreign state or because of Soviet repressions of Poles, Soviet conduct during the Warsaw uprising of 1944, the trial of the Sixteen, and executions of former members of the Home Army. To accommodate Poles unable to return to their home country, Britain enacted the Polish Resettlement Act of 1947, Britain's first mass immigration law. Initially, a very large Polish community was centred around Swindon, where many military personnel had been stationed during the war. After occupying Polish Resettlement Corps camps, many Poles settled in London and other conurbations, many of them recruited as European Volunteer Workers. Many others settled in the British Empire, forming large Polish Canadian and Polish Australian communities, or in the United States and Argentina. Post-war dispersal and settlement In the 1951 UK Census, some 162,339 residents had listed Poland as their birthplace, up from 44,642 in 1931. Polish arrivals to the UK included survivors of German concentration and POW camps and war wounded needing additional help adapting to civilian life. This help was provided by a range of charitable endeavours, some coordinated by Sue Ryder (1924–2000), a British humanitarian who, as Baroness Ryder of Warsaw, was later raised to the House of Lords and spoke there in the cause of Poland. Another British woman, Dame Cicely Saunders, was inspired by three displaced Polish men to