In danger of arrest, she resisted the calls of the BCRC in London for her to depart Czechoslovakia and remained there until August 1939, leaving only a month before the beginning of World War II.

Her father abandoned the family when she was young and her stepfather, George Wellington, insisted over her objections that Beatrice adopt his last name.

[4] The accession to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany in 1933 began the flight of refugees, mostly communists, Social Democrats, and Jews to Czechoslovakia.

An additional 150,000, mostly Jews, were unregistered, fearing that registering and identification would make them targets in a country increasingly under Nazi control.

[7] To see for herself the nature of the growing conflicts in Europe in the mid-1930s, Wellington took a year's leave of absence from teaching and went to Geneva, Switzerland, though the details of her employment remain obscure.

On 24 April, the head of BCRC, Doreen Warriner, left the country after being informed that she was on a Gestapo list to be arrested.

[11] Wellington's task was to obtain exit documents from the German occupiers for individuals and families whose names were given to her by the Quakers, Unitarians, and other organizations dealing with the refugees.

[12][13] On her return to Britain, Wellington worked for the Czechoslovak Refugee Trust Fund (the government-controlled successor to the BCRC), inciting both "admiration and annoyance".