The three articles in this special section of the Journal of Refugee Studies examine the establishment and efficacy of UK responses to the plight of Chileans fleeing their homeland in the wake of the 1973 coup d’état led by General Augusto Pinochet. Alan Angell outlines international responses to the coup and then charts the response of UK scholars in founding the organization Academics for Chile (AFC), which would partner with the NGO World University Service (WUS) to provide educational and training grants to Chileans. I examine the structure of WUS’ support, the nature and reasons for its development focus, and quantitative and qualitative indicators of its success as well as its limitations. Together, these two articles record a moment in the history of UK refugee support, detailing how that support was funded, organized, and delivered effectively within the context of changing UK governmental policy. They thus reflect not on what might be done in policy terms, but what was achieved at a particular point in time in relation to the wider national and international political contexts. My article also offers an analysis of refugees’ individual life stories from the perspective of gendered memories of the experience of exile, drawing on oral interviews with former Chilean refugees to offer a qualitative discussion of the scheme which is extended by Jasmine Gideon to the sphere of health. Discussing the concept of ‘journeys to health’, Gideon’s work draws on an independently conducted set of oral interviews to examine how health is entwined in refugees’ journeys and how their stories need to be heard in the care setting. The second two articles thus draw on a substantial corpus of interviews to illustrate the importance of a narrative approach in understanding both initial refugee experiences and long-term exile. However, they also bring out the granularity of contrasting life narratives, for instance with regard to strategies for coping and memories of activism.