Even in 1968, the so-called Rivers of Blood speech was extraordinarily controversial. Powell himself was summarily sacked from the Tory front bench, never to return; in liberal circles, he became a pariah. Yet few people now care to remember that the speech made him an enormous folk hero, the tribune of Britain\u2019s silent white majority. Hundreds of dockers marched on Westminster to show their support, workers in Wolverhampton and the Black Country walked out to demand his reinstatement, and opinion polls consistently put support for Powell at more than 70 per cent. Within two weeks of the speech, Powell had been sent more than 43,000 letters, almost all of them praising him, and for years afterwards he was easily the most admired politician in the country.<\/p>\n

What was the reaction to Enoch Powell\u2019s 1968 \u2018Rivers of Blood\u2019 speech?<\/h2>\n
As we listened to his relentless words\u2026 I knew he had taken the lid off Pandora\u2019s box and that race relations in Britain would never be the same again\u2026 I believe he has helped to make a race war, not only in Britain but perhaps in the world, inevitable.<\/p>\n
Barbara Castle\u2019s diary, 21 April 1968<\/em><\/p>\n
Most people in the country will agree with him\u2026 We can take no more coloured people.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To do so, as Mr Powell says, is madness.<\/p>\n
News of the World, 21 April 1968<\/em><\/p>\n
I dismissed Mr Powell because I believed his speech was inflammatory and liable to damage race relations. I am determined to do everything I can to prevent racial problems developing into civil strife\u2026 I don\u2019t believe the great majority of the British people share Mr Powell\u2019s way of putting his views in his speech.<\/p>\n
Edward Heath, 22 April 1968<\/em><\/p>\n
Congratulations from my Mother, myself, and many friends on your speech last Saturday. We admire you for speaking up for us all\u2026 We know people cannot help the colour of their skin, but they can change their uncivilised way of life by conforming more to ours.<\/p>\n
Anonymous letter to Powell, 23 April 1968<\/em><\/p>\n
<\/p><\/div> <\/section>
His views might seem abhorrent to modern readers. And yet there is little doubt that, at the time, he spoke for the vast majority of the British public.<\/p>\n
One of the ironies of the Rivers of Blood controversy was that it overshadowed the 20th anniversary of that supremely iconic moment in the history of immigration to Britain, the voyage of the SS Empire Windrush<\/em> from Kingston, Jamaica to Tilbury, where its 492 passengers disembarked on 22 June 1948. Each had paid \u00a328 10s for the chance to escape the poverty and limited horizons of the West Indies, and to build a new life in the imperial mother country.<\/p>\n
Read more | Bound for Britain: your guide to the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hints of the hostility to come<\/h3>\n
Contemporary press reports treated the newcomers as a diverting oddity, not a threat: the Express described trilby-hatted Jamaicans clapping and cheering on the dock before sitting down and tucking into roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and spotted dick. Yet not everybody welcomed the newcomers to Britain\u2019s shores, and even in 1948 there were hints of the anxiety, hostility and prejudice that would lead to Enoch Powell\u2019s speech two decades later.<\/p>\n
As the Windrush<\/em> approached, some civil servants had talked of moving its passengers on to Kenya, while a group of Labour back-benchers even wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee<\/a> complaining that \u201can influx of coloured people\u201d would \u201ccause discord and unhappiness among all concerned\u201d. Attlee ignored them; like many politicians of the day, he was attached to the ideals of imperial brotherhood. All Britain\u2019s subjects, he wrote, should be \u201cfreely admissible to the United Kingdom\u201d. But it was not a view that found much favour with the general public, and by the late 1950s, when West Indians were arriving in Britain at the rate of around 50,000 a year, the extent of public hostility was becoming ever more apparent.<\/p>\n
Was Britain a racist country in the 20\u202fyears between the Windrush<\/em>\u2019s arrival and Powell\u2019s speech? The answer is rather more complicated than a simple yes or no. Polls found that most Britons disapproved of overt colour prejudice, while as late as 1956, two out of three still supported the principle of unrestricted Commonwealth immigration. Yet the unspoken prejudices that had underpinned the British Empire died hard. Children grew up with stories of imperial derring-do against brutal savages; even a progressive politician like the Labour Chancellor Hugh Dalton could refer to the colonies as \u201cdiseased nigger communities\u201d. Many hotels, restaurants, dance halls and landlords operated a colour bar; indeed, as more immigrants arrived, the colour bar often became more severe. In the mid-1950s, more than eight out of ten London landladies said they would refuse to house students who were \u201cvery dark Africans or West Indians\u201d, while a survey in Birmingham found just 15 landladies out of a thousand who would let rooms to non-white families. \u201cNo Coloureds\u201d, the signs used to read, a sentiment with which millions of people evidently agreed.<\/p>\n
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Generalising about the immigrant experience is of course extremely difficult. After all, by 1961 the total black and Asian population had risen to 337,000, and ten years later, despite various attempts to curtail it, the immigrant population hit 650,000. Some people clearly thrived in their new homeland, making new friends and progressing rapidly up the career ladder. But they were probably the exceptions. Implicit colour bars in many walks of life, from British Railways platforms to Bristol buses, meant that highly qualified immigrants had to settle for ill-paid, backbreaking jobs: one Pakistani customs inspector, for example, worked as a railways cleaner. \u201cThe jobs we got were always the worst, even if we were educated people who could read and write much better than the people who were in charge,\u201d he later remembered. \u201cThey knew I had been an inspector of Customs, but that didn\u2019t matter.\u201d Discrimination at work or in housing was bad enough. What was worse, however, was the growing undercurrent of racist violence that finally spilled over in the Nottingham and West London riots of August 1958, when knife-wielding white teenagers, bored in the summer heat, went \u201cnigger hunting\u201d in the dilapidated streets where immigrants had settled. On the worst night of the trouble, some 700 people \u2013 among them dozens of women and children \u2013 rampaged through the streets of Notting Hill, chanting \u201cKill the niggers!\u201d One black student, cornered by pursuers, took refuge in the doorway of a greengrocer\u2019s shop; only the intervention of the grocer\u2019s wife saved him from what may have been a savage beating.<\/p>\n
Read more | The great British civil rights scandal: the Bristol bus boycott<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Contemporary observers recognised that the fighting was a shocking illustration of the prejudices that bubbled under the apparent civility of British society in the 1950s. In a front page cartoon in the Daily Mirror<\/em> a few days later, Adolf Hitler<\/a>\u2019s ghost addresses a \u201cracialist thug\u201d in Teddy Boy regalia. \u201cGo on boy,\u201d the late F\u00fchrer is saying. \u201cI may have lost that war but my ideas seem to be winning.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Notting Hill, \u201cracialism\u201d disappeared from the headlines. But it did not disappear from the streets, or from the hearts and minds of millions of people. And while the prejudices of the 1950s can be explained as a hangover from the days of imperial superiority, or as a historically common reaction to people who seemed \u201cdifferent\u201d, in the years that followed racism fed on the alienation of working-class Britons who felt betrayed by Harold Wilson<\/a>\u2019s government and were horrified by the nation\u2019s apparent decline into economic penury. Indeed, as the 1960s wore on, and even though immigrants were arriving at a slower rate, the politics of race became more intense. And nowhere was this more apparent than in Enoch Powell\u2019s political heartland, the West Midlands.<\/p>\n

Timeline:\u00a0From Windrush<\/em> to Rivers of Blood<\/h4>\n
22 June 1948<\/h6>\n
To a mixture of bemusement and hostility, the SS Empire Windrush<\/em> docks at Tilbury, carrying 492 West Indian passengers who have come to Britain in search of a new life.<\/p>\n
23 August \u2013 5\u202fSeptember 1958<\/h6>\n
Race riots break out in St\u202fAnn\u2019s, Nottingham, and Notting Hill, West London, as gangs of white teenagers roam the streets attacking immigrant families.<\/p>\n
17 May 1959<\/h6>\n
Kelso Cochrane, a carpenter from Antigua, is stabbed to death by white youths in Notting Hill in Britain\u2019s first high-profile race-motivated murder.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The police discount his colour as a factor, and his killers are never convicted.<\/p>\n
18 April 1962<\/h6>\n
The Macmillan government passes the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which scraps the principle of free admission for all British subjects and introduces strict controls on immigration from the former colonies.<\/p>\n
15 October 1964<\/h6>\n
Peter Griffiths wins the Smethwick parliamentary seat beating Labour\u2019s Patrick Gordon Walker. Posters and stickers carrying racist slogans were used during the election campaign.<\/p>\n
22 July 1965<\/h6>\n
The BBC broadcast the pilot of the sitcom Til Death Us Do Part<\/em>, introducing millions\u00a0of viewers to the racist opinions of the East Ender Alf Garnett.<\/p>\n
20 April 1968<\/h6>\n
Enoch Powell delivers his controversial Rivers of Blood speech against immigration at a Conservative meeting in the Midland Hotel, Birmingham, and is summarily sacked from the Shadow Cabinet.<\/p>\n
23 April 1968<\/h6>\n
Hundreds of dockers march on the Houses of Parliament with placards reading \u201cDon\u2019t Knock Enoch\u201d. The protesters force their way into the building to harangue government ministers.<\/p>\n
<\/p><\/div> <\/section>
Tough times for scapegoats<\/h3>\n
The West Midlands became associated with the politics of racism for two reasons. The area had attracted a disproportionate share of black and Asian immigrants in the mid-1950s, when its engineering and manufacturing firms were booming. Ten years later when the economic pendulum had swung against Britain\u2019s exporters, the firms of the West Midlands were particularly hard hit. And in the grimy, derelict industrial towns of the Black Country, the immigrant communities \u2013 who had moved into the cheapest and therefore least salubrious parts of town \u2013 made perfect scapegoats. \u201cVote Labour for more nigger-type neighbours\u201d read campaign stickers in the parliamentary election in Smethwick in 1964.<\/p>\n
The Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths, a fierce critic of immigration, won the seat, beating Labour\u2019s foreign affairs spokesman Patrick Gordon Walker in one of the century\u2019s most shocking electoral upsets. And although the Smethwick campaign was a rare episode of openly racist electioneering, it exposed the seething, unsettling resentments that lay beneath the froth and bubble of Harold Wilson\u2019s supposedly Swinging Britain.<\/p>\n
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22 June 1948<\/h6>\nTo a mixture of bemusement and hostility, the SS Empire Windrush<\/em> docks at Tilbury, carrying 492 West Indian passengers who have come to Britain in search of a new life.<\/p>\n

17 May 1959<\/h6>\nKelso Cochrane, a carpenter from Antigua, is stabbed to death by white youths in Notting Hill in Britain\u2019s first high-profile race-motivated murder.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe police discount his colour as a factor, and his killers are never convicted.<\/p>\n

18 April 1962<\/h6>\nThe Macmillan government passes the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which scraps the principle of free admission for all British subjects and introduces strict controls on immigration from the former colonies.<\/p>\n

15 October 1964<\/h6>\nPeter Griffiths wins the Smethwick parliamentary seat beating Labour\u2019s Patrick Gordon Walker. Posters and stickers carrying racist slogans were used during the election campaign.<\/p>\n

22 July 1965<\/h6>\nThe BBC broadcast the pilot of the sitcom Til Death Us Do Part<\/em>, introducing millions\u00a0of viewers to the racist opinions of the East Ender Alf Garnett.<\/p>\n

23 April 1968<\/h6>\nHundreds of dockers march on the Houses of Parliament with placards reading \u201cDon\u2019t Knock Enoch\u201d. The protesters force their way into the building to harangue government ministers.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section>

22 June 1948<\/h6>\n
To a mixture of bemusement and hostility, the SS Empire Windrush<\/em> docks at Tilbury, carrying 492 West Indian passengers who have come to Britain in search of a new life.<\/p>\n

17 May 1959<\/h6>\n
Kelso Cochrane, a carpenter from Antigua, is stabbed to death by white youths in Notting Hill in Britain\u2019s first high-profile race-motivated murder.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The police discount his colour as a factor, and his killers are never convicted.<\/p>\n

18 April 1962<\/h6>\n
The Macmillan government passes the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which scraps the principle of free admission for all British subjects and introduces strict controls on immigration from the former colonies.<\/p>\n

15 October 1964<\/h6>\n
Peter Griffiths wins the Smethwick parliamentary seat beating Labour\u2019s Patrick Gordon Walker. Posters and stickers carrying racist slogans were used during the election campaign.<\/p>\n

22 July 1965<\/h6>\n
The BBC broadcast the pilot of the sitcom Til Death Us Do Part<\/em>, introducing millions\u00a0of viewers to the racist opinions of the East Ender Alf Garnett.<\/p>\n

23 April 1968<\/h6>\n
Hundreds of dockers march on the Houses of Parliament with placards reading \u201cDon\u2019t Knock Enoch\u201d. The protesters force their way into the building to harangue government ministers.<\/p>\n
<\/p><\/div> <\/section>