20TH-CENTURY BRITAIN
Multicultural Britain is born
Sonia Grant charts black Britain in the 20th century, through the early settlers, war, the arrival of the Windrush, and beyond
Featured on the same page of the edition of The Sphere dated 3 July 1948 were two striking but juxtaposing images: the first showed the arrival of hundreds of West Indian migrants to Britain aboard HMT Empire Windrush; the other was of the P&O liner Ranchi as it set sail with English emigrants bound for a new life in Australia. In the aftermath of World War II, Britain haemorrhaged more than 2 million people as they escaped the bleakness of austerity and the hardships of rationing.
The unprecedented scale of the exodus caused Winston Churchill to plea: “I say to those that wish to leave our country… Do not desert the old land. We cannot spare you.” Yet people still left in droves, and soon, labour shortages were being filled by those arriving on ships such as the Windrush – whether they had come with the specific intention of finding new work opportunities, or simply wanted a chance to travel to the “mother country”.
But although Windrush is regarded as signalling the advent of mass immigration – with its arrival at Tilbury Docks on 22 June 1948 – that does not tell the whole story. Around half a century earlier, there was a visible black presence already to be found in Britain, mainly around the port cities of London, Liverpool and Cardiff. The latter, for instance, was known to have at least 50 different nationalities overcrowded around the dock area of Butetown (also known as Tiger Bay).
Although merchant seamen represented the largest contingent of black British subjects, there were also pockets of students, businesspeople and professionals joining these well-established communities. They were not welcomed with open arms but faced discrimination through unofficial ‘colour bars’, which led to political mobilisation in 1900 with Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester organising the First Pan-African Conference in London. Invariably, there were different expressions of dissatisfaction, such as by fellow barrister Augustus Boyle Chamberlayne (ABC) Merriman-Labor. Arriving from Sierra Leone in 1904, he grew disenchanted by the discrimination he experienced and, in 1909, published Britons through Negro Spectacles, a satirical critique of life in Britain from the eyes of an outsider.
Mobilised and mobbed
Yet with the outbreak of World War I, black British subjects and men from across the empire rallied to the cause. Nearly 16,000 volunteers enlisted with the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR), which served in supporting roles on the Western Front and saw combat in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq, Kuwait and parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey). By the end of the war, soldiers of the BWIR were awarded 81 medals for bravery.
Postwar Britain, however, turned out not to be the promised “land fit for heroes” for returning troops, and high unemployment and housing shortages were blamed on “coloured foreigners”. Tensions erupted in a series of race riots from January to August 1919, breaking out in Glasgow, South Shields, Salford, London, Hull, Newport, Barry, Liverpool and Cardiff – where black communities were concentrated. Racial violence and mob rule was rife. Some 700 black residents in Liverpool had to be held in police stations for their safety, while in Whitechapel, London, Reverend Thomas Jackson of the Working Lads’ Institute sheltered some 600 former soldiers, many of them demobbed from the BWIR.
Earnest Marke, a Sierra Leonean seaman, later wrote in his biography Old Man Trouble how he escaped injury “by the skin of his teeth”, but a friend, Charles Wotten from Bermuda, was not as fortunate. Chased by a mob to the docks in Liverpool, he either fell or was pushed into the water and, after being pelted with stones, drowned.
Part of the government response to the riots was to escalate its repatriation scheme for subjects of colour; on offer was a small sum of money and passage on the first available ship, if they chose to leave voluntarily. Nevertheless, once order had been restored many chose to remain – having built their own lives in Britain – and, over the following decades, the black population increased. Organisations were established to meet their needs. In the 1930s, for instance, Barbadian activist Arnold Ward founded the Negro Welfare Association, which campaigned on both domestic and international issues.
Grassroots activism
The need to organise only intensified in the years after the arrival of the Windrush in 1948. The new arrivals faced many challenges and, despite being granted citizenship by the recent British Nationality Act and holding British passports, were not made to feel welcome by all. Many experienced widespread prejudices: when Mary McLachlan visited her local church and was asked not to return the following Sunday as her presence might upset parishioners, she took it upon herself to start what became the Church of God in Christ in her living room. Accommodation was also difficult to obtain and when faced with banks refusing to grant loans for mortgages or exploitative slum landlords, most notoriously the Notting Hill-based Peter Rachman, informal community banking systems – known as pardners, or susu – sprouted up to raise funds so people could buy homes.
Such examples of grassroots activism and participation were common among black communities. In 1959, however, Dr David Pitt took the leap into electoral politics, becoming a pioneering candidate of African descent when he ran for parliament. Standing for Labour in Hampstead in London, he later recalled how a man approached him during his unsuccessful bid saying that if he did not withdraw, “We will get you and your family”. The intimidation went beyond threats: violent disturbances broke out at a hustings when members of the White Defence League gate-crashed and shouted chants of “Keep Britain white”.
As for the children of the ‘Windrush generation’, they faced their own unique challenges growing up in Britain. In his 1971 work, How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain, Grenadian teacher Bernard Coard criticised the disproportionate number of black children being “dumped” in Educationally Subnormal Schools (ESN) – a term derived from the 1944 Education Act to characterise young people deemed to have limited intellectual ability. He argued some of the reasons given were spurious, such as the teachers’ inability to understand West Indian accents.
Coard’s book was met by outrage by the establishment, but inspired black communities and galvanised in the Black Education Movement, a collective which fought for equality and mitigated against injustices by organising supplementary or Saturday schools across the country.
Place in society
From the 1980s onwards, black Britons forged their own identity and place in society. The first Black History Month took place in 1987; the achievement of Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, a special projects officer at the Greater London Council. Black entrepreneurs also came to the forefront, epitomised by the likes of Dounne Alexander. With no business training, she brought her homemade remedy ‘Gramma’s Herbal Pepper Sauces’ to market; got her products on the shelves of Fortnum & Mason and Harrods; and, in 1990, opened her first factory.
In countless ways, people who came to Britain from Africa or the Caribbean, or were born to immigrant parents, changed and defined British multicultural society, and still do so. Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson – described as “the pulse of black British activism” – has chronicled black British history over five decades with his work. His million-selling albums of spoken word mixed with dub and reggae music have charted everything from sus laws (a precursor to ‘stop and search’) and the 1981 uprisings (clashes between black youths and police) in Toxteth and Brixton.
Throughout it all, Jamaican-born Johnson remained an optimist, saying at the end of the 20th century: “It’s absolutely critical that we have a historical perspective. There’s an entire generation of young blacks who have no understanding of how we got to where we are now, so no idea of how to move forward into the 21st century.”
Bristol’s bus boycott
Inspired by Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s protest in Montgomery, Alabama, black Britons fought racism on public transport
In 1955, the Bristol Omnibus Company unofficially agreed to uphold a resolution by the local branch of the Transport and General Workers Union that no “coloured” workers should work on their buses. Even amid staff shortages, it refused to employ people of colour as drivers or conductors. By the 1960s, the West Indian Development Council (WIDC) had formed to fight this discrimination.
Led by Jamaicans Owen Henry, Roy Hackett, Audley Evans and Prince Brown – and with 26-yearold Paul Stephenson as its spokesperson – the WIDC organised a bus boycott, announced in April 1963. It gathered widespread backing: marches were held, bus depots picketed, and figures such as local MP Tony Benn and cricketer Sir Learie Constantine (by then the high commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago) voiced their support.
After four months, the Bristol Omnibus Company agreed to employ its first non-white conductor: Raghbir Singh. In 1965, the first Race Relations Act was passed, banning racial discrimination in public places, with a further Act in 1968 banning racial discrimination in housing and employment.
Sonia Grant is a historian, writer, researcher and photographic exhibition curator, specialising in black history