State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Ever since mass immigration from the Commonwealth began in the early 1950s, successive governments had been anxious to make sure that the newcomers found productive work and a chance to make their way up the ladder. Initially there seemed good reason for optimism: a study in 1970 found that many immigrants had readily adapted to new challenges, with 18 per cent of both Indians and West Africans finding professional or technical work and another 19 per cent getting clerical jobs. But by the mid-1970s it was worryingly obvious that progress had stalled. One problem was that thousands of immigrants had chosen to live in industrial towns with falling populations and cheap housing – precisely those places, in other words, that suffered most in the economic troubles of the 1970s. And since the mills and factories that would once have given newcomers a foothold on the ladder were closing down, they often found themselves condemned to low-paid manual jobs in dreary, dilapidated, depressed towns that the rest of Britain had forgotten. By 1975, government figures showed that unemployment among immigrants was twice the national average, while young black school-leavers were four times less likely than their white counterparts to find jobs. Education was not always the answer: a year later, more figures suggested that one in four West Indian and Asian university graduates now worked in manual trades, compared with only a tiny proportion of white graduates. And by the beginning of the 1980s, it was clear that the decline of Britain’s manufacturing industries had taken a heavy toll on the ambitions of its immigrant population. In 1984, eight out of ten Caribbean men and seven out of ten Asian men were still working as manual labourers – compared with only five out of ten whites. And instead of moving up the property ladder, immigrants found themselves trapped at the bottom: in London, for example, some of the most run-down, violent and intimidating housing estates virtually became immigrant reservations, such as the Holly Street Estate, Hackney, or Broadwater Farm, Haringey. Here too racial discrimination clearly played its part, but to an extent the newcomers were simply the helpless victims of economic history.19

  Outside London the situation was little better. Nottingham, for example, had attracted a sizeable immigrant population in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to its history as a major textile town. By 1971, Commonwealth immigrants accounted for about 6 per cent of its total population, and a council official estimated that there were 10,000 West Indians, 4,000 Indians and 3,000 Pakistanis. Instead of being dispersed across the city, they were packed into a few seedy, neglected inner-city neighbourhoods such as St Ann’s, Lenton and Radford. But this was not merely a matter of choice. Despite the race relations legislation of the late 1960s, housing discrimination was still a fact of life: in February 1971 Nottingham’s Fair Housing Group, which had close links to the council, local estate agents and building societies, reported that ‘discrimination still continues to appear in various forms when an immigrant intends to purchase a house in one of the suburban areas of the city’. It was ‘so subtle’, the report claimed, ‘that even the Race Relations Act has become powerless to prevent it’.

  In interviews, immigrants consistently complained that white residents refused to sell to them, that neighbours put pressure on sellers to pull out, that building societies were reluctant to give them mortgages or would ask for an impossibly high deposit. In Nottingham, seven out of ten said that they had suffered housing discrimination, while almost eight out of ten complained of employment discrimination too. Time and again, they said, they were turned down without an interview, or told that the job had been filled as soon as the interviewer discovered they were black. One man rejected for a salesman’s job, for example, was told that ‘customers might not like a coloured man calling on them’, even though the interviewers admitted that he was perfectly ‘fit for the job’. So it was hardly surprising that no fewer than nine out of ten West Indians told researchers that they had been deeply disappointed by the realities of British prejudice. ‘We thought England was the home of justice – so we got quite a shock,’ one said. ‘The least little trouble they’ll turn round suddenly and say why don’t you go back where you come from,’ another lamented. ‘I was not expecting at all any prejudice or discrimination,’ admitted a third. ‘As a matter of fact I did not know I was a coloured man until the English tell me. Somebody referred to me as a coloured person on the bus once and that was the first time I knew who I was.’20

  That many people were prejudiced is not in doubt. In the same survey, six out of ten white Nottingham residents agreed that ‘English’ people should have priority in council housing. ‘It’s our bloody country so we should get first chance,’ one said. ‘Because the English fought to keep out the invaders and all both governments have done since is to open the doors to them all,’ said another. ‘We’ve fought two wars to keep our country English so we should have priority,’ insisted a third. And an even greater proportion (67 per cent) agreed that the ‘English’ ought to have priority in employment, too, even though this was technically illegal under the Race Relations Act of 1968. ‘It’s our country. I know some blacks are born here but I still think the Englishmen should have priority,’ one said. ‘It’s England isn’t it? I’m Alf Garnett. He said that when God made this earth he allotted a little bit to everybody. I’ve got no intention of going to India,’ said another. ‘I’m not prejudiced,’ said a third. ‘It’s just an Englishman’s right.’21

  Although Nottingham was badly affected by the economic downturn of the 1970s, other towns were even harder hit, and there prejudice took on a sharper, more aggressive edge. In Blackburn, Jeremy Seabrook found ‘an elaborate system of legends, myths and gossip’ surrounding the town’s 5,000 Pakistani immigrants, who made up just 5 per cent of the total population. One man told him that ‘this chap, white chap’ had heard noises in his loft one night, and upon ascending had found ‘a great long row of mattresses in the roof, all the length of the street, and on every one is a Pakistan [sic]’. Another man reported hearing that a Pakistani had managed to get £40 from the social services to pay for his car repairs (although even he admitted: ‘I shouldn’t think the Social Security’d be as generous as that’). In fact, Seabrook had heard it all before: these were common urban myths of the day, repeated in towns across the country and always involving some mysterious friend of a friend. But they were none the less virulent for being false. Visiting a Victorian terraced house in a run-down area, Seabrook met a crowd of middle-aged and elderly white women who were almost falling over each other to tell him that the Pakistanis were benefit cheats. As Seabrook saw it, the women were clearly frightened of being stranded in immigrant-dominated areas, their homes losing their value, their moral attitudes becoming obsolete in a disturbing new social and cultural landscape. The Pakistanis spat on the street, they complained; they blew their nose between their thumbs and fingers, instead of using a handkerchief; their wives did not even bother to scrub their front steps, as proper Blackburn women did. ‘We’re being driven out, no doubt about it,’ one said passionately. ‘We’re going back to the Stone Age,’ said another woman, ‘where they can just do as they like on the pavement … It’s like a jungle living here. People are very bitter. And if they can’t live like we live I think it’s time they went back.’22

  As Seabrook pointed out, these kinds of resentments – which often seemed more bitter and outspoken in the 1970s than in the decades beforehand – were only partly the result of racial prejudice. He noticed that many of the Blackburn women seemed uncomfortable with their own sentiments: afterwards ‘there was a certain uneasiness in the room, a sense of shame, the shame of people who have unburdened themselves to a stranger’. They knew that racial prejudice was wrong, which is why they often insisted that they were not prejudiced themselves (‘but …’). ‘This business about colour is all wrong,’ one told him. ‘I had some Italians live next door to me, and nicer people you couldn’t wish to meet … They make me sick when they say it’s on grounds of colour. It’s not the colour at all.’ Of course this was not really true: ‘the colour’ – understood broadly as
the immigrants’ attitudes, habits and values, as well as their appearance – was clearly a factor. But there was more to it than atavistic hatred, Seabrook thought: there was a sense of loss, of helplessness, of nostalgia for an idealized industrial working-class world with strict moral and social boundaries, a world that seemed to be slipping away. The women’s anger was ‘an expression of their pain and powerlessness confronted by the decay and dereliction, not only of the familiar environment, but of their own lives too’.23

  In many ways, racial prejudice was becoming increasingly unacceptable in Edward Heath’s Britain. In the political arena, overt racism was largely unknown, and most politicians trod extremely carefully. For almost all ambitious politicians, fear of being attacked by the press as a ‘racialist’ was much greater than the appeal of pandering to working-class sentiments. It was revealing, for example, that even when tabloid newspapers were attacking immigration, they took care to present themselves as tolerant and open-minded, insisting that their opposition was based on economic or environmental factors rather than questions of skin colour. Even though more than eight out of ten people agreed with Enoch Powell in the spring of 1968 that immigration had gone too far, seven out of ten told a Race Relations Board survey that they regarded themselves as tolerant and would happily drink with a black man at the pub. And for the Daily Mirror, still seen as the voice of the ordinary working man, even this was not enough. ‘The immigrant population – especially the second generation immigrants – don’t want simply to be tolerated,’ an editorial thundered. ‘They are NOT economic units. They are human beings. They are citizens of this country here to build a new life for themselves and their families. It is as fellow citizens and fellow human beings that they are entitled to be accepted.’24

  Fine words indeed; yet by the early 1970s, it was clear that racial prejudice was more deeply entrenched than it had seemed. This was, after all, a world in which the highly educated James Lees-Milne, a lover of the arts and driving spirit in the National Trust, saw nothing wrong in recording his horror that ‘half the inhabitants [of London] are coloured’. They were ‘aliens with alien beliefs’, he wrote in 1977, ‘and no understanding of our ways and past greatness. England to them is merely a convenience, a habitation, rather hostile, where wages are high and the State provides.’ This was tame stuff, though, compared with the views of Philip Larkin, arguably Britain’s finest poet, who complained to his mother in 1970 that ‘one child in eight born now is of immigrant parents’, and in fifty years’ time ‘it’ll be like living in bloody India’. Of course people often write controversial or politically incorrect things in their diaries or to their families and close friends. Perhaps Larkin was only joking. But it still says much that such a thoughtful and sensitive poet (albeit one with extremely conservative man-of-the-people opinions) was happy to send his friend Anthony Thwaite a Jubilee poem bemoaning ‘the rising tide of niggers’, or to tell Robert Conquest that one of his poetic tips on ‘How to Win the Next Election’ was to ‘kick out the niggers’. And it also says much that in one of the first Inspector Morse novels, Last Seen Wearing (1977), Colin Dexter’s intellectual detective, arguing with a Maltese bouncer in a strip-club, readily calls him a ‘dirty little squit’ and a ‘miserable wog’ – and that his sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, then a Welshman, clearly thinks nothing of it.25

  As so often, it was humour that best revealed the limits of racial tolerance. Racist banter in the workplace, for example, was very common. ‘I went for a job up the road,’ one black 18-year-old told the Sunday Times in 1973, ‘and the man he says, “You don’t mind if we call you a black bastard or a wog or a nigger or anything because it’s entirely a joke.” ’ When the applicant answered that in that case he could ‘keep his job’, the man insisted that he was ‘not colour prejudiced’, the standard formula of the day. But it is easy to see why the employer might have thought that such ‘jokes’ were acceptable. Popular culture in the early 1970s was saturated with humour and attitudes that later generations would regard as shockingly racist. Jokes about black men and ‘Pakis’ (‘I saved a Paki from drowning the other day. I took me foot off his head’) were the common currency of pubs and working men’s clubs. In Trevor Griffiths’ play Comedians (1975), which follows the fortunes of a group of aspiring Manchester stand-up comics, almost all of them fall back on racist mockery to impress their first audience, from jokes about black physical endowment (‘a big black bugger rushes in [to the toilet]. Aaaah, he says. Just made it! I took a look, I said, There’s no chance of making one in white for me is there?’) to a particularly offensive joke about a Pakistani on a rape charge (‘They bring the girl in and the Pakistani shouts, She is the one, Officer. No doubt about it’). Yet this is one of the few jokes that make an impression on the visiting talent scout, for whom racist material is clearly nothing untoward. ‘It was a different act, the wife, blacks, Irish, women, you spread it around,’ he says admiringly to another comedian.26

  What Griffiths’ play captured – and what made it controversial and deeply uncomfortable viewing when it was adapted for television four years later – was the raw, resentful tribalism of much working-class comedy in the 1970s. Even television stand-up often had a racist edge: almost no edition of ITV’s hugely popular show The Comedians, which gave a regular platform to Northern working-class comics such as Bernard Manning, Stan Boardman and Lennie Bennett, was complete without a handful of racist jokes. What was remarkable, though, was that the tellers included black comedians themselves. The South Yorkshire comedian Charlie Williams, the son of a Barbadian soldier who had settled in Barnsley, played for Doncaster Rovers in the 1950s before turning to the club circuit and was a great favourite with television audiences. As a black man with a cheerful demeanour and strong Yorkshire accent, he cut a confusingly ambiguous figure, defying easy stereotypes. Yet although Williams was a role model for a younger generation of black performers, and may well have been the most popular black Englishman in the early 1970s, his material was controversial even at the time. Among all the jokes about the minutiae of Northern working-class life – the ‘boxes of broken biscuits, terraced houses, outside lavatories, the coalface, scrumping apples’, as his obituary put it – he regularly fell back on jokes about his own colour. ‘If you don’t shut up,’ he would tell hecklers, ‘I’ll come and move next door to you.’ And while Williams sometimes poked fun at racial stereotypes – ‘When Enoch Powell said: “Go home, black man”, I said: “I’ve got a hell of a long wait for a bus to Barnsley” ’ – his act could hardly be described as particularly subversive.

  More often than not, in fact, Williams simply reinforced the racist clichés of the day, delighting audiences with his remarks that he had been ‘left in the oven too long’ or was sweating so much that he was ‘leaking chocolate’. ‘During the power cuts,’ he once joked, ‘I had no trouble at all because all I had to do was roll my eyes.’ He even joked about being a cannibal, telling a story about a man he invited to dinner: ‘Halfway through the meal he says: “I don’t like your mother-in-law.” So I said: “Leave her on the side of the plate and just eat the chips and peas.” ’ This kind of material guaranteed Williams an enthusiastic reception: when he topped the bill at Scarborough in 1973, he broke box-office records. But was he merely pandering to white prejudice, or was he blazing a trail for other black comedians? He certainly inspired Lenny Henry, by far the most successful black comedian of the next generation, who admired his energy and courage in taking to the stage. Not all black observers, however, were impressed by Williams’s eagerness to do routines about ‘darkies’, ‘Pakis’ and ‘coons’. ‘He thinks he can hide behind his Yorkshire grin,’ one correspondent wrote to the Guardian, condemning Williams for not ‘speaking for his brothers’. But that was highly unrealistic: a professional comedian who performed Black Power routines would not have lasted long on ITV.27

  Lenny Henry’s own career was not without its ambiguities. One of seven children born to Jamaican parents in Dudley, he made an imme
diate impact on the club circuit as a teenager and won ITV’s New Faces competition in 1976 when he was just 17. Almost immediately, however, he joined the touring version of the Black and White Minstrel Show, which attracted sell-out audiences almost every year in the major cities and seaside resorts. Looking back later, he admitted that there were two voices in his head: one told him that there was a ‘fundamental problem’ with appearing alongside grinning minstrels in blackface; the other told him to ‘take the money and have a great time’. In fact, it is obvious why an ambitious teenage comedian would join the Minstrels. By the mid-1970s, they had a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most popular stage show, and when Henry joined he found himself performing for twenty-two consecutive weeks at the Blackpool Opera House before 3,000 people a night. For an aspiring performer, this was an unbeatable education in cabaret and pantomime, and it made it easier for him to block out the protesters who sometimes heckled from the stalls, or the publicity photographs that showed him alongside blacked-up performers pretending to take off his make-up. Like most of the other performers, he told himself that the costumes were merely a distraction, that the essence of the show was the sets and the songs, and he accepted the conventional wisdom that it was ‘not a racial show’. Ultimately, though, he was no fool, and the protests of his friends finally changed his mind. In 1979, ‘going mad’ with frustration, he walked out. ‘The mistake wasn’t in doing the show and getting stage time and getting experience and learning to time a joke,’ he said later. It was in not realizing that, as a ‘second generation West Indian guy’, he had no place in a show based on racial caricatures.28

  Defenders of the Black and White Minstrel Show often insisted that it was merely innocent, harmless fun, without any racial dimension, and that its critics were humourless killjoys. In fact the television show, which began in 1958, was dogged for much of its run by quiet murmurs of discontent within the BBC and angry protests from race relations groups. In some ways it beggars belief that neither the producers nor the performers could detect any hint of racism in routines that showed grinning men in blackface serenading pretty white women. ‘It depicts my race as singing, dancing, laughing, idiotic people,’ Clive West, a young Trinidadian who organized a petition calling for its cancellation, told The Times in 1967. But although West collected 200 signatures blaming the programme for causing ‘misunderstanding between the races’, the Minstrels refused to budge: as their producer George Inns put it, ‘how anyone can read racialism into this show is beyond me’. And in their defence, the Minstrels could point to their enormous popularity with the British public. They regularly attracted audiences of more than 12 million, drawn to the old-fashioned and highly accomplished song-and-dance routines: as late as 1976, when the show had already lost some of its lustre, the Minstrels’ Christmas special was still among the top five programmes of the season. Millions of people clearly thought the routines were perfectly acceptable, and there is no evidence that the producers were deliberately prejudiced. ‘Not one of us ever gave a thought to racism,’ the performer Les Want later told a BBC documentary. ‘We didn’t connect it with black people, because the original shows were white people blacked up. It never felt offensive.’ Yet by the mid-1970s – much to Want’s disappointment – the show had lost its supporters in the BBC. In an era when black performers like Lenny Henry and Floella Benjamin were becoming mainstays of the television schedules, not even the most conservative television executives could defend a show trading in blackface caricatures. In July 1978 it was cancelled, never to return.29