The H of C (free vote) decided tonight to put the death penalty for murder into cold storage for 5 years which presumably will mean the abolition of capital punishment in English law. The Home Secretary and the Cabinet advised the House that in their opinion this was not the moment to make the experiment – the police and the judges are said to be against the change – but the Comrades as a body were not convinced. Human life is sacred, hanging is no deterrent to murder, other countries have abolished it without any increase of murder – why should not we? All very plausible – all very noble-minded – but what does all the fuss amount to? Chuter Ede gave us figures to show that about 11 or 12 people are hanged every year – that a majority of murder cases are reprieved – that the chance of a miscarriage of justice is very slight . . . We are asked therefore to do away with capital punishment against the advice of responsible authority at a time when criminal violence is on the increase . . . The speeches today were good, bad and indifferent – and each speaker in turn congratulated the one who spoke before him on his high morality and sincerity. There was a deal of sob stuff which depressed me as it always does.
The majority of 23 in favour of an experimental suspension of the death penalty would have been greater if it had been a genuinely ‘free vote’. In fact, Attlee on the morning of the debate curtly told his junior ministers that, given the Cabinet’s position, they were not to vote for Silverman’s amendment. Among those who protested – and in due course abstained – was the rather incongruous pair of Evan Durbin and James Callaghan.
It proved a short-lived triumph for the mainly middle-class Labour backbenchers. Four days later, the Sunday Pictorial’s headline was ‘“Hanging” Vote Worries Public’, with the paper’s reporters having conducted an intensive two-day inquiry ‘all over Britain’ which found that ‘the majority of the public, while welcoming an end to hanging as the sole penalty for murder, feel it should be kept as protection from the worst criminal types’. Accordingly, ‘nine out of ten people favoured degrees of murder, with death for killers in the first degree’. The paper also quoted some representative vox pop:
Criminals will stick at nothing now they know they cannot be hanged.
(Capt. A. E. Tarran, Shadwell, Leeds)
With this last deterrent gone, no woman will feel safe in London after dark. (Miss A. Bennett, Martin Way, Merton)
It is a mistake to remove the only punishment of which armed thugs are afraid. (Mr T. Ashton, Holloway Road, N7)
I think Members of Parliament should have their heads examined for coming to such a decision. (Mr H. Ronson, Deane Road, Bolton)
How dare the Commons abolish the death penalty without hearing the views of the people they represent! (Mr T. O’Neil, Wadham Road, Liverpool)
Now it was up to the Lords. But meanwhile, Gladys Langford noted in early May, ‘. . . another policeman shot – Forest Gate this time’, and later that month another Gallup poll revealed that 66 per cent were opposed to suspending capital punishment for five years and only 26 per cent in favour. The Lord Chief Justice, the uncompromising Lord Goddard, had already made clear his view that criminal law would be respected only if it remained in line with public opinion, and on 2 June (the day the Queen toured the Lancashire cotton mills) the Lords rejected suspension by a crushing 181 votes to 28. At a Cabinet meeting soon afterwards, Attlee – well aware of where public feeling lay – successfully insisted that, for the time being at least, the abolitionist game was up; Hartley Shawcross, no longer the master, left the room in tears.19
The summer of 1948 was even more of a defining moment in the centuries-old story of immigration to Britain. For many years the most widely stigmatised ‘others’ in British society had been the Jews and the Irish, by the end of the war numbering respectively some 400,000 and 600,000 (ie on the mainland). Although it is possible to exaggerate the extent of the prejudice, Jews in particular were demonised, even after the film cameras had entered Belsen and Auschwitz; shockingly, British fascism revived quickly after the war, little impeded by the men in blue. ‘I suppose it is perfectly in order for a lousy swine like Jeffrey Hamm [Oswald Mosley’s main sidekick] to get up on a street corner in the East End of London and shout, “Down with the Jews. Burn the synagogues. Kill the Aliens,” and he gets away with it, but if a person tries to pull him up, what happens?’ a concerned local person asked the Home Secretary rhetorically in October 1946. ‘The so-called keepers of law and order, the police, go up to this person and tell him he’d better move away before he gets hurt . . . These guardians of the law and order from Commercial Street Police Station openly boast about being members of Jeffrey Hamm’s fascist party.’ The following year saw anti-Semitic riots in several British cities. These were triggered by lurid headlines about the hanging in Palestine of two captured British sergeants but also involved a widespread belief that it was Jews who were responsible for running the black market – and making a killing from doing so.
There was likewise some persistent anti-Semitism in the higher echelons of society. Frederic Raphael’s schooldays at Charterhouse were famously made a misery because of it, while in the City of London the malign legacy survived of Montagu Norman, the notoriously anti-Semitic Governor of the Bank of England between the wars. ‘Mr Randell of Bank of England says he is a very pushing individual – German Jew – who established himself here in 1938,’ stated (early in 1948) an internal note of the Issuing Houses Association, to which Walter Salomon had applied for his firm to join. ‘They don’t know a lot about him, but think it would do no harm to let him cool his heels a bit more.’ And, damningly: ‘His office is full of foreigners.’ When the IHA took other soundings, no one denied that Salomon was a man of ability and energy, but – the face not fitting – he did indeed have to cool his heels.20
However, the Jew was about to be replaced by the black immigrant as the prime ‘other’. At the end of the war, some 20,000 to 30,000 non-whites were living in Britain, and studies were starting to be made of the attitude of whites towards them. Kenneth Little’s Negroes in Britain – published in 1948 but mainly based on fieldwork done in the late 1930s and early 1940s in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay (where Shirley Bassey, seventh child of a Nigerian seaman, was growing up) – concluded hopefully that ‘a great deal of latent friendliness underlies the surface appearance of apathy and even of displayed prejudice in a large number of cases,’ though he did concede that it was difficult to generalise, given that as yet ‘relatively few English people have made close contact with coloured individuals.’ The other port with a sizeable number of black immigrants was Liverpool, where Anthony Richmond in the early 1950s examined what became of several hundred West Indians who went there during the war (under an officially sponsored scheme to boost production) and subsequently stayed on. Richmond found that by 1946 at the latest they were encountering considerable prejudice in the workplace from skilled tradesmen who, having served their apprenticeships, ‘resented being associated in the minds of English people with the unskilled negro labourer’: ‘Outside the field of employment there can be little doubt that the area of most intense prejudice against the West Indian Negroes is that of sexual relations,’ in that ‘men who are accepted in the ordinary course of acquaintance are subjected to serious insults if seen in the company of a white girl’, and ‘the girl herself is often stigmatised among all “respectable” people’.
A Guyanan at the sharp end of prejudice in 1947/8 was Eustace Braithwaite, who after demobilisation from the RAF struggled, for over a year and despite having a Cambridge physics degree, to get a job: ‘I tried everything – labour exchanges, employment agencies, newspaper ads – all with the same result. I even advertised myself mentioning my qualifications and the colour of my skin, but there were no takers. Then I tried applying for jobs without mentioning my colour, but when they saw me the reasons given for turning me down were all variations of the same theme: too black . . .’ Eventually, sitting one day beside the lake in St James’s Park and watching the ducks, he fell into convers
ation with ‘a thin, bespectacled old gentleman’ and related his plight. The stranger told him there were many vacancies for teachers in the East End, and soon afterwards Braithwaite secured a job at an LCC school in Cable Street, scene of the pitched battle between fascists and Communists in 1936. He was the only black teacher in London, and the eventual literary (and cinematic) upshot was To Sir, With Love.
Ignorance about black immigrants and where they came from no doubt played its part in shaping indigenous attitudes. A survey of almost 2,000 adult civilians, conducted mainly in May 1948, revealed the following:
‘Housewives, unskilled operatives, and people over the age of sixty, are the least well-informed sections of the population,’ observed the report, adding that among even the most knowledgeable occupational group, comprising professional, managerial and higher clerical workers, less than two-thirds could explain the difference between a colony and a dominion. The report went on: ‘Public opinion is inclined to be complacent about the work that Britain has done in the Colonies. Only 19% think that we have “tended to be selfish in the past” – though this feeling is stronger among the better informed sections of the population than among the more ignorant. In any case, the great majority of people believe that we are doing “a better job now”.’21These were significant findings. Whatever people’s instinctive attitude towards black immigrants, not many believed that Britain morally owed them a favour. The guilt factor, in other words, was still the preserve of a privileged minority.
At the Ministry of Labour (MOL), faced by a serious labour shortage, the need to attract migrants was obvious. But whereas it went out of its way in these years to bring into the British labour market many thousands of white European workers, a high proportion of them Poles, its attitude to Caribbean labour was essentially negative, albeit sometimes covertly expressed. ‘Whatever may be the policy about British citizenship,’ Sir Harold Wiles, Deputy Permanent Under-Secretary, told a colleague in March 1948, ‘I do not think that any scheme for the importation of coloured colonials for permanent settlement here should be embarked upon without full understanding that this means that coloured element will be brought in for permanent absorption into our own population.’ The colleague, M. A. Bevan, agreed: ‘As regards the possible importation of West Indian labour, I suggest that we must dismiss the idea from the start.’ And in May, submitting a report on the question of employing ‘surplus male West Indians’, the MOL came up with an avalanche of reasons (or what it called ‘overwhelming difficulties’) why this was a bad idea. There was the major problem of accommodation; Caribbean workers would be ‘unsuitable for outdoor work in winter owing to their susceptibility to colds and the more serious chest and lung ailments’; those working underground in coal mines would find conditions ‘too hot’; and anyway, ‘many of the coloured men are unreliable and lazy, quarrels among them are not infrequent’.22That, it seemed, was that.
How did such attitudes chime with questions of British citizenship? The issue had been raised by Wiles in his March 1948 memo, in the knowledge that legislation was in the pipeline for what, following its second reading in May, became by the end of the summer the British Nationality Act 1948. This legislation, distinguishing between citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies on the one hand and citizens of independent Commonwealth countries on the other, was essentially a response to Canada’s recent introduction of its own citizenship and sought to affirm, in the authoritative words of the historian Randall Hansen, ‘Britain’s place as head of a Commonwealth structure founded on the relationship between the UK and the Old Dominions’. It was not in any sense a measure centrally concerned with matters of immigration; and nor was it really about the colonies. Although in practice it sanctioned what over the next 14 years would be a very liberal immigration regime, it was (again to quote Hansen), ‘never intended to sanction a mass migration of new Commonwealth citizens to the United Kingdom’ – and, crucially, ‘nowhere in parliamentary debate, the Press, or private papers was the possibility that substantial numbers could exercise their right to reside permanently in the UK discussed’.
Significantly, with cross-party support and little public interest, the bill’s passage was smooth and quick. Inasmuch as politicians considered the immigration aspect, no one expected the legislation to have more than a marginal impact. The subsequent recollection of one Tory, Quintin Hogg – ‘We thought that there would be free trade in citizens, that people would come and go, and that there would not be much of an overall balance in one direction or the other’ – would have applied equally to Labour.23After all, the general expectation was that any future labour shortage could continue to be met by European labour; no one anticipated the increasing availability of cheap transportation from the Caribbean. The act was thus a fine example of liberalism at its most nominal. Yet by a delicious irony, even as the legislators legislated, that liberalism was starting to be tested.
On 24 May the Empire Windrush, a former German troop-carrier, set sail from Kingston, Jamaica, with 492 black males and one stowaway woman. Their destination was Tilbury, and as early as the 26th the London office of the Ministry of Labour reacted to the news with ‘considerable dismay’, predicting that if the men tried to get jobs in areas of worsening unemployment like Stepney and Camden Town (in both of which there were quite a few black workers already), ‘there will probably be trouble eventually’. By 8 June the minister, George Isaacs, was emphasising to MPs that the job-seekers had not been officially invited. ‘The arrival of these substantial numbers of men under no organised arrangement is bound to result in considerable difficulty and disappointment,’ he declared, adding, ‘I hope no encouragement will be given to others to follow their example.’ Over the next fortnight the MOL tried in vain to delay the Empire Windrush’s arrival but did arrange jobs for many of its passengers – mainly out of London and mainly well apart from each other.
Within the Cabinet the flak for this untoward turn of events was directed at the Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones. He was blamed on the 15th for not ‘having kept the lid on things’ and was requested, amid considerable press interest (curious rather than hostile) in the ship’s imminent arrival, to ‘ensure that further similar movements either from Jamaica or elsewhere in the colonial empire are detected and checked before they can reach such an embarrassing stage’. Replying to his critics three days later, Creech Jones did not deny that the men were fully entitled to come to Britain but sought to offer reassurance for the future: ‘I do not think that a similar mass movement will take place again because the transport is unlikely to be available, though we shall be faced with a steady trickle, which, however, can be dealt with without undue difficulty.’ Fewer than 500 constituting a ‘mass movement’? Given that over the previous 12 months as many as 51,000 white European voluntary workers had been placed in one sector alone of the British economy (agriculture), the subtext was almost palpable. Soon afterwards, in a letter sent to Attlee by 11 anxious Labour MPs, there was no beating about the bush:
This country may become an open reception centre for immigrants not selected in respect to health, education, training, character, customs and above all, whether assimilation is possible or not.
The British people fortunately enjoy a profound unity without uniformity in their way of life, and are blest by the absence of a colour racial problem. An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and to cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned.
Accordingly, the MPs suggested that the government should, ‘by legislation if necessary, control immigration in the political, social, economic and fiscal interests of our people’. They added that ‘in our opinion such legislation or administration action would be almost universally approved by our people’.24
This petition to Attlee was sent on Tuesday, 22 June – the very day that the Empire Windrush’s passengers disembarked at Tilbury. The Star’s report that evening concentrated on ‘25-year
-old seamstress Averill Wanchove’:
She stowed away on the ship and was befriended by Nancy Cunard, heiress of the Cunard fortunes.
Tall and attractive Averill was discovered when the ship was seven days out from Kingston.
Mr Mortimer Martin made a whip round and raised £50, enough to pay Averill’s fare and to leave her £4 for pocket money.
Nancy Cunard, who was on her way back from Trinidad, took a fancy to Averill and intends looking after her.
Pathé newsreel film of the new arrivals featured the calypso singer Lord Kitchener (real name Aldwyn Roberts) performing his latest composition, ‘London Is the Place for Me’, a buoyantly optimistic number which he had started composing about four days before the boat landed. ‘The feeling I had to know that I’m going to touch the soil of the mother country, that was the feeling I had,’ he recalled almost half a century later. ‘How can I describe? It’s just a wonderful feeling. You know how it is when a child, you hear about your mother country, and you know that you’re going to touch the soil of the mother country, you know what feeling is that? And I can’t describe it. That’s why I compose the song.’
Austerity Britain Page 34
