Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  They hit the student. A youth flings his cycle at him. He pleads and cries out, then breaks away, into a greengrocer’s shop. The greengrocer locks the door. The student stands trembling and says: ‘They’ll kill me.’

  Then police cars come and a police van with a dozen policemen. They take the student to safety and the greengrocer says to me: ‘They’d have murdered him.’

  The man running for his life was Seymour Manning, a 26-year-old African student living in Derby, who had come down to London for the day to see friends; the greengrocer’s wife who bravely let him in and kept the pursuers at bay was Mrs Pat Howcroft. ‘I was one of the three that first got ’im,’ an angry white boy in a red shirt told another reporter. ‘I half-twisted his leg off anyway. We’d have tore ’im apart if it hadn’t been for the police.’

  That evening, as darkness fell, huge, rampant mobs of white youth – shouting ‘Kill the niggers!’ and estimated as up to 2,000 strong – smashed their way through a large swathe of Notting Hill. By this time the local blacks, supplemented by Jamaicans from Brixton (itself in a highly volatile state), were fighting back, including an all-out pitched battle in Powis Terrace, with the philosophy being, recalled one, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’. A Daily Express reporter caught something of the flavour of a chaotic, violent night:

  Youths surged from the Bramley Road area, through Oxford Gardens into Blenheim Crescent. They shattered windows of a Jamaican woman’s home with palings torn from the garden fence of her English neighbour.

  A Fascist meeting in Barandon Street nearby lost its audience as youths marched away to Blenheim Crescent. A bottle containing lighted petrol was hurled among them from the roof of a four-floor tenement. A rain of milk bottles followed. The road was littered with broken glass. An old lamp-lighter going his rounds on a bicycle was felled by a brick. Two more petrol bombs followed, sending sheets of flame up from the road.

  Early next morning a politician, living in nearby Holland Park, toured the battle zone. ‘I saw the debris and the corrugated iron up behind the windows of the prefabs where the coloured families live,’ recorded Anthony Wedgwood Benn. ‘The use of petrol bombs and iron bars and razors is appalling. There is a large area where it is not safe for people to be out.’ That Tuesday afternoon he toured again – ‘even at 5 o’clock there was an ugly atmosphere and people hurried along the streets’ – and indeed another night of trouble lay ahead, with 55 people (mainly white) arrested, often for possession of offensive weapons such as broken milk bottles and loaded leather belts. ‘In one street where some of the ugliest fighting has taken place your Correspondent found a group of men in a public house singing “Old Man River” and “Bye Bye Blackbird”, and punctuating the songs with vicious anti-Negro slogans,’ noted The Times. ‘The men said that their motto was “Keep Britain White”, and they made all sorts of wild charges against their coloured neighbours.’ Rain at last arrived on Wednesday to damp things down, and though Thursday was another hot, tense day with some disturbances, a degree of normality began to return from Friday onwards.3

  It was hardly news, of course, that not all whites in Britain viewed the 165,000 or so non-white immigrants with unalloyed enthusiasm. ‘I have been living in Hartington Street for over 30 years and I have seen the deterioration which has been caused by the coloured people,’ Mrs F. L. Greenwood, a widow from Moss Side, Manchester, told a local paper the previous autumn. ‘We are all made by the same Creator, but I think the coloured folk should live together in one district, as they do in Birmingham.’ Or from Paddington, take the views (as elicited in April 1958) of some of the white residents of Oakington Road:

  I’ve got nothing against them, but they should have a place of their own like Maida Vale. I was brought up prejudiced against them.

  There’s 10 people sleeping in a room over there.

  They should not be allowed to flood here. They must be stopped. They give white girls babies.

  They blow their nose as they pass you.

  Their windows and curtains are filthy. They are noisy.

  God made black as well as white, but if you see all the black prostitutes in Piccadilly, it’s awful.

  They don’t interfere with me. I don’t like them around. I don’t know why.

  Two months later it became a national story when local magistrates renewed the licence of the Scala ballroom in Wolverhampton even though it was operating a colour bar. ‘The fact is people don’t want them,’ the manager, Michael Wade, explained. ‘They have said to me: “We have to work with them; some of us even have to live next to them. We want to get away from them sometimes.”’ So too elsewhere in the West Midlands. ‘Are there too Many Coloured Folk in Coventry?’ was the title at the start of August of an editorial in the Coventry Standard – noting how ‘each day a stream of them wends its way down Grey Friars Lane to the Employment Exchange, and most of them have savings accounts at the banks’ – while later in the month the Birmingham Mail’s industrial correspondent, Clem Lewis, argued that, in the context of ‘no longer enough jobs to go round’, the time had come for action: ‘The problem is one of people coming from impoverished countries to a country with standards and a way of life that they cannot immediately understand or accept. For their sake and our own it has to be faced honestly, fairly, and imaginatively – NOW.’4

  For their part, non-white immigrants undoubtedly continued to encounter significant prejudice and discrimination – but the question is to gauge how much. A glance at the small ads for furnished apartments in the Kensington News on 22 August, just before the troubles began, is suggestive, being full of phrases like ‘English only’, ‘Europeans only’, ‘White business people only’, ‘No coloured people’ and, regretfully, ‘Sorry, no coloured’. Moreover, as the sociologist Ruth Glass found not long afterwards, the omission of such a phrase was no guarantee of an open door. Only one in six of ‘neutral’ private advertisers in the Kensington Post were in practice, on being rung up, willing to countenance West Indian tenants. With council housing almost out of the question in the context of the ongoing housing shortage – ‘It would be quite unrealistic,’ frankly stated a housing minister, Reginald Bevins, in November 1957, ‘to expect local authorities to give priority to immigrants over other local families who have often been on the waiting-list for several years’ – the most common recourse was to dilapidated housing owned by fellow immigrants, too often far from scrupulous about issues of sanitation and overcrowding. As for employment, where non-whites by now were often doing the menial or ill-paid jobs that whites no longer wished to do, it was a more mixed picture: the colour bar virtually gone in sectors like the NHS and public transport, but explicitly or implicitly often present elsewhere, not least through local branches of trade unions operating colour quotas with the tacit consent of employers. ‘We do not get past the factory door because we are told “No coloured workers wanted” as soon as they see us,’ a Jamaican in Birmingham told a journalist in March 1957. ‘Even when we know there are jobs vacant we are told, “Sorry, there is nothing.” Sometimes they are very polite, but politeness and rudeness mean just the same thing.’5

  One should not exaggerate the general severity of the prejudice. ‘Wherever there are tensions, these tend to be subdued,’ reckoned Ruth Glass about the customary workplace situation. ‘West Indians sometimes complain that they have been slighted or insulted by their workmates. More often they tell stories of incomplete “integration”: they say that all goes well at work, but once it is done, the white workers do not mix with them in the canteen or on their way home, nor do they ask them to come along to the local pub.’ That is probably right: incomplete integration as typical rather than, say, the more dramatic experience in 1958 of the future actor Delroy Lindo, living in Eltham as the six-year-old son of Jamaican parents, and one day terrified out of his skin when a Teddy boy got his attention in the street and then drew a finger across his throat. Either way, it was piquant timing for the singalong smiliness of the BBC’s The Black and White Mi
nstrel Show, which, complete with The Television Toppers and Kenneth Connor as MC, had its first outing on 14 June and was an instant hit. ‘Very much to my taste,’ applauded Punch’s Henry Turton in pregnant late August. ‘I am glad that most of the creaking conventions of the old-time minstrel-show have been dispensed with. George Mitchell’s merry men black up, certainly . . . otherwise little pretence is made at reproducing the rather flat-footed routine of the genuine burnt-cork-and-tambourine troupes.’6

  Inevitably, whatever the prior rumblings, the lurid events of Nottingham and Notting Hill came as a considerable shock to activators. Ten years after Windrush, and with non-white Commonwealth immigration during 1955–7 running each year at well over 40,000 (compared to 2,000 in 1953 and 11,000 in 1954), the question naturally arose of whether ‘the emigration of coloured people to this country should be limited’ – as the opening questioner put it at the Leisure Hall in Mere, Wiltshire, on the return of Any Questions? on 12 September from the programme’s summer break. The panel’s response was unanimously negative. The Tory MP Ted Leather said there could be ‘no possible excuse for intolerance and mob violence of any kind’; the Labour MP Anthony Greenwood insisted it would be ‘morally wrong’ to impose such a limitation; the would-be Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe declared that ‘if the brotherhood of man means anything, well then let’s share what we have got’; and the farmer-writer A. G. Street was likewise against restrictions (‘to stop immigration would wreck the Commonwealth’), though he observed that ‘this coloured thing is very difficult, it is based on physical repulsion, if you like on sex jealousy’. A last word went to the chairman, Freddie Grisewood, who added that ‘as a corollary to what has been said it wouldn’t be a bad moment just to pay a tribute to the police in the way they have handled these shocking riots’.7

  That all sounded more or less fine, dandy and liberal, but for both the main political parties the reality this autumn was more complex. In the immediate wake of the troubles, only The Times of the Tory-supporting national dailies came out unequivocally against immigration controls, declaring in a leader on ‘A Family of Nations’ that such a policy would ‘almost certainly have unforeseen and harmful effects’, was ‘a counsel of despair’ and ‘should not be countenanced’. With an election probably only a year away, however, the last thing Macmillan wanted was a major, divisive furore, and on 8 September – two days after Butler as Home Secretary had asserted in a speech at Maldon that it would need ‘considerable force of argument’ to alter the ‘right of British citizenship to come in and out of the mother country at will’ – the Cabinet was entirely in agreement that it was ‘important to avoid, if possible, any major pronouncement on Commonwealth immigration’.

  Over the next few weeks most Tories adopted a measured tone – ‘faults on both sides’ was the overriding theme of the analysis in the Smethwick Telephone by that constituency’s prospective Tory candidate Peter Griffiths, before he dropped in the assertion that ‘it would seem reasonable to restrict immigration into this country to healthy people who have jobs to go to’ – but it became increasingly clear that there was a divide between on the one hand the party leadership, on the other hand some backbench MPs and the bulk of the party membership. In October the party conference was at Blackpool, where (despite Butler’s insistence that ‘we should maintain the long and respected tradition of allowing citizens of the Commonwealth to come here’), delegates endorsed by a large majority a motion calling for immigration controls. No backbencher was keener on those restrictions than Cyril Osborne, who later that month in the Commons declared that ‘it is time someone spoke for this country and for the white man who lives here’, and expanded upon what he claimed to be the idleness, sickness and crime that coloured people brought to the country. Few other Tory backbenchers openly supported him, however, and at a meeting of the 1922 Committee he was humiliated and indeed reduced to tears. One backbencher watching it all, and keeping his counsel, was the MP for Wolverhampton South West, Enoch Powell, who 35 years later would tell his biographer Simon Heffer that he had felt ashamed ever since of staying silent during the attacks on Osborne.8

  It was not wholly different in the Labour and Labour-supporting ranks, from where in early September there were four significant interventions. ‘The Government must introduce legislation quickly to end the tremendous influx of coloured people from the Commonwealth,’ North Kensington’s MP George Rogers told the right-wing Daily Sketch. ‘Overcrowding has fostered vice, drugs, prostitution and the use of knives. For years the white people have been tolerant. Now their tempers are up.’ Another Labour MP, the usually liberal-minded Maurice Edelman, wrote a fairly balanced but ultimately pro-control piece for the Daily Mail that was given the exaggerated headline, ‘Should we let them keep pouring in?’ – a piece that earned him praise for his ‘courage’ from the Daily Mirror, which itself did not just declare that Commonwealth citizens should only be allowed to come to Britain if they already had a job and home lined up but also called for greater powers of deportation: ‘Some of the coloured people who have settled here are no-goods. As Commonwealth citizens, they cannot be deported. That is ludicrous.’ The fourth intervention came from the TUC, meeting at Bournemouth, where its General Secretary, Sir Vincent Tewson, spoke in favour of immigration control, asserting that ‘there should be gates in their land of origin and here through which people must pass’.

  Nevertheless, the majority opinion among Labour MPs was almost certainly the other way, with Benn on the 7th expressing it in a Reynolds News article which claimed that the introduction of immigration controls would in effect be ‘the start of apartheid’, given that the object of such controls could only be ‘to keep out coloured people’. For many on the Labour side, including the leader Hugh Gaitskell, haunted by memories of the 1930s, the much-publicised presence of Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist followers during the Notting Hill troubles was probably a decisive consideration in their determination to brook no compromise. Later in the month, just before its conference, the party issued a statement unambiguously rejecting immigration controls and promising that the next Labour government would ‘introduce legislation making illegal the public practice of discrimination’.9

  What of public opinion? It is easy enough to locate individual viewpoints – ‘It’s high time the growing resentment felt in the country against the black invasion of Britain was thus made violently and forcibly manifest,’ noted an approbatory Anthony Heap on 1 September about the ‘racial riots’, while letters received by Edelman after his Daily Mail article were largely supportive – but the only reliable representative guide is the Gallup poll conducted nationwide on the 3rd and 4th. The key findings included: 55 per cent wanting restrictions on non-white immigration from the Commonwealth; 71 per cent disapproving of ‘marriages between white and coloured people’; 54 per cent not wanting ‘coloured people from the Commonwealth’ to be ‘admitted to council housing lists on the same conditions as people born in Britain’; and 61 per cent definitely or possibly moving ‘if coloured people came to live in great numbers’ in their district. These were striking enough figures – with the first especially at variance with the broad party political consensus – but need to be set against others: only 9 per cent definitely moving, and 21 per cent possibly, ‘if coloured people came to live next door’; and only 7 per cent objecting ‘if there were coloured children in the same classes as your children at school’.

  Altogether, as Ruth Glass dryly put it, the poll showed that ‘the veneer of racial tolerance is a rather thin one’. But at the same time, at least that thin veneer existed, and arguably owed at least something to a widespread underlying decency on the part of a socially still very conservative population. ‘Discussed the Colour problem, Jewish problem, & agreed that the 4 years sentence on the Teddy Boys who beat up the Colour chap was just,’ noted Florence Turtle after lunch with a friend on the 17th, in the context of the recent deliberately punitive sentences given to the nine white thugs who had presaged the Notting Hi
ll troubles. Not dissimilarly, speaking in some sense for Middle England, there was the Giles cartoon of the 7th, showing three Teds walking out of a surgery where the battle wounds they had brought on themselves had been treated by a black nurse and doctor. Even on the part of averagely decent whites, though, a strict limit applied to their appetite for the whole issue. As BBC Television’s autumn schedule unfolded, members of the viewers’ panel found it ‘a pleasure to watch such an artist’ when Harry Belafonte was on, but not so with The Untouchable, a worthy-sounding Sunday-night drama about an impoverished widow taking an Indian law student into her home as one of her lodgers. ‘To a good number,’ noted the report, ‘this play about the colour bar seemed “ill timed” – there was “too much talk and controversy” already and they were “sated with the subject”.’

  Probably for many anyway, it was still a rather academic question, given that only 49 per cent of those polled by Gallup had actually ever known a non-white person.10 But for those living in the areas of non-white settlement it was far from academic, and in three of them there were some particularly strong reactions during these charged days and weeks.

  Starting in Notting Hill itself, so much in the national spotlight that on 5 September the nine o’clock news on the radio had five minutes shaved off in order to include a special report on the area that featured the views of white people living there. ‘Some of those interviewed, after disavowing any racial prejudice, agreed,’ noted the Listener,

  that ‘This here trouble with the blacks’ as one of them called it, all started by coloured men forcing white girls into prostitution and living handsomely on their earnings and often drawing national assistance as well. Others alleged that coloured immigrants bought up houses in the area, evicted the original tenants and then filled them up with their friends, five and six to a room, when they further outraged the feelings of the local inhabitants by rowdy parties lasting all night.