Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  The biggest of the black British pop stars was Errol Brown, singer with Hot Chocolate, a group that defied all trends to have hits in every year of the decade. They were the living proof of Amoo’s analysis of record companies, an R&B band converted into mainstream white pop by producer Mickie Most. When, on a tour of America, Most suggested that they should concentrate on black audiences, guitarist Harvey Hinsley had to point out that it was a bit late in the day to be changing his mind: ‘We don’t play for black people in England, you don’t see any black people at the gigs,’ he explained patiently. ‘We’re not black music.’ At the same time, however, black American music – from Motown to Philly to disco – was being lapped up by a British audience that was considerably more open-minded than the industry that served it.

  In sport, too, there was a discrepancy between the imported and the domestic stars. By 1971 every football fan knew that perhaps the two greatest-ever players of the game were Pelé and Eusebio, but still an English FA official who specialized in schoolboy football was able to claim that it would be more difficult for black players in Britain, because ‘a lot of them don’t like to play when it’s cold or wet’. Such myths were to linger for years to come. At the same time, however, future England manager Ron Greenwood, who had signed Clyde Best and Nigerian Ade Coker to West Ham, pointed out that ‘Negro players have a suppleness and natural ability rare in whites’. Greenwood also predicted that ‘within ten years there might be four or five playing at the top end of the game’. Actually by the end of the ’70s there were around fifty black professional footballers in England (out of perhaps two thousand), enough for the testimonial game for Len Cantello at Ron Atkinson’s West Bromwich Albion to have the novelty of an all-white team playing an all-black team, an event that caused disquiet even at the time. ‘Politics should be left to the politicians,’ said Garth Crooks defensively, when challenged about his participation in the match. ‘This is just a game of football played for a fellow professional.’

  Meanwhile, in the 1970–71 season, Ben Odeje had become the first black footballer to play at schoolboy level for England, to be followed by Cliff Marshall, and in 1978 Viv Anderson of Nottingham Forest became the first to do so at full international level. (The time lapse between the two was partly accounted for by the FIFA regulations of the time, which allowed schoolboys to play for the country in which they were being educated, while an adult could only play for the country in which he or his father had been born, thus making ineligible any immigrant players.)

  Perhaps the one genuine exception to the white dominance of televised sport was professional wrestling, which became a Saturday teatime ritual, a regular appointment in homes right across the social spectrum. Mum looked on admiringly at real men like Vic Faulkner, as dad – nervously fingering his pools coupons in anticipation of the football results – rolled his eyes and muttered about how it wasn’t real and it was all fixed, and gran screamed blue murder at the screen whenever Mick McManus delivered yet another illegal punch to yet another blue-eye hero on the blind side of the ref, but in full view of the cameras. Meanwhile the kids revelled in the fabulous fantasy figures: Massambula, the African witch doctor, Billy Two Rivers, the Native American chief who sported a Mohican haircut years before punk and delivered tomahawk chops, and Kendo Nagasaki, the masked oriental (played by Peter Thornley from Staffordshire; his speciality was the kamikaze roll, and he had his portrait painted by Peter Blake). Like the American TV detectives of the era, every wrestler had to have his own gimmick, whether it was the temper tantrums of ‘Crybaby’ Jim Breaks, the jodhpurs of ‘Tally Ho’ Kaye or the deafness of Alan Kirby. This latter was a good guy, but he couldn’t hear the ref, so he’d frequently get a public warning for not breaking a hold on command, and the audience would share his anguish. But that was part of the attraction – the whole ritual was drenched in ersatz emotion and a cosy kind of catharsis.

  More than that, though, it was a wonderfully accommodating world; all popular culture was here. There was room for glitter pop (the Hell’s Angels tag team of ‘Exotic’ Adrian Street and ‘Bad’ Bobby Barnes), for a British take on blaxploitation (the bowler-hat-wearing ‘Soulman’ Dave Bond) and for shameless TV rip-offs: Kung Fu and Catweasel took their names from contemporary series, bringing to the grapple game the latest fads in martial arts and medieval wizardry. There was also space for image-driven stars from other fields: show-jumper Harvey Smith and Radio One DJ Jimmy Savile both pursued wrestling careers. Even Coronation Street had its own wrestler for a while, when Stan Ogden tried his hand at the forearm smash and the straight-finger jab. This was sport – or at least a member nation of the World of Sport – as all-inclusive family entertainment. And then came Big Daddy.

  Shirley Crabtree, who had earlier been a heel billed as the Blond Adonis and as Mr Universe, reinvented himself as Big Daddy, the biggest of all the blue-eyes, in 1976 when he was already in his mid-40s. The name he chose carried an odd set of associations; essentially a friendly identity, with hints of Burl Ives in the 1958 movie Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it had also an immediate context: the name Big Daddy in a tabloid headline of the time invariably referred to Idi Amin. The wrestling incarnation of this dubious heritage wore a Union Flag leotard, loved little kiddies and ended every bout with his speciality, the splash, in which he belly-flopped on the head and torso of a prostrate opponent. No one got up after a Big Daddy splash.

  And he had the same effect on wrestling itself. Despite the arrival of even bigger bad boys in the unappealing shapes of Giant Haystacks and the forty-two-stone Fatty Thomas, the course and outcome of every Big Daddy bout was crashingly obvious. And what had been a diverse and multicultural tradition was crushed by twenty-five stones of sentimentality, patriotism and predictability. It was noticeable that the rise of Big Daddy coincided with the rise of Margaret Thatcher, and that she was on record as saying that he was her favourite wrestler.

  If, despite music, football and the wrestling, black Britons were largely invisible in entertainment and sport, the same was even more true of positions of power within the establishment. Writing in 1987, James Callaghan reflected on the famous claim that ‘in fifteen or twenty years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’, as reported by Enoch Powell in 1968. ‘That period has now elapsed,’ he commented, ‘and I note that there is not yet a single black member of Parliament, that they are absent from the higher ranks of the law, the civil service, the police and the armed forces, and that the election of a black mayor is still regarded as newsworthy.’ There were, in short, very few role models available to suggest to black people that this society offered much hope of advancement.

  From the perspective of the white population, the depiction of ethnic minorities in the media was a particularly crucial issue in the 1970s, since for many people the only black faces they were likely to encounter came on the television screen. Britain was certainly becoming multiracial, but it was a patchy phenomenon, and the contrast between the ethnic composition of the major cities and that of the country beyond was striking: official figures showed that one child in every fourteen born in Britain in 1976 had an immigrant mother; in London it was one in three and in some boroughs – Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, Brent, Haringey and Ealing – the figure rose to one in two.

  In the context of such a disparity, it was perhaps inevitable that the spectre of overt political racism should arise, though the boundaries between Nazi, nationalist and racist were to remain awkwardly blurred. In 1967 a collection of far-right groups – the League of Empire Loyalists, the British National Party, and members of the Racial Preservation Society and the Greater Britain Movement – came together to form the National Front, which rapidly emerged as the most powerful such party since the days of Oswald Mosley in the 1930s. Although an uneasy alliance from the outset (its first chairman A.K. Chesterton, a veteran of Mosley’s movement, resigned within months of the launch), it drew strength from Powell’s newly raised profile for its own anti-immigration st
ance and fielded ten candidates in the 1970 general election, averaging over a thousand votes apiece. In 1974, as the recession began to make more acute the accusations of ‘coming over here and taking our jobs’, the number of candidates rose to fifty-four, enough to warrant a five-minute TV broadcast, and then to ninety, and although the average vote was less than 1,500 per constituency, the cumulative total of over 100,000 people prepared to register their support for a racist party was beginning to cause a certain level of concern amongst mainstream politicians. And, of course, for any non-white residents in one of the targeted constituencies, the concern was somewhat more pressing.

  A major factor in the NF’s progress was the announcement in August 1972 by Idi Amin that all those resident in Uganda of Asian origin and with British passports would be expelled from the country as part of a process of Africanization. At a time when the British government was pledged to ensure there would be ‘no further large-scale immigration’, this presented a problem for Heath, but, despite a crowd-pleasing speech by Powell at that year’s Tory conference, he insisted that Britain would honour its obligations to the victims of Amin’s racism. When, in due course, some 28,000 Ugandan Asians arrived in Britain, their long-term impact proved to be entirely beneficial, but in the interim period, fears of immigration returned to the top of the political agenda, Powell reached his peak popularity, with ‘one quarter of the electorate wanting to see him as prime minister’, and Martin Webster of the National Front got nearly 5,000 votes in the West Bromwich by-election that saw Labour’s Betty Boothroyd returned as an MP.

  But the NF was, for black and Asian Britons, only the more explicit manifestation of a racism that was felt in society more generally, as evidenced by a justice system that did not appear to reflect the new complexion of the country. This was perceived to be the case at every level, most visibly in a police force that was disproportionately white. In November 1970 the press reported that there were now ‘ten coloured policemen in London’ and, though ‘five had joined in the past three weeks’, it could hardly be called even a token presence. And the rate of progress was painfully slow, despite Robert Mark launching a campaign to recruit ethnic minorities into the Met: the 1976 figures showed seventy such officers in a force of over 22,000. In such a situation, it was hardly surprising that there were accusations of a low-lying prejudice against blacks from police officers, expressed in daily harassment on the streets. Such claims, however, went largely unreported, which meant that the occasional explosion of conflict appeared without context, as though it were a force of nature.

  The violence that flared at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival came at the end both of the hottest, driest summer of the century, and of several months’ worth of warnings from community leaders and police chiefs alike that tensions were getting close to breaking point. In the absence of any political response, the resentments did indeed boil over and the riot that ensued was Britain’s worst racial conflict since the war, with hundreds injured, many of them policemen who had been ill-equipped to deal with the running battles of that bank holiday weekend; the following year, the Home Office authorized the introduction of riot shields so that officers might not again have to resort to using dustbin lids to defend themselves. ‘It was like nothing so much as a return to the sordid celebrations attending the hangings at Tyburn Tree,’ wrote Mark of the 1976 Carnival. ‘Blatant disregard of liquor and other laws, hooliganism, drunkenness, vandalism and most of all, pocket picking and robbery all occurred on a large scale.’ From another perspective, Robert Elms recalled attending the Carnival and being greeted on arrival by a policeman asking ‘why I wanted to be here with “all the niggers”’.

  The courts too were suspected by many of a racial bias. This was particularly the case with magistrates’ courts, though the most controversial trial was that heard at the Old Bailey in January 1978. John Kingsley Read, a former member of the Conservative Party and an ex-chairman of the NF, had made a speech some eighteen months earlier in which he had spoken of ‘niggers, wogs and coons’ and, in reference to the murder of an Asian man in Southall, had commented: ‘One down, a million to go.’ He had consequently been prosecuted for incitement to racial hatred.

  In his summing-up to the jury, Judge Neil McKinnon argued that the latter statement was an insult to the dead man, but that that was not in itself an offence. He also took issue with the notion that the word ‘nigger’ was itself offensive, citing rhymes such as ‘Ten Little Niggers’, ‘Eenie Meenie Minie Mo’ and ‘Nigger, nigger, pull the trigger’ and asking: ‘All these old jokey nursery rhymes, have they become criminal offences suddenly because of the multiracial society into which we have moved?’ More speculatively, he ruminated on the issue of immigration itself, claiming that ‘the black man wanted to follow the white man to England’ because of the ‘affection engendered’ by British colonists in the days of empire. While this influx was understandable, he said, it had to be controlled: ‘Goodness knows, we have one and a half million unemployed already and all immigrants are going to do is to occupy jobs that are needed by the local population.’ And it wasn’t just jobs they would take: ‘It will be said that immigrants will occupy homes which are needed by ordinary English folk in this country.’ And, in a final bizarre twist, he lapsed into personal reminiscence, saying that when he was at school in Australia he had once sung a hymn in an Aboriginal language, and had himself been nicknamed ‘Nigger’; the implication was that it had done him no harm, and he could see no reason why anyone else would take exception.

  Unsurprisingly in the light of such comments, the jury – which happened to contain only white people – took just ten minutes to acquit Read. At which stage a storm broke over what The Times discreetly described as McKinnon’s ‘eccentric summing up’. Twenty black barristers announced that they would refuse to appear in cases before him, at his next court appearance demonstrators had to be removed from the public gallery, and 133 MPs signed a Commons motion calling for him to be de-wigged. Of these responses, it was the MPs’ action that provoked the most hostile comment; even if, it was argued, one accepted that McKinnon would have been wiser not to wish Read ‘good luck’ as he dismissed him without a stain on his character, still the historical separation of the powers of the legislature and the judiciary made any such protest by politicians dangerously unconstitutional. Amidst the heat of the debate – and there were plenty prepared to support McKinnon’s defence of free speech – it was not always borne in mind that the alleged offence had taken place just days before the 1976 Race Relations Act had come into force. Read was therefore tried under the 1965 Act, which had the added hurdle for the prosecution of having to prove intent to incite racial hatred; the new law removed the concept of ‘intent’ and it is doubtful whether, had he been prosecuted under its provisions, he would have been acquitted.

  If the police force and the courts were considered to be sometimes discriminatory on grounds of race, the third leg of the judicial system was even less trusted. The prison service was widely considered to be – in an expression from a later era – institutionally racist, and few were comforted by the knowledge that the NF was actively recruiting prison officers. ‘This evening a friendly warder gave me a game of chess,’ wrote John Stonehouse while on remand in Brixton jail in 1976, ‘as well as confiding to me that he used to be active in the Young Conservatives. It seems that most of the warders support the National Front, so he must be an exception.’ The following year, it was reported that the chaplain at the same jail, the Reverend Terry Spong, who had recently returned from Rhodesia, was himself a member of the Front. ‘I am appalled to see what has happened in Britain, the country of my birth,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘There are many other churchmen who do not agree with the left wing point of view, but I have had the courage to say so.’ Even before this, Brixton had a bad enough reputation to warrant a mention in the sitcom Porridge; in a 1975 episode Napper Wainwright (Peter Jeffrey), an officer transferred to the fictional Slade prison from Brixton, tells a black
inmate: ‘I’m not just prejudiced against your lot. Oh no! I’m prejudiced against liberals, longhairs, pillheads, winos, queens, slags, squealers, pikeys and greaseballs.’

  The extent of racial prejudice in Britain was both hotly disputed and frequently hidden for many years, even within the Labour movement. ‘Every year the head office gets a lot of resolutions for the union’s annual conference from branches all over the country which are strongly colour prejudiced,’ commented a former official of the Transport and General Workers’ Union back in 1968. ‘The senior officers see to it that none of them comes up in debate.’ A decade later Tony Benn noted in his diary a meeting with John Boyd, general secretary of the engineers’ union, at which he was told that: ‘Our people are very worried. There is no doubt the Labour Party in the Commons hasn’t got its feet on the ground. We have got to limit the number of immigrants, partly because of employment and partly because of colour.’ Similar expressions were to be found too in fiction, as in Frederic Raphael’s novel The Glittering Prizes, where a shop steward spells it out: ‘The lads’ve got nothing against blacks as such, I’m not saying that, I’m not having anyone say it, but we don’t want ’em in here, taking jobs from local people.’ And again, in the sitcom Sykes, a shop steward played by George A. Cooper explains his men’s position to the boss: ‘We have no racial prejudice. You can employ as many coloureds as you like,’ he says. ‘Once we get another canteen.’