Among railwaymen themselves, morale was near rock-bottom. Their relative standard of living had deteriorated sharply since the war, skilled men (including drivers and firemen) were leaving in droves, and too many recruits were of questionable quality and being promoted too quickly, compromising safety standards. Brian Thompson’s first vacation job as a Cambridge undergraduate was to work as a relief porter at sooty, sulphurous, ‘massively overmanned’ Liverpool Street station in the run-up to Christmas 1955. The prevailing cynicism, he found, was total:
You could describe railway portering of the period as money for Old Holborn. It was unskilled labour in all but one regard: there was a knack in dropping a promising-looking box just hauled from the goods van at exactly the right height onto its most vulnerable corner. When it was done properly, the packaging shattered and the contents were revealed. The rest was sleight of hand. The first time I saw this done, I had to blink twice to believe it, the more so because it was effected under the nose of a foreman porter there on purpose to prevent it. The theft that followed was accomplished as smoothly and routinely as a laundress folding sheets.
We took our breaks in an underground mess at the end of one of the platforms, an unheated hell-hole littered with the crusts of sandwiches, newspapers and cigarette packets. Rats ran round the walls the way they do in pantomime sketches, as if drawn by strings; nobody seemed to notice. Some had come to work only to sleep, others to add to an open-ended seminar on horse-racing . . .
A seasoned porter called Chas took me on as his assistant and for half the ten-hour shift we would walk, a couple of buckets of sand in each hand, up some stairs and across a creaking cast-iron gantry before leaving them in a corner while we nipped into Bishopsgate for a wet. Then we would stagger back with them to our underground cave for a smoke. The only time anything like despatch was shown was the day the royal family set off for Sandringham. On that morning half the station staff mobbed the train, hustling for the honour of lifting a suitcase into the compartments assigned to the entourage. The knack here was to avoid the equerries, who had seen a thing or two before joining the Palace, and go for elderly ladies-in-waiting, who responded with bewildered gratuities.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have any coin in my purse,’ one said.
‘Don’t you worry about that, ma. Me and my family wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas.’
Blushing, she passed across a green pound note.
Altogether, it was ‘the perfect antidote to romantic idealism about the unawakened working class’.3
Another industry with inadequate growth in labour productivity was the Lancashire cotton industry. There, dismay had greeted the announcement in early 1954 of the Anglo-Japanese Payments and Trade Agreement, which in effect opened up the whole sterling area to Japanese imports. ‘It was not to be expected that this freeing of trade would be popular in Lancashire, but if it cannot be liked it will just have to be lumped,’ noted an unsympathetic Spectator, adding that there persisted in that county ‘bitter memories of Japanese competition between the wars’. Predictably, the man who made most noise at this point was the combative, publicity-seeking mill owner Cyril Lord, who accepted an invitation from Picture Post to discuss the matter with Kyoshi Fujise, a Japanese trade representative in Britain. He pitched in from the start:
Lord: The point is that the Japanese have now got unlimited access to our Colonial markets. Why should they send stuff here? I can only speak from the commonsense aspect as far as this country goes. I am vitally interested in textiles, having twelve mills and over 5,000 workers. It is an industry I’ve been in all my life – and I have seen the economic distress caused solely by our attitude to Japan. I am sorry to bring this up Mr Fujise, but the appreciation of what we have done for Japan pre-1939 was shown by Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. What has Japan ever done for us? Why should we do anything for Japan?
Fujise: I admit that Japan did a very bad thing in starting war by attacking Pearl Harbor. But she lost the war. It might be God’s judgement – that I don’t know, and cannot say. But I think that Japan does not have to remain an outcast nation in the world.
Lord: That is true. But why should Britain destroy herself economically for Japan? Are you suggesting that we, and not America, should help you to attain the standards of conditions that exist in this country? After all, it is America that is building you up as a buffer state against Communism. I am speaking personally. I would not care whether you were Communistic, Democratic, or what you were, because whichever way the wind blows, that way you will go. If it suits you to go Communistic, you will.
Fujise: I am not prepared to discuss that matter.
Lord then went on to accuse Japanese industrialists of being subsidised by their government, lamented that the stinginess of British banks prevented the Lancashire cotton industry from modernising and declared that ‘we have been sold down the river by the Government’. Proceedings concluded on a sour note:
Fujise: I understand your feelings, and I do not expect goodwill from you. But I should like to end this meeting in a sincere and honest way.
Lord (shaking hands before leaving): Thanks. Your boys were shaking hands in Washington at the time they attacked Pearl Harbor.
Fujise: I am sorry that you’ve mentioned that. If I may say this frankly: Japan has been, and is, looking forward to a lead from this country and from the British Commonwealth, and they take what they say, and write, very seriously. I myself am very much for the British, not against them. But, quite frankly, I am rather disappointed with Mr Lord’s attitude. I respect his argument. I am not talking about that. But I was disappointed at his way of saying farewell to me. I look to you British as the gentlemen of gentlemen.
In the event, the Japanese threat to Lancashire’s colonial markets proved to be exaggerated, and by 1955 the focus had moved to the Commonwealth, with the industry campaigning for import controls on cheap cloth first from India and then from Pakistan and Hong Kong also. ‘The hangman of Lancashire’ was Lord’s typically judicious term for Peter Thorneycroft, President of the Board of Trade, but Thorneycroft was adamant that, in the context of the government’s wider policy of liberalising trade, Lancashire could not be made a special case.4 The cotton industry, in short, was on a one-way ride.
‘Not for the first time in our history we have a Colonial problem on our hands, but it’s a Colonial problem with a difference,’ began Robert Reid’s voiceover at the start of the television documentary, Has Britain a Colour Bar?, transmitted on the last day of January 1955. ‘Instead of being thousands of miles away and worrying other people, it’s right here, on the spot, worrying us.’ And he asked about the West Indian immigrants: ‘How do they fit in to our ways and standards of life, coming, as they do, from places where customs, standards of life, are much different, and, very often, lower than our own?’ The main body of the programme saw René Cutforth in investigatory mode in Birmingham, home (in a manner of speaking) to some 10,000 West Indians. ‘Well, let’s face it,’ he said, ‘they are different. They look different and they behave differently . . . they sound different and their tastes in matters of food are different.’
The strength of the documentary, which made a considerable stir, was in its interviews, and next day the Birmingham Post asserted that through them Cutforth had ‘sought to show that while official circles are careful to ensure that there is no colour-bar, prejudice is encountered in the daily life of the newcomer’. Thus an estate agent ‘agreed that he hesitated to let houses to coloured persons, who might overcrowd them’, a white factory worker ‘stated bluntly that the sooner all coloured people were sent home the better he would be pleased’; and Harry Green, district secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, emphasised ‘different traditions’ and warned that ‘real trouble was possible in the event of a trade slump’. For William Salter, television critic of the New Statesman, ‘probably the most depressing thing of all was the spectacle of trade union leaders having to defend and attempt to justi
fy their members’ xenophobia’, and his overwhelming impression was that legitimate concerns about ‘problems of economics [ie employment] and housing’ were ‘rationalisations of attitudes of mind inadmissible to the public view’. He may well have been right, for although Cutforth had tried to interview the white bus crews at Hockley bus garage, scene of the recent dispute over the Corporation’s employment of black workers, they had refused to talk on camera and had prevented their black colleagues from doing so either. Reid for his part would receive an unambiguous postcard from one viewer: ‘You and your black friends ought to be put up against a wall and shot.’5
There was no doubting the proliferation, not least in London. ‘The number of negroes and coloured people about is amazing,’ noted Gladys Langford neutrally in April 1955. ‘They seem to be everywhere.’ Altogether, in terms of the mid-1950s surge after America had shut its doors to West Indian immigration from 1952, Home Office figures for net immigration are probably the most reliable guide:
West Indies India Pakistan Total ‘Coloured’ Commonwealth
1953 2,000 – – 2,000
1954 11,000 – – 11,000
1955 27,000 6,000 1,800 42,700
1956 30,000 5,500 2,000 46,850
Traditionally the West Indian newcomers had been almost entirely adult males, but in 1955 virtually one-third were women and children, with the great majority of those newcomers as a whole coming from Jamaica.6
Inevitably they encountered a range of reactions. When the eighteen-year-old Morris Gurling arrived in London in 1955 to study engineering, it took him eight hours and endless rejections before he finally got a room in Camden Town, sharing a house with young white men mostly working at the BBC. Another 1955 arrival was Carmel Jones, a future Pentecostal minister:
Biggest shock was, one, the cold, and two, having gone to church for the very first time – so elated, so delighted that I’m coming from an Anglican church back home, I went to join in worship, and so I did – but after the service I was greeted by the vicar, who politely and nicely told me: ‘Thank you for coming. But I would be delighted if you didn’t come back.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘My congregation is uncomfortable in the company of black people.’ That was my biggest shock. I was the only black person in that congregation that Sunday morning, and my disappointment, my despair went with me and I didn’t say anything to anyone about it for several months after that.
At least one newcomer this year had a somewhat more welcome time of it. ‘When you gave a passenger his change and ticket, besides marvelling at the fact that you actually spoke English and that you gave him the correct change, he would also grab hold of your hand and then shout to all the bus that your hands are warm,’ remembered a Jamaican migrant (in Donald Hinds’s rich 1966 book, Journey to an Illusion) about his early experience as a London bus conductor. ‘Some, of course, gave your hands a vigorous rub to see whether it was dirt that made you black. So many people put their hands on my hair for good luck in the first year of my working on London buses that I was in fear of going bald prematurely.’ It was better yet for ‘Melon’, a Jamaican who in 1955, after eight years of lodging in rundown parts of Notting Hill, Elephant and Castle, Brixton and Stoke Newington, was able to buy his own house. ‘When Melon moved into a short quiet street at the northern end of Brixton,’ recorded Hinds, ‘his was the only “coloured house” for many a street around. The neighbours showed no hostility. In fact, one helped him to decorate his rooms cheaply, and taught him how to mend electric fuses . . . The children in the street used to gather around Melon and ask him what time it was. They were disappointed when he showed them his gold watch; they laughed happily when he looked up to where the sun ought to be and then guessed the time.’
Nevertheless, for most immigrants, whether new or well established, the question of a colour bar was becoming all too topical. ‘Did your reporters visit Moss Side?’ asked a reader from Sale after Picture Post in early 1954 had claimed there was ‘no colour bar’ in Manchester, mainly on the grounds that no heads turned when ‘a negro bank clerk’ went into the cocktail bar of the Grand Hotel. ‘Did they interview any Colonial students who had tried to find lodgings, without success?’ And about Manchester as a whole: ‘There are many ignorant people who fear those with coloured skins. There are people who will not sit next to negroes on buses.’ Or take Birmingham, where, quite apart from the television evidence, there was the case in November 1954 of Kenneth Goodman, a black organist due to give a recital in the Town Hall, being refused accommodation at 23 hotels. ‘One cannot deny the existence of considerable prejudice against the coloured immigrants,’ reflected the Birmingham Post a fortnight before Cutforth’s programme. ‘The difficulties of finding accommodation, the undoubted lack of social amenities, the occasional hurtful taunts they suffer because of their colour, all tend to generate bitterness.’ So too elsewhere in the West Midlands: in Coventry, at the General Wolfe pub in Foleshill Road, there was a well-publicised case in February 1955 of two rooms being off limits to ‘coloured people’, mainly Indians, while soon afterwards there was a furore when the landlord of the Red Cow pub in Smethwick instituted a colour bar in his Men Only smoke-room – a move only half-heartedly opposed by Smethwick’s Labour MP, Patrick Gordon Walker.
The general upshot, in terms of day-to-day life, seems to have been a broad acceptance on both sides of separate spheres. ‘The West Indians take a passive attitude to any incipient discrimination,’ found a Manchester Guardian reporter in January 1955 about immigrant life in Brixton. ‘In the shopping areas the women keep as much as possible to themselves and make little attempt to mix or chat with their white-skinned neighbours. Most of the immigrants are anxious not to provoke incidents . . .’ But sometimes there was a flashpoint, as in a series of tense nights in Camden Town in August 1954, culminating in an attempt by an aggressive group of white men to set fire to a house in Baynes Street occupied by West Indians, after first entering it and smashing up all the furniture. ‘Then they come into my shop, they do nothing but complain and ask for a quarter of a pound of this and that,’ a white resident of the street told a journalist soon afterwards. ‘It’s not worth serving them.’ And another: ‘Those girls with them – up at Clerkenwell [ie magistrates’ court] every week, I’ll bet.’ And a third, using the inevitable, all-purpose adjective: ‘They’re dirty . . .’7
Turning to the workplace, there was a positive aspect, especially in the prevailing full-employment context. ‘Faced with a growing list of vacancies, transport concerns somewhat reluctantly recruited coloured conductors and drivers, West Indians especially,’ noted Michael Banton later in the 1950s in his eminently judicious survey of White and Coloured. ‘London and Manchester early led the way with small numbers of coloured transport workers, then in 1954 Birmingham Corporation had to recruit them in larger numbers, and in 1955 Sheffield, Nottingham, Coventry and other towns followed suit.’ As for the wider industrial scene, a January 1955 despatch from Coventry in the Manchester Guardian quoted the personnel manager of a large car factory: ‘Frankly, we would be completely lost without our coloured workers. Our foundry just would not keep going. They don’t mind how hard they work . . .’ Yet overall it was a far more mixed picture. In Coventry itself, according to Steven Tolliday in his study of that city’s engineering workers, recruitment practices at the major firms meant that ‘most blacks never got inside the factory gates’, while as for Birmingham the Post’s analysis of race relations noted that ‘several large firms’ still operated a colour bar.
Such a policy, there and elsewhere, to a large degree reflected employers’ awareness of shop-floor anxieties and prejudices, with the trade unions far from distinguishing themselves in terms of mediating those attitudes. Even where non-white workers were allowed, they tended to be treated by their representatives as second-class members, with The Times observing in November 1954 that ‘the trade unionists, excepting such undertakings as the Post Office and London Transport, where it is a point of honour that
there shall be no colour bar, often have an understanding with managements that the hallowed rule of “last in, first out” shall not apply to whites when coloured immigrants are employed, and that coloured workers shall not be promoted over white’. Soon afterwards, Emrys Thomas, General Secretary of the Ministry of Labour Staff Association, spelled out the facts of life about ‘West Indian Workers’ for Socialist Commentary’s progressive, socially liberal, middle-class readers:
Practically only about 25 per cent are skilled or semi-skilled in the sense that they can walk straight into a job of work and begin to produce. The rest are just not up to the quality of the white workers. The man who says he is a carpenter turns out to have done only rough work and has no tools. Worse, he is not used to the industrial discipline of this country; the necessity to stick at the job and not spend too much time at the lavatory or smoking and talking. He is unfamiliar with the things in industrial life which are second nature to the white worker. He appears, often, to be unused to the idea of completing his stint each day and every day.
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 54
