In Cardiff in the 1920s, men with passports, discharge papers from war service in the army or navy and even birth certificates, all demonstrating their status as British subjects, were forced by the police to register as aliens. One seaman who had his passport confiscated and issued with an Aliens Card was threatened with arrest when he refused to accept it.72 These restrictions and the spread of a colour bar in inter-war Britain meant that in one narrow sense the mobs of 1919 had succeeded in their efforts to strip black people of their status as full British citizens.
