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May 16 - June 15, 2019
If a local woman keeps a shop and a coloured soldier enters, she must serve him, but she must do it as quickly as possible and indicate as quickly that she does not desire him to come there again. 2. If she is in a cinema and notices a coloured soldier next to her, she moves to another seat immediately. 3. If she is walking on the pavement and a coloured soldier is coming towards her, she crosses to the other pavement. 4. If she is in a shop and a coloured soldier enters, she leaves as soon as she has made her purchase or before that if she is in a queue. 5. White women, of course, must
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The result was a scandal in the national press as the women of Worle turned, not against the black GIs, but against Mrs May. One local
However what ended the crisis was D-Day, and the transfer of the vast majority of the black GIs to the Continent.
The Colour Problem As The American Sees It, an Army Bureau of Current Affairs educational pamphlet that was distributed in December 1942, suggested that the problem of mixed-race children was not just an American concern but a British one too.
By the end of the war, twenty-two thousand children had been born to British mothers and white American soldiers. The number of ‘brown babies’ was not known but became the subject of feverish speculation, with estimates ranging from a plausible five hundred and fifty to a ludicrously exaggerated twenty thousand.
Many children were abandoned by their mothers, who had themselves been ostracized by their communities and even families.
More than twelve thousand West Indians served in the British forces during the war, many of them highly skilled specialists.
Over a hundred men from the West Indies who served with the RAF and Royal Canadian Air Force were decorated during the conflict.
The editorial lamented that ‘Colonial troops came to this country to help us win the war. But they are bitter because the colour bar still exists in Britain.’53
When the case of Constantine v. Imperial Hotels Ltd came to court in 1944 one witness explained that Constantine had reminded the management that ‘he was a British subject, and that he saw no reason why Americans, who were aliens, should have any preference at the hotel over a British subject.’
Among those who served in the KAR was Hussein Onyango Obama, the grandfather of the 44th President of United States, who was deployed in both Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma.
What is certain is that British attitudes were changed by the war, not just from the experience of living alongside the black GIs and fighting alongside airmen and soldiers from the black colonies, but through what had been learnt during the conflict about Nazi racial policies.
The view that race was the ‘key to history’, as the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had claimed in the 1850s, lay in tatters.
The inescapable reality that racism had led to Auschwitz permeated the national consciousness.
As the dark skin of Africans had for many generations been accepted as a marker of their supposed inferiority, the revelation that there was no scientific basis for this could not be easily assimilated into everyday thinking.
Attlee did not respond to Padmore, nor did his government address the problem of discrimination or seek to end the colour bar
over 100,000 members of the Polish armed forces and their families, who had lived in Britain during the war and fought against the Nazis, were given the right to settle permanently.
Ukrainians, Latvians and Poles, who were being housed in miserable camps in Germany and Austria, were also recruited under the European Voluntary Workers scheme (EVW).
the government actively discouraged immigration by black West Indians.
black West Indians would be ‘unsuitable for outdoor work in winter owing to their susceptibility to colds and more serious chest and lung ailments’.
That same year, a hundred and ten Jamaican workers arrived, unexpectedly, in Britain on the former troopship the Ormonde, having ignored the Colonial Office’s untruths about ‘paper vacancies’.
The next year, British governors in the West Indies warned London that thousands more West Indians were applying for passports.
there has been a natural and immediate demand for the employment of British West Indians, who are British subjects and many of whom have had experience of work in Britain during the war years, to relieve the labour shortage in Britain’
When it became clear that the government was unable to prevent the Empire Windrush from docking, or to prevent the migrants from coming ashore – given that they were British subjects carrying British passports – they changed their strategy.
they were warehoused in an old deep-level air-raid shelter near Clapham South underground station, which was reopened to accommodate them.
By modern standards, post-war Britain’s immigration laws and her reaffirmation of citizenship rights to hundreds of millions of her colonial subjects were incredibly liberal.
The people the government envisaged making use of the rights of entry and residence enshrined in the 1948 Act were white people of ‘British stock’, to use the common phrase of the time, who were coming ‘home’ to Britain.
Like many political decisions made in the immediate post-war years the underlying objective was to ensure Britain remained a significant world power, but the emotional appeal of the idea of the old dominions and their deep historical bonds to the ‘mother country’ was immensely powerful in the 1940s and 1950s.
Few politicians believed that large numbers of non-white people from the ‘new commonwealth’ would make use of their new rights to reside in Britain, yet that is exactly what they did.
What The Times reported as ‘Liverpool Racial Disturbances’ were in fact organized attacks on the homes and clubs of black people.15 As in 1919, the unions were involved,
that led to the death of Charles Wootton: they raided the hostel and arrested the black men trapped inside. What followed in Liverpool was intergenerational distrust of the police by the black community that lingered on into the 1980s.
Thousands of people who had been barely able to subsist before the hurricane had even fewer reasons to remain and many looked to emigrate.
The 1952 act placed new restrictions on entry, reducing the flow of West Indian migrants to a trickle. The number of visas allocated to the British West Indies as a whole was slashed to a mere eight hundred per year
A year later Harold Macmillan reported in his diary, with some incredulity, that Churchill thought ‘Keep Britain White’ might make an appropriate slogan with which to fight the upcoming election.
The challenge was to draft legislation that specifically targeted non-white immigrants while not appearing to be motivated by racial considerations.
successive British governments set about gathering information that was intended to prove that the black settlers represented a social problem. Five internal investigative studies were launched in the 1950s, by both Labour and Conservative politicians, all of which set out to delineate and define the problems caused to the country by the presence of black migrants
No comparable investigations were established to discover if the arrival of European Voluntary Workers from the Displaced Persons camps of post-war Europe might pose similar threats to the social fabric of the nation.
Its report of 17 December 1953 makes for shocking reading today. It suggested that ‘coloured workers’ struggled to find employment because of their ‘irresponsibility, quarrelsomeness and lack of discipline’ and stated that black men were ‘slow mentally’ and in general ‘not up to the standards required by British employers’.
By the 1970s the words ‘immigrant’ and ‘coloured’ were being used almost interchangeably, even though only one in three immigrants entering Britain came from the new Commonwealth.29 British sociologist
British governments therefore walked the tightrope between damaging the Commonwealth project and their general opposition to non-white migration into Britain.
The minute we said we’ve got to keep these black chaps out, the whole Commonwealth lark would have blown up.’31
In his book The Colour Problem Anthony Richmond argued that one-third of the population were ‘Extremely prejudiced people’ who ‘strongly resist the idea of having any degree of contact or communication with coloured people.
He defined Anthony Richmond’s ‘Extremely prejudiced’ proportion of the population as the ‘third of people in Britain [who] still had imperialist ideas’
The middle third King regarded as being mildly hostile to black migration and the final third, he thought of as ‘just nice, ordinary people’ who did not hold racist views.34
‘One remarkable fact which emerges from almost all studies of prejudice in Britain is that most people think others more prejudiced than themselves.
Why, asked another British social scientist, were ‘coloured people so often . . . shabbily treated when the vast majority of individual Britons are favourably disposed towards them?’
The word repeatedly used in the memoirs of the West Indian and African migrants who came to Britain in the post-war decades is ‘disappointed’. They were disappointed that the nation they had been told was their ‘mother country’ treated them so badly,
predatory landlords such as West London’s infamous Peter Rachman.
1959 book White and Coloured: The Behaviour of British People Towards Coloured Immigrants. His research revealed that many Britons were largely relaxed about the immigration of non-white people.
He reported that when presented with the statement ‘It would be a good thing if people of different races mixed with one another more’, 62 per cent of his interviewees approved.
