‘No Coloureds’
Angelique Richardson
The demobbed troopship HMT Empire Windrush that arrived at Tilbury Dock on 22June 1948 was not Britain’s first migration ship, but its passengers were the first to be promised British citizenship, which the British Nationality Act 1948 conferred on ‘every person born within the United Kingdom and Colonies’. Of the 1029 passengers, 802 from the Caribbean, 96 were household domestics and 85 were mechanics; there were also, in smaller numbers, scholars, civil servants and a judge. They had accepted an invitation to help rebuild the Mother Country and arrived full of hope for a warm reception. Two weeks later the NHS opened its doors to all. It could not have done so without the labour of migrants.
As migration to Britain increased, so did the number of small ads offering rooms to rent that stipulated ‘no coloureds’. In 2015, the Guardian published a letter suggesting that signs saying ‘no Irish, no blacks, no dogs’ were an ‘old myth’, though ‘notices aimed at Commonwealth immigrants (“no coloureds”, “no West Indians”) certainly did exist.’ A few days later the Guardian published a response affirming there had been ‘notices galore that said “No Irish, no coloureds”’. But the first letter has since been misused as evidence that such signs of discrimination never existed. Two commenters on a piece I wrote in July added their voices to the denial, with one dismissing the ads as ‘a familiar trope of anti-racism’.
The urge to impose a higher burden of proof on accounts of racism and racial discrimination – to demand photographic evidence, for example – than on other matters of similar import is itself worthy of further interrogation. Where were the demands for proof in 2016 of Vote Leave’s claim that Turkey was poised to join the EU? Or, in February this year, for the basis on which Boris Johnson reckoned Britain could use Covid-19 as an opportunity ‘to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other’? Or the challenges to Priti Patel’s suggestion this month that refugees’ asylum claims should be rejected if they entered the country illegally, even though that would contravene Article 31 of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees?
That ads routinely excluded Black, Asian and Irish people is a fact testified both by oral and documentary evidence (including stories I grew up with). My mother reliably – and why shouldn’t she be reliable? – recalls seeing them as a child in newsagents and sweet shops. Often they were written on the backs of envelopes; sometimes they were placed on removable boards outside. She used to read them when she was queueing with her sister for sherbet lemons in the postwar sugar rush. They didn’t deter her, on the brink of the 1960s, from marrying my Sri Lankan father.
He docked at Tilbury in June 1953, when he was 22. He saw the ads not in sweet shops but at railway stations, on the noticeboards next to the telephones and ticket offices at Greenford, Ealing Broadway and West Ruislip, where British Rail gave him his first job as a ticket collector. One landlady, he told me, asked him to describe the precise colour of his skin: how did it compare to a cup of coffee, for example? She was pleased to establish he was ‘not black but brown’, someone who could be accommodated as part of a wider system of exclusion. That moment speaks to the need, more than half a century later, to acknowledge the different and often greater oppression to which Blacks are subjected.
Acknowledging difference doesn’t preclude solidarity. Working-class Caribbean, African and Asian communities have often come together: to protest against the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962, for instance, or against state racism in education, housing, policing and the criminal justice system. The term political Blackness emerged from this united struggle in the 1970s. The imprecise, state-sanctioned and often alienating abbreviation BAME (or BME), however, replaces a progressive political unity with an umbrella term that is in danger of at once essentialising historically produced identity categories, and eliding or suppressing differences.
My father, as it happens, is not embittered by the ads, or the landladies’ questions. Nearly seventy years later, he shows no more than just anger at the government’s chaotic response to the pandemic, which has let down the most vulnerable. As both older and Asian, he is among those disproportionately at risk to the virus. But he loves this country and is buoyed by hope.
When he left British Rail to work in a paint factory, in the autumn of 1953, he found in the managing director, Robert Morley (an Edwardian, if not a late Victorian), an early white ally. Having lost his father during the imperial war effort in Sri Lanka, when he was 10, he also found in Morley a father figure. When he was sacked by the foreman for being late (living in digs for the first time, with no alarm clock), Morley asked him to come back and gave him the money to buy a clock. He found one for a guinea and worked at the factory for a further 33 years, becoming a chargehand, until it was closed during the Thatcher years.
The history of white allies goes back a long way, though it’s never been straightforward. In 1865, J.S. Mill – no longer an East India Company colonial administrator, though still a theoretical supporter of imperialism – spoke out against British state brutality when the governor of Jamaica, Edward John Eyre, authorised the killing of 439 unarmed Jamaicans. As chair of the Jamaica Committee, Mill spent several years campaigning for Eyre to be tried for murder and abuse of power. Other members of the committee included Darwin, A.V. Dicey and Leslie Stephen. Opposing them, Thomas Carlyle led the Eyre Defence and Aid Fund Committee. Dickens, for all his professed concern with English social justice, took the side of Eyre and Carlyle, along with Ruskin, Tennyson and Charles Kingsley.
Mill received plenty of hate mail:
As a matter of curiosity I kept some specimens of the abusive letters, almost all of them anonymous, which I received while these proceedings were going on. They are evidence of the sympathy felt with the brutalities in Jamaica by the brutal part of the population at home. They graduated from coarse jokes, verbal and pictorial, up to threats of assassination.
A year after the Eyre killings, James Hunt attacked Mill in the Anthropological Review for his ‘day-dream of racial equality’ and for substituting ‘abstract ideas’ of ‘social justice’ for ‘the facts of race’. Mill had argued in 1850 that ‘the Greeks learned their first lessons in civilisation’ from Egyptians, whom he described as black (and it has since been established that the Greeks did indeed acquire various elements of their culture from Egypt and Western Asia). He considered different countries to be at different historical stages of ‘civilisation’, but defined this in terms of their collective ability to combat famine, disease and natural disasters. Hunt, by contrast, saw ‘historical evidence of inequality’ as proof of a fixed, fundamental and essential racial hierarchy. He ridiculed Mill’s opposition to slavery, his support for the rights of women and Blacks to vote, and his insistence that liberty was ‘the possibility of all peoples’.
The paint factory where my father worked, founded in 1935, was a microcosm of progressive racial attitudes. Owned by an American company, selling German paint to the world, it was international in outlook. It was also a Transport and General Workers’ Union closed shop. The T&G, founded in 1922, campaigned for equal pay and for the repurposing of arms factories to make more socially useful products instead. Morley encouraged my father to become a shop steward, and to invite other people of colour to join the company, at a time when there was growing hostility to migrants in Britain at large. By 1955, my father’s workmates included two of his Sri Lankan friends and several Caribbean men. He was, in his own words, no longer ‘the only one’.
My mother went to work at the paint factory in 1958. When my parents married, there was support and celebration in the factory, in both families, and in the Hoover factory where my mother’s father was an engineer – such different attitudes from those expressed by an agony aunt in a tabloid column I read as a child in a dentist’s waiting room in the early Thatcher years. She advised a white woman not to marry the Black man she loved because any children they had would be bullied. As I was.
Stories of anti-racist allies are an important part of Britain’s history. Too often, the white working class sees immigration as its enemy, forgetting that Britishness is not the same as whiteness. The separating of human beings according to skin colour for the purposes of capital – slavery, imperialism – has been a foundational fiction for much of the Global North. And this process of othering lies behind the morally bankrupt vote in the Commons yesterday rejecting the Lords’ amendments to the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (Withdrawal) Bill. Progress and justice depend on understanding that race and class are both consequences of that division. To put it another way, racialisation is one way of dividing labour and resources along unjust and oppressive lines; class is another. Both are part of the means by which groups and individuals are pitted against each other.
White defensiveness is often evidence, unfortunately, of how extensive and effective the process – and the internalisation – of racial and economic division has been. We are more, and better, than this. If we discount the actions of white anti-racists, then we are being played by the great essentialist myth that underpins the racist logic of modernity. The racist ads in the shop windows and stations are part of Britain’s history, as are my parents’ experiences at the paint factory. We can and must include acts of solidarity and alliance in our reckoning of the past without whitewashing or denying histories of violence and discrimination.
Comments
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21 October 2020
at
9:53am
Charles Evans
says:
Thanks for another great, thoughtful piece, Angelique
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21 October 2020
at
1:34pm
freshborn
says:
You are rather misrepresenting the other side here. This is the previous comment you quote, in which the person states explicitly that they recall seeing a mythical "no irish" card, and also states that "unashamed discrimination in housing is a matter of historical record". If you are correct in your presumption that this commenter is white, I could hardly say he is defensive, nor attempting to push some racist agenda. It seems he was, quite reasonably, correcting a stretch in your rhetoric.
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21 October 2020
at
1:43pm
freshborn
says:
@
freshborn
It's also extremely hard to say that these people are asking for a "higher burden of proof", when their doubt arises from the fact that there is no proof at all. Anyway, the "no blacks, no dogs, no Irish" myth is an interesting example of the Mandela Effect, and a nice reminder of the fallibility of human memory (which is the answer to the question about your mother).
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21 October 2020
at
2:37pm
ptrptr
says:
@
freshborn
"It is unlawful to discriminate in the provision of rented accommodation because of race. In Great Britain under Chapter 2 of Part 2, and Part 4 of the 2010 Act and in Northern Ireland under Part III of the 1997 Order, landlords must not discriminate against a potential tenant because of race (2010 Act) or on racial grounds (1997 Order). Race and racial grounds include colour, nationality, and ethnic or national origins. Colour means being black, white, etc."
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21 October 2020
at
6:20pm
P Eluard
says:
@
freshborn
Whilst that particular wording might be mostly apocryphal, I recommend this great site to you called Google. It has an image search, and it took me seconds to find photographic proof, from a BFI documentary, of racist letting notices.
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21 October 2020
at
10:43pm
thebluecat
says:
I wasn't looking at rental notices in the 50s - not having been born then - but I well remember when Robert Relf made the headlines.
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23 October 2020
at
9:02pm
davidovich
says:
Discrimination is always on the basis of imputation of worthiness of otherwise. I have an old copy of Allen Silitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The book is in fact several short stories around the theme of white working class life. The last two stories are brilliant and heartbreaking portraits of ‘selected’ working class “unworthiness” and Sillitoe’s bitter self-denunciations over “the “literary thing” he has “gotten into” which has made him “working -class -worthy.” He ends with a frank confession of hatred for the English middle classes.
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25 October 2020
at
12:28am
hayden eastwood
says:
"White defensiveness is often evidence, unfortunately, of how extensive and effective the process – and the internalisation – of racial and economic division has been."
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25 October 2020
at
7:45am
pauline courtney
says:
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26 October 2020
at
4:38pm
Sharmini Mahendran
says:
Thank you from a Sri Lankan born to diplomat parents in Ghana, growing up in China, higher-educated in Boston and now a Trump refugee in Canada. My parents, Sri Lankan diplomats in 1950s America, were denied apartments in Washington DC. We have come a long way but constant questioning and reflection is still needed before we reach the promised land.
Read more--------
Britain “festooned with ‘no coloureds, no Irish, no dogs’”. What exactly does this familiar trope of anti-racism actually mean. That there was unashamed discrimination in housing, in particular in social housing, well into the 1980’s, is a matter of historical record. The “no blacks, no Irish, no dogs” phrase presumably refers to the cards that used to advertise rooms to let, in pre-internet days, in newsagents’ windows. Here, much of the discrimination was, and would still be, legal, since anyone has the right to decide who to allow into their family home, which was the nature of most of the lettings thus advertised.
I don’t remember the 1950’s, but I remember a card saying “no Irish” in a newsagents und Oxford, about 1967 or 8: it struck me as unpleasant, and unusual.
Good article except for the straw-manning, though.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/376789/Code_of_Practice_for_Landlords__web_.pdf
He had a house to sell. Initially he advertised it the words with "positively no coloureds", but then modified it to read "for sale to an English family only".
This was in 1976, after the Race Relations Act had been passed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Relf
The trope that drives all social striving in industrial societies is the almost unconscious knowledge among the somewhat vulnerable that the most vulnerable can be , effectively , brutalised and murdered with impunity.
It surprises me that a professor of the history of science, can interpret disagreement with a point of view as proof of that same point of view. It seems she is not yet familiar with the scientific method.
Most interesting. I myself am a Sri Lankan who grew up in London in the 50's and therefore found reading this stirred up memories of a whole period of my deliberately forgotten life. Thank you...