‘The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.’ (Toni Morrison)
For the longest time, the central distraction for black Britons was insisting on our existence. That we were black was unarguable. That we were in Britain was acknowledged if only to be contested. But the notion that we could be black and British, both from this place and in our bodies, confounded many, if not most. Britain, we were told, was an essentially white place to which we had only just arrived. We had no history here.
This had an impact on both our politics and our self-perception. ‘The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere‘ (E.H. Carr). Effectively orphaned by the most accessible national story available, many black Britons sought surrogate historical parents elsewhere and found them in America, whose story of racial disenfranchisement and resistance we adopted as our own.
So a book [Peter Fryer’s Staying Power. The history of black people in Britain] that starts with the sentence: ‘There were Africans in Britain before the English came here‘ serves as the basis to a transformative understanding not only of the past, but the present and future too.”
Gary Younge, “Foreword” to Peter Fryer, Staying Power, The History of Black People in Britain, 1984.

Preface

Black people – by whom I mean Africans and Asians and their descendants – have been living in Britain for close on 500 years. They have been born in Britain since about the year 1505. In the 17th and 18th centuries thousands of black youngsters were brought to this country against their will as domestic slaves. Other black people came of their own accord and stayed for a while or settled here.
This book gives an account of the lives, struggles, and achievements of men and women most of whom have been either forgotten or, still more insultingly, remembered as curiosities or objects of condescension.

Can such an account be written by a white writer in a way that is acceptable to black readers?
This question has been much discussed in the United States. Robbed in the past of all they had, from their freedom to their very names, Afro-Americans have made up their minds never to be robbed again – and no longer to tolerate the pillage of their history by ignorant and superficial white writers out for fame and gain.
On the other hand, it is accepted that white writers who make the effort to ‘think black‘ – i.e. to grasp imaginatively as well as intellectually the essence of the black historical experience – may have something worthwhile to offer.
But they are warned that this may entail a painful rethinking of basic assumptions. I have written with these considerations in mind.

This is a history of black presence in Britain. And it is written, not just for black or just for white readers, but for all who have a serious interest in the subject.
Serious readers will want to know first of all what keys to understanding this book has to offer. It offers two.
One is the contribution made by black slavery to the rise of British capitalism and, in particular, to the accumulation of wealth that fuelled the industrial revolution. That’s why there is a chapter on Britain’s slave ports.
The other key is the effect English racism has had on the lives of black people living in this country. That’s why there is a chapter on the rise of English racism.
These two chapters are not ‘background’. They go to the heart of the matter. Without these two chapters this book would be like a history of the Jews in Germany that stayed silent about antisemitism and extermination camps.

For the rest, the method is as far as possible biographical, the scope comprehensive but not exhaustive.

It is a pleasure to thank those who urged me to take on this task and have helped and encouraged me along the way. It was a chance remark by Bob Supiya of the British Library, during the 1981 ‘riots’, that finally led me to lay aside other work and start writing this book instead. I learnt much from the ‘Roots in Britain’ exhibition assembled by Ziggi Alexander and Aubrey Dewjee. Paul Gilroy read a draft of the last two chapters and made helpful comments. Jeffrey P. Green gave me a lot of information about black people in Britain in the early years of this century. I was privileged to attend the International Conference on the History of Blacks in Britain (1981) and the scholars I met there were unstinting with information and suggestions.

It seems to me now that I began work on this book with an arrogance that has been deservedly humbled by what I have learnt while writing it. Above all, I have learnt how little I know and can hope to know. All who venture into this field must sooner or later ponder the West African saying: ‘Knowledge is like the baobab tree; one person’s arms cannot encompass it.’

Chapter 1. ‘Those kinde of people’

There were Africans in Britain before the English came here. They were soldiers in the Roman imperial army that occupied the southern part of our island for three and a half centuries. Among the troops defending Hadrian’s wall in the 3rd century AD was a ‘division of Moors’ (numerus Maurorum Aurelianorum) named after Marcus Aurelius.
Besides African soldiers and slaves, there may well have been officers (praefecti) from the flourishing towns of north Africa serving in Roman Britain in the second and third centuries.

There are traces of an African presence in the British Isles some 400 or 500 years after the Romans left. An ancient Irish chronicle records that ‘blue men’ (fir gorma) were seized by Vikings in Morocco in the 9th century and carried off to Ireland, where they stayed for a long time.
And the remains of a young African girl were recently found in a burial, dated c. 1000, at North Elmham in Norfolk, about 25 miles north-west of Norwich.

Then the records are silent until the early 16th century, when a small group of Africans was attached to the court of King James IV of Scotland, experiencing in the royal service what had been called a ‘benevolent form’ of the black slavery that had become common and fashionable in southern Europe during the preceding 200 years.

Around the same time as that group of Africans reached Edinburgh, a solitary black musician was living in London, employed by Henry VII and his successor, Henry VIII. Whether he came straight from Africa or from Scotland – or, indeed, as is quite possible, from Spain or Portugal – is not recorded. Nor do we know his real name. The accounts of the treasurer of the Chamber, who paid the king’s musicians their wages, refer to him as John Blanke – but this, since it means ‘John White’, was surely an ‘ironic jest’.

Forty years later, the first group of black Africans came to England. It was the summer of 1555 – before we had potatoes, or tobacco, or tea, and nine years before Shakespeare was born. Queen Mary was on the throne, had recently married Philip of Spain, and was much occupied with having heretics burnt. Some of her subjects were more interested in getting rich than in arguing about religion, and it was the pursuit of riches that caused them to bring here a group of five Africans. The visitors came from the small town of Shama, which can be found in any large atlas, on the coast of what nowadays we call Ghana. Three of them were known as Binne, Anthonie, and George; the names, real or adopted, of the other two have not come down to us. A contemporary account speaks of ‘taule [tall] and stronge men‘ who ‘coulde well agree with owr meates and drynkes‘ although ‘the could [cold] and moyst ayer [moist air] dooth somewhat offende them‘.
The same account refers to these five Africans as slaves. Whatever their status, they had been borrowed, not bought. Englishmen were not to start trafficking in slaves for another 8 years. For the time being, English merchants were simply after a share in the profits to be gained from African gold, ivory, and pepper. The Portuguese had been hogging this lucrative West African trade for more than 100 years and had long managed to keep their rich pickings secret from their European neighbours. Now the secret was out. But the English needed African help if they were to succeed in breaking the Portuguese monopoly. That was why John Lok, son of a prominent London merchant and alderman, brought the group of West Africans over here in 1555. The idea was that they should learn English and then go back to Africa as interpreters and, as it were, public relations men.

As more and more Englishmen went to Africa, were surprised and impressed by the riches and living standards of the rulers and merchants they met, and started publishing their findings in travel books, sober facts began to get mixed with the accepted myths. Readers were told that some Ethiopians had no noses, others no upper lips or tongues, others again no mouths. The Ptoemphani were ruled by a dog. The Arimaspi had a single eye, in the forehead. There were people in Libya who had no names, nor did they ever dream. The Garamantes made no marriages; the men held the women in common. Such fantasies tended to cement in the minds of English people the notion that Africans were inherently carefree, lazy, and lustful.
Such myths eased English consciences about enslaving Africans and thereby encouraged the slave trade. To justify this trade, and the use of slaves to make sugar, the myths were woven into a more or less coherent racist ideology. Africans were said to be inherently inferior, mentally, morally, culturally, and spiritually, to Europeans.
The first Englishman to line his pockets by trafficking in black slaves was an unscrupulous adventurer called John Hawkyns. On that first English triangular voyage, in 1562-3, he acquired at least 300 inhabitants of the Guinea coast. Some he bought from African merchants whose wares included domestic slaves; some he hijacked from Portuguese slavers; some he simply seized. Though it would be another 100 years before English merchants were trafficking in slaves in a really organised way, and longer still before they succeeded in dominating the slave trade, they had started dabbling.
And, as a by-product of this dabbling, African slaves were brought to England from the 1570s onwards. In the late 16th century, there were used here in three capacities: as household servants (the majority); as prostitutes or sexual conveniences for well-to-do Englishmen and Dutchmen; and as court entertainers. There is no evidence of black people being bought and sold in this country until 1621, which is not to say that it did not happen before that year. But there is clear evidence that black people were living here – and not only in London – in the last 30 years of the 16th century. In 1570 one Nicholas Wichehalse of Barnstaple in Devon mentioned ‘Anthonye my negarre‘ in his will. The illegitimate daughter of Mary, described as ‘a negro of John whites’, was baptized in Plymouth in 1594; the supposed father was a Dutchman. Towards the end of the 16th century it was beginning to be the smart thing for titled and propertied families in England to have a black slave or two among the household servants. In the 1570s Queen Elizabeth was shown with a group of black musicians and dancers entertaining her courtiers and herself. To disguise themselves as black women in masquerades became a favourite pastime among the queen’s ladies-in-waiting.

Chapter 4. The black community takes shape

So far we have been looking at Britain’s black population exclusively through the eyes of the natives of the country they were brought to against their will. We have had no alternative. Until about 1750 the traces left by their presence here – royal proclamations, entries in parish registers, instructions to slave-ship captains, offers of slaves for sale, advertisements for runaways – were the documents of native rulers, administrators, merchants, noblemen, and ships’ officers.
But from about the middle of the 18th century there is something new in the records. There is evidence of cohesion, solidarity, and mutual help among black people in Britain. They had developed a lively social life. And they were finding ways of expressing their political aspirations. Black self-awareness took literary shape in autobiography, political protest, journalism, and other published writings by Africans who lived in or visited England and wrote in English. The lives and work of these writers and leaders of Britain’s black community will be described in the next chapter.

More important than its size, is how the community conducted its affairs, reacted to the atrocious circumstances so many of its members had to endure, and took part in the movement for the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery. In London at least, black servants were able to gather informally in small groups from time to time, no doubt to exchange information and discuss matters of common concern. One of Samuel Johnson’s visitors stumbled across such a gathering about the year 1760. Johnson was away from home, ‘and when Francis Barber, his black servant, opened the door to tell me so, a group of his African countrymen were sitting round a fire in the gloomy anti-room’. Barber was no longer a slave, and in Johnson – who once scandalized ‘some very grave men at Oxford‘ with the toast: ‘Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West-Indies‘ – he had an employer who treated him as a human being. So the meeting was probably a regular event that had Johnson’s blessing than one hastily convened while his back was turned.
But London’s black community organized very much bigger and more elaborate affairs, with music and dancing, at various taverns. ‘No Whites were allowed to be present, for all the performers were Blacks‘. There was also community observance of christenings, weddings, and funerals – precisely those events in the human life-cycle which, if we take christening as a special case of name-giving, figure so largely as social occasions throughout black Africa.

The most interesting and informative among hostile witnesses is Sir John Fielding, magistrate and half-brother of the novelist, authentic voice of the English governing and master class. He noted in 1768 that it was the practice of blacks ‘intoxicated with Liberty‘ and ‘grown refractory‘ to ‘enter into Societies, and make it their Business to corrupt and dissatisfy the Mind of every fresh black Servant that comes to England‘. The blacks had succeeded in getting ‘the Mob on their side‘. The ‘Mob’ were the working people of London, the pre-industrial craftsmen and labourers who poured onto the streets of the capital in their thousands to demonstrate for ‘Wilkes and Liberty’. Ever since the political upheavals of the 17th century, this ‘Mob’ had been impregnated with a love of liberty, a hatred of slavery, and a spirit of ‘sturdy independence and hostility to the executive‘. No wonder it was not merely difficult but dangerous for masters to try to recapture people who had such formidable allies. And allies they were.
London’s working people were not trying to make use of the black community or usurp its leadership. Their attitude to slavery had nothing in common with the sentimentality of many middle-class abolitionists. They saw black people as fellow-victims of their own enemies, fellow-fighters against a system that degraded poor whites and poor blacks alike. With their help, London had by the 1760s become a center of black resistance.

Chapter 9. Challenges to empire

The aim of this chapter is to describe the lives and achievements of some of the black people who lived in Britain between about 1830 and 1918. What these people had in common gives this chapter its title. All of them, in one way or another, to some degree or other, challenged empire or – it came to much the same thing – challenged racism. A black person leading any kind of public life in Britain could hardly help doing so.

Chapter 12. The new generation

Right through the 1970s, Britain’s black communities had been under attack from fascists and police. They had been forced to defend themselves, since nobody else could or would defend them. The rebellion of black youth in the inner cities was the logical and, as is now clear, inevitable response to racist attacks. It was the culmination of years of harassment. Its message was simply: ‘We have had enough’.
With remarkable historical symmetry, this burst of youthful rage began, and proved to be most powerful and sustained, in the very cities which had once been this country’s chief slave ports: Bristol, London, and Liverpool. There, if anywhere, the persistent bullying of black people was bound, sooner or later, to provoke rebellion. The size and scope and ferocity of the rebellion astonished everyone, including the youth themselves. They learnt that, tactically, they could defeat the police; that, strategically, they could hold them to a draw. The police learnt how far, in future, they could goad. On both sides of the barricades, many other lessons are no doubt still being digested.
Those who at present rule this country, and for whom control of Britain’s black communities has been a major consideration in the turn to ‘hard’ policing, would be ill-advised to underestimate the intelligence, determination, and proud traditions of those they desire to control.
And if, as has been suggested, ‘traces of black life have been removed from the British past to ensure that blacks are not part of the British future‘ [in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back, 1982], the present book is offered as a modest contribution to setting the record straight.

Peter Fryer, Staying Power. The History of Black People in Britain, 1984

Preface

This book is an attempt to put in historical perspective the Black presence in Britain as it relates to the development of British capitalism and its control and exploitation of black labour. The making of the Black working class in 20th-century Britain has been a long process, reflecting essential changes in Britain’s labour needs over time, both at home and abroad.

As overseas trade expanded, the discipline and control of labour (both black and white) became imperative to Britain’s economic well-being. To ensure the continued exploitation of colonial labour, an ideology based on racial differences, which bred an inferior/superior nexus both in interpersonal relations and in international trade, was constructed to keep Blacks in subjection.
Thus, plantocracy racism supported by British capitalists, politicians, historians and influential people of letters, engendered dogmatic belief in white supremacy and institutionalised racism in Britain and her colonial ‘possessions’.
Consequently, the cultural transmission of racist ideas was handed down over generations.
Historically, as Blacks in the colonies laboured under the inhuman and deplorable working conditions endemic in slavery, indentureship and trade union-regulated working conditions, in response, they resorted either ‘spontaneously’ or in an ‘organised’ way to various forms of resistance, creating in the process their own ideologies of Indian nationalism, Pan Africanism and Black Power, and autonomous organisation. This tradition of struggle has, in turn, informed and strengthened the black working-class movements both in the colonies and Britain in recent years.

In order to avoid any confusion that might arise in the reader’s mind, it is perhaps necessary to define the ‘black working class‘ in the context of this book.
In general, ‘black’ refers to non-white persons, particularly those from former colonial and Commonwealth countries. Within this usage, there are sub-divisions denoting the various constituent groups: these are Africans, Asians, West Indians, Afro-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, Asian-Caribbeans and Black British.
‘Working class’ refers essentially to those unskilled and semi-skilled Blacks who came to Britain throughout the period, but particularly during the heavy post-war immigration in search of jobs.

Chapter 1. Profits, Slavery and the Black Poor

The long standing presence of black people in Britain dates back to Roman times. By the 17th century many were employed as servants, pageant performers, court jesters and musicians. Later, this black presence would become significant as trade and economic expansion forged a fundamental connection between the demands of British capitalism and black labour. Indeed, Negro slavery and the slave trade were responsible for providing the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England and of ‘mature’ industrial capitalism which, in turn, destroyed the slave system. Thereafter, black labour has remained a crucial factor in the development of the British economy.

Chapter 2. Black Radicals and Black Women in Service

There was a continuous black presence. In Liverpool (the slave port and centre of the cotton trade) research has shown that there never was a time, throughout the century, when the city did not have black citizens and that these citizens were always united by common problems and interests.

Despite a decrease in the number of the black poor in Britain during the 19th century, their essential poverty remained unaffected. So much so, that action of another kind became necessary; action based on common causes shared to some extent by the wider British working class. Common problems and common interests there were indeed.

But in spite of the shift in British public opinion, black people in Britain were, in various ways, forced to submit to the prejudices inherent in English society, as their fellow Blacks endured the agonies of slavery on the colonial plantations.

Chapter 4. Britain, Empire and Labour

The old slave port of Liverpool has had a continuous black presence; stretching from the period of slavery into the 20th century. In time, ‘African’ immigrants came to be regarded with suspicion and hostility, particularly after being discharged from the armed forces and the Merchant Navy in 1919. Antagonism between Blacks and Whites grew. And, as in Cardiff about this time, serious disturbances broke out. In the aftermath, public opinion was in favour of the repatriation of Blacks to the colonies. In spite of the Blacks’ minority status in Liverpool, they were nevertheless seen as a threat by the white population, particularly in terms of competition for employment. This threat led to stereotyped opinions of black people. Indeed, the English worker could not accept the black worker as an equal; he was bound, gagged and tied by the notion of the black man as being inferior.

The inter-war and post-war years saw an increase in the black population in Britain. Constituting a small but important minority, as a group, the Blacks were largely disorganised. Often they sought representation for their grievances from black organisations, few of which had any real credibility.

Chapter 5. The Development of a Black Radical Ideology

The failure of the black intelligentsia was, in part, the failure of Marxism to accommodate the problem of minorities. It is clear that in Marx’s writings, a separate theory on minorities would have constituted a serious breach with the basic postulate of the primacy of economic factors on the consciousness of man and its concomitant of the ‘class’ struggle as the motivating factor in history. Marxists have been unable successfully to integrate ‘race’ with ‘class’.

These decades constituted an important transitional period when the mood of the small black community moved from a large measure of grudging acceptance to rising consciousness and radicalism. Black radicalism was in the ascendant. Moreover, heightened awareness of national identity clarified the fact that political freedom was not enough; economic self-sufficiency was also of primary concern. Freedom from colonial domination was the major theme.

Chapter 9. The Black Workers’ Industrial Struggle

In spite of the massive publicity and trade union support throughout Britain, the Grunwick Strike [i.e., a pivotal industrial dispute at a film processing plant in North London, in which predominantly South Asian women fought for union recognition; however, the strike ended without achieving formal recognition] demonstrated that a victory was only possible through the emergence of an ‘autonomous leadership’, capable of an international appeal, free from the traps of the British trade unions. The white workers were not there to support a strike by black workers. They were there simply on the issue of defending the trade union movement. The strategy the Grunwick strikers had subsumed themselves to was a complete denial of their own history.
Trade union officials knew and cared very little about immigrant workers. When at the height of their wealth and power during the 1950s and 1960s the unions had enormous potential for effecting radical change for the benefit of Britain’s working class as a whole, they failed to accept the challenge on behalf of their black members. While it was understandable, it was nonetheless unforgivable.

By contrast, the movement of Blacks internally and the activities of young Blacks and black workers in Britain had thrown up race into the forefront of the struggle (as a daily lived experience) and thus laid the basis for a powerful national and international linkage of black struggles.
The Black Workers’ Movement believed that their platform of demands must speak for the needs of the whole black working class. They believed that within the black community there was ample experience and willingness to make a front of Black Workers Against Racism in Industry a serious political force for unity and struggle within the black working class.

Chapter 11. Black Working Class Consciousness

British immigration legislation which has clearly indicated that ‘blacks are not wanted here’ is a fact known intimately by all black people in Britain. Racial discrimination and racial disadvantage, and the sub-class position of the black working class vis-à-vis the white working class has led black cultural and political organisations across the country to achieve and acknowledge (at various levels), for the first time, a national black working-class consciousness – the inevitable outcome of race and class oppression.

According to E.P. Thompson, the English working class ‘made itself as much as it was made’. He adds crucially: ‘Class consciousness is the way the experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms’.
Indeed, an integral part of these ‘cultural terms’ was racialism. Thus historically, the practices and policies of British capital that have made the English working class, ironically, in turn, received the general endorsement of the white working class in the making of the black working class in Britain.

Black working-class autonomous organisation is today’s reality, necessitated and conditioned by institutionalised racism. Historically, the trade unions, the Labour Party and the British working class generally (in spite of their hollow, hypocritical pronouncements of ‘the brotherhood of man’) have actively helped to make and maintain this fracture within the class.
They must know, more than ever before, that it is incumbent on them to listen and act on the representations of black autonomous organisations.
While the black working class in Britain may hope for a positive response from the white ‘labour aristocracy’ and the white working class generally, their autonomous struggle (the direct result of British racism) will continue as their urgent, insistent demands extend to every aspect of their essential deprivation.

Ron Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain, 1987.

Preface

My original aim in writing this book was to provide not just an overview of the history of all those of African and Caribbean heritage in Britain, but also an introduction to the latest research.
I have written about the history of those people of African and Caribbean heritage. It might be argued that there is only British history, with no other qualifiers. But unfortunately those of African and Caribbean heritage have too often been excluded from it. All people, including those of dual heritage, have a specific geographical cultural heritage, based on their places of origin, or that of their families, and I do not see why this should be denied to those of African and Caribbean heritage who have made such an impact on the history of Britain. Today, when the majority of Britain’s Black population have migrated from or are connected with the African continent, it is even more vital that what has come to be referred to as ‘Black British’ history reflects the experiences and struggles of all those of African and Caribbean heritage. This history is always part of Britain’s history.
Although there has been important new work, the focus of many historians remains firmly on the 20th century. There is still a lack of research on the period before 1500 and on the 17th and 19th centuries, as well as the period after 1985. In short, there is still much research that remains to be done to strengthen our knowledge of this history. Not only has the history of people of African and Caribbean heritage in Britain often been centred around their struggles, but to firmly establish this history requires a significant struggle as well.

Chapter 1. The Early African Presence

The presence of Africans in Britain during the Roman period has been established by historians for many years. It is therefore correct to say that Africans were present before the settlement, centuries later, of Angles, Saxons and Jutes.

The latest DNA evidence also suggests that African migrants had reached Britain perhaps a thousand years before the Romans. Enamel oxygen isotope evidence from human remains again suggests that the Isle of Thanet in Kent might have received North African migrants in the Bronze Age. In February 2018, it was revealed that those who might be considered some of the first Britons – that is the first to provide genes that can be found amongst some of the modern inhabitants of Britain – had ‘dark to black’ skin, as well as dark hair and blue eyes. Indeed, one newspaper headline boldly proclaimed that according to the latest DNA study ‘the first Britons were black’.
The research, conducted by the Natural History Museum, analysed the skeletal remains of Cheddar Man, first discovered in a cave in Somerset in 1903, who is thought to have lived in England some 10,000 years ago amongst a population of only 12,000. The almost complete skeleton of Cheddar Man is the oldest so far discovered of a modern human in Britain. The study showed that migrants who originated in Africa, and came to Britain via western Asia and Europe, maintained darker skin pigmentation for much longer periods than was previously thought and that the development of pale skin pigmentation took place much more recently. The earliest Britons could be considered Black people. Notions of Britishness and Englishness once more need to be rethought. The analysis of the skeletal remains of Cheddar Man also demonstrated significant scientific advances. Although the analysis of DNA has been possible for several years, techniques have markedly improved in the 21st century, and created the possibility for new revelations about the ancient population of Britain in the future.

The latest archaeological and scientific techniques have been utilized to analyse human remains found in what was the Roman city of Eboracum, now York. At the beginning of the 20th century people digging in a street in York discovered a 1,700-year-old stone coffin of a woman. She had been buried with jewellery, including jet and ivory bracelets, as well as other valuable possessions, and was undoubtedly of elite status. It was not until 2010 that archaeologists were fully able to analyse the skeleton, which they discovered to be that of a young woman, probably between 18 and 23 years old and of North African origin. The archaeologists were even able to make a reconstitution to show us what this African ‘Ivory Bangle Lady’ may have looked like [see below].

This and other research has shown that those of African heritage, including African women of all classes, were a settled population before the arrival of the Angles and the Saxons. Such findings prompted archaeologists to conclude that analysis of the ‘Ivory Bangle Lady’ and others like her, contradicts common popular assumptions about the make-up of Roman-British populations, as well as the view that African immigrants in Roman Britain were of low status, male and likely to have been slaves.

Chapter 2. African Tudors and Stuarts

Before the 17th century, it is quite possible that Africans were perceived as a normal part of Elizabethan and Jacobean society. They worked in a variety of occupations, lived in towns and villages throughout England and Scotland and intermarried, or had sexual relations, with their British contemporaries. They were subject to no special laws and had a very similar status to their neighbours. Certainly, people in England and Scotland were interested in the fact that Africans had a different skin colour to their own, that this colour was transferred to children even when they did not live in a tropical climate and might even be transferred to children born of European women. However, in this period, modern notions of racism had not yet been developed, especially in England. An African might sometimes be described as ‘a stranger’, indicating that they were foreign-born, but in other respects Africans appear to have been generally treated as other residents and subjects of the monarch.

Chapter 3. That Infamous Traffic

In the subsequent fight against slavery, it is important to note that it was the actions of people, and most importantly of the enslaved themselves, in the Caribbean, Britain and beyond, that had made enslavement and trafficking increasingly unpopular, inefficient, unprofitable and dangerous. The conditions for this significant change in policy were brought about by Africans themselves, in Africa, in Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean and North America, as well as in Britain and elsewhere. The struggle against human trafficking and slavery was truly international and in the late 18th century it became a mass political movement, often connected with a wider struggle for political rights.

Chapter 4. Freedom struggles

In the early 19th century, people of African and Caribbean heritage were to be found pursuing numerous and varied occupations, but the vast majority lived in difficult social and economic conditions, as did most of their British contemporaries. For some, enslavement was still a fact of life in Britain, even in the 1830s, just as it was for those in the Caribbean.
It is not surprising, therefore, that in the same way as in the 18th century, those of African and Caribbean heritage concerned themselves not only with their everyday struggle for survival, but also with the major political struggles of their time.

Chapter 6. War, Riot and Resistance: 1897-1919

One of the most important aspects of the history of African and Caribbean people in the 20th century has been the formation of political organisations. Although there had been many efforts by those of African and Caribbean heritage to aid each other over the centuries, there is very little evidence of people working within organizations in order to do so until the 20th century. Political organizations became vitally important at the turn of the century, not only because of the oppressive nature of colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean but also because Black people in Britain were subject to various forms of racism and often regarded as inferior to other citizens.

Chapter 10. Black Liberation

The period from the mid-1960s onwards is often associated with the experiences of those young people who were the children of post-war migrants, who faced racism in school, employment and at the hands of the police. Many of these young people were born in Britain to families who had long been resident in the country. It was the era of Black Power and Black Liberation, with the emergence of new political organisations that struggled to resist racism and defend the rights of African and Caribbean communities. It was also the period of significant youth uprisings in major cities against racism, disadvantage and disempowerment. The political organisations, publications, bookshops, poetry, music and other manifestations of the period gave rise to a particular Black British culture of resistance and self-expression that had a powerful influence throughout the country.

Chapter 11. Into the New Century

One of the most significant changes towards the end of the 20th and the start of the 21st century has been that the population who traced their heritage directly from the African Continent became larger than those who traced their immediate heritage to the Caribbean. (One must note that the figures can be misleading, since the term ‘Black’ may exclude many of those of mixed heritage who generally self-identify as Black.)

Despite now constituting the majority of the Black population, the history and experiences of those of continental African heritage is, at present, poorly documented.
British citizens of Nigerian heritage have long been a significant population in Britain, especially in London, and in such concentrations that an area such as Peckham has become known as ‘Little Lagos’. Two of the area’s most famous Nigerian residents were friends.
A population of Somali heritage has also long existed in Britain and, from the 19th century onwards, northern Somali men, often originating from Aden, were working as seafarers and settling in port cities.
Migrants from Zimbabwe constitute a newer community, most of whom have settled in Britain since the 1980s and particularly so during the 21st century, with increasing numbers claiming political asylum.

Black Firsts
The emergence of a new Black British identity was accompanied by numerous historic breakthroughs for Britain’s citizens of African and Caribbean heritage around that time. In 1981 Moira Stuart became the BBC’s first woman of Caribbean heritage to become a newscaster for the BBC, and went on to present all the BBC’s major television news programmes. Another key appointment was that of Jamaican-born Bill Morris, who, in 1991, was elected General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and thereby became the first Black leader of a major trade union. There were also many sporting firsts during this period. There are many other examples of those who individually and collectively contributed to a distinctive Black British sense of achievement in the period since the 1980s.

However, particular challenges and many struggles remained for those of African and Caribbean heritage.

The protests in the summer of 2020 highlighted a variety of ongoing concerns, but one of the key demands articulated was the need to address the neglect throughout the education system of what was often referred to as ‘Black history’ and particularly ‘Black British history’. Such Eurocentrism has resulted in young people of African and Caribbean heritage being alienated from the history studied in schools and even in universities. However, this history is not just important for young people of African and Caribbean heritage. It is important that a full picture of Britain’s history is available to all. It is not just a history of the white men of property, but one that includes those who, like Cheddar Man and other early Britons, either migrated to Britain from other parts of the world or had ancestors who were migrants.
In many respects, history is the study of change. It demonstrates that change is not just possible but inevitable and that we are the agents of that change.

Hakim Adi, African and Caribbean People in Britain. A History, 2022.

It is obvious to anyone that the last two decades have produced an outstanding growth in the range of work done in the field of the history of Labour organisations and of the more informal modes of working-class self-organisation and forms of cultural identity.
Yet despite all this activity, I seriously wonder whether we could with any confidence suggest that we have a more historically conscious labour movement now than we have done at previous periods of crisis in the past. I would think not. Clearly the reasons for this major discrepancy are complex and difficult to disentangle. But two observable trends have presented themselves openly and consistently.

• The first has been the so far irreversible tendency for all historical projects to find themselves a home within the ambivalent political world of higher education, and then turn naturally to that same world for their validation and legitimation.

• The second and related trend has been that the publication and dissemination of the work produced has been, for the most part, unproblematically offered into the hands of the commercial readership chosen by the market priorities of capital investment. Expensive hardbacks for the higher education libraries, rather than pocketbooks for the people, has been the general trend.

The tragic result of the increasing separation of the academic world of social history from the pressing day-to-day concerns of working-class and socialist politics, is that neither is exercising any interventionist influence on the other. Much historical work within the academic world has become obsessive about the minutiae of social history, so that its exponents have become self-parodying, like the fossil collectors and butterfly hunters of 1950s’ children’s fiction. There seems to be an unspoken assumption that if, somehow, every detail of the past could be described and understood, then the immanent meaning of history would reveal itself, no longer through a glass darkly, but truly face to face. Once every moment of past working-class experience has been noted and analysed, then all the forms and structures of capitalist relationships will powder and disintegrate, leaving at last pure, unmediated working-class authentic being.
It is more important to make history than understand it, though of course we should try to do both. Surely the first responsibility of socialist historians is to promote as widely as possible the discussion of the accumulated historical experiences of the working-class and socialist movement, and help re-create a strong sense of the history which brought people to the positions inherent in contemporary political struggles.
Otherwise many people will come to cynically regard the new socialist history in the same terms as Milton regarded the libertarian rhetoric of his period: ‘a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary’.
One of the results of this kind of development is that people coming to the new texts of socialist history from outside the universities are actually made to feel more ignorant after reading them, rather than more enlightened.

Local people’s history and History Workshop: a complicated relationship

This is why the new local people’s history movement is so important, possibly central, to the project of reviving the historical component of an affirmative class consciousness.
This is why it is a matter of priority that the relationship between the growing number of autonomous local history projects, nearly all of whom have attached themselves to the flourishing Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, and the movement associated with the Ruskin History Workshop and the History Workshop Journal, is subject to a new discussion of common aims and modes of activity.

The relationship to date (between local people’s history & History Workshop) has been an uneasy one, if anything growing more distant.

• Yet there is no doubt that many of the community history projects were directly inspired by attendance at one or more of the Ruskin Workshops. It was at the Workshop on Childhood in May 1972 that many political activists, but non-historians, were inspired to see the political importance of the new history movement. Producing shareable and common history from the spoken reminiscences of working-class people seemed a positive and important activity to integrate with various other forms of ‘community’ politics.
  This development coincided with many activists’ involvement in some kind of alternative newspaper or printing resources centre which provided the material and productive basis for local publishing. And at first there was some very important practical and political encouragement given by Ruskin History Workshop activists to the first local people’s history groups started.

• But on the whole, parental interest waned rather quickly. Many Ruskin students, it seems, on leaving the college, went into the academic sphere rather than returning to the local history initiatives which seemed to be being promoted as the way forward in 1972. ‘Dig where you stand’ was the motto of the day, but some had already left the site and were down the road before the first morning tea-break, leaving the rest to carry on with blunt and inappropriate instruments – and no architect’s drawings either. Later on one heard the occasional charge of ‘populist’ levelled at the community-based history groups, to which the counter-charge was ‘academic’.
  Neither observation was either useful or constructive. Visits back to the family home at Ruskin became less frequent, conversations more perfunctory and superficial. The local groups were one part of a wider movement which formed the co-ordinating FWWCP in 1976, which became also, but not very satisfactorily, the theoretical discussion place of the local history projects. At the same time, the Ruskin movement evolved into the History Workshop Journal. Two separate directions were formalised in these two bodies, which since then have not had any serious relationship at all.

The position must clearly be remedied. Both movements have much to learn from each other and therefore joint discussions should begin to take place in the near future.

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It is the study circle, discussion group, evening class – call it what you like – which best provides the context in which the study of history, local and national, can be socialised and politicised.

Many of the local history projects are based in known local ‘alternative’ and self-produced institutions: Hackney, with the Centerprise bookshop and community centre, is a case in point. All of these centres have known socialist colourings and therefore the local history work is clearly seen as being part of a partisan cultural and political strategy/presence/formation. I think that in these areas it is now commonly accepted that it is active socialists who have helped provide the energies and time to promote the interest in, recording and publishing of local working-class experience.
This helps explain why, for example, there was a genuine and widespread local outrage when the Centerprise project was set on fire one night by the neo-fascist ’11th Hour Brigade’. Through its local history commitment and its local publishing work it had earned a widely shared agreement to its being an important institution in the cultural fabric of Hackney working-class life. It is now, for many people in Hackney, the first place to bring old photographs, old letters, the notebooks of recently deceased relatives, partly written or completed autobiographies, as well, of course, as people’s own poetry and other writings. It is significant that quite a few of the people who initially came along to a WEA class or project at Centerprise stayed to become involved in other aspects of the work of the total project.

Nearly all of these local projects have proved to be in important positions from which to intervene in and influence history teaching in local schools. And it is in schools where intervention is rather crucial. All of the projects mentioned have won support from local teachers and many of the locally published books are now extensively used in schools, with projects lasting from a few days to a whole term built around particular local history publications. In some schools, syllabuses are being re-drawn to include local working-class autobiographies and local histories. One of the most significant effects of this kind of local publishing, particularly the publishing of characteristic working-class autobiographies, has been that for the first time perhaps, a book used in school is picked up by the parents at home and becomes the basis for a real discussion between parents and children, in which the parents’ own experiences are both significant and important to the school syllabus. That breakthrough, in which it is possible for young people to begin to see their own parents as historical figures, is critically important.

Ken Worpole, “A ghostly pavement: The political implications of local working-class history”, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory, 1981.

Since it was established in 1971, Centerprise – and its related projects such as ‘A People’s Autobiography of Hackney’, the Hackney Writers’ Workshop, Hackney Reading Centre, and a number of quite specific writers’ workshops catering for women only, or young black people in Hackney – has published over 100 titles. This has been the work of many people, including over the years dozens of Centerprise workers, WEA tutors, Literacy Tutors, and a much wider network of community activists. The number of people involved in the various workshops since those early days now runs into hundreds, forming both in name and fact a community of personal friendships and political alliances that still retains a strength and vitality beneath the surface of quotidian Hackney life.

The various publishing initiatives, originally inspired by the early Ruskin pamphlets and the attendance by a handful of Hackney teachers at the 1971 History Workshop on Childhood, has since then been admired and applauded by the History Workshop Journal, though mostly at a distance. The trajectory which the Centerprise initiative took veered increasingly away from that of the History Workshop movement; there were times in Hackney when we felt judged from Oxford and found wanting.

Finding itself based in a community centre in a multi-racial, volatile, and at times politically divided urban community, the Hackney project could not but respond to events, conditions and struggles as they happened, developing a trajectory of its own rather than fulfilling a political and cultural programme mapped out in the seminar room or party headquarters. The project always struggled to keep pace with the complexities and contradictory pressures of local social, cultural and demographic change. It still does.
The traditional categories and discourses of history (even people’s history), literature and belles-lettres simply did not fit.
Emphasis was placed on representing the experiences of the many communities and individual life-choices that made up Hackney; on publishing attractive books at low prices and distributing them locally; on book-launching parties and celebrations. The book-launch party became a cultural form in its own right. There were launches with kosher food and Eddie Cantor records, parties with curry goat, Red Stripe lager and dub music, launches with giant iced cakes in the form of double decker buses or sewing machines, with flowers, with readings, with reunions and emotional silences. They were the most memorable of occasions. There were launches and readings in Irish pubs, in prisons, in literacy centres and in sheltered accommodation. Literature was at last re-joined to daily life.

An unqualified success story, then? A triumph of goodwill and enthusiasm against all odds? Not at all. There were walk-outs, dissensions, splits and recriminations; the politics of class at times tangled head on with the politics of race and gender. People argued and sometimes fell out. All the various claims and priorities of class, race, gender and sexual orientation at time spilled out into meetings, workshops, even public readings. There were endless post-mortems, guilt, bad faith – and sometimes, but certainly not always, times of reconciliation. But as the Russian proverb has it, life is not a walk across an open field.

Ken Worpole, “Local History & Community Publishing in Hackney”, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), History Workshop: A Collectanea, 1991.

– Who was being critical about the Hackney Autobiography project?

– So we were publishing poetry, autobiographical, you know, autobiography, and history as well… it did make our presence at certain kinds of history workshop meetings difficult, because, they sometimes thought we were social workers. We weren’t, you know… We were neither academics, serious academics, historians, nor were we class warriors. So it was quite, that was quite frustrating, and remained frustrating.

Ken Worpole, interviewed by Bea Moyes, for A Hackney Autobiography website

Early days and community politics

The constitution of the FWWCP, worked out shortly after the founding meeting, chose an inclusive, even vague, form of words when it referred to ‘writing produced within the working class and socialist movement or in support of… working class activity and self-expression‘. But there is disagreement about emphases.
One Annual Meeting included a contentious discussion on ‘Working class or Socialist?’, insisting that we might have to make a choice.
Apart from the fact that feminist groups would not necessarily see the Federation as serving their interests, it isn’t always obvious from the other side either that their aims are the same, and issue 25 of Voices prints an argument against admission of a feminist group to the Federation. (Voices is a quarterly magazine, originally organised from Manchester, now acting as an anthology for the whole Federation.)
There has also been discussion, and different decisions made in different groups, about therole of ‘middle-class managers’ – those of us who have been involved as educators, bookshop or publishing workers, sometimes servicers of the group’s work, paid or unpaid. Like for example, most of those who have met to produce this book. Some groups hold that these can threaten and inhibit working class writers (by their position, not by behaving badly), or have found it hard to create structures that oblige the ‘professionals’ to share their skill and confidence so that the group can go on without them.

The Republic of Letters. Working Class writing and Local Publishing, 2009

Acknowledgements

This book has obscure origins in an idea that David Shonfield once suggested for a ‘Radical Walks in Britain’ guide.

Introduction

Joshua Virasami is 21 years old, black, and ‘born and bred’ a Londoner. He grew up in West London and, like most of his fellow students, was working to pay his way through college. His job was in Costa Coffee at Heston motorway service station on the M4. But on 15 October 2011 Josh wasn’t at work or college. He was in one of the oldest parts of his home city, the original site of the Roman Temple to Diana, the churchyard at St Paul’s Cathedral. He was about to have a remarkable day.
Josh and some thousands of others were at St Paul’s because it was the advertised starting point for a demonstration. The protestors intended to occupy the London Stock Exchange – hence the name ‘Occupy LSX’. But the police prevented them from doing so, and in the game of cat and mouse that followed through the streets of the City of London the demonstrators took their last stand back where they started: on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. There an impromptu rally took place and a tent city began to take shape. The protest grabbed the attention of the media, partly because it was one of many similar protests in 80 countries around the world, partly because it sparked a political crisis in the Church of England over whether the permanent protest camp that sprang up around the Cathedral should be forcibly removed.
Not all of Josh’s fellow protestors will have been aware of it as they struggled to resist the attempts by the police to remove them that evening, but many other radicals over many centuries had stood where they now stood. Josh’s 17th-century precursors, the apprentices of the City of London, were at the heart of the mass mobilizations that made the English Revolution. The ‘apron youths’, as the Leveller leader John Lilburne called them, would swarm St Paul’s Churchyard. By the time of the English Revolution St Paul’s churchyard was a hive of political radicalism, the very centre of the printing industry. Booths around the Cathedral itself sold the pamphlets and newsbooks that were pouring from the presses in unprecedented numbers. The printed declarations of the Agitators in the New Model Army could be bought here. So could the pamphlets of the Levellers. So could the revolutionary works of John Milton, resident around the corner in Aldersgate Street. The Levellers had particular reason to remember St Paul’s Churchyard: one of their heroes, Robert Lockyer, was executed by a firing squad of musketeers for mutiny there in 1649.
In the late 1830s the first great working-class movement, the Chartists, adopted an unusual agitational strategy: mass attendance at Sunday sermons. St Paul’s Cathedral was one of their targets. On Sunday 11 August 1839, some 500 Chartists assembled in West Smithfield and marched to St Paul’s. They wore, as protestors still do today, ribbons in their buttonholes to show support for the cause.
Not all protests at St Paul’s have been as peaceful as the Chartists or the Occupy movement. In 1913 the Suffragettes planted a bomb under the bishop’s throne in the Cathedral. It failed to explode because the clockwork arming mechanism had been wound in the wrong direction.

An unusual amount of London’s history has happened in and around St Paul’s. But there is barely a street in inner London that cannot tell at least one tale like this.
Here we set out to capture just some of this past.
Partly we try to do this through describing the social circumstances of the poor and the working class in London down the centuries.
But this is not in the first instance a social history; it is mainly the story of London as a theatre of political activism, told, as much as is possible, with a focus on the lives, actions and words of the actors themselves.

Why does London have such a history of radicalism? The things that make London a centre of wealth and power have also made it a centre of dissent and radicalism. As the home of national government, London is the focal point for protest. The historian E.P. Thompson describes how by the late 18th century ‘the British people were noted throughout Europe for their turbulence, and the people of London astonished foreign visitors by their lack of deference’. Repression was met by resistance.
London does more than many capitals: it combines a centre of national and local government with a financial centre, a port, and a vast retail and entertainment hub. For most of its history London has been pre-eminently an international port: within living memory many of its jobs were still connected with the river, the realm of dockers, stevedores, lightermen, warehousemen, shipbuilders and seafarers. London’s port was a cradle of radicalism and dissent. The vast number of jobs created on and around the river, the centrality of the docks to commercial life, and the huge mixture of races and cultures which came to London on ships from across the world, all contributed to a consciousness formed by living in the city itself. Out of this organization came ideas of collective change to achieve greater social and political equality.
Women have become an increasingly visible part of left-wing, working-class politics in London. Even at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, the importance of London for the ‘new woman’ – educated, self-reliant and emancipated – was becoming clear. The big city gave young women the space and freedom to develop away from family or the confines of village or small-town life. This privilege was initially felt only by middle-class women, but increasingly at least some working-class women who were branching into white-collar work gained some of this benefit.
What the working class looks like today is very different and London probably has the most varied working class in terms of race and nationality of anywhere in the world. While divisions of race, nationality and gender remain real and can sometimes be exacerbated, the common experience of class in London is a powerful countervailing factor.

London’s mob, a term for the mass crowd which assembles in London over a wide variety of issues, was capable of laying siege to Parliament, demonstrating, rioting and attacking the rich. The mob was also a means of communication where news and information seem to spread like wildfire. The term ‘mob’ comes from the Latin term mobile vulgus, coined in the 18th century to describe the labouring poor. In the summer of 2011, the riots which erupted across London were denounced by politicians and media as the actions of a criminal mob. Criminality could not explain many of the actions, however: they started with the death of a young black man shot by the police in Tottenham, spreading to Hackney where police harassment was a major issue. The shops which were targeted were mostly chain stores, symbols of expensive consumerism were attacked, and those who responded to questions about their motives repeatedly expressed anger about lack of a future, unemployment, inequality, racism and police harassment.

London’s mixture of extreme poverty and exploitation, the expansion of working-class districts especially in the East end, the radicalism of the intellectuals who tended to congregate there and who developed alternative ways of thinking, like the women who pioneered the figure of the ‘New Woman’, all combined to create a sympathetic atmosphere for socialist and radical ideas. London also became a seedbed for municipal socialism, with the settlements, housing schemes, education pioneers and health radicals all creating an infrastructure upon which Londoners still rely today.
All of the elements which contribute to the alienation of so many from London are also the source of much of its radicalism. London’s size in relation to the rest of Britain gives its working class and poor a clout which, when they care to use it, has a major political impact. The impersonality of the city forces its inhabitants to come together in all sorts of different ways to try developing community, organization and civil society so as to alleviate some of the worst features of city life. And the wealth of the London rich is a source of daily resentment for the vast majority of those inhabitants who help to produce that wealth.

The London of the 21st century is reproducing the conditions that gave rise to radical and socialist ideas in the past. In 2011 over 1,000,000 Londoners lived in low-income families where at least one adult is working. Housing costs are a critical factor in explaining why London has the highest poverty rates of all England’s regions. Inequality in London is staggering. The poorest 50 per cent have less than 5 per cent of financial or property wealth.
As the 2012 Olympics open, motorcades of dignitaries, politicians, company CEOs and celebrities will sweep through East London on the specially cleared executive super-highway to Stratford that is only open to them. A few yards away, in damp and overcrowded blocks of flats, Black, white, and Asian workers will be preparing to go to work, if they are lucky, in jobs that pay a pittance. Perhaps they will be serving coffee to, or clearing up after, those very same people. For centuries in London such contrasting conditions have produced riots and radicalism, strikes and socialism. That history is unlikely to be over.

Lindsey German, John Rees, A People’s History of London, 2012.

Introduction

The circular transmission of human experience from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back again corresponded to the same cosmic forces that set the Atlantic currents in motion, and in the 17th and 18th centuries, the merchants, manufacturers, planters, and royal officials of northwestern Europe followed these currents, building trade routes, colonies, and a new transatlantic economy. They organized workers from Europe, Africa, and the Americas to produce and transport bullion, furs, fish, tobacco, sugar, and manufactures.
It was a labour of Herculean proportions, as they themselves repeatedly explained. The classically educated architects of the Atlantic economy found in Hercules – the mythical hero of the ancients who achieved immortality by performing twelve labours – a symbol of power and order. For inspiration they looked to the Greeks, for whom Hercules was a unifier of the centralized territorial state, and to the Romans, for whom he signified vast imperial ambition. The hero represented progress: Giambattista Vico, the philosopher of Naples, used Hercules to develop the stadial theory of history, while Francis Bacon, philosopher and politician, cited him to advance modern science and to suggest that capitalism was very nearly divine.

The same rulers found in the many-headed hydra an antithetical symbol of disorder and resistance, a powerful threat to the building of state, empire, and capitalism.
The second labour of Hercules was the destruction of the venomous hydra of Lerna. The creature, born of Typhon (a tempest or hurricane) and Echidna (half woman, half snake), was one in a brood of monsters that included Cerberus, the three-headed dog, Chimera, the lion-headed goat with a snake’s tail, Geryon, the triple-bodied giant, and Sphinx, the woman with a lion’s body. When Hercules lopped off one of the hydra’s heads, two new ones grew in its place. With the help of his nephew Iolaus, he eventually killed the monster by cutting off a central head and cauterizing the stump with a flaming branch. He then dipped his arrows in the gall of the slain beast, which gave his projectiles fatal power and allowed him to complete his labours.
From the beginning of English colonial expansion in the early 17th century through the metropolitan industrialization of the early 19th century, rulers referred to the Hercules-hydra myth to describe the difficulty of imposing order on increasingly global systems of labour. They variously designated dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, pirates, urban labourers, soldiers, sailors, and African slaves as the numerous, ever-changing heads of the monster.

But the heads, though originally brought into productive combination by their Herculean rulers, soon developed among themselves new forms of cooperation against those rulers, from mutinies and strikes to riots and insurrections and revolution. Like the commodities they produced, their experience circulated with the planetary currents around the Atlantic, often eastward, from American plantations, Irish commons, and deep-sea vessels back to the metropoles of Europe.

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In 1751 J.J. Mauricius, an ex-governor of Suriname, returned to Holland, where he would write poetic memoirs recollecting his defeat at the hands of the Saramaka, a group of former slaves who had escaped the plantations and built maroon communities deep in the interior jungle, and who now defended their freedom against endless military expeditions designed to return them to slavery:

There you must fight blindly an invisible enemy
Who shoots you down like ducks in the swamps.
Even if an army of ten thousand men were gathered, with
The courage and strategy of Caesar and Eugene
They’d find their work cut out for them, destroying a Hydra’s growth
Which even Alcides [Hercules] would try to avoid.

Writing to and for other Europeans assumed to be sympathetic with the project of conquest, Mauricius cast himself and other colonizers as Hercules, and the fugitive bondspeople who challenged slavery as the hydra.

Andre Ure, the Oxford philosopher of manufactures, found the myth to be useful as he surveyed the struggles of industrial England in 1835. After a strike among spinners in Stayleybridge, Lancashire, he employed Hercules and his rescue of Prometheus, with his delivery of fire and technology to mankind, to argue for the implementation of the self-acting mule, a new machine ‘with the thought, feeling, and tact of the experienced workman’. This new ‘Herculean prodigy’ had ‘strangled the Hydra of misrule’; it was a ‘creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes, and to confirm to Great Britain the empire of art’. Here again, Ure saw himself and other manufacturers as Hercules, and the industrial workers who challenged their authority as the hydra.
When the Puritan prelate Cotton Mather published his history of Christianity in America in 1702, he entitled his second chapter, on the antinomian [Antinomians are, in the widest sense, heretical puritans] controversy of 1638, ‘Hydra Decapita’. ‘The church of God had not long been in this wilderness, before the dragon cast forth several floods to devour it’, he wrote. The theological struggle of ‘works’ against ‘grace’ subverted ‘all peaceable order’. The Antinomians raised suspicions against religious and political officials, prevented an expedition against the Pequot Indians, confused the drawing of town lots, and made particular appeals to women. For Mather, the Puritan elders were Hercules, while the hydra consisted of the Antinomians who questioned the authority of minister and magistrate, the expansion of empire, the definition of private property, and the subordination of women.

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If the hydra myth expressed the fear and justified the violence of the ruling classes, helping them to build a new order of conquest and expropriation, of gallows and executioners, of plantations, ships, and factories, it suggested something quite different to us as historians – namely, a hypothesis. The hydra became a means of exploring multiplicity, movement, and connection, the long waves and planetary currents of humanity. The multiplicity was indicated, as it were, in silhouette in the multitudes who gathered at the market, in the fields, on the piers and the ships, on the plantations, upon the battlefields. The power of numbers was expanded by movement, as the hydra journeyed and voyaged or was banished or dispersed in diaspora, carried by the winds and the waves beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Sailors, pilots, felons, lovers, translators, musicians, mobile workers of all kinds made new and unexpected connections, which variously appeared to be accidental, contingent, transient, even miraculous.

Our book looks from below. We have attempted to recover some of the lost history of the multiethnic class that was essential to the rise of capitalism and the modern, global economy.

The historic invisibility of many of the book’s subjects owes much to the repression originally visited upon them: the violence of the stake, the chopping block, the gallows, and the shackles of a ship’s dark hold.
It also owes much to the violence of abstraction in the writing of history, the severity of history that has long been the captive of the nation-state, which remains in most studies the largely unquestioned framework of analysis.
This is a book about connections that have, over the centuries, usually been denied, ignored, or simply not seen, but that nonetheless profoundly shaped the history of the world in which we all of us live and die.

Chapter 1. The Wreck of the Sea-Venture

[The Sea-Venture was part of a fleet carrying colonists and supplies to the English settlement in Virginia, in year 1609. Caught in a hurricane, the ship was separated from the rest of the fleet and wrecked on the uninhabited islands of Bermuda. The 150 passengers and crew survived, and spent nearly a year on the islands before building two small vessels and continuing their voyage to Virginia. The incident became one of the most written-about events of early English colonialism, and is believed to have inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Linebaugh and Rediker describe tensions between the Virginia Company officials and the “commoners” on Bermuda.]

The history of the Sea-Venture can be recounted as a microcosm of various forms of human cooperation.

• The first of these was the cooperation among the sailors, and eventually among everyone on the ship, during the hurricane, as they steered the vessel, struck sails, cleared the decks, and pumped out the water that was seeping into the hull.

• After the shipwreck, cooperative labor was extended and reorganized among the ‘hands’ ashore, in part by the leaders of the Virginia Company, in part in opposition to them. This work consisted of building huts out of palmetto fronds for shelter and commoning for subsistence – hunting and gathering, fishing and scavenging.

• Beginning with the challenge to authority aboard ship, the commoners, led by the sailors, cooperated on the island in the planning of five distinct conspiracies, including a strike and marronage.

• Alongside and against that oppositional cooperation, the Virginia Company officials organized their own project of cooperative labor: the hewing of cedar trees and the building of vessels to carry the shipwrecked on to Virginia.

Cooperation bound together many different kind of people, with many different kinds of work experience: sailors, laborers, craftsmen, and commoners of several sorts, including two Native Americans, Namuntack and Matchumps, who were returning to the Powhatans in the Chesapeake after a voyage to England.

Such cooperative resistance shaped Shakespeare’s conception of the conspiracy waged in The Tempest by Caliban the slave, Trinculo the jester, and Stephano the sailor, who combine in a plan to kill Prospero and seize control of the island (Bermuda). Caliban himself embodies African, Native American, Irish, and English cultural elements, while Trinculo and Stephano represent two of the main types of the dispossessed in Judge Popham’s England. ‘Misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows’, muses Trinculo as he joins Caliban beneath a gaberdine mantle, seeking shelter from a thunderstorm – but not before asking himself, ‘What have we here? a man or a fish?’. When Stephano arrives on the scene, he surveys what he thinks is a many-legged creature and wonders if a new kind of being has been created: ‘This is some monster of the isle with four legs’. It is not a fish, of course, nor is it a monster, nor a hybrid (a word originally used to describe the breeding of pigs and first applied to humans in 1620, when Ben Johnson referred to young Irishwomen); it is, rather, the beginning of cooperation among a motley crew of workers. Caliban promises to use his commoning skills (i.e., hunting and gathering) to show Trinculo and Stephano how to survive in a strange land, how and where to find food, fresh water, salt, and wood. Their cooperation eventually evolves into conspiracy and rebellion of the kind promoted on the island of Bermuda by the commoners of the Sea-Venture before they, too, were defeated.

We have said that the meeting of Caliban and Trinculo under the gaberdine is the beginning of the motley crew. We should explain the significance of the term. In the habits of royal authority in Renaissance England, the ‘motley’ was a multicolored garment, often a cap, worn by a jester who was permitted by the king to make jokes, even to tell the truth, to power. As an insignium, the motley brought carnivalesque expectations of disorder and subversion, a little letting-off of steam. By extension, motley could also refer to a colorful assemblage, such as a crowd of people whose tatterdemalion dress made it interesting. A motley crowd might very likely be one in rags, or a ‘lumpen’-proletariat (from the German word for ‘rags’). Although we write about and emphasize the inter-racial character of the motley crew, we wish that readers would keep in mind these other meanings – the subversion of power and the poverty in appearance.

Shakespeare presented the conspiracy of Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano as a comedy of low characters. But their alliance was far from laughable. The actual mutinies on Bermuda, which threw up democratic, antinomian, and communist ideas from below, were more varied, complex, sustained, intelligent, and dangerous than Shakespeare allowed. Perhaps he had no choice.
Like the rebels of the Sea-Venture, the cooperation and combination of ‘strange bed-fellows’ who rose up in insurrection in The Tempest were represented as monstrous. Here Shakespeare contributed to an evolving ruling-class view of popular rebellion that would be summarized by the anonymous author of The Rebel’s Doom, a later-17th-century history of uprisings in England. Early tumults in the realm had resulted almost entirely from the ‘most Eminent Personages of the Nation’, but after the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, ‘the rabble, like a Monstrous Hydra, erecting their shapeless heads, began to hiss against their Soveraigns Regal Power and Authority’.
The strikes, mutinies, separations, and defiances against the power and authority of the sovereign Virginia Company after the shipwreck on Bermuda would play a major, even determining part in the course of colonization.

Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra. Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, 2012.

A note on the text

In this book, I draw on a wide range of historical sources – newspaper reports, magazine articles, fieldwork conducted by social scientists, campaign leaflets, interviews, letters, speeches, acts of parliament, photographs, memoirs, novels – to try to reconstruct the experiences of, and attitudes towards, ethnically diverse communities across four British cities at different points in time.

Introduction

My first kiss was with a girl called Bushra. It must have been in the mid-1990s, because I was no more than 10 or 11 years old and still at junior school in Balsall Heath, a diverse neighbourhood barely two miles south of Birmingham city centre. It’s difficult to say how unusual it was at this point for a white boy like me to have had his first kiss with a girl like Bushra, whose parents were from Yemen. Balsall Heath and Sparkhill, the neighbouring district where I lived, were poor, dilapidated, and sometimes rough. If these were simply features of everyday life, so, too, was the ethnic diversity around me. From the vantage point of my childhood self – when my mother dropped me off with my Pakistani childminder each day, or later when I went to school past the Asian shops that lined Ladypool Road and Stoney Lane – our neighbourhood seemed no more remarkable than the cars that passed by in the streets or the lollipop ladies who guided us across them.
I was among a minority of children at school who spoke English as a first language, and an even smaller minority of white pupils. From the late 1950s onwards in Britain, it became apparent that accelerating inner-city ethnic diversity was not going to be a temporary situation.

This was a nightmare scenario for a growing number of politicians and other commentators, who positioned themselves as quasi-prophets warning of the malaise that, in their view, inevitably awaited the country because of its ‘open-door’ immigration policy. The most influential among these was undoubtedly Enoch Powell, who, in 1968, as the Conservative Shadow Defence Minister and MP for Wolverhampton South West, delivered what became known as his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in a Birmingham hotel, in which he talked of his white constituents as having been rendered ‘strangers in their own country’, their ‘wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition’. Powell’s narrative of white victimhood at the hands of an external and supposedly alien ‘invasion’ would be repeated, with different inflections and particular targets in mind, at regular intervals over the subsequent 50 years.
These anxieties were felt most acutely in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and other one-time imperial nations, where growing populations of formerly colonial peoples coincided with (and acted as the unsuspecting reminders of) the rapid decolonisation taking place since the Second World War. Political concerns about race, immigration and ‘multiculturalism’ were bound up with ‘postcolonial melancholia’ (Paul Gilroy) whereby formerly imperial societies simultaneously struggled to process both the loss of empire and its ongoing legacy in the present day. In 2011, UK Prime Minister David Cameron criticised what he called ‘the doctrine of state multiculturalism’ which, in his view, had ‘encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream’.

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Multiculturalism has been used by politicians to stand in for a much broader set of concerns. But the term has different meanings.

• It can refer specifically to a set of policies that were rolled out in Britain from the 1970s onwards – particularly by Labour-run local authorities such as the Greater London Council – that were designed to provide the space and finances to enable particular ethnic groups to celebrate cultural traditions or religious practices. In spite of the doctrinaire philosophy evoked by the ‘ism’, the strategies of multiculturalism vary considerably from context to context. In Britain, they often meant the provision of small grants to voluntary groups in inner-city areas for arts projects and cultural festivals, or for the maintenance of community buildings.

• But multiculturalism can also refer to a concrete reality, a dynamic whereby different cultural communities live together and attempt to build a common life while retaining something of their ‘original’ identity. This understanding is necessarily connected to immigration, but takes in themes such as the process of settlement, the formation of community structures, the establishment of new relationships, and the shifting dynamic brought about by the emergence of new generations of ethnic minorities who are born in the ‘host’ country.

While events in high politics cast an important shadow over the story I tell in Multicultural Britain, I am primarily focused on unearthing a social history of multiculturalism, or what one writer (Ralph Grillo) has referred to as ‘actually existing multiculturalism’: the interactions that took place at different points in time as cultural difference was negotiated in everyday life, between neighbours, coworkers, school friends, lovers, or casual acquaintances.
For this modern history of multicultural Britain, my focus is the 70-year period from the end of the Second World War to the first decades of the 21st century. If the years after 1945 saw immigration to Britain increase dramatically, by the turn of the century Britain was engaged in what the Jamaican-born British intellectual Stuart Hall called a ‘drift’ towards the multicultural.

• We too often think of ‘multicultural Britain’ as something that exclusively concerns black or Asian communities. Certainly, immigrants from the Caribbean, East and West Africa, and the Indian subcontinent became the largest and most visible ethnic minorities to make their home in Britain. They experienced the most overt discrimination and had to fight the hardest for political representation and against the inequality they encountered in almost every area of their lives. These groups are the indispensable heart of this book.

• But it is also important not to lose sight of the active role ‘white society‘ played in the making of multicultural Britain. This could mean white immigration to Britain from across Europe, or internal migrations from Scotland, Wales, and rural England into Britain’s major cities.

• Yet it must also mean white society taking ownership of the history of white racism; white ignorance; what the writer Reni Eddo-Lodge has emphasised as ‘white privilege‘; and, at certain points, white decency and communality.

In this book I foreground an understanding of multiculturalism as a pluralistic historical process. I want to get at the nature and ‘feel’ of different multicultural communities – what it was like to live in them on a daily basis – from the vantage points of those who shaped them. And this necessarily includes the white shopkeeper in 1960s Birmingham who railed against ‘coloured people coming into this country and taking jobs off our own countrypeople’, alongside the Arab founder of a mosque in 1940s Cardiff, the Jamaican founder of a social club in 1950s Nottingham, and the Pakistani community organiser in 1980s Bradford.
What follows is a series of snapshots, seen from a bottom-up perspective, of the experience of multicultural Britain in particular places at different points in time. What was it like to navigate Cardiff as an Arab or Caribbean seafarer in the late 1940s, almost two decades before racial discrimination was formally (if partially) made illegal in Britain? How did the white residents of Nottingham view the city’s growing ethnic minority population? What was it like to be in a mixed-race relationship in 1960s Birmingham? How were the children of such relationships treated, and how did they see themselves? What kind of politics emerged out of multicultural communities, as ethnic diversity increased and the needs of particular groups – including the growing number of ethnic minorities born in Britain – changed over time?

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In seeking answers to these questions, a number of themes have emerged as threads.

• One is the spatial element of Britain’s multicultural drift.
  It was no coincidence that the areas around which the spectacle of increasing ethnic diversity played out were marked by the poorest-quality housing, which private landlords commonly sought to exploit by cramming immigrants and their families into single rooms. If they could, many white residents moved out of the inner city to the more affluent (and therefore whiter) suburbs – a process American sociologists referred to as ‘white flight’.
  But what emerges at the same time is how inner-city spaces were physically transformed as consecutive generations of ethnically diverse communities sought to establish themselves in Britain. Establishments that emerged as a response to the need to provide essential services that were not otherwise available became safe spaces away from the hostility of the indigenous white population, and at times acted as the springboard for the emergence of more overtly political organisations.

• Along this is the centrality of the themes of love, sex, and intimacy.
  Sex in particular – and especially the prospect of sex between white women and black men – propelled some of the earliest, most fraught anxieties in Britain about increasing ethnic diversity. ‘I do not think I would avoid social or business relations with coloured people’, one respondent to a social survey reflected in the 1940s. But on the other hand, he admitted that he felt ‘very strongly about intimate relations with coloured folks’. In his view, the time had come for the ‘laws of the land to prohibit inter-marriage of white people with coloured’. The prominence of such attitudes helps undermine the notion that was often peddled by British wartime propaganda that, in contrast to Nazi Germany, the British public maintained a modishly egalitarian attitude towards race.
  However, as well as underpinning such moments of tension, love and sex were also behind some of the most embryonic instances of multicultural interaction. Whether this meant the scores of white women from Cardiff who, in October 1945, overwhelmed an American army base in order to embrace their African American sweethearts, the Jamaican immigrant who met the white woman who would become his wife while asking for directions outside Nottingham’s train station, or the complicated relationship between a South Asian immigrant and his Anglo-Irish partner in Balsall Heath, romantic liaisons could open up spaces for conservations and the development of cross-cultural understanding. Given these relationships often took place in the context of the inner city, class was an important dynamic here. It was often the poorest white people who lived next door to newly arrived immigrants from Pakistan or East Africa.

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When I try to interrogate my relationship to these themes, it is to a photograph of my friends and me in Sparkhill Park on 21 September 1996 (my eleventh birthday) that I often turn.

As the photograph suggests, this was a happy moment for me. All my closest friends from school had come to celebrate with a game of football.
But as I examine the image now, I also see that my 11th birthday was a significant turning point in my own trajectory into adulthood. At the insistence of my father (back row left), I had just started at a different secondary school from the one most of my Balsall Heath friends were attending. It had a better academic reputation and was a few miles further south, closer to my dad’s home in a slightly more well-to-do part of town. By anyone’s standards, this was also a multicultural school, with a particularly large South Asian presence, but it also included a substantial white working-class population – a segment of society that, while present in my world, I had yet to encounter en masse. By the time I packed my bags to leave Birmingham for university, seven years later, I had lost touch with most of the people from my childhood world.

My parents had also arrived in Birmingham with histories of migration. These were completely different paths from those followed by the families of most of my childhood friends. On my mother’s side, my great-grandparents from County Cork had, in the 1910s, embarked on the well-worn journey from Ireland to England in search of work. My maternal grandmother, meanwhile, had grown up in Germany, and moved to Britain as a child when her father found work at a plastics factory in Lancashire in 1926. For my father, the migration that characterised his life was an internal one. He had grown up in Nuneaton, a small mining town in the East Midlands that would be blighted by the growing speed of deindustrialisation. Disillusioned with life in the provinces, he moved to Birmingham in his late teens. That city is a mere half-hour by train from Nuneaton. But the cultural differences my father encountered there were nevertheless significant. He gravitated towards the inner cities, ground for the emergence of an arts scene that, across a range of forms, provided alternative perspectives on the growth of multicultural Britain. My intellectual interests have been guided by these currents.
But my opportunities in life have also been shaped by the relative privilege of my background, compared to many of my childhood friends. As I navigated the increasingly white spaces of secondary school, 6th form and university, I could call on the advantages that came from having two university-educated parents at home; my own white privilege also allowed me to sidestep the vicious effects of racial discrimination that, in myriad forms – structurally, economically, politically, and socially – continues to affect the lives of ethnic minorities in Britain, and often bars them from entering the best universities, the best jobs, the positions of power.
In some ways, my own move away from Balsall Heath was an alternative form of white flight from the inner cities. But whereas most white residents who left them in the 1950s and ’60s were fleeing the shock induced by the arrival of widespread ethnic diversity, in the late 1990s I was gravitating away from what – for me – was the familiarity of the multicultural inner city. This was something which I had experienced more properly as a dislocation. As Didier Eribon has argued, ‘whatever you have uprooted yourself from or been uprooted from still endures as an integral part of who or what you are’. My work as a historian is informed by this tension, and an ongoing conversation with my childhood experiences in Balsall Heath. Indeed, it is the main reason I decided to write this book.

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Multicultural Britain charts the long, unstable, and often difficult historical process of ethnically diverse populations weaving themselves, their cultures, and their politics into the fabric of Britain’s major cities. Often powered in the first instance by sex and love, it is a story also indelibly bound up with the legacies of colonialism, empire, and the accelerating forces of globalisation. What follows is just one chapter in the much larger story of the making of modern Britain. But it is one in which – no matter the particularities of our own familial backgrounds and childhood experiences – we all have a stake.

Kieran Connell, Multicultural Britain. A People’s History, 2023.