Lonnie Donegan’s success may have made him a household name, but he went to considerable lengths to remain connected to his fans, encouraging them to set up skiffle clubs wherever he went on tour. By late 1957, his fan club had over two thousand members, each paying five shillings for a membership card, a blue guitar-shaped enamel badge with his initials on, and a twelve-page magazine, printed three times a year. The October 1957 issue contained an easy-to-follow guide on how to play ‘Rock Island Line’ and ‘I’m Alabamy Bound’, as well as photos from a party for members that Lonnie hosted at the Cavern Club, described as ‘Liverpool’s underground jazz club’. Donegan also outlined his plans to personally attend club meetings when playing in towns where there were more than fifty members.
By spring 1958, the clubs were becoming more organised. Encouraging youngsters to ‘meet socially, discuss and listen to folk and skiffle music, form their own groups and dance etc’, the Club Office in London undertook to pay for the hiring of a hall and to send a free copy of every Lonnie Donegan release to each club. Members were instructed to elect their own officers, to charge each member one shilling to attend – guests were allowed, although they had to pay two shillings and sixpence – and to spend any money raised on the purchase of books and records.
In the summer 1958 issue of the club magazine, Lonnie outlined how he thought the meetings should be conducted. Records were to be played as people arrived, followed by a general discussion, and then two or three skiffle groups should perform. The winter edition carried the contact details of clubs in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Shrewsbury and Worcester.
These autonomous gatherings gave teenagers an opportunity to meet outside of the confines of church-run youth clubs, where activities were organised and approved by adults. They would also prove a good training ground for those who would play a part in organising the folk clubs that grew out of the skiffle boom in the early 60s. But it wasn’t only Lonnie Donegan’s fan club that was inspiring young people to come together. Between 15 May and 19 June 1957, the
British government, in the face of mounting international efforts to ban the testing of atomic weapons, detonated three hydrogen bombs above Malden Island, an uninhabited British possession in the central Pacific Ocean. The deployment of the H-bomb stirred up public opposition at home. The National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapon Tests, who had led the campaign against testing, decided that it made more sense to oppose the existence of nuclear weapons rather than merely protesting against the tests and, in February 1958, transformed itself into the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
From the very beginning, CND attracted huge numbers of young people. Having survived the Second World War as children, they were outraged that their parents’ generation were contemplating another conflict – one which had the potential to wipe out all life on Earth. It was the first mass political movement in Britain to engage the nation’s youth and its focus was the Aldermaston Marches.
In 1950, the British government established the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at the former RAF base at Aldermaston in Berkshire, some fifty miles due west of London. CND chose the AWRE as the focus for a march from Trafalgar Square over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend of 1958. The organisers believed that music should be a central component of the event. Flyers sent out by CND contained a line for people to fill out which read: ‘I can play … … … and am willing to be in a band’.
A few weeks before the march, Gerald Holtom, a quietly spoken commercial artist from Twickenham, came to the first meeting of the London Region CND with a strip of black cloth about six yards long and eighteen inches wide, designed to be carried on poles by two people. On the black cloth were the words ‘Nuclear Disarmament’ and each end featured a strange symbol that Holtom had conceived, based on the semaphore signals for N (an inverted V) and D (a vertical line), surrounded by a circle.
When thousands gathered in Trafalgar Square on Good Friday, similar banners were handed out bearing slogans such as ‘From Fear to Sanity’, ‘Against H-bombs for Britain, USA, Russia’, ‘First Step to Peace’ and, presaging a widely used slogan of the 60s, ‘Make Friends Not Enemies’. CND also produced several hundred placards bearing Holtom’s ‘broken cross’ peace symbol, first seen that weekend and destined to become an icon of the alternative society.
Over four days, a crowd sometimes numbering six thousand marched down the A4 arterial road towards Reading, the nearest major town to Aldermaston. Local supporters organised food and shelter for the marchers, while pubs along the way made their toilets available. Fred Dallas and his Original Riverside Skiffle Group were part of an advance guard, sent into towns ahead of the march to welcome them in.
John Hasted mounted an amplifier in a pushchair and led his London Youth Choir on the march, singing a number specially written for them by John Brunner called ‘The H-Bomb’s Thunder’. Set to the tune of the old American union song ‘The Miner’s Lifeguard’, it became the rallying song of CND. Out of respect to the religious pacifists attending the march, it was decided that, it being Good Friday, the marchers should observe a contemplative silence until they reached Shepherd’s Bush, some five miles to the west. The City Ramblers clearly didn’t get the memo, for as soon as Canon Collins of St Paul’s Cathedral had bidden the marchers on their way, the Ramblers struck up with the spiritual ‘Study War No More’ as the crowds filed out of the square. The Daily Telegraph reported that the marchers ‘skiffled their way along’ through the streets of west London.
The next day, headlines declared the Easter weather to have been the worst for a century. Snow had fallen in Kew Gardens in west London on Saturday as the marchers passed on their way towards Aldermaston. Despite the terrible Bank Holiday weather, spirits were kept high by musicians, both on the march itself and in the crowds that gathered in support along the way. The Daily Telegraph observed that, on arrival at Reading, marchers were greeted by ‘five guitars, a washboard and three dozen people singing a Negro spiritual’.
The presence of musicians is well documented in March to Aldermaston, a thirty-three-minute black-and-white documentary film of the event. Credited to the Film and TV Committee for Nuclear Disarmament, the footage was shot by a large team of film-makers led by documentary producer Derrick Knight, while Tony Richardson took over at the editing stage. His old collaborator from the Free Cinema days, Karel Reisz, was also involved in the production. The first musician to be seen in the film is Ken Colyer, leading his Omega Brass Band, in their uniform of white shirt, black tie and white ‘milkman’s hat’, through the streets of west London, bringing a touch of the New Orleans marching band tradition to the cause of nuclear disarmament. Various trad jazz bands appear along the route, while guitars and washboards are clearly visible among the younger marchers, as are a huge number of duffel coats. At one point, a guy holding a trumpet and surrounded by the rest of his band explains to some bystanders why he and his pals are marching: ‘We’re lovers of good music and if this hell of a lot goes up, we’re not likely to hear good music any more.’
The atmosphere wasn’t always positive. On one occasion some fascists lay in wait and threw a few eggs at marchers before being chased away, and in Reading a local vicar rang his church bells vigorously to drown out speakers calling for world peace. But by the time they arrived at Aldermaston, their numbers had swelled to over ten thousand and a new movement had been born. The marchers felt empowered and, all over Britain, teenagers had found a cause with which to identify.
While skifflers and trad jazzers were well represented on the march, there was no sign of the new generation of rock ’n’ roll stars on the route to Aldermaston. Did they have no appetite for politics? While they might not have opposed the H-bomb, that question was answered in September 1958 when Melody Maker carried a front-page story in which Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Lonnie Donegan and a host of other prominent British artists signed a statement condemning racial prejudice. They were voicing their opposition to a series of racially motivated attacks by gangs of white youths on the West Indian community in west London.
As the British Empire began its transition to the Commonwealth following the loss of India in 1947, British citizenship was granted to all colonial subjects under the Nationality Act of 1948. As soon as this became law, adverts were placed by the UK Ministries of Health and Labour in Caribbean newspapers seeking to recruit nurses, hospital auxiliary staff and domestic workers. In 1956, London Transport began bringing men and women from Barbados to work as bus conductors, station staff and canteen assistants.
Many who came to Britain from the Caribbean were well educated and highly qualified but willing to accept low-status jobs in the hope of gaining promotion or finding more suitable employment. Instead, they found discrimination. Paid lower wages than their white colleagues, passed over for promotion despite being better qualified, they were often denied accommodation on grounds of race, rooms suddenly becoming unavailable when the landlord saw a black face. Inevitably, many Caribbean immigrants found themselves living in some of the worst housing in London.
Now an upmarket area, Notting Hill in the late 1950s was a slum. Chronically overcrowded in the interwar years and badly damaged by the Blitz, it was a place of cheap lodgings and squalor. When, in July 1957, the Conservative government lifted controls on rent that had been in place since the war, unscrupulous landlords were quick to see how they could exploit immigrants desperate for accommodation. The legislation only applied to new tenants, so Peter Rachman, who owned over a hundred large houses in the Notting Hill area, began forcing out white residents whose tenancies protected them from rent increases. He then subdivided these properties into smaller flats and let them to West Indians for a higher premium.
A long-term resident of the area, Arnold Leese was the founder, in 1929, of the Imperial Fascist League, whose symbol was a swastika imposed over the Union Jack. Once a rival to Oswald Mosley as the leading figure of British fascism, Leese was jailed in 1947 for helping members of the Waffen SS escape from prisoner-of-war camps in Britain. Following his death in 1956, his house in Notting Hill became the base of operations for the White Defence League, led by Colin Jordan, a virulent racist and anti-Semite. Under their slogan ‘Keep Britain White’, the WDL campaigned for an end to immigration and the repatriation of all ‘coloured’ immigrants already living in the UK.
Mosley himself was active in the area, seeking to unite the remnants of his pre-war British Union of Fascists under the new banner of the Union Movement. During the 1930s, Mosley had relied on his blackshirts to rough up the opposition. In 1958, it was the Teddy Boys who did his dirty work, roaming the streets in gangs looking for people to intimidate.
Tensions were rising through the summer of 1958, with both the White Defence League and the Union Movement holding meetings and distributing leaflets in the Notting Hill area. At the end of July, a group of Teddy Boys attacked a cafe in nearby Shepherd’s Bush. On 23 August, after closing time, a gang of nine white youths aged between seventeen and twenty toured the streets in a car, armed with iron bars, starting handles, chair legs and a knife. They later told the police that they were ‘nigger-hunting’ – whenever they saw a West Indian man walking alone they attacked. Five of their victims needed hospital treatment, three of whom were seriously injured.
The violence came to a head on the night of 30 August, when a young white Swedish woman was attacked by a group of local white youths unhappy at her marriage to a Jamaican, who they claimed was her pimp. When the police arrived and, aiming to defuse the situation, arrested the woman, the crowd moved on to nearby Bramley Road, where a mob of around four hundred armed with iron bars and knives began attacking houses occupied by West Indian tenants.
Mosley’s Union Movement were quick to capitalise on the unrest. The next day, their newspaper, Action, was being hawked on every street corner by young men shouting slogans such as ‘Down with the niggers’ and ‘Keep Britain white’. As night fell, crowds of white youths again gathered and another night of racist violence ensued, which the Manchester Guardian reported ‘left five black men lying unconscious in the streets of Notting Hill’. The disturbances attracted more racists to the area, eager to join in the attacks. But the West Indian community also drew support from places such as Brixton, from where members of the Afro-Caribbean community came to help organise resistance.
On 3 September, heavy rain seemed to dampen passions, but the next day was among the most ferocious, with petrol bombs thrown into the homes of West Indian families. After five days of mob rule on the streets of west London, the authorities were finally able to restore order on 5 September. Miraculously, no one had been killed, but the scenes of violent hatred had sent shockwaves across British society. Among the first to respond were the jazz and pop communities. Denis Preston pulled together a statement condemning the racial attacks, which appeared on the front page of Melody Maker on 6 September. Under the headline ‘Race Riots’, Britain’s pre-eminent music paper declared itself to be disturbed both by the interracial rioting and ‘the absence of any civic, spiritual, industrial or political move’ to condemn the racism. It printed the artists’ statement in full:
‘At a time when reason has given way to violence in parts of Britain, we the people of all races in the world of entertainment, appeal to the public to reject racial discrimination in any shape or form. Violence will settle nothing: it will only cause suffering to innocent people and create fresh grievances. We appeal to our audiences everywhere to join with us in opposing any and every aspect of colour prejudice wherever it may appear.’
Among the twenty-seven prominent artists who signed the statement were Chris Barber, Lonnie Donegan, Humphrey Lyttelton, Matt Monro, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers of the Goons, Tommy Steele, Dickie Valentine and Marty Wilde.
The statement was followed by the formation of the Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship (SCIF), organised by Preston and Fred Dallas, along with mixed-race jazz couple John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, hugely popular Trinidadian pianist Winifred Atwell, jazz singer George Melly, Ken Colyer, and Russell Quay and Hylda Sims of the City Ramblers Skiffle Group. Initial meetings were held in Dankworth’s office in Tin Pan Alley and, as well as musicians, the group attracted actors such as Laurence Olivier, who became chair of the organisation, and writers Colin MacInnes and Eric Hobsbawm, the latter then reviewing jazz records under the pen name Francis Newton.
SCIF’s first initiative was to organise a fundraising gig at the Skiffle Cellar. They also produced an eight-page illustrated broadsheet that was distributed around the streets where the violence had occurred, as well as in the skiffle and jazz clubs of Soho. It contained the group’s mission statement: ‘[Our] aims are to promote understanding between races and banish ignorance about racial characteristics; to combat instances of social prejudice by verbal and written protests; to set an example to the general public through members’ personal race relations; and to use all available means to publicise their abhorrence of racial discrimination.’
Organising gigs in Soho was a start, but to have any real effect SCIF needed to take their message to the streets of Notting Hill, where the White Defence League and the Union Movement were still active. Colin MacInnes, whose Absolute Beginners would feature the riots as the climax of the narrative, was renowned among SCIF activists for loading his car with leaflets and personally delivering them to households in the streets where violence had erupted.
The key to SCIF’s engagement with Notting Hill was Claudia Jones, a forty-three-year-old activist from Trinidad, whose parents had taken her to live in New York when she was nine years old. In 1936, looking for organisations that actively opposed racism, she joined the Young Communist League, rising to become a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party of the USA in 1948. During the McCarthyite repression, she was jailed four times because of her convictions, before being deported. When the authorities in Trinidad refused to allow her admission, she was offered residency in the UK on humanitarian grounds, arriving in London in late 1955.
A journalist by trade, Jones founded the first wholly black newspaper in Britain, the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News, which was based over a barber’s shop in Brixton. Gravitating towards the Communist Party of Great Britain, she met Eric Hobsbawm and became an early member of SCIF. Jones provided the organisation with contacts in the Afro-Caribbean community in west London, helping to organise the first SCIF event in the area, a Christmas party for 250 children of all races held at Holland Park School on 23 December 1958.
This was quickly followed by the opening of the Harmony Club, a social space where teenagers from different backgrounds and races could get together to enjoy music provided by the stars of the day. The club was hosted by Jo Douglas, one of the original presenters of Six-Five Special, and opened on Mondays and Fridays at St Mark’s Church Hall, Notting Hill. Club chairman Harvey Hall declared that ‘this will not be a select club … Teddy Boys will be welcomed.’ This was a direct challenge to the fascists operating in the area who relied on the thuggish element among local Teddy Boys to do their dirty work.
In the weeks that followed, black and white activists involved with SCIF received letters from fascist groups threatening violence, and threats were made to burn down the church hall that housed the club. Tensions in the area were heightened further in April 1959, when Union Movement leader Oswald Mosley declared that in the forthcoming general election he would stand for the parliamentary constituency of North Kensington, which included Notting Hill.
A week later, the BBC television programme Panorama brought SCIF members together with Colin Jordan of the White Defence League to discuss the issue of race relations. Johnny Dankworth made it clear that SCIF was an anti-fascist initiative. ‘The objectives of the campaign are largely to counteract any cranky organisations which try to preach the gospel of a master race anywhere. Such organisations as [the WDL] seem laughable on the face of it but they aren’t really laughable because Adolf Hitler started a similar organisation about twenty or twenty-five years ago which caused the deaths of millions and millions of people and the sufferings of millions more.’
In the end, the Harmony Club only lasted six weeks. Its problem, argued Alexis Korner, was that it was just too successful: ‘We were limited to just fifty [members] and we got hundreds.’ SCIF continued its activities at the Skiffle Cellar in Soho, hosting regular events aimed at openly challenging the colour bar.
In the districts most affected by the riots, local black activists took the lead, most notably Claudia Jones, who went on to found the Notting Hill Carnival. Mosley was decisively beaten by the Labour Party at the general election of October 1959, coming last with just 7.5 per cent of the vote. SCIF had run its course, the first high-profile, artist-led, anti-racist, anti-fascist campaign seen in the UK. Two decades later their cause would be taken up again with the formation of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, once again bringing artists and fans together in the fight against discrimination.
The first generation of British teenagers had found their collective voice in opposition to nuclear weapons, and the skifflers had been in the front rank. Popular music was emerging as an international language through which young people spoke to one another across borders, questioning everything that the older generation threw at them, seeking to create a better world than that which they’d inherited.