Notting Hill
From 1948 until 1962, roughly the period of the Malayan emergency, there had been virtually an open door for immigrants coming into Britain from the Commonwealth or colonies. The British debate over immigration had been hobbled by contradiction. On the one hand, overt racialism had been discredited by the Nazi enemy. Britain’s very sense of herself was tied up in the vanquishing of a political culture founded on racial difference. This meant that the few unapologetic racialists, the anti-Semitic fringe or the pro-apartheid colonialists, became outcast. Official documents would refer to the handful of MPs who were outspokenly racialist as ‘nutters’. So unthreatening were they thought to be that Oswald Mosley, who had been funded by Mussolini before the war and would have been a likely puppet-leader had Germany invaded Britain, was promptly allowed out of prison after the war, to strut on the back of lorries and yell at his small number of unrepentant fascist supporters. Ignoring him, the public propaganda of Empire made much of a family of races under the British flag all cooperating, loyally together.
In Whitehall, the Colonial Office strongly supported the right of black Caribbean people to migrate to the Mother Country, fending off the worries of the Ministry of Labour about the effects on unemployment during downturns. When some 500 Caribbean immigrants arrived in 1948 on the converted German troopship SS Windrush, the Home Secretary declared that though ‘some people feel it would be a bad thing to give the coloured races of the Empire the idea that, in some way or the other, they are the equals of people in this country,’ the government disagreed: ‘we recognise the right of the colonial peoples to be treated as men and brothers with the people of this country.’ Britain, in short, believed herself to be the logical opposite of Nazi Germany, a benign and unprejudiced world-connected island. The Jewish migration of the thirties had brought one of the greatest top-ups of skill and energy that any modern European state had ever seen. The country in fact already had a population of about 75,000 black and Asian people and labour shortages suggested it needed many more. The segregation of the American Deep South, and the arrival of the ideology of apartheid in South Africa were treated alike with high-minded contempt.
And yet everyone knew this was not really the whole story. Prewar British society had never been as brutal about race as France or Spain, never mind Germany, but it was riddled with racialism nevertheless. Anti-Semitism had been common in popular novels and obscure modernist poetry alike. The actual practice of the British upper and middle classes had been close to the colour bar practised by Americans. Africans were tolerated as servants and musicians while in Britain, little more. White working-class people hardly ever came across someone of another colour: during the war, black GIs, though welcomed, had been followed around by awestruck locals simply wanting to touch them or hear them speak. Almost as soon as the first post-war migrants arrived from Jamaica and other islands of the West Indies, popular papers were reporting worries about their cleanliness, sexual habits and criminality: ‘No dogs, No blacks, No Irish’ was not a myth, but a perfectly common sign on boarding houses. The hostility and coldness of native British people was quickly reported back by the early migrants. And Hugh Dalton, a cabinet colleague of the high-minded minister quoted earlier, was also able to talk of the ‘pullulating poverty stricken diseased nigger communities’ of the African colonies.
For most people, questions of race were obscure and academic. The country remained overwhelmingly white and only tiny pockets of colour could be found until the sixties, most of them in the poorest inner-city areas. A quarter of the world was in theory welcome to come and stay. There were debates in the Tory cabinets of the Churchill, Eden and Macmillan years but for most of the time they never got anywhere. Any legislation to limit migration would have kept out white people of the old Commonwealth too; and any legislation which discriminated would be unacceptably racialist. Conservatives as well as socialists regarded themselves as civilized and liberal on race. By this they meant pick-and-choosy. For instance in the fifties, the Colonial Office specifically championed ‘the skilled character and proved industry of the West Indians’ against ‘the unskilled and largely lazy Asians’. Immigration from the Indian subcontinent had begun almost immediately after independence and partition, as a result of the displacement of Hindus and Muslims, but it had been very small. Sikhs had arrived, looking for work particularly in the industrial Midlands, and in the west London borough of Southall, which quickly became an Asian hub. Indian migrants created networks to buy and supply the corner shops which required punishingly long hours, and the restaurants which would almost instantly become part of the ‘British’ way of life – there were more than 2,000 Indian restaurants by 1970 and curry would become the single most popular dish within another generation. Other migrants went into the rag trade and grew rich.
So immigration continued through a decade without any great national debate. Much of it was not black but European, mostly migrant workers from Poland, Italy, France and other countries who were positively welcomed in the years of skill and manpower shortages. There was a particularly hefty Italian migration producing a first-generation Italian community of around 100,000 by 1971 to add to the earlier migrations which went back to the 1870s. There was constant and heavy migration from Ireland, mainly into the construction industry, three-quarters of a million in the early fifties and two million by the early seventies, producing little political response except in the immediate aftermath of IRA bombings. There was substantial Maltese immigration which did catch the public attention because of violent gang wars in London between rival Maltese families in the extortion and prostitution business (though to be fair to Malta, many of these people had arrived there from Sicily first). There was a major Cypriot immigration, both of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, as the divided island became more politically violent. Again, apart from the enthusiastic adoption of plate-smashing and moussaka in ‘Greek’ restaurants in British cities, there was no discernable public fuss. Chinese migration, mainly from the impoverished agricultural hinterland of Hong Kong, can be measured by the vast rise in Chinese fish-and-chip shops and restaurants, up from a few hundred in the mid-fifties to more than 4,000 by the beginning of the seventies. The Poles, carefully resettled after the war, were joined by other refugees from Stalinism, Hungarians and Czechs, again without any national response other than warm enthusiasm.
Thus, if there were clear rules about how to migrate quietly to Britain, they would have started first, be white, and second, if you cannot be white, be small in number, and third, if all else fails, feed the brutes. The West Indian migration failed each rule. It was mainly male, young and coming not to open restaurants but to work for wages which could, in part, be sent back home. Some official organizations, from the National Health Service to London Transport, went on specific recruiting drives for workers, nurses or bus-drivers or cleaners, with cheery advertisements in Jamaica for ticket-clippers on London buses. Most of the population shift, however, was driven by migrants themselves desperate for a better life, particularly once the popular alternative of migration to the United States was closed down in 1952. The islands of the Caribbean, dependent on sugar or tobacco for most employment, were going through hard times. As word was passed back about job opportunities, albeit in difficult surroundings, immigration grew fast to about 36,000 people a year by the late fifties. One historian notes the scale of the change: every two years ‘a number equivalent to the total non-white national population in 1951 was arriving in Britain’. The black and Asian population had risen to 337,000 by 1961. And it was concentrated, rather than widely dispersed. Different West Indian groups clustered in different parts of London and the English provincial cities – Jamaicans in the south London areas of Brixton and Clapham, people from Trinidad in west London’s Notting Hill, islanders from Nevis in Leicester, people from St Vincent in High Wycombe, and so on.
The way these people migrated and made their way had a huge impact on the later condition of post-war Britain and deserves analysis. The fact that so many of the first migrants were young men who found themselves living without wives, mothers or children inevitably created a wilder atmosphere than they were accustomed to in their island homes. They were short of entertainment and short of the social control of ordinary family living. A chain of generational influence was broken and a male strut liberated. Drinking dens, the use of marijuana, ska and blues clubs, and gambling were the inevitable result. A white equivalent might be the atmosphere of the Klondike gold-rush communities, not in general notable for their sobriety and respect for law. Early black communities in Britain tended to cluster where the first arrivals were, which meant in the blighted inner cities. There, as discussed earlier, street prostitution was more open and rampant in the fifties than it would later become; it is hardly surprising that young black men away from home often formed relationships with white prostitutes, and that some then went into pimping. This would feed the press and white gang hysteria about blacks (unsportingly well-endowed, it was thought) stealing ‘our women’. The combination of fast, unfamiliar music, the illegal drinking and drugs and the sexual needs of the young migrants combined to paint a lurid picture of a new underworld. It was no coincidence that the Profumo affair had involved a West Indian drug dealer alongside its cast of aristocrats, politicians, good-time girls and spies.
More important for the longer term, a rebelliousness was sown in black families which would be partly tamed only when children and spouses began arriving in large numbers in the sixties, and the Pentecostal churches reclaimed at least some of their own. Housing was another crucial part of the story. For the immigrants of the fifties, accommodation was necessarily privately rented since access to council homes was based on a strict list, dependent on how long you had been living in the area. We have already seen how the early squatting revolt was ended by the threat of participants being moved to the back of the council housing queue. So the early immigrants were cooped up in crowded and often condemned old properties – the gaunt Victorian speculative terraces of west London, or the grimy brick terraces of central Leeds. Landlords and landladies were often reluctant to rent to blacks. Once a few houses had immigrants in them, a domino effect would clear streets as white residents sold up and moved. The 1957 Rent Act, initiated by Enoch Powell in his free-market crusade, perversely made the situation worse since it allowed rents to rise sharply, but only when tenants of unfurnished rooms were removed to allow furnished lettings. Powell meant this to allow a cushion of time before rents rose. Its unintended consequence was that unscrupulous landlords such as the notorious Peter Rachman (an immigrant himself) could buy up low-value rented properties, usually with poorer white tenants in them and then – if only he could oust the tenants – pack in new tenants at far higher rents. Thuggery and threats generally got rid of the old. New black tenants, desperate for somewhere to live and charged much higher rents, were then imported. The result was the creation of instant ghettos, in which three generations of black British would live. The Brixton, Tottenham and Toxteth riots of the eighties can be traced back, in part, to the moral effects of early young-male migration and the housing practices of the fifties.
The other side to the story is the reaction of white Britain. As one Caribbean writer ironically put it, he never met a single English person with colour prejudice. Once he had walked down a whole street, ‘and everyone told me that he or she ’ad no prejudice against coloured people. It was the neighbour who was stupid. If only we could find the “neighbour” we could solve the whole problem. But to find ’im is the trouble! Neighbours are the worst people to live beside in this country.’ Numerous testimonies by immigrants and in surveys of the time show how hostile local people were to the idea of having black or Asian neighbours. The trade unions bristled against blacks coming in to take jobs, possibly at lower rates of pay, just as they had campaigned against Irish migrants a generation earlier. Union leaders regarded as impeccably left-wing lobbied governments to keep out black workers. They were successful enough for a while to create employment ghettos as well as housing ones, though in the West Midlands in particular black migrants gained a toehold in the car-making factories and other manufacturing. Only a handful of MPs campaigned openly against immigration. Powell raised the issue in private meetings though as a health minister he had been keen enough to use migrant labour. But anti-immigrant feeling was regarded as not respectable and not to be talked about. The elite turned its eyes away from the door-slamming and shunning, and escaped into well-meant if windy generalities about the brotherhood of man and fellow subjects of the Crown. Most of the hostility was at the level of street and popular culture, sometimes the shame-faced ‘sorry, the room is taken already’ variety and sometimes violent. The white gangs of the Teddy boy age went ‘nigger-hunting’ or ‘black-burying’ and chalked the ‘Keep Britain White’ signs on walls. They may have been influenced by the small groups of right-wing extremists, such as the Union for British Freedom, or Mosley’s remaining fascist supporters, but the main motivation seems to have been young male competition and territory-marking. These were, after all, the poor white inhabitants of the very same areas being moved into by the migrants.
All this came to a head in the Notting Hill riots of 1958. Rather like Suez a couple of years earlier, Notting Hill was more a symbol of change than a bloody slaughter. In fact, nobody was killed in the rampaging and by the standards of later riots, there was little physical damage. Furthermore, the trouble actually started far away from London, in the poor St Ann’s district of central Nottingham and only spread to Notting Hill a day later. Yet it was a large and deeply unpleasant outbreak of anti-immigrant violence which ran for a total of six days, across two late summer weekends. It was no coincidence that Notting Hill was the area where the rioting happened as distinct from, say, Brixton, which also had a very large and visible black population by the mid-fifties. It had the most open, well-known street culture for black people, near enough to Soho at one side, and the new BBC headquarters on the other, to be advertised and even celebrated by hacks, broadcasters and novelists. It was known for its gambling dens and drinking clubs. It had a resentful and impoverished white population but also, as two historians of British immigration put it, ‘It had multi-occupied houses with families of different races on each floor. It had a large population of internal migrants, gypsies and Irish, many of them transient single men, packed into a honeycomb of rooms with communal kitchens, toilets and no bathrooms.’
Into this honeycomb poured a crowd first of tens, and then of hundreds of white men, armed first with sticks, knives, iron railings and bicycle chains, and soon with petrol-bombs too. They were overwhelmingly young, mostly from nearby areas of London, and looking for trouble. They began by picking on small groups of blacks caught out on the streets, beating them and chasing them. They then moved to black-occupied houses and began smashing windows. The crowds swelled until they were estimated at more than 700 strong, whipped up by the occasional fascist agitator, but much more directed by local whites. Racist songs and chants of ‘Niggers Out’, the smash of windows – though some local whites protected and even fought for their black neighbours, this was mob violence of a kind Britain thought it had long left behind. It shrunk away again partly as a result of black men making a stand, and fighting back with petrol bombs. There were 140 arrests, mainly of white youths, and though far-right parties continued to organize in the area, there was no discernible electoral impact, or indeed any more serious trouble. The huge press coverage ensured, however, that Britain went through its first orgy of national introspection about its liberalism and its immigration policy, while overseas racist regimes such as those of South Africa and Rhodesia mocked the hand-wringing British.
After the riots, many black people did ‘go home’. Returns to the Caribbean soared to more than 4,000. There, West Indian governments expressed outrage at the riot and made it clear that there would be no action by them to restrict migration in order to appease lawless white thugs. Indeed the Commonwealth, whose usefulness has been questioned elsewhere in this history, clearly functioned as a kind of doorstop to maintain immigration. It retained a loose association between Crown, obligation and common citizenship which felt real to politicians of both parties. Pressure to close the open border for Commonwealth citizens hardly increased in the Tory Party after the Notting Hill riots, though extra-parliamentary campaigns, such as the Birmingham Immigration Control Association, did spring up. Of course, given that the violence was directed against immigrants by whites, it would have been grotesquely unfair had the first reaction been to send people home. Labour was wholly against restricting immigration, arguing that it would be ‘disastrous to our status in the Commonweath’. The Notting Hill Carnival, begun the following year, was an alternative response, celebrating black culture openly. For many black migrants, the riots marked the beginning of assertion and organization. They were looked back on as a racial Dunkirk, the darkest moment after which the real fightback would start.
Only after Macmillan’s stunning 1959 general election victory did pressure really begin to build up for some kind of restriction on immigration to Britain. Opinion polls were now showing strong hostility to the open-door policy. Perhaps as important in Whitehall, both the Ministry of Labour and the Home Office wanted a change to help deal with the new threat of unemployment. This was a case of the political class being pushed reluctantly into something which offended their notion of their place in the world, the father-figures of a global Commonwealth. One study of immigration points out that what was truly remarkable was the passive acceptance by politicians and bureaucrats of Britain’s transformation into a multicultural society: ‘Immigration was restricted a full four years after all measures of the public mood indicated clear hostility to a black presence in Britain, and even then it was only done with hesitation.’ And when the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act finally passed into law, it was notably liberal, at least by later standards, assuming the arrival of up to 40,000 legal immigrants a year with complete right of entry for their dependants. Even so, it had only gone through after a ferocious parliamentary battle, with the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell making emotional and passionate attacks on a measure which was still privately opposed by some of the Tory ministers involved. One particularly contentious issue was that the Republic of Ireland was allowed a completely open border with Britain. This may have seemed only practical politics given the huge number of Irish people living and working there already but it offended in two ways. By discriminating in favour of a country which had been neutral in the war with Hitler and declared itself a republic, but against Commonwealth countries which had stood with Britain, it infuriated many British patriots. Second, by giving Irish people a better deal than Indians or West Indians it seemed frankly racialist.
The new law created a quota system which gave preference to skilled workers and those with firm promises of employment. In order to beat it, a huge new influx of people set out in 1961 for Britain, the biggest group from the Caribbean but also nearly 50,000 from India and Pakistan and 20,000 Hong Kong Chinese. This ‘beat the ban’ phenomenon would be repeated later when new restrictions were introduced in the seventies. One historian of immigration puts the paradox well: in the three-year period from 1960 to 1963, despite the intense hostility to immigration, ‘more migrants had arrived in Britain than had disembarked in the whole of the twentieth century up to that point. The country would never be the same again.’