State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  It is probably unfair to single out the Black and White Minstrel Show for special condemnation. In general, television and film culture during the 1970s was remarkably indifferent to racial sensitivities, and attempts to include black characters were often ludicrously clumsy. Superficially, Roger Moore’s debut as James Bond, Live and Let Die (1973), might look like a rare attempt to embrace black culture and promote black performers: most of the cast are black, and the producers drew inspiration from the ‘blaxploitation’ genre then popular with American audiences. In fact, the film makes even Ian Fleming’s novel look like a model of racial liberalism. While Moore has never been more effortlessly urbane, the film’s black characters, almost without exception, are villainous hoodlums, and the post-colonial black politician at its centre turns out, surprise, surprise, to be a part-time gangster and drug smuggler. ‘A white woman has been tied to a post and a black man dressed in animal skins is laughing crazily and wielding a massive poisonous snake,’ writes one Bond aficionado, reliving the experience of watching the climax as a 10-year-old in Tunbridge Wells. ‘Around them hundreds of voodoo worshippers are screaming and convulsing.’ Even when Bond appears to rescue Jane Seymour, the black revellers are ‘too busy rolling their eyes and waving old cutlasses to offer proper resistance’. And not even his pioneering sexual encounter with a black woman – who of course turns out to be a traitor and dies almost immediately – can quite dispel the impression of unthinking, endemic racism, which makes the film ‘such a shameful experience on each viewing’ – albeit a bizarrely enjoyable one.30

  By this point, black faces were becoming increasingly common on British television. Crossroads introduced its first black character – Melanie Harper, played by Cleo Sylvestre – in January 1970, cleverly teasing the audience by presenting her as Meg Richardson’s daughter (although she turns out to be adopted). Four years later it became the first television soap to feature a black household – the James family, born in Jamaica – and in the summer of 1977 it presented viewers with the first interracial romance, between the Cockney mechanic Dennis Harper and the Asian receptionist Meena Chaudri. But while the producers of Crossroads handled race with rare sensitivity, others were rather less adept. Spike Milligan was a particular offender: his crude portrayal of the half-Irish half-Pakistani Kevin O’Grady (‘Paki-Paddy’) in Curry and Chips (1969) was so bad that ITV cancelled the show after just six episodes. When Milligan blacked up again with John Bird for The Melting Pot (1975), playing a Pakistani father and son who live in a London rooming house alongside a black Yorkshireman and a Chinese Cockney, the BBC pulled the plug after a single episode, afraid of a public backlash. And even the infinitely superior Rising Damp (1974–8), in which much of the comedy derives from the tension between the racist Rigsby and his black lodger Philip, is not altogether comfortable viewing today. Don Warrington’s Philip is clearly the most sympathetic character: suave, dignified and intelligent, as befits the ‘son of a chief’. Yet it is Rigsby who has all the best lines, for instance when he worries whether Philip’s behaviour will change ‘when he hears the drums’, or when he suggests that Philip’s being a chief merely means that ‘his mud hut is bigger than all the other mud huts’, or when he opines that ‘when they first had petrol stations out there, they spent three years worshipping the pumps’. As with Alf Garnett, the laughter track leaves no illusions about the audience’s sympathies. When Rigsby opens his mouth to deliver a fresh put-down, the viewers are laughing with him, not at him.31

  But it was another sitcom, Thames Television’s Love Thy Neighbour (1972–6), which best illustrated the limits of racial tolerance in the early 1970s. Although later regarded as a terrible embarrassment, it was extremely popular in its day: indeed, from 1973 to 1975 it reigned as Britain’s favourite sitcom. The basic situation is very simple: a West Indian couple, Bill and Barbie Reynolds, move in next door to the white working-class Eddie and Joan Booth. The two women get on well; the two men take an immediate dislike to one another and are soon hurling insults such as ‘Choc-ice!’ and ‘Snowflake!’ over the garden fence, to the evident delight of the studio audience. Almost incredibly, when the show started there was much talk of it as a highly charged version of Till Death Us Do Part, using satire to tackle the problem of racism in modern society. Thames’s head of Light Entertainment predicted that it would ‘take some of the heat out of race relations’, while the TV Times made the extravagant claim that it was ‘about racial prejudice – with a difference. It should make us laugh a lot … and think a lot, too.’ That Love Thy Neighbour made many people think a lot, however, is very hard to believe.

  As numerous academics have pointed out, the premise of the show seemed almost deliberately designed to stop audiences thinking seriously about the roots of racial tension. So the white racist, Eddie (Jack Smethurst), is shown as backward in almost every way: a Labour voter, a trade union member, a Manchester United supporter, a Daily Mirror reader, he is a relic of a dying working-class world who insists that ‘equal rights does not entitle nig-nogs to move in next door’. By contrast, the black couple are models of self-improvement and upward mobility: rather implausibly, Bill (Rudolph Walker) is a devoted admirer of Edward Heath. In other respects, though, he is just another caricatured black man, ‘a happy go lucky Jamaican with strong Conservative views’, as publicity for the inevitable spin-off film put it, with a comically childish high-pitched laugh. Meanwhile his wife, Barbie (Nina Baden-Semper), seems to be a sensible modern woman with a swanky stereo. Deep down, though, she is just another voluptuous black siren in a bikini and hot pants, who spends much of her time being ogled by white men. And throughout the series runs a thread of aggressive racial hostility that to modern eyes seems deeply distasteful. In one episode, ‘Operation Aggro’, Eddie organizes a petition to ‘Keep Maple Terrace White’ and throws dog muck over the fence, narrowly missing his black neighbour. In others, he denounces Bill to his face as a ‘coon’, a ‘bloody nig-nog’, ‘Sambo’ and ‘King Kong’, while for good measure he dismisses other immigrant groups as ‘Fu Manchu’, ‘Gunga Din’ and ‘Ali Baba’. Yet Bill himself is hardly a model of tolerance. Quick to dismiss Eddie as a ‘honky’, a ‘snowflake’ and a ‘racialist poof’, he admits to his wife that he would not want black neighbours himself because of their impact on house prices. Amazingly, though, Rudolph Walker claimed to be ‘excited’ by the scripts. ‘Here are white men writing for blacks,’ he said proudly, ‘and there isn’t a hint of the Uncle Tom.’32

  Since Love Thy Neighbour attracted large audiences for eight series over four years, millions of people presumably found it hilarious. What now seems extraordinary, though, is that many critics complained that it was too tame and inoffensive. It was ‘quite bland’, said the Telegraph’s reviewer after the first two episodes, while the Observer thought it ‘all very nice and soft-centred and predictable’. In The Times, Barry Norman even commended the programme as ‘a step in the right direction’, but thought that ‘Eddie’s mild little jokes about spades and sambos and nignogs have no shock value and indeed are so gentle and so comfortable that the words themselves acquire a sort of respectability. Anyone, listening to Eddie, who has ever thought of black men as spades or nignogs might well feel reassured that this is precisely how we ought to think of them.’ As time went on and the programme lost any pretence of having a satirical edge, however, the criticism became sharper. Black viewers unsurprisingly found the programme – and especially its implied moral equivalence between the racist and his victim – deeply disturbing: in July 1975, a spokeswoman for the Race Relations Board told New Society that she had not ‘met a black person who isn’t offended to hell by it’. And as the critic Chris Dunkley pointed out in September 1972, it was ‘a little frightening that the loudest laugh from Monday’s audience, and even a little shower of applause, was elicited by a joke about a Negro’s house-warming party: the “White Honky” threatened that his house would get really warm when somebody burned it down. There seems precious little hope o
f cathartic benefit in cracking jokes like that.’ But as so often in the 1970s, many people simply could not understand why others were complaining. ‘Who can really take offence’, asked James Murray of the Daily Express, ‘if kids in school playgrounds nowadays copy the epithets of Eddie and Bill and call each other “Choc ice” and ‘Snowflake”? It’s got to be an improvement on “nigger”.’33

  In the early hours of Tuesday, 7 April 1970, a 50-year-old kitchen porter called Tosir Ali was returning home from his work at a Wimpy Bar in central London when he ran into two white youngsters armed with knives. He bled to death at the door of his building on St Leonard’s Street, Bow, just moments from the safety of his flat. At first the police ruled out racist motives. But it soon became clear that the murder was part of a pattern of brutal attacks on Asian residents in East London, and especially on the East Pakistani* community packed into the narrow streets around Brick Lane. In one incident, two Asian workers at the London Chest Hospital were badly beaten by a gang of white youths; in another, the imam of the East London Mosque was taken to hospital after being beaten with an iron bar and kicked in the face; in a third, Pakistani mourners at the funeral parlour beside the mosque were taunted and bombarded with bottles. In what many champions of racial integration saw as a worrying development, the local Pakistani Workers’ Union announced it was organizing vigilante patrols to protect local families. But The Times sympathized with their feelings. ‘The Pakistani community in London are now badly frightened and very resentful,’ its lead editorial explained on 14 April. ‘They are coming to regret their reputation for gentleness. If nothing further is done to protect them, the time will come when they will fight back.’ It was time, the editorial concluded, for a crackdown on violence and ‘a few exemplary punishments in the courts. That was what put a stop to further violence after the Notting Hill race riots in 1958 and it may be necessary to demonstrate again with all the force of the law that young thugs will not be permitted to establish the pattern of race relations in Britain.’34

  The next few weeks were a grim time for race relations. In Brick Lane, tension escalated into a full-scale race riot at the end of April; in Luton, gangs of white youths roamed the streets looking for Pakistani victims; in Wolverhampton, the Indian Workers’ Association advised its members to stay at home after dark after a string of attacks by white youngsters. And in each case, the newspapers levelled the blame at a new and uniquely disturbing figure. At one level, as the latest teenage folk devil to haunt the nightmares of Middle England, the incarnation of primeval violence and working-class rebellion, the skinhead was the descendant of the Teddy Boy and the Mod. But whereas both Teddy Boys and Mods were stereotypes of upward mobility, being working-class youngsters with unprecedented freedom, self-confidence and cash in their pockets, skinheads were defiantly backward-looking. With their cropped hair and steel-capped boots, they had originated in East London as a working-class riposte to the ‘nancy-boy’ hippies who dominated press coverage of youth culture. Skinheads were self-consciously hard; they were unapologetically working class; and above all, they were white. They hated hippies, but they hated immigrants even more. ‘We’re being exploited, the working class,’ one East End skinhead explained. ‘It’s hard for us to fight for our job and our house, but with them here as well, trying to get our houses, it’s another opposition … I’ll tell you another thing, when you stand next to these people that have just come over here, they fucking stink.’35

  Although the summer of 1970 marked the high point of the skinhead panic, they did not go away. Indeed, thanks to a stream of astonishingly popular thrillers by the pulp novelist James Moffatt (writing as Richard Allen), skinhead culture spread well beyond the capital, appealing to disaffected working-class teenagers seduced by its heady mixture of violence, resentment and tribal identity. Racism was always a major element of its appeal, cementing the loyalties of men who felt adrift in a world of deep economic anxiety and social change. ‘It was like the black hole of Calcutta down my factory,’ lamented one East London hooligan who joined West Ham’s notorious Inter-City Firm. ‘You’d get them all standin’ in a mob, all talkin’ that chapatti language an’ all that, an’ you never know whether they’re talkin’ about you.’ He looked forward to the weekend rampages against immigrants, when he and his fellow supporters would ‘steam round an’ kick fuck out of the Pakis’ – a chance, as he saw it, to proclaim their white working-class masculinity, to stand up to the effeminate middle classes and job-stealing immigrants who were trying to keep them down. As skinhead culture merged almost seamlessly into the growing culture of football hooliganism, so the post-match ‘Paki-bashing’ became just another weekend ritual alongside the pie and the pints. And even after skinheads had faded from the headlines, their attacks continued to blight the lives of immigrant families. In London alone, Gurdip Singh Chaggar was killed in Southall in 1976, Altab Ali, Kennith Singh and Ishaque Ali were murdered in Whitechapel, Newham and Hackney respectively in 1978, and Akhtar Ali Baigh was killed in Newham a year later. In the East End, reported a local trade union group, there were 110 racist attacks just in the autumn of 1977, ‘an almost continuous and unrelenting battery of Asian people and their property’.36

  What made the racist violence of the 1970s even more unsettling was that many immigrants felt utterly abandoned by the authorities. ‘The Pakistanis of East London’, one observer remarked in April 1970, ‘have unquestionably lost confidence in the police’, and who could blame them? Despite the fact that London now had an immigrant population in the hundreds of thousands, the Metropolitan Police was staggeringly white, with only ‘ten coloured policemen’, to use the terminology of the day. Although the new Met commissioner Robert Mark devoted considerable effort to attracting more black and Asian recruits, by 1976 there were just 70 black police officers in a force more than 22,000 strong. Many encountered persistent mockery and hostility from their fellow recruits, which was hardly surprising given the prevailing prejudice within the ranks. But London was hardly exceptional. Most police officers, reported the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration in 1971, believed blacks were more likely than whites to be criminals, even though the statistics actually showed that levels of crime among blacks were no higher. In Nottingham, a city with almost 20,000 immigrant residents but not a single black or Asian policeman, efforts to organize race relations seminars were undermined when, at the end of one session, a group of veteran officers started chanting ‘Enoch, Enoch, we want Enoch!’ And when the sociologist Maureen Cain investigated police attitudes in 1973, she reported that most officers thought ‘niggers’ or ‘nigs’ were ‘pimps and layabouts, living off what we pay in taxes’. ‘Have you been to a wog house?’ one officer asked her. ‘They stink, they really do smell terrible.’37

  For many immigrant families, police hostility was an unpleasant but sadly inevitable part of life in Heath’s Britain. In Nottingham, 31 per cent of West Indians and 36 per cent of Pakistanis thought that the police gave them ‘less favourable treatment’. Many complained that the police turned a blind eye to racist attacks: one man, who called the police after a neighbour’s son smashed his windows, recalled that they were initially very sympathetic, but changed their tune when they discovered that the boy was white. Even more distressingly, one in five Nottingham immigrants claimed that the police regularly beat up blacks and Asians – an allegation dismissed at the time, but one that matches accounts from other cities. For black youngsters growing up in London, Mike and Trevor Phillips wrote, the police were ‘a natural hazard, like poisonous snakes or attack dogs off the leash’. A survey in 1972 found that almost all of the capital’s West Indians thought the police discriminated against them, and one in five claimed to have had direct experience of police racism. One man later remembered that ‘as black kids, you couldn’t go anywhere without a copper creasing your collar … and if they didn’t like your face, if your face didn’t fit, or you was a bit too lippy, as most black kids are, you’d get a little kicking’.
Similarly, Herman Ouseley, later chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, recalled that in Brixton he ‘didn’t even wait for a bus’, since ‘just being black and being on a street was very frightening because you were seen as acting suspiciously’.38