Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  From Windrush to ‘Rivers of Blood’

  Immigration into Britain was long-standing and the impact of those from the Caribbean, Africa or the Indian subcontinent took some time to be felt. In Britain, after the war, as before, the largest immigrant nationality was the Irish, 350,000 of whom came in 1946–59.3 In the period 1946–51, most of the 460,000 foreigners who arrived in Britain were Poles who had fought in armed forces, German or Italian POWs, refugees or displaced persons from war-torn Europe. About 91,000 so-called European Voluntary Workers – mainly Ukrainians, Poles and Latvians – were recruited by the Ministry of Labour in 1946–9 to work in key sectors such as mining.4 On 22 June 1948 the Empire Windrush landed 500 Jamaican passengers at Tilbury Docks, downstream of London.5 They impressed by their colour rather than by their number and only 30,000 immigrants per year in 1955 and 1956 came from the Caribbean.

  The challenge to entrenched colonial hierarchies by this immigrant majority did not, however, take long to be felt. Race riots broke out in August 1958 in Notting Hill, London and in Nottingham, in response to white women being seen with black men. ‘It comes as a shock’, declared the Manchester Guardian, ‘to hear the ugly phrase, “lynch him” on English lips in an English city’.6 Jamaican-born Stuart Hall, who was teaching at a secondary modern school in Stockwell, later said that this reflected both ‘the racial violence associated with the segregated states of the American South’ and ‘the persistence of colonial mentalities […] into the postcolonial years’.7 On 17 May 1959 Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane, aged 32, was murdered by white youths in the Notting Hill area. This violence persuaded many Afro-Caribbeans that even if they tried to assimilate into British society they should at the same time cultivate their own identity and traditions. Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian activist who had been expelled from the United States as a communist, founded the West Indian Gazette in Brixton and launched what became the Notting Hill Carnival.8

  The British Nationality Act of 1948, crafted with the white Dominions in mind, made citizens of the Dominions and colonies also citizens of Britain.9 Increased immigration from West Indian and African countries between 1960 and 1964 dramatically changed attitudes to immigration. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 aimed to restrict the influx from the former colonies but also provoked a rush of immigration to ‘beat the ban’. Between 1955 and 1968 net immigration to Great Britain from the non-white countries that became known as the New Commonwealth was 670,000. This included 191,000 Jamaicans and 132,000 from the rest of Caribbean, but more significantly 200,000 Indians and 146,000 Pakistanis. Bengali Muslims came to Britain, fleeing first the violence associated with partition in 1946–8, then the violence of the 1971 war of liberation of Bangladesh against Pakistan.10 The influx of immigrants of Asian origin increased with the quasi-expulsion of populations of Asian origin from the newly independent East African countries of Kenya and Tanzania after 1967. Fearing a haemorrhaging of working-class votes the Labour government announced on 22 February 1968 a Commonwealth immigrants bill further restricting immigration, but this in turn provoked an influx of 750 Kenyan Asians a day, seeking to ‘beat the ban’.

  Those immigrants who made it past restrictions at the border found themselves subjected to racial prejudice, discrimination and segregation. In Britain immigrants from the West Indies or subcontinent concentrated in certain suburbs of the large cities. In 1971 in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, for example, 11 per cent of the population was Caribbean and nearly 8 per cent from India, Pakistan or Ceylon.11 Bengali migrants favoured Tower Hamlets, because Bengali sailors had come there in the First World War, and Oldham, because the mills used Indian cotton.12 In Leamington near Coventry, by contrast, the overwhelming proportion of the immigrant population were Sikhs from the Indian Punjab, living in the less fashionable southern side of the town.13 Immigrants searching for housing, education and jobs were systematically frustrated by overt and covert colour bars. In Leamington, when a Sikh was granted a council mortgage 1959, thirty residents sent a petition of protest to the town hall.14 Sikhs found menial jobs in foundry and engineering works, in hospitals and also in the Midland Bus Company. There was an expectation that a non-white worker would not be appointed over the head of a white worker, so when an Indian was appointed as a bus inspector in 1961, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) complained.15 A 1966 survey in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, where the docks provided much employment, found that the craft unions did their best to block Bengalis from getting jobs and did not help them when they were the first to be laid off in a recession.16 A parallel survey in 1966–7 in the outer London suburb of Croydon found that staff employed in shops, banks and commercial sectors prevailed on employers to operate ‘an almost total colour bar’. In department stores non-white staff were allowed to work in the backroom but not at the sales counter. It was ‘a bit difficult to have coloured sales staff in Croydon’, said one personnel officer, ‘the public might mind’.17

  For the most part British politicians distanced themselves from the politics of racism and upheld tolerant attitudes, but there were signs that a few already recognised that political capital could be made out of racial prejudice. After the 1958 riots Solihull MP Martin Lindsay asserted, ‘we all know perfectly well that the core of our problem is coloured immigrants. We must ask ourselves to what extent we want Great Britain to become a multi-racial community. A question which affects the future of our own race and breed is not one we should leave merely to chance.’ In this he echoed the sentiments put bluntly by Lincolnshire MP Cyril Osborne after 1955 that ‘This is a white man’s country and I want it to remain so.’18 His concerns were intensified by the arrival of Kenyan Asians ten years later. He then exclaimed that ‘It will not be long before there are more coloured than white people in Britain. The English people will be strangers in their own land.’19

  This influx to the metropolis had a dramatic effect on domestic politics. The arrival of immigrants from the former colonies at the same time as colonies were granted independence was a visible reminder to the ‘home’ French and British people of the trauma of the loss of empire and of national decline. Colonial hierarchies seemed to be overturned as immigrants competed for homes and jobs and made the ‘host’ society feel as if it were being ‘overrun’ or ‘swamped’. A paradigm-changing response in this respect was the 1964 general election in Smethwick, a Birmingham suburb next to Handsworth. Since 1951 the seat had been held by Patrick Gordon Walker, an Oxford-educated Fabian socialist, the son and grandson of officials of the Raj. His views were seen to be paternalistic and out of touch as immigration increased into the area. In 1964 he was challenged by Peter Griffiths, a local working-class grammar-school boy, who was greatly affected by the loss of empire and supported Ian Smith’s white Rhodesia. Elected to Smethwick council in 1955, he co-founded in 1961 the Birmingham Immigrant Control Association that met in Smethwick’s Red Cow Hotel, and sent regular petitions on immigration control to Sir Cyril Osborne. Against all expectations Griffiths beat Gordon Walker and Colin Jordan’s rowdy National Socialist troops, who backed Griffiths, chased the car of the defeated Labour MP shouting, ‘Take your niggers away!’20

  The defeat of the Conservative Party in 1964, however, made it vulnerable to the challenge of racist politics. The key player here was Enoch Powell, who had served in the Indian Army during the war, was greatly affected by the 1947 loss of India, and was elected to Parliament for Wolverhampton in 1950. He joined the Suez Group in 1953 and was committed to defend the remnants of empire, notably Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. Britain, it has been suggested, was two things: a hard external carapace of the United Kingdom, and a soft centre of an idyllic England.21 In the face of immigration and a sense of national decline and immigration Powell descanted on the latter. ‘The power and the glory of the Empire have gone’, he reflected in an address to the Royal Society of St George on 22 April 1964, ‘but in the midst of the “blackened ruins”, like one of her oak trees, standing, growing, the sa
p rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, [is] England herself’. ‘This sentimental, rustic wonderland’, he clarified, ‘is embodied in three enduring principles of Englishness: its unity under the Crown in Parliament, its historical continuity, and its racial homogeneity’.22 This Englishness had no place for immigrants from India, Pakistan, the Caribbean or Africa.

  Powell was also keen to draw lessons from other countries of the threat of immigration and communal politics. In the United States, the Civil Rights movement exposed entrenched racial inequalities which exploded in riots in the black ghettos of northern cities during three hot summers in 1965–7. As shadow defence minister he visited the United States in October 1967 and commented on the race riots of July 1967 in Detroit. Early in 1968, when Sikh bus conductors marched through Wolverhampton against a ruling that they could not work in their turbans and beards, he made a speech in Walsall warning that ‘communalism has been the curse of India and we need to be able to recognise it when it rears its head here’.23

  The climax of Powell’s campaign was his so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham on 20 April 1968. It linked the influx of immigrants and the betrayal of the British working class to the loss of empire and perceived national decline. It defined a narrow British nationalism based on a sense of racial superiority masquerading as racial victimhood. He told the story of a ‘white woman pensioner’ who had lost her husband in the Second World War, and now kept a boarding house. Black immigrants moved into the street and harassed her, he said, pushing excrement through her letter box.24

  Premier Edward Heath considered that he had gone too far and dismissed him from the shadow cabinet the next day. There was, however, a powerful popular response in his support. Three thousand London dockers came onto the streets on 25 April 1968 (Figure 5.1), and thousands more signed a petition asking the government ‘to seriously consider the continuous threat to our living standards by this blind policy of unlimited immigrants being imposed on us’.25

  Figure 5.1 A show of colonial force in London: dockers march in support of Enoch Powell, 23 April 1968.

  Getty Images / Evening Standard / Hulton Archive / Stringer / 3398988

  Powell received a huge postbag, which often linked immigration to Britain’s squandering of victory in the Second World War and the loss of empire. One anonymous letter of 22 April 1968 read:

  Our British working classes have maintained this country, all down the years with the toil of our hand and the sweat of our brows, and shed rivers of blood in its defence, as you know. We have bled for it, fought for it, worked for it and paid for it. And now, two packs of the dirtiest traitors on God’s earth [British politicians], for the sake of a rotten, old tradition of a dead empire […] have wrenched our birth-right from us and handed our country over on a silver plate to millions of immigrants from all over the world […] Our British working classes have been sacrificed on the altar of a dead colonialism.26

  The virulence of anti-immigration rhetoric was taken up in working-class communities and injected a new element of violence into local race relations. In the summer of 1969 a West Indian youth was murdered in Handsworth Park, Birmingham.27 In London what became known as ‘Paki-bashing’ by white skinheads or ‘bovver boys’ took off in the winter of 1969–70. This culminated in the murder on 6 April 1970 of Tausir Ali, returning from work from a Wimpy Bar in the West End to his home in Bromley, by two 18-year-old white youths.28 Other attacks on Asians took place in Luton and Wolverhampton in May 1970.29 In Tower Hamlets, Pakistanis held mass meetings and set up self-defence groups, much to the concern of Trevor Huddleston, now Bishop of Stepney, who feared the eruption of South Africa-style racial violence in the British capital.30

  The Algerian War Comes to France

  In France, the largest immigrant communities in 1946 were the Italians (28 per cent) and the Poles (25 per cent), followed by Spaniards (18 per cent), Belgians (10 per cent) and other nationalities (19 per cent).31 Under plans for French reconstruction 310,000 immigrants were to be brought in by 1949, including 90,000 North Africans, and by 1954 there were 240,000 Algerian workers in France.32

  A French survey of 1951 said that North African immigrants ‘created miniature ghettos in the bidonvilles or shanty-towns they inhabited’ and ‘little casbahs in Paris, Marseille and Lyon’.33 Attitudes to immigrants depended very much on where they came from. In France, Belgians were very well regarded. Poles, Italians and Spaniards were tolerated, but North Africans were suspected of harbouring disease and criminality; only German immigrants were disliked more.34 At this stage, North Africans were cowed by the political oppression they had experienced at home: migrants from Sétif, who worked as unskilled labourers in gas and chemical factories at Champigny-sur-Marne, feared a repeat of the reprisals they had experienced in 1945.35 When they did respond to Algerian nationalist agitation and demonstrated in Paris on 14 July 1953, they were confronted by police who shot six of them.36

  The issue of immigration and colonialism in France was completely redefined by the Algerian War. After six years of bloody struggle, France abandoned its most important overseas possession and with it the white community.37 A million pieds noirs were obliged to flee the newly independent Algerian state they had resisted ever materialising. They suffered the trauma of having lost what they considered their homeland in French Algeria and felt that they had been betrayed by the French government which in the end turned its guns on them. At the same time 140,000 harkis – the Algerian auxiliary troops who had fought alongside the French – fled to France on pain of being massacred as traitors. Having used them, the French now found them an embarrassment. They were herded into internment camps across the south of France that had previously been used to control ‘dangerous’ or ‘undesirable’ groups, such as Spanish republicans, foreign Jews, and in turn Italian, German, Vietnamese and Algerian POWs. After a few years they were moved to so-called transit camps where the men were put to work on forest plantations.38 While numerous Algerians living in France returned to independent Algeria many others came to work in France under the Evian agreements that ended the war, so that by 1969 there were 608,000 Algerians in France. In Paris, these Algerian immigrant populations were relegated to slum districts like the Goutte d’Or, near Barbès Metro station, crammed several to a room or in cellars in hostels owned by so-called marchands du sommeil or ‘sleep merchants’. Otherwise they lived in bidonvilles that sprang up around Paris at Nanterre, Saint-Denis and Champigny-sur-Marne and also around other large cities such as Lille, Caen, Marseille, Toulon, Nice and Toulouse. To deal with the hygiene and security risk of these encampments, vulnerable to Algerian nationalist propaganda, special hostels were built in the 1960s by the mainly state-owned National Society for the Construction of Accommodation for Algerian Workers (SONACOTRA). These were no more than barracks for Algerian workers and were largely run by staff who had served as soldiers or police in Algeria and had experience of controlling what was considered a lazy and subversive population, not least by torture.

  French settlers in Algeria and indigenous Algerians who had been at each others’ throats in Algeria now regarded each other with scarcely concealed hostility in France. Historian Benjamin Stora, a pied noir of Jewish origin who was forced to leave Algeria as a boy in 1962, speaks of a ‘transfer of memory’ across Mediterranean from Algeria to the metropolis. He argues that the pieds noirs cultivated a ‘Southern’ memory, resembling the memory of the Confederation cultivated by the ‘poor whites’ in the United States, with its myths, its heroes and its own ‘French War of Secession’, that is, the Algerian War. This was a narrow and exclusive French nationalism which was anti-Arab and anti-Muslim.39

  The question of French and British relations with their colonies and with the Third World in general was shaken up and deepened by the events of 1968. French activists who made 1968 were shaped by opposition to French brutality in the Algerian War, especially the use of torture. Young communists were inspired either by Trotskyism, who argued that
revolution would be made by a vanguard of intellectuals, like the Bolsheviks of 1917, or by the Maoism of the Chinese Cultural Revolution that took off in 1966. Benjamin Stora, studying at the University of Nanterre, himself became a Trotskyist in the aftermath of 1968.40 Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, studying at the elite École Centrale in Paris, recalled that ‘We got an anti-Soviet and anti-Stalinist version of the story of the conquest of power in China […] there was a spiritual time bomb in Mao Tse-tung’s saying that “a revolution is not a dinner party” […] we liked Mao’s idea that there had to be trouble.’41 What these movements had in common is that they responded to revolutions against imperialism, whether American, European or Soviet, across the Third World – first Cuba, then Algeria, then China. The Vietnam War, which pitted American imperialism against the communist people and Vietcong fighters of North Vietnam, galvanised immense support among young people and gave protest movements a mass base. On 16 April 1967 a letter from Che Guevara was read to the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, otherwise known as the Tricontinental. He urged creating ‘a Second or Third Vietnam, the Second and Third Vietnam of the world!’ All local Third World conflicts could aspire to become Vietnams.42 Che himself then went off to fight in Bolivia, where he was killed on 9 October 1967, a death which dramatised the global Third World revolution even more than his life had done.