Foreigners

by Caryl Phillips

  My husband and I always looked out for him, and if we ever heard that he was in a particular shop doorway we would always go out and try to find him. The white vagrants slept in the city centre underneath the railway arches, but whenever I went down there looking for David they would say 'He's not here' and 'We don't want that type around here'. I mean, the cheek of them. We tried to get David into the shelter at St George's Crypt, but they said that he was a drunk and that he was too loud, but what they didn't say was that he was too black. The Salvation Army would often take him in for a couple of days, but then he'd get racially abused and he'd answer back and that would be the end of that for they'd want to get rid of him. You know, that was half the problem, that David wouldn't take any abuse from anybody. And he was an easy target. In the early days, the lonely walk back home across Woodhouse Moor from a night's drinking in Chapeltown, or from the Mecca, always left him exposed. I'd never realised just how much of an easy target he was, but he'd never take any abuse from anybody, including the police. They would always tell me that David had failed the 'attitude test', but that was because he wasn't prepared to be anybody's victim. Some of the other Africans tried to help him, but you know it was a very busy time with lots of activism. People's energies were being used up all over the place. It was, after all, the beginning of the Black Power movement for one thing, and the local community were actually succeeding in their efforts to close down racist pubs. People were busy and so they didn't always realise that David was no longer on the scene.

  I think David suffered a lot in silence. I'm sure that the first time they took him into Armley jail he wouldn't take any abuse from the screws, and that's why they sent him to the asylum where they treated him like a schizophrenic and tried to drive him mad. Oh, they have their stupid reasoning, telling you that he gets aggressive and that they can't understand him, but it's a cultural thing for heaven's sake. Rather than add another adverb or clause, West Indians and Africans tend to raise their voices or use their hands to speak. Jews do it as well, and that's not madness that's culture. But by sending him out of Armley jail and to High Royds they deliberately made David 'slow' when he was never, ever, slow before. I mean, when he emphasises with his hands they say he's aggressive, and so they pump him full of drugs. Like anybody, David could be lippy if you insulted him, but ninety-nine per cent of the time he was extremely gentle and polite, and very protective. I remember that once when we were out somebody swore in a pub, and David just looked at the offender and said, 'Ladies', meaning, 'Stop that because ladies are present.' After David came out of the hospital he was very, very quiet. On a few occasions the police actually phoned my house. Not all the police were bad apples. There were some good ones, and if they found him sleeping rough anywhere near my house they might call me up and David would come here and spend the night. In the morning he'd wake up, read the Guardian, then have some breakfast and go off. Before David left the house my husband would often ask him, 'David, shall we go and look for a flat for you?' but he would always say, 'No, I'm fine. I'm going to meet somebody.' He never wanted help. He was too proud. In fact, as soon as I even got close to saying that I'd get him a flat, or a rented room, he didn't want to discuss it. He was a man of great personal dignity. He used to have such high hopes for his future, but the sad thing was he came to recognise that all of that had gone. In the old days he used to wonder what he'd do once he qualified as an engineer. That's all he used to think about. But this new David didn't want to be pitied. Not by anybody. But I should also say that there were others who helped a lot more than I did. Other Africans were always looking out for him. If they saw David wasn't doing well they would offer to give him money, or help him in some way. I remember one Ghanaian who sold crockery, and who had a crockery warehouse. This man always left the side door of his warehouse open in case David needed somewhere to sleep, but David didn't want to bother anybody. He didn't want to be a burden or cause trouble for anybody. This was his way.

  These days the typical black admission is young, in his twenties, loud, paranoid, resisting strongly – you need to get him sedated to restrain him, and the doctors don't know what's going on – he's usually brought in by the police, therefore the doctor hasn't got a clue as to his history – and as with men generally they would be more aggressive, you would be more frightened of them and you would put them on more medication.

  National Health Doctor, 2002

  In 1858 the Empress of the British Empire, Queen Victoria, came to Leeds to open the newly constructed town hall. Boasting Corinthian columns, and guarded by large stone lions, Leeds Town Hall was one of the largest civic buildings in Europe. The words around the vestibule – 'Europe – Asia – Africa – America' – reminded the people of Leeds that, only one year after the Indian Mutiny had been put down, the globe remained Britain's true sphere of influence. Leeds was perfectly positioned to take advantage of this fortuitous fact. Clothing was no longer the town's main business, and Leeds was becoming better known as the 'workshop of the world'. Hundreds of factories produced bicycles, cranes, nails, sewing machines, bolts, train rails, locomotives, axles, bricks, and much more. There were scores of furnaces burning every day, and the sky was choked with chimneys and pollution. Glassworks and tanneries, skinworks and breweries, every type of industry was represented. Leeds was a hive of productivity and entirely dependent upon the labour of the poor and the young.

  Thousands of little children, both male and female, but principally female, from seven to fourteen years of age, are daily compelled to labour from six o'clock in the morning to seven in the evening, with only – Britons, blush while you read it! – with only thirty minutes allowed for eating and recreation. Poor infants! Ye are indeed sacrificed at the shrine of avarice, without even the solace of the negro slave; ye are no more than he is, free agents; ye are compelled to work as long as the necessity of your needy parents may require, or the cold-blooded avarice of your worse than barbarian masters may demand! Ye live in the boasted land of freedom, and feel and mourn that ye are slaves, and slaves without the only comfort which the negro has. He knows it is his sordid, mercenary master's interest that he should live, be strong and healthy. Not so with you. Ye are doomed to labour from morning to night for one who cares not how soon your weak and tender frames are stretched to breaking! You are not mercifully valued at so much per head; this would assure you at least (even with the worst and most cruel masters) of the mercy shown to their own labouring beasts. No, no! your soft and delicate limbs are tired and fagged, and jaded, at only so much per week, and when your joints can act no longer, your emaciated frames are instantly supplied with other victims, who in this boasted land of liberty are hired – not sold – as slaves and daily forced to hear that they are free.

  Richard Oastler, Letter to Leeds Mercury, 29 September, 1830

  During the nineteenth century, cloth continued to occupy a special place in the Leeds economy, and with the onset of Jewish immigration it achieved something of a revival. The first Jew arrived in Leeds in the 1820s and was listed as a voter in 1832. By the late 1840s a small community of middle-class German Jews had established themselves in Leeds, but the Jewry that followed in their wake was largely comprised of poor Jews from Eastern Europe, often Polish or Russian in origin, who were fleeing pogroms, particularly those that followed the murder of Tsar Alexander II. They would arrive at Hull and make their way west to Leeds in the hope of finding some kind of occupation in the clothing industry, for many were skilled tailors. As their numbers increased they settled in their own ghetto near North Street in conditions familiar to most workingclass residents of Leeds. But this was now their city – their new home – and they had no intention of going anywhere else, despite the well-displayed signs that let them know that Jews were not welcome. By the end of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of the 8,000 Jews in Leeds were employed in one of the 98 Jewish tailoring sweatshops where the conditions were often indescribable.

  The thousands of Irish immigrants to Leeds
, who arrived in the wake of the great famine of the 1840s, lived in conditions at least as intolerable as those of the Jews. They congregated in the east end of Leeds in slums of unimaginable depravity where crime and prostitution were rife, and these Irish Catholics often embarrassed their English co-religionists with their supposed debauchery. However, what was beyond dispute was the fact that conditions for the poor in Leeds were among the worst in Britain. The water supply was putrid and contaminated with effluence from the sewers, and hundreds of people were often forced to share one privy. Disease was rife, and these overcrowded places were devoid of either daylight or fresh air. Understandably, life on the street was, for some, a much more palatable option. With the introduction of horsedrawn, and then electric, tramways, by the end of the nineteenth century some workers were able to move out of the centre of Leeds and they began to commute to work from the suburbs. However, the vast majority of the poor were trapped in squalor and therefore unable to enjoy civic improvements in education, transport, and the opening up of public spaces for parkland.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Leeds formally became a city and it boasted a population of nearly half a million. However, despite the city's affluence, problems of pollution and overcrowding continued to blight the lives of the working population. Fears of contagious diseases such as tuberculosis were real, as were Jewish concerns about anti-Semitism. Despite the fact that over 2,000 Jews volunteered for service during the First World War, Jews continued to be regarded as 'foreigners'. In 1917 fighting between Christian and Jewish men in the city escalated into a full-scale riot which resulted in many Jewish properties in the Leylands area being destroyed. The city's resistance to perceived 'outsiders', no matter how long they have been resident in the city, has always bedevilled Leeds. This antipathy easily crossed over into the twentieth century, and its virulence was fuelled by the well-known capacity of the people of Leeds for drinking and gambling.

  The economic depression of the early twentieth century meant that there was no shortage of people to fill the poorhouses and workhouses of the city. Although new council-owned houses were being built to house the working classes, those who lived below a certain economic level had little choice but to live in slums that remained mired in a depravity reminiscent of the early Victorian years. During the great depression of the twenties and thirties it was once again the clothing industry that saved Leeds. Firms such as Burtons, Hepworths, John Collier, and Jackson's began to corner not only the national, but the international market in ready-made 'smart' clothes. Employment opportunities began to grow, and eventually slums began to be cleared. By the Second World War, Leeds was becoming surprisingly progressive in her civic attitude towards ongoing difficulties in housing and education, but the city's often hostile attitude towards 'outsiders' continued to be a deeper and more impenetrable problem.

  In 1933 the Leeds Jewish Refugee Committee began to help German Jews escape from the brutal anti-Semitism of their own country, and by 1939 some 700 German Jews had found refuge in Leeds. However, upon arrival they soon discovered that local golf clubs banned Jews, and that the tea rooms and dance halls openly advertised their 'English only' policy. Jews were treated as pariahs and often subjected to physical attack, or swastikas being painted on their shop windows. But this was now their home; modern Leeds. A city of half a million people with one of the most robust economies in Britain; a city made up of migrants who had all come to settle on the banks of the River Aire. Like the Irish before them, the Jewish population of Leeds refused to move on. They were going nowhere. This was their home. And then others arrived.

  In fact, these 'others' had been appearing in Leeds for some time. In 1791, the famous African writer Olaudah Equiano visited Leeds while promoting sales of his influential autobiography, and he later wrote a letter to the Leeds Mercury under his adopted name, Gustavas Vassa. In December 1859, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech in Leeds Town Hall at a meeting of the Leeds Anti-Slavery Society, and the third edition of his autobiography was actually printed in Leeds. And later still, in 1901, the black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor composed a choral cantata for the Leeds Triennial Music Festival. However, aside from these visitors, there is precious little evidence of a significant black presence prior to the Second World War. The occasional individual does turn up in the records, such as Abraham Johnson, who was born in Zanzibar in 1848 and who, during the second half of the nineteenth century, worked for a while at John Marshall's Flax Mill in Leeds. Or Pablo Fanque, a black man who owned and operated a circus in late Victorian England, and who is buried in Leeds. The small pre-Second World War black population in Leeds consisted almost entirely of domestic servants, theatrical performers, or industrial workers, and they existed as isolated individuals in an otherwise homogeneous white society.

  After the Second World War many 'demobbed' colonial soldiers, aircrew, and seaman from Africa and the Caribbean 'stayed on' in some English cities. In 1945 the black population of Leeds largely consisted of such persons but, in common with the rest of the country, the numbers were negligible. However, by the mid-fifties the nation had begun a programme of massive recruitment of Caribbean labour in order that the post-Second World War infrastructure of Britain might be maintained, particularly in health and transport. As a result, dark strangers began to appear in far greater numbers on the streets of Leeds. According to the 1951 census, there were 107 West Indians and 45 Africans living in the city. Ten years later, in 1961, there were 2,186 West Indians and Africans, which included carpenters, masons, tailors, mechanics, painters, and electricians. These newcomers of African origin were visible and vulnerable on the streets of Leeds, but they no longer needed to think of themselves as being isolated. A community was being formed.

  Chapeltown's history is written into its architecture. Its huge semi-detached and terraced houses, built for the prosperous, Christian new middle classes in the early 1900s, its two parks and its wide, tree-lined streets are now interspersed with buildings which were once synagogues, and Asian-owned mini-markets selling the produce of the world. Halfway up Chapeltown Road there's a wall which, throughout the seventies, bore the inscription REMEMBER OLUWALE in huge white letters. Near that wall there's an ugly vacant lot which, until recently, was the site of the elegant country club built in the twenties for those prosperous Christians. The club became Chapeltown's most notorious pub. White Leeds imagined that inside the Hayfield every type of black sinner was making mischief. A curious corollary of this fantasy was that the Hayfield became a kind of 'black space', where whites only entered if they accepted the rules laid down by the black men who played dominoes, drank, sold a little weed and checked the ladies. Since these rules were easy to accept – mutual respect and toleration, whatever status the outside world conferred upon you – lots of adventurous whites found themselves at home there. It's said that David Oluwale frequented a similar place in Chapeltown, a nightclub called, in his day, the Glass Bucket, but I'm pretty certain the early evening would have found him in the Hayfield. The Hayfield was erased from the map around 2004 – yet another sign of the city's inability to deal properly with its black citizens.

  Dr Max Farrar, Leeds Metropolitan University, 2006 The Chapeltown Enterprise Centre stands at the bottom of Button Hill. The centre features the Best Fade Unisex Salon. Across the road is the Silver Tree Club which, these days, is a bricked-up, burned-out building. Chapeltown has changed. Chapeltown no longer boasts good manners. It is becoming derelict and infested with drug dealers. Garbage lies piled up in the streets, and there is a paucity of civic pride. Modern Chapeltown is home to a lost generation. A young woman shouts at me. 'Hey you, black man.' Her voice is raw and flat. A broad Yorkshire voice. As she crosses the street and walks toward me I can see that she is swathed in a big black coat. 'Hey you, black man.' Her eyes are wet with drugs, and she promises me that she will do anything. 'Black man.' I quicken my steps. I glance back at the Best Fade Unisex Salon. I want to tell the people in the enterprise centre that they
are right to try, but they should look around themselves. There is no real enterprise. No real business, beyond survival, in this faded Chapeltown. And across the street, where the Hayfield pub would have stood, there is now nothing. Nothing at all. It is gone. (Like you, David. Gone.) The bottom of Button Hill is empty.

  The dark 'others' began to arrive in Leeds in the fifties. But what kind of a city was this that expected these newcomers to live like animals in abandoned bombed-out slums? The emigrants had heard rumours that the English often set fires in their houses, but until they reached England and felt the sharp bite of their first winter they did not fully understand. But they soon learned. However, what they never learned to understand, or accept, was the racism which confined them to filthy rooms. Landlords, including Leeds City Council, seemed intent upon extracting money from them in exchange for rooms in which it was barely possible to turn around; rooms which one had to share with mice and fleas and rats, where water ran down the walls when it rained, and thereafter snails crawled up them; rooms where the nearest bathroom was your handbasin, and your one toilet bowl was in the next street and had to be shared with 200 others. The mother country was welcoming her citizens at the front door, and then quickly ushering them out through the back door crying, 'No Blacks', crying, 'No Coloureds', crying, 'Go back to where you come from'. And David heard these shouts, but he wanted an education in order that he might make something of himself in England, and so he redoubled his polite efforts to learn. He worked harder, and studied harder, but still they took him to Armley jail, and then on to the asylum where they changed his personality. And when they released him back into the world, David soon discovered that he had lost his damp, cold room at 209 Belle Vue Road. Even this dismal place had slipped through his fingers, but he still possessed his city of Leeds on the banks of the River Aire. David still had his city.