Nottingham was no different to many other urban centres in the post-war period, built upon a strong ethic of work hard, play hard. The factories boomed, as did the hard-drinking image of the city portrayed in Alan Sillitoe’s groundbreaking 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, later filmed starring Albert Finney. It was the first in a series of ‘kitchen-sink’ cinema dramas focusing on the boozing, street-fighting, womanising, white working-class male and his view of the world. It encapsulated his schizophrenic existence, the Saturday night alcoholic haze contrasting with the sobriety of the Sunday, which preceded the start of the working week.
The no-frills hero of the story, Arthur Seaton, is a man who coins a phrase for his and subsequent generations: ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ Set in the terraced Victorian ‘little palaces’ of Radford, where much of the later movie was filmed, it captures his life working at the local Raleigh factory where, just as at the nearby Players cigarettes factory, thousands of Nottingham workers would clock in and out during the week and await the weekend. It doffed the cap to the country of D.H. Lawrence’s miner, but now instead of working at the coalface he was sweating over a lathe to bring home his wages. It was also the age of the Angry Young Man and the whiff of revolt was in the air, but what Sillitoe, Nottingham and the rest of the country had missed was that this would realise itself, initially, in antagonism from within the indigenous white working-class community towards the communities who had migrated to Britain in the post-war period.
After the Second World War, many communities within the British Commonwealth and Europe, which had been allies in the war effort, saw in Britain a chance to throw off the shackles of the old world and embrace a new life in a new country – the mother country. The loss of a large proportion of the young, white population of working age during the war created a demand for labour. Among those who took up the challenge and sailed from Jamaica were two brothers, Vincent and Wellesley Robinson. In Nottingham and further afield, they would eventually become known by their respective nicknames: ‘PG Man’ and ‘Douggie Man’. The story of their extended family is a microcosm of some of the roots of social and crime problems besetting the Afro-Caribbean community in Britain today. The Robinson family were to become infamous in Nottingham, their story eventually emerging in Nick Davies’ ground-breaking book Dark Heart. But to understand what was happening we must go back to 1950s Britain and the new immigration.
By the late 1950s, many Afro-Caribbean families had made the trip to Britain. Some Caribbean men had already experienced the UK, having been stationed as servicemen, mainly airmen, in the country during the war. They found in Britain a chance of prosperity unavailable back home. On 22 June 1948, the steamship SS Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury, Essex, carrying nearly 500 people from Jamaica and Trinidad, many of them ex-servicemen. Though it amounted to a mere trickle of migrants, those who made the transatlantic voyage were pioneers, setting in motion a myriad of social changes in post-war Britain.
Steve Mitchell, a former serviceman and passenger on the Windrush, later described the alienation that he and other male Afro-Caribbeans encountered when they reached British cities. ‘People just took their chance,’ he told the radio journalist Alan Dein. ‘I suppose what was the biggest stumbling block to them was being refused accommodation in houses that had vacancies. You could see notices in the windows, they have vacancies, and as soon as they ring the bell or knock the door, they would shut the door in their face. This was the mother country and they expect it to be motherly to them but they were disappointed. All I had was my bit of clothing, nothing else. I landed with £5 and no tools, nothing else, couple of suits, few shirts, no overcoat, no nothing, wasn’t prepared for the cold weather. I was given a little job, pick-and-shovelling to fortify myself for the winter to come, so in that sense I was lucky.’ Mitchell described another integration problem which would later lead to Britain’s first major race riots: black men meeting white women at dances. ‘There was a lot (of white women) who would willingly dance with you so it was mostly the men who caused the problem, not the women. Black fellas never had no problem getting white women, it was the men who was making all the problem. You’d go to dances [and] very few women would refuse to dance with you.’
With Britain ill-prepared for integration, it was this tension between the white working-class male portrayed in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and the new immigrants from the Afro-Caribbean which led on 23 August 1958 to an outbreak of sustained violence in the St Ann’s area. There are two different stories about what sparked the riots that night but both involved the perception that a black man should not be with a white woman. ‘There were two accounts,’ said the late Eric Irons, who became Nottingham’s first black magistrate in 1962. ‘One was that a West Indian was in the pub chatting up a white young lady and, when he left the premises, he was assaulted. The other was that someone insulted a West Indian man out with his white girlfriend. I think the police and everybody were shocked by the speed and ferocity of the West Indian response. There was no nonsense about it.’
At 10.20pm, police received a 999 call from a pub in St Ann’s Well Road after a black man was severely beaten by several youths with his own walking stick. Hours later, the city was recovering from the devastation caused by more than 1,000 young men – mostly Teddy Boys and West Indian males going on the rampage. As running street battles continued throughout the night, young men were bottled, beaten and, in several cases, men, mostly white males, were stabbed. ‘The whole place was like a slaughterhouse,’ said the Nottingham Evening Post. It was clearly an overstatement, yet it captured the feeling of shock that the whole city felt. The following weekend a larger crowd of 4,000 gathered in St Ann’s Wells Road but the Afro-Caribbean males stayed away. More violence erupted as the white Teddy Boys turned on each other, creating a turf war between young gangs from St Ann’s and those who had dared to venture into the city from the Bulwell area.
As Mike and Trevor Phillips point out in their illuminating book Windrush, the second outbreak of violence was more significant. ‘At the time, nearly all the commentators, focused as they were on race, missed the point, which was that if there were no black people available on whom to focus their rage, the crowds were equally willing to fight each other. In that sense it was apparent that the riots were as much about the feelings of exclusion and deprivation experienced by a wide section of the English population as they were about the presence of black migrants. The attention that the disturbances claimed for the conditions in which the people lived was, in itself, a factor calming the city.’ It was also about young people defining themselves by the area into which they had been born or, as the young black males from the estates in St Ann’s or the Meadows would later describe it, life in the ghetto.
By 1958, the belated post-war boom which had brought many Afro-Caribbean immigrants to Britain was drawing to a close and cultural tensions, which had been hidden to some extent, began to surface. Many West Indians found themselves facing a closed door when applying for jobs in Nottingham factories or even when buying a half of their favoured stout at the local pub. On the other hand, life for everyone in St Ann’s was tough, with poor housing conditions for white and black neighbours alike.
As Milton Crosdale, another Nottingham black rights campaigner, pointed out, the riots led to a change in public housing policy. ‘Up to 1958, you had a number of people from Caribbean countries in Nottingham,’ he said. ‘They had jobs but they had difficulty finding a place to live or they were in multiple occupation. People from the Caribbean were being shepherded into St Ann’s and the Meadows. You had people crowded into old St Ann’s, most of them living in multiple occupation. Nottingham, unlike other cities, went on to knock down major estates. Derby didn’t knock down whole areas and rebuild them. Leicester didn’t do it. It had a significant effect on the redistribution of people in the city. For me, the most significant thing was about how the employment market was being opened up. People began to realise that ther
e was a serious problem. Who would have thought there would have been riots in Nottingham? Riots on their doorsteps? You can talk about prejudice but if it doesn’t affect them in their front rooms, it doesn’t matter. You can get away from it. It’s like famine in Africa. It’s only when it’s on a TV picture and you’re eating a meal in your front room that it affects you.’
A week after the riots in Nottingham, the Notting Hill area of west London erupted in an orgy of violence that made headlines around the world.
Into this cauldron of racism and lack of opportunity dropped Vincent and Wellesley Robinson when they arrived in Nottingham from their homes in Spanish Town, Jamaica, in the early 1960s. The story has it that Vincent was born on the day in 1938 that the Governor of Fiji made an official visit to Jamaica, and so was nicknamed ‘Fiji Man’ by relatives, which over the years became mispronounced as PG Man. Vincent was around twenty when he arrived in Nottingham, while Wellesley was a couple of years older. Before long, any aspirations they held were dashed when it became apparent just how difficult it was to get a steady job if you were black. Every time they went to the factory gates with a vacancy sign on it, they were turned away with the words, ‘Job filled, sorry.’ They became worn down by the sheer repetition of the rejections, although Vincent, who was a dapper dresser, managed to get a tiny part as an extra in the film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He appeared on screen only briefly, seen in the background in a scene involving Albert Finney near the city’s castle, but such was his pride that he spent a week polishing his shoes for the part.
Many of the new immigrants identified not with England, which had held out a hand of false hope to them, but with their Jamaican homeland, and they began to import a bit of Caribbean sunshine into those dark days. Shebeens, or illegal drinking and gambling houses, began to spring up in Nottingham and Vincent and Wellesley saw this as a way to provide for their growing families. There would be classic ska music, soul and blues playing through the distorted sound system, which was always cranked up high enough to vibrate through the neighbours’ floorboards, and there would be rice and peas, yams and curried goat and other tasty Jamaican food. And, of course, there would be ‘a bit of smoke’. Cannabis was as essential to the Jamaican soul of the sixties as the music which boomed from the sound systems. The rude boy was born.
While most of the drug-taking white youth of Nottingham were downing amphetamines – for the most part taken from chemist shops which had been burgled – and staying up all night to listen to The Who and the Rolling Stones, their Jamaican counterparts were easing back into their chairs for a smoke of ganja, playing cards or dominoes and listening to the ska of Prince Buster, the blues of Jimmy Cliff and later the reggae of Bob Marley and the Wailers. Prince Buster’s hit Big Five in 1968 would almost certainly have been banned if the controllers of the nation’s radio airwaves had understood the lyrics. They also illuminated the baser instincts of the Jamaican male, which would cause a host of social problems in later years.
Right now I’m feeling irie
Want a big, fat pussy this December night
Today I smoke an ounce of weed
Tonight I’m gonna plant a seed
In her wump, alright.
By the late 1960s, Nottinghamshire Police had concluded that it was easier to bust Jamaicans for cannabis than it was to bust white youths for popping pills. They only had to follow the pumping sounds coming from the shebeens and smell the acrid smoke wafting out from the houses to know they could make a quick bust. The sound systems were a product of the ghettos of Kingston and Spanish Town, where DJs would load up their trucks with a generator, turntable and huge speakers and set up impromptu street parties. By the early 1960s, Jamaican MCs such as Count Machuki were pumping out music through wardrobe-sized speakers capable of delivering 30,000 watts of sound.
PG Man and Douggie Man were soon running regular blues nights at their homes in Nottingham, initially using a fifty-watt speaker. Once they had a little money, they invested in a sound system they named the V Rocket. It would become well known throughout the UK over the following three decades and even now tapes from the V Rocket are much sought after. V Rocket would vie with the sound system called Saxon run by a Birmingham crew, and there would be many times in the 1980s and 1990s when guns were let off into the ceilings of shebeens to salute the DJs from the two sound systems.
With cannabis readily available, it was a safe bet that they would be busted sooner or later. When they were, it triggered a chain of events that would lead, eventually, straight to the front pages of the News of the World, the country’s most lurid, and popular, Sunday tabloid. PG Man was living in Querneby Road, near to what would become the St Ann’s estate, when things started to get hot. PG Man had already had a few encounters with the police. He spent three months in prison in the early 1960s after he was caught with a small amount of cannabis. Douggie Man, who lived nearby in Alfred Street North, had also been busted for a small amount of cannabis in August 1966, which resulted in a £100 fine. Then things started to get much worse: PG Man began working for the police. After his last bust they had told him that he would be able to run his shebeen, sell cannabis and stay out of prison if he started informing on his friends and family. Police raids started to occur regularly and PG Man’s friends and neighbours all told the same story: drugs were being planted and were nothing to do with them. They were people like Keith Ansell Maclean, nicknamed ‘P Sun’, whose home in Truman Street was raided in September 1968 for a small amount of drugs. PG Man testified against him in court for the prosecution, saying that he got drugs from him, and P Sun went to prison for twelve months.
In the end, even Douggie Man was busted. Despite his daughter Elaine claiming she had spotted police planting the drugs on top of a radio, the courts did not believe he was an innocent man. He faced a three-year prison sentence and it became apparent to everyone that mattered that PG Man was working for the police. By now he had acquired another nickname: ‘Judas’. Yet he was sick with remorse that he had sold his own brother down the river to save his own skin and vowed to get his revenge on the cops who, he felt, had forced him into a corner. He went to London to see if he could get a gun and planned to come back and use it on the officers who he felt had used him. But one of PG Man’s friends, Adam Foster, had a better idea. He knew a News Of The World journalist, Simon Regan, and was sure that he could expose what had been going on and hurt the police officers on PG Man’s back without resorting to violence. Regan listened to PG Man’s woes as he detailed the troubles of a black man living in a white man’s world. Then he set up PG Man up with several job interviews in the Nottingham area, including at the Player’s cigarette factory. He watched how each job vacancy disappeared once PG Man showed his face for interview. Altogether, he was turned away from more than forty vacancies. Next Regan moved onto PG Man’s story of planting drugs on his neighbours for the police. By the summer of 1969, Regan had a wealth of covert tapes which he believed were enough to show that certain police officers had acted corruptly. They apparently included PG Man going into the police station, being given cannabis and then arranging to call the police once he had been able to plant it.
In August 1969, the country’s biggest-selling newspaper ran the story under the headline ‘Police Plot to Plant Drugs’. It detailed, in full, PG Man’s allegations and caused a sensation. The tapes landed on the desk of the then Home Secretary, James Callaghan, who had helped draft the Race Relations Act of 1968. He wasted no time in appointing a senior officer from Manchester and Salford Constabulary to investigate. The officer listened to the tapes, interviewed PG Man and many of his friends and associates, and believed what they had to tell. The inquiry sent shockwaves through the corridors of Nottinghamshire Police and three officers were charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice. PG Man was cock-a-hoop, as were his relatives and friends.
The officers went on trial at Nottingham Crown Court in October 1970. Opening the prosecution case, Cyril Salmon, QC, told
the jury they were about to hear ‘a saga of corruption’ which revolved around Jamaican immigrants being ‘bullied, coerced and intimidated’ by police officers into giving false evidence against family and friends. Police officers, he said, had threatened to arrest and prosecute Jamaican males who refused to become informants, had turned a blind eye to the illegal activities of others involved in prostitution and shebeens, on the basis that they became informants and had given drugs to others to plant on the targets of their crime-busting activities.
However, the jury were to be denied access to the damning tapes made by Simon Regan and PG Man. The judge, Mr Justice Kilner-Brown, decided that there was no proof that the voices on the tapes belonged to the police officers, and ruled them inadmissible. The jury then heard witness after witness describe how police had coerced them into informing after their homes were raided by officers looking for drugs. They included Victor ‘Speck’ Brown, who was arrested over non-payment of a fine and sent to prison for ten weeks. He told the court, ‘A vice squad officer said to me: “Tell us about anyone who is selling cannabis and you walk – otherwise you is going to prison.”’ Seymour Oliver said police had planted cannabis on him as well. Then it was thirty-two-year-old PG Man’s turn. He described how he had been forced to write a statement implicating Ansell ‘P Sun’ MacLean in dealing cannabis, resulting in MacLean being jailed for a year. He said police had told him, ‘Vincent, you can continue to deal in cannabis and run a shebeen if you inform on other Jamaicans.’
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