It was in this context that Rachel Fleming won the support of Liverpool’s authority figures to research Liverpool’s ‘wretched’ – read: mixed-race – children. She founded the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children in 1927. Muriel Fletcher, a University of Liverpool graduate working as a probation officer, was tasked with writing the association’s first report. Her work meant that through welfare services she had contact with some of the poorest families in the city, and it was through this skewed lens with some of Liverpool’s poorest mixed-race families that she conducted her research.
The Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports was published in June 1930. It concluded, with scant evidence, that venereal diseases were twice as likely to be found in black seamen than white seamen, and that mixed-race – or to use the language of the report, ‘half-caste’ – children were more likely to be sickly because of this. ‘The children seemed to have frequent colds, many were also rickety, and several cases were reported in which there was a bad family history for tuberculosis,’ wrote Ms Fletcher. Perhaps reflecting popular attitudes at the time, Fletcher deemed mixed-race girls and women as tainted by their race, writing ‘only two cases have been found in Liverpool of half-caste girls who have married white men, and in one of these cases the girl’s family forced the marriage on the man.’18 In her report, Muriel Fletcher organised the white women who chose to have relationships with black men into four categories: the mentally weak, the prostitutes, the young and reckless, and those who felt forced into marriage because of illegitimate children.
Children who were researched in the study had their eyes examined and their noses measured, with their facial features categorised as either ‘Negroid’ or ‘English’. Commenting on the fact that mixed-race young adults struggled to find work, Fletcher wrote: ‘mothers of a better type regretted the fact that they had brought these children into the world, handicapped by their colour.’ Echoing the hugely popular eugenics movement at the time, it seems that Muriel Fletcher thought that race mixing – or, as eugenicists called it, miscegenation – was such an abomination that the children of mixed-race relationships had ‘little future’.
Popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, the British eugenics movement believed that social class was determined by biological factors such as intelligence, health and the vague criteria of ‘moral values’. Eugenicists argued that those with desirable qualities should be encouraged to reproduce, while those without should be discouraged. The racism was inherent here: whiteness was to be aspired to, whereas any hint of black heritage was considered a kind of contamination, leading to a hard line against mixed-race relationships and mixed-race people. Despite support from influential names like John Maynard Keynes and George Bernard Shaw, there was no legislation passed in Britain to cement eugenics into the workings of the state (for example, forced sterilisation), and a 1931 Private Members Bill advocating this was outvoted in Parliament.
On publication, Muriel Fletcher’s Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports had a national impact, with a representative of the Anti-Slavery Society calling it an ‘extraordinarily able document’ containing ‘the most impressive and authoritative detail’. In a recent study on the report, academic Mark Christian argued that it had a long-lasting negative effect on the black people of Liverpool, and cemented the use of the term ‘half-caste’.19
The aftermath of yet another world war brought with it fresh labour demands, and Britain once again encouraged immigration. When the SS Empire Windrush sailed from the Caribbean to England, it carried 490 Caribbean men and two Caribbean women, all of whom were prepared to muck in with the job of restoring a post-war Britain.20 The Windrush docked at Tilbury in Thurrock, Essex on 22 June 1948. That same year, the government introduced the British Nationality Act – a law that effectively gave Commonwealth citizens the same rights to reside as British subjects.
The country’s black population continued to rise. Between 1951 and 1961, the Caribbean-born British population grew from 15,000 to 172,000,21 with the majority of those people from Jamaica (an increase in population from 6,000 to 100,00022).
By 1958, Nottingham’s black population numbered 2,500. But a decade of legislation explicitly welcoming Commonwealth citizens to Britain had not changed attitudes on the ground. Quotes from a local newspaper reported a colour bar in Nottingham’s pubs, with black men expected to stand aside until white people had been served. White resentment towards the city’s black residents was rife, and black resentment at white resentment was simmering. On 23 August 1958, an altercation in a pub between a white woman and a black man spiralled out of control. Reports on what sparked the following events are sketchy. What we do know is this: later that day, a thousand people had crowded into St Ann’s Well Road ready to riot. Razors, knives and bottles were used as weapons, and eight people were hospitalised.
What happened in Nottingham was also occurring in other parts of the country. On 20 August in Notting Hill, west London, a group of teddy boys – young rock-and-roll-loving white men who wore creeper shoes and suits – set upon the streets with the sole objective of attacking black people. They called themselves the ‘nigger hunters’. That night, their violent spree put five black men in hospital.23
At the time, Notting Hill was a poor and overcrowded area of London, with desperation for housing exploited by the notorious slum landlord, Peter Rachman. Rachman’s reputation was so poor that his name became a synonym for bad treatment of tenants. Chambers 21st Century Dictionary defines Rachmanism today as ‘exploitation or extortion by a landlord of tenants living in slum conditions’.24 It was black people who fell prey to Rachman’s small dilapidated properties and extortionate rents. They had very little choice. Oral histories from those who lived through these times report ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ signs in the windows of other, more respectable properties.25 This only exacerbated poor race relations in the capital.
Nine days after the nigger-hunting spree from Notting Hill’s teddy boys, and a mixed-race married couple – a black man and white Swedish woman – were arguing outside Latimer Road tube station. It was an August bank holiday. With many off work, the argument drew a crowd of white men, who jumped in to defend the woman, perhaps believing that she was under attack. Spotting the onslaught, some black men got involved to support her husband. They began fighting each other.
Later, interviews with white rioters suggest that there was a rumour going around that a black man had raped a white woman.26 This scuffle outside a train station quickly escalated into two hundred white people roaming the streets chanting racist abuse. As the fighting intensified, some white rioters berated the police for holding them back from attacking black people. The riots stretched on for three whole days. Swastikas were painted on to the doors of black families. Black people fought back with weapons and makeshift Molotov cocktails. Those black people who were stopped on the street by the police during the violence stressed their need to defend themselves. No fatalities were recorded, but over a hundred people – the majority of them white – were arrested.