Turning to the workplace, there was a positive aspect, especially in the prevailing full-employment context. ‘Faced with a growing list of vacancies, transport concerns somewhat reluctantly recruited coloured conductors and drivers, West Indians especially,’ noted Michael Banton later in the 1950s in his eminently judicious survey of
White and Coloured
. ‘London and Manchester early led the way with small numbers of coloured transport workers, then in 1954 Birmingham Corporation had to recruit them in larger numbers, and in 1955 Sheffield, Nottingham, Coventry and other towns followed suit.’ As for the wider industrial scene, a January 1955 despatch from Coventry in the
Manchester Guardian
quoted the personnel manager of a large car factory: ‘Frankly, we would be completely lost without our coloured workers. Our foundry just would not keep going. They don’t mind how hard they work . . .’ Yet overall it was a far more mixed picture. In Coventry itself, according to Steven Tolliday in his study of that city’s engineering workers, recruitment practices at the major firms meant that ‘most blacks never got inside the factory gates’, while as for Birmingham the
Post
’s analysis of race relations noted that ‘several large firms’ still operated a colour bar.
Such a policy, there and elsewhere, to a large degree reflected employers’ awareness of shop-floor anxieties and prejudices, with the trade unions far from distinguishing themselves in terms of mediating those attitudes. Even where non-white workers were allowed, they tended to be treated by their representatives as second-class members, with
The Times
observing in November 1954 that ‘the trade unionists, excepting such undertakings as the Post Office and London Transport, where it is a point of honour that there shall be no colour bar, often have an understanding with managements that the hallowed rule of “last in, first out” shall not apply to whites when coloured immigrants are employed, and that coloured workers shall not be promoted over white’. Soon afterwards, Emrys Thomas, General Secretary of the Ministry of Labour Staff Association, spelled out the facts of life about ‘West Indian Workers’ for
Socialist Commentary
’s progressive, socially liberal, middle-class readers:
Practically only about 25 per cent are skilled or semi-skilled in the sense that they can walk straight into a job of work and begin to produce. The rest are just not up to the quality of the white workers. The man who says he is a carpenter turns out to have done only rough work and has no tools. Worse, he is not used to the industrial discipline of this country; the necessity to stick at the job and not spend too much time at the lavatory or smoking and talking. He is unfamiliar with the things in industrial life which are second nature to the white worker. He appears, often, to be unused to the idea of completing his stint each day and every day.
Ultimately, Thomas envisaged a policy of ‘limitation’, but meanwhile, ‘so long as the proportion of coloured people in the white community is low and well-dispersed, then the complicated relationships are minimised and hardly obtrude themselves’.
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One local dispute in February/March 1955 suggested that things were already quite ‘complicated’. This was at West Bromwich, where busmen took strike action in protest at the hiring of an Indian trainee conductor. C. H. Mullard, a bus driver for 18 years, issued a union-sanctioned statement: ‘The platform staff are deeply concerned about this matter because, owing to our low rate of wages, we know that if we accept an influx of coloured labour we shall be brought down to a 44-hour week on which it would be impossible for a family man to exist.’ Tellingly, the busmen received little public sympathy, typified by a letter to the local paper that described West Bromwich conductors and conductresses as ‘the most ill-mannered, bad-tempered and ignorant lot I have ever met’. Bkika Patel himself, who had previously worked with the Bombay tramway service, understandably opted for caution – ‘I have no wish to cause any trouble and I am keeping clear of the dispute’ – and ultimately, as in several other similar public-transport disputes in the Midlands this year, it was the white strikers who largely won the day in the form of (to quote Clive Harris, historian of the non-white ‘industrial reserve army’) ‘the imposition of a quota on the number of black workers taken on, their confinement to specific duties and agreements about redundancy’.
There was a piquant footnote to the West Bromwich episode. After the Bishop of Lichfield had condemned the striking busmen as unChristian, the MP for Wolverhampton South-West (in the Black Country, like West Bromwich) wrote to him to argue that it was not racial considerations as such that had motivated the busmen, but rather their dislike of a foreign group muscling in, as with the Durham miners when they had gone on strike over the employment of Italians. The MP, Enoch Powell, suggested that the time had come for an amendment to the 1948 British Nationality Act, in order to ‘distinguish’ Jamaicans ‘from citizens of this country’, and he concluded piously: ‘In seeking to prevent while it is still possible the creation here of perhaps insoluble and intractable political problems, I hope one is not necessarily in breach of any obligation of humanity or Christianity.’
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In general, the question of immigration controls was starting – but only starting – to become a politically high-profile issue. In March 1954, a few weeks after the inconclusive Cabinet discussion on ‘Coloured Workers’, Lord (‘Bobbety’) Salisbury, Lord President of the Council and a key figure in the Tory Party, sounded an apocalyptic note to the Colonial Secretary: ‘We are faced with a problem which, though at present it may be only a cloud the size of a man’s hand, may easily come to fill the whole political horizon . . . Indeed, if something is not done to check it now, I should not be at all surprised if the problem became quite unmanageable in 20 or 30 years time. We might be faced with very much the same type of appalling issue that is now causing such great difficulties for the United States . . .’ The decisive argument, however, had already been made a few days earlier by the Commonwealth Secretary, Lord Swinton, writing to Salisbury: ‘If we legislate on immigration, though we draft it in non-discriminatory terms, we cannot conceal the obvious fact that the object is to keep out coloured peoples. Unless there is really a strong case for this, it would surely be an unwise moment to raise the issue when we are preaching and trying to practise partnership in the abolition of the Colour Bar.’ There the matter rested for the moment, though one historian, Kathleen Paul, has argued that it was from this point that the government initiated what she calls ‘a deliberate campaign to sway public opinion in favour of control’.
By the autumn of 1954 it was obvious that the number of West Indian immigrants was rising sharply, and on 5 November a Labour backbencher, John Hynd, secured a half-hour Commons debate on the immigration issue. ‘If there is a sudden influx of outsiders, whether they be Jamaicans, Poles, Welshmen or Irishmen, it upsets the balance,’ he declared, before going on to excuse the proprietors of a dance hall in his Sheffield constituency who had imposed a colour bar. In response, a Colonial Office minister, Henry Hopkinson, could only say that the whole question was receiving ‘very careful attention’. Three days later
The Times
warned against the powder-keg implications of the new wave of immigrants becoming concentrated in areas of serious housing shortages – ‘What are likely to be the feelings of more than 50,000 would-be white tenants in Birmingham, who have waited years for a decent house, when they see newcomers, no matter what their colour, taking over whole streets of properties?’ – while on the 12th, in his Smethwick constituency near Birmingham, Gordon Walker came out for a policy of control: ‘I don’t think any country has a moral obligation to import a racial problem . . . I am a great believer in Commonwealth unity, but I cannot see that there will be any danger to it if Britain takes powers over immigration.’
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At Cabinet, the issue came to a head in January 1955, shortly before the BBC documentary and amid considerable press coverage of some spectacularly big-number disembarkations of Jamaicans at Plymouth. ‘More discussion about the West Indian immigrants,’ noted Macmillan on the 20th. ‘A Bill is being drafted – but it’s not an easy problem. P.M. thinks “Keep England White” a good slogan!’ In the event the Cabinet shied away from action. The reasons were probably a mixture of disinclination to accept the potential seriousness of the issue, uncertainty about the state of public opinion and concerns about the implications for the ‘Old’ [ie white] Commonwealth. Irrespective of the question of ‘should’,
could
Churchill have done more? ‘I think it is the most important subject facing this country, but I cannot get any of my ministers to take any notice,’ he privately informed the
Spectator
’s editor, Ian Gilmour, though the truth surely was that at this particular point in his political career he was little inclined for major controversy, in the domestic sphere anyway. About the same time, a right-wing Tory MP, Cyril Osborne, tried and failed to introduce a private member’s bill in favour of restrictions. He seems to have been sat on by the government, even to the extent of having to pretend to be ill, while it did not help his cause that Princess Margaret was about to visit Jamaica in celebration of the tercentenary of British sovereignty there. But on the ground, the issue was far from going away. ‘I believe in international democratic Socialism, and I don’t like the idea of controlling the movement of people, but when a city is faced with a problem like Birmingham’s, with a shortage of houses, a shortage of house-building land and workers from many countries flocking to it, it seems to me that we Socialists must do some re-thinking,’ publicly declared Frank Price, an ambitious Birmingham local politician, in March. ‘If the present situation continues without control, conditions in the city, already very difficult, will become chaotic. What the city council can do to meet the problem has yet to be worked out, though my view is that it demands national consideration and action by the Government.’
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It is not easy to judge the state of public opinion as a whole by this time, including in the many areas of Britain where the sighting of a non-white person was still a rarity. In November 1954, following a
Picture Post
article on mixed marriages, there was strikingly rosy testimony from ‘a young coloured man happily married to an English girl’: ‘Thank God, I can honestly say not one person I have met has brought up the question of my colour. I think I can speak with some authority, since I have completed a hitch-hike tour of the British Isles. On this tour I was treated with every kindness conceivable, and more than one driver went out of his way to oblige me.’ However, there were far more letters to the press of an essentially negative kind. To quote a handful from 1954/5:
I would have been far happier to stay among my own people. Now I find that there is nowhere I can go without being stared at. Even in church many hesitate to sit next to me just because I am dark.
(Indian student, Bradford)
The real problem is not the dope pedlars, but the tens of thousands of hard working types who in so many cases find white wives and promptly produce larger families than their white neighbours.
(Les Pritchard, Llandaff)
One must face facts. There is a Colour Bar growing, as the hundreds of West Indians pour into our isle, seeking ‘paradise’. This flow must be greatly restricted. As the American says, ‘Don’t get me wrong’. I want the West Indians to have a fair crack at the whip, but not at the expense of the strife and turmoil that a Colour Bar brings.
(Anthony Alton, Lancashire)
At the present influx of coloured people it will be a rarity to hear an English voice on our city streets in a generation, or so. We are known as a hospitable people, but have we not opened the doors of our national hospitality too wide?
(C. Corfield, Birmingham)
The influx of coloured people into this country continues. Some firms now employ more West Indians than Englishmen. Are British workers blind to the threat to their welfare or can they see no farther than across the road?
(O. Duncan, London SE15)
Unfortunately, there is no satisfactory (or even semi-satisfactory) statistical survey of attitudes, and what we do have from this time conveys a jumbled message. Gallup in April 1955 asked, ‘Do you think it is right or wrong for people to refuse to work with coloured men and women?’, to which only 12 per cent thought it was right, whereas 79 per cent thought it wrong. (In the same poll, to the question ‘Do you personally know or have you known any coloured people?’, 58 per cent replied in the negative.) Also in 1955, the sociologist Anthony Richmond, in a report entitled
The Colour Problem
, estimated that the majority of Britain’s white population was prejudiced against black people, with about one-third believing that they ‘should not be allowed in Britain at all’. Finally, there was the
Daily Sketch
, a right-wing tabloid. In January 1955, on the back of a ‘special inquiry’ by the paper into West Indian immigrants which had found that ‘too many of them will be doomed to poverty relieved only by the public purse’, it polled its readers: 97.6 per cent were against unrestricted entry and 81.3 per cent were in favour of stopping entry altogether.
For all too many West Indian newcomers, irrespective of these various figures and estimates, there was often huge ignorance to overcome, abetted by an instinctive suspicion or resentment of ‘the other’, and further compounded by the time-honoured English vice, hypocrisy. One West Indian, A. G. Bennett, offered this wry but heartfelt sketch in his 1954 book
Because They Know Not
:
What is wrong is with what they style the ‘neighbour’. Since I came here I never met a single English person who had any colour prejudice. Once, I walked the whole length of the street looking for a room and everyone told me that he or she had no prejudice against coloured people. It was the neighbour who was stupid. If we could only find the ‘neighbour’ we could solve the entire problem.
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