Abstract
The author explores the political life in Britain of black Barbadian Chris Braithwaite (c.1885–1944), also known as ‘Chris Jones’, a hitherto overlooked, yet outstanding figure in the history of the twentieth-century Black and Red Atlantic. As leader of the Colonial Seamen’s Association and an important ‘class struggle Pan-Africanist’, he was the lynchpin of an anti-colonial maritime network in interwar London. Through his work in the Communist party in the early 1930s and then in the International African Friends of Ethiopia and the International African Service Bureau, led by George Padmore and C. L. R. James, Braithwaite’s talents as organiser, speaker and writer came to the fore.
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1.R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: a life, Vol. II: the arch-poet, 1915-1939 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 511. On Mannin, see Andy Croft, ‘Ethel Mannin: the red rose of love and the red flower of liberty’, in Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai (eds.), Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals; British women writers, 1889-1939 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1993) and Robert Huxter, Reg and Ethel: Reginald Reynolds (1905-1958), his life and work and his marriage to Ethel Mannin (1900-1984) (York, Sessions, 1992) .
2.Ethel Mannin, Comrade O Comrade: or, low-down on the Left (London, Jarrolds, 1947), p. 5 .
3.Ibid., p. 118. Mannin’s partner, the anti-imperialist writer Reginald Reynolds describes in his 1956 memoirs - which includes a wonderful portrait of Chris Braithwaite - how this account of the meeting of minds between Goldman and Braithwaite was based on a real incident. Reginald Reynolds, My Life and Crimes (London, Jarrolds, 1956), pp. 153-54. In 1941, Mannin published Red Rose , a novel about Emma Goldman, while for more on Goldman and her meetings on the Spanish Revolution in London, see David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: left-libertarian thought and British writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2006) .
4.See Kent Worcester, C.L.R. James; a political biography (New York, State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 42 .
5.Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators’: militant anti-colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918-1939 (London, Hurst & Company, 2008), p. 284 .
6.For some further discussion of why activists like Braithwaite have tended to be a little overlooked by scholars, see Christian Høgsbjerg, ‘Black Books’, History Workshop Journal (Vol. 70, 2010). This is a review of Carol Polsgrove’s recent important work on the Pan-Africanists around George Padmore from the 1930s to the 1950s. See Carol Polsgrove, Ending British rule in Africa: writers in a common cause (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009) .
7.George Padmore, ‘Chris Jones: fighter for the oppressed’, New Leader , September 1944, online at ‘http://www.marxists.org/archive/padmore/1944/chris-jones.htm’ .
8.On emigration from Barbados in this period, see Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean radicalism in early twentieth-century America (London, Verso, 1999), p. 30, and Mary Chamberlain, Empire and nation-building in the Caribbean: Barbados, 1937-66 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 26-50 .
9.Nancy Cunard, ‘On the coloured seamen in the Merchant Navy’, report submitted to the Ministry of Information in June 1943, p. 1, Folder 1.3, Nancy Cunard Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin .
10.Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: workers and racial difference in late imperial Britain (London, Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 3, 39 .
11.‘The advent of war had led to a considerable increase in the number of black (lascar and British) and Chinese seamen on British ships. When war was declared, 8,000 merchant seamen joined the armed forces, while a further 9,000 nationals of now hostile countries were sacked. Black workers were among those who replaced them, particularly during 1915-17 when wages were increased and labour was recruited in the colonies themselves.’ Paul Gordon and Danny Reilly, ‘Guest workers of the sea: racism in British shipping’, Race & Class (Vol. 28, No. 2, 1986), p. 75 .
12.New Leader , 23 August 1941
13.Barbara Bush, Imperialism, Race and Resistance; Africa and Britain, 1919-1945 (London, Routledge, 1999), p. 222. Mannin’s partner Reginald Reynolds confirmed in his memoirs that Braithwaite, ‘of medium height, thick-set and engagingly ugly’, had ‘received very little schooling but he had seen the world in the merchant service, read a little, thought a lot and made up his mind on all major issues’. Reynolds, op. cit., p. 118 .
14.Cunard, op. cit., p. 1 .
15.Chamberlain, Empire and nation-building in the Caribbean , pp. 28-29. There is extensive discussion of Caribbean migration to America in James op.cit .
16.James, op. cit., p. 71 .
17.Susan D. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich; race and political culture in 1930s Britain (Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 92 .
18.On Ferdinand Smith, see Gerald Horne, Red Seas; Ferdinand Smith and radical black sailors in the United States and Jamaica (London, New York University Press, 2005), which also discusses Mulzac, who, among other things was the author of a ‘classic work of proletarian literature’, A Star to Steer By . On Mulzac, see also James, op. cit., pp. 92-3. As Gerald Horne notes ‘The NMU carried forward the tradition of those black sailors who in the late eighteenth century had brought the word of insurrection in Haiti to the Deep South and southern Africa. There were NMU members in prisons from India to South Africa to Germany to Brazil as a result of participation in democratic struggles. Over eight hundred members of the NMU fought in Spain in the 1930s.’ See Gerald Horne, ‘Black Thinkers at Sea: Ferdinand Smith and the decline of African American proletarian intellectuals’, Souls (Vol. 4, No. 2, 2002), p. 43 .
19.Padmore, op. cit .
20.Cunard, op. cit., p. 1 .
21.Padmore, op.cit. C.L.R. James in a 1975 interview with Alan MacKenzie confirmed that Braithwaite’s political radicalisation really dated from his settlement in Britain after the war. See Alan John MacKenzie, ‘British Marxists and the Empire: anti-imperialist theory and practice, 1920-1945’, (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1978), p. 180 .
22.Tabili, op cit., pp. 2-3 .
23.Jacqueline Jenkins, Black 1919: riots, racism and resistance in imperial Britain (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2009), p. 2. See also Neil Evans, ‘Across the universe: racial violence and the post-war crisis in imperial Britain, 1919-25’, Immigrants & Minorities (Vol. 13, Nos. 2/3, 1994). This was a special issue of the journal edited by Diane Frost on ‘Ethnic Labour and British Imperial Trade: A History of Ethnic Seafarers in the UK’ .
24.Tabili, op. cit., p. 111 .
25.Ibid., pp. 11-12 .
26.Ibid., pp. 3, 35, 114, 120. See also Tony Lane, ‘The political imperatives of bureaucracy and empire: the case of the Coloured Alien Seamen Order, 1925’, Immigrants & Minorities (Vol. 13, Nos. 2/3, 1994) .
27.Tabili, op.cit., pp. 140, 144. Bush, op. cit., p. 222 .
28.Tabili, op. cit., p. 51 .
29.Notes in Baruch Hirson and Lorraine Vivian, Strike Across the Empire; the seamen’s strike of 1925: in Britain, South Africa and Australasia (London, Clio, 1992), p. 38. See also Tabili, op. cit., p. 42 .
30.Tabili, op. cit., pp. 84, 93 .
31.Arthur Marsh and Victoria Ryan, The Seamen: a history of the National Union of Seamen, 1887-1987 (Oxford, Malthouse Press, 1989), p. 116 .
32.Tabili, op. cit., pp. 3, 55-7, 83-6. Padmore, op. cit .
33.Tabili, op. cit., pp. 101-2. In 1929 ‘a petition from “several coloured members of the Union in London” solicited the appointment of “a coloured delegate … to look after their interests”’. It seems almost certain Braithwaite was involved in this petition .
34.Chris Jones, ‘Problems of coloured seamen’, International African Opinion (Vol. 1, No. 1, July, 1938) .
35.Padmore, op. cit. We do not know, for example, whether he had any connection with the short-lived National African Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union (NASFU), based in Liverpool during the early 1920s, or how much of the rank-and-file seamen’s militancy – which included an international wildcat strike in summer 1925 against a union-sanctioned pay cut – he took part in. On these, see Tabili, op. cit., pp. 97, 157 and Hirson and Vivian, op. cit .
36.Letter dated 16 July 1939 from Chris Braithwaite to the NUS Temporary Management Committee, Warwick Modern Records Centre: MSS 175/328. Tabili, op. cit, p. 81 .
37.Letter dated 16 July 1939 from Braithwaite to the NUS Temporary Management Committee .
38.Tabili, op. cit., pp. 82, 102-3 .
39.Marika Sherwood, ‘The Comintern, the CPGB, colonies and black Britons, 1920-1938’, Science and Society (Vol. 60, No. 2, 1996), p. 152. For more context on the Communist International and its work among colonial seamen in this period, see Hakim Adi, ‘The Comintern and black workers in Britain and France 1919-37’, Immigrants & Minorities (Vol. 28, Nos. 2/3, 2010). On the Profintern, see Reiner Tosstorff’s massive history Profintern , unfortunately only available in German but reviewed by Ian Birchall in Historical Materialism (Vol. 17, 2009) .
40.Sherwood, op. cit., p. 153 .
41.Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics; The left and the end of empire, 1918-1964 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 86, quoting a ‘Secret Report on Communist Party Activities in Great Britain among Colonials’ submitted to the Colonial Office by Superintendent E. Parket on 22 April 1930 .
42.The National Archives (TNA), Kew, London: KV 2/1102/73a .
43.George Hardy, Those Stormy Years: memories of the fight for freedom on five continents (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1956), p. 215. On Hardy, see Andrew Flinn and Kevin Morgan, ‘George Hardy (1884-1966)’, Dictionary of Labour Biography , XI, (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 98-109, and see also his Special Branch file: TNA, KV2 / 1027 / 66 .
44.Sherwood, op. cit., pp. 154-6 .
45.See Haywood Patterson, Scottsboro Boy (London, Victor Gollancz, 1951), and James A. Millar, Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rosenhalt, ‘Mother Ada Wright and the international campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931-1934’, American Historical Review (Vol. 106, No. 2, 2001) .
46.Padmore, op. cit .
47.New Leader , 23 August 1941
48.Sherwood, ‘The Comintern, the CPGB, Colonies and black Britons’, p. 155 .
49.Negro Worker (Vol. 2, No. 5, May 1932). See also James R. Hooker, Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (London, Pall Mall Press, 1967), p. 26
50.Sherwood, op. cit., p. 158. In July 1933, Braithwaite addressed a Scottsboro Defence Committee musical gala at London’s Phoenix theatre. See Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich , p. 49 .
51.Negro Worker (Vol. 2, No. 8, August 1932)
52.Matthew Worley, Class Against Class; The Communist Party in Britain Between the Wars (London, I.B. Taurus, 2002), p. 227. On Ward and the NWA, see Hakim Adi, ‘The Negro Question: The Communist International and Black Liberation in the Interwar Years’, in Michael O. West, William G. Martin and Fanon Che Wilkins (eds), From Toussaint to Tupac: the black international since the age of revolution (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 167-8, 172 .
53.Ward was described by Special Branch in 1938 as being ‘one of the principal negro agitators in the UK’ since 1930. TNA, CO 295/606/4. For more on Ward, see the numerous references in Pennybacker, op. cit .
54.The Times , 28 November 1932
55.Derrick, op. cit., pp. 283-4. Both resigned after an apparent disagreement with Reginald Bridgeman, secretary of the League Against Imperialism .
56.Anne Chisholm, Nancy Cunard (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981), p. 281. In undated correspondence with George Padmore’s partner, Dorothy Pizer, Cunard later recalled Braithwaite and Jim Headley as both ‘magnificently intelligent and capable as well as very good men’. See Maroula Joannou, ‘Nancy Cunard’s English Journey’, Feminist Review (No. 78, 2004), p. 148 .
57.Derrick, op. cit., p. 284 .
58.MacKenzie, op. cit., p. 180 .
59.Pennybacker, op. cit., p. 85 .
60.Quoted in Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn, Communists and British Society 1920-1991 (London, Rivers Oram Press, 2007), pp. 216-217 .
61.Braithwaite remained in contact with Padmore and Cunard, though by 1934 both were now based in France. See Cunard’s letter to the Nigerian nationalist leader Nnamdi Azikiwe in 1934, when the latter passed through London that summer. ‘Hope you will meet Chris Jones by now; make him take you to the docks where he works. A remarkable place. And he will also show you Walker’s Café … unique of its kind.’ Quoted in Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey; an autobiography (London, C. Hurst, 1970), p. 197 .
62.His political work aside, Braithwaite also seems to have undertaken important and overlooked cultural - or perhaps ‘counter-cultural’ - work from the mid-1930s onwards, helping George Padmore and Amy Ashwood Garvey recruit black colonial seamen, particularly Africans, to play roles as extras when necessary on the British stage and screen, though there is no record of him appearing in any productions himself. On the importance of black colonial seamen for many stage and screen productions during the inter-war period, see Marie Seton, Paul Robeson (London, Dennis Dobson, 1958), pp. 38, 77, 99-100 .
63.Tabili, op. cit., pp. 78, 82 .
64.Negro Worker (Vol. 5, No. 9, September 1935)
65.Marika Sherwood, ‘Lascar struggles against discrimination in Britain 1923-45: The work of N.J. Upadhyaya and Surat Alley’, The Mariner’s Mirror (Vol. 90, No. 4, November 2004), p. 443 .
66.See Hannen Swaffer’s article in the Daily Herald , 24 August 1935, TNA, KV/2/1824/7a and also Daniel Waley, British Public Opinion and the Abyssinian War 1935-6 (London, Temple Smith, 1975), p. 115 .
67.Matthew Quest, ‘George Padmore’s and C.L.R. James’s International African Opinion ’, in Fitzroy Baptiste and Rupert Lewis (eds.), George Padmore: Pan-African revolutionary (Kingston, Jamaica, Ian Randle, 2009), p. 122 .
68.‘Colonial Seamen warn Fascists’, Daily Worker , 3 September 1935 .
69.Bush, op. cit., p. 222. This was Braithwaite’s eldest daughter Pamela .
70.The Times , 4 June 1936. For more on the remarkable scenes on Haile Selassie’s arrival, see Time , 15 June 1936. The Manchester Guardian noted ‘bright red banners were upheld by the Friends of Abyssinia organisation, and people were wearing amulets or enamelled badges in the Abyssinian colours or waving small Abyssinian flags. Many coloured people were in the crowd…’ Indeed, ‘there was no red carpet on the platform, no festoons of flowers, no Cabinet ministers, no guard of honour, but there can seldom have been an occasion when the arrival of a foreign monarch so stirred the hearts’. Manchester Guardian , 4 June 1936. The CSA was part of a delegation representing the black community of Britain which was spurned when it planned a welcome reception for Haile Selassie. See Robert A. Hill (ed.), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers , Vol. X; Africa for the Africans, 1923-1945 (London, University of California Press, 2006), pp. 629-630
71.Tabili, op. cit., p. 159. Negro Worker (Vol. 7, No. 2, February 1937) .
72.Sherwood, ‘Lascar struggles’ op. cit., p. 443 .
73.The Keys (Vol. 4, No. 3, January-March, 1937)
74.Chris Jones, ‘Britain’s coloured seamen’, The Keys (Vol. 5, No. 1, July-September, 1937) .
75.Sherwood, ‘Lascar struggles’ op. cit., p. 443 .
76.Ras Makonnen, Pan-Africanism From Within (London, 1973), pp. x, 129. Makonnen seems to have confused the name of Braithwaite’s Colonial Seamen’s Association with the Coloured Colonial Seamen’s Union which existed in Cardiff around Harry O’Connell, an activist also like Makonnen originally from British Guiana. On O’Connell, see Marika Sherwood, ‘Racism and resistance: Cardiff in the 1930s and 1940s’, Llafur (Vol. 5, No. 4, 1991), pp. 60-1 .
77.Peter Fryer, Staying Power; the history of black people in Britain (London, Pluto, 1987), pp. 341, 345 .
78.Africa and the World (Vol. 1, No. 4, September 1937), and Hooker, Black Revolutionary , p. 53. For more on the IASB and the Caribbean Labour Rebellions, see Christian Høgsbjerg, ‘“A Thorn in the Side of Great Britain”: C.L.R. James and the Caribbean labour rebellions of the 1930s’, Small Axe (No. 35, July 2011)
79.See for example the CSA meeting held on 14 March 1938, mentioned in TNA, CO 295/606/4 .
80.By May 1938, the CPGB had retreated from offering British colonies independence and were merely committed to supporting interim democratic charter rights. See the May 1938 CPGB statement ‘Peace and the Colonial Question’, discussed in Nicholas Owen, The British Left and India: metropolitan anti-imperialism, 1885-1947 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 244 .
81.M.A.R.H.O. (ed.), Visions of History (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 269 .
82.Socialist Platform, C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism : an interview (London, Socialist Platform, 1987), p. 6. For a dramatic account of perhaps the most heroic and famous ‘revolution at the back of the hall’ ever made by Chris Braithwaite, at the thousand-strong conference in London on ‘Peace and Empire’ organised by the India League and the London Federation of Peace Councils in mid-July 1938, see Reynolds, op. cit., pp. 118-120 .
83.C.L.R. James, ‘Notes on the life of George Padmore [c.1960]’, p. 36. This is an unpublished manuscript, a copy of which is available at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London. As James later recalled of Braithwaite’s interventions at CPGB meetings, ‘he would intervene and say: “You say that the bourgeoisie in India can make the revolution, but I have been in the Party and you have said that this was impossible. Comrade James, you have the document. Read out what they used to say”. I always kept the documents with me … ’ See MacKenzie, op. cit., p. 236 .
84.See for example Orwell’s famous article ‘Not counting niggers’ in The Adelphi in July 1939, republished as George Orwell, ‘Review of Union Now by Clarence K. Streit’, in Peter Davison (ed.), The complete works of George Orwell , Vol. 11 (London, Secker & Warburg, 1998) .
85.Interview with the late Len Edmondson on 21 May 1999, Beamish Museum, p 26. See the Len Edmondson papers, Tyne and Wear Archives Service, Newcastle, 4707/4a .
86.Chris Jones, ‘Coloured seamen’, International African Opinion (Vol. 1, No. 2, August 1938) .
87.Quest, op. cit., pp. 121-122 .
88.Chris Jones, ‘Seamen’s Notes’, International African Opinion , (Vol. 1, No. 6, February-March 1939) .
89.Socialist Platform, op. cit., p. 6 .
90.C.L.R. James, A History of Negro Revolt (London, F.A.C.T.,1938), p. 83 .
91.Joannou, op. cit., pp. 153-4. As Cunard wrote, ‘to these men from West Africa and the West Indies is due their full measure of national thanks. They have been to every one of the maritime war-zones and many have taken convoys to the Soviet Union where they have seen something of the rhythm of life of our great Russian ally.’ On some of the class struggles of black seamen during the early 1940s, see Marika Sherwood, ‘Strikes! African seamen, Elder Dempster and the government 1940-42’, Immigrants & Minorities (Vol. 13, Nos. 2/3, 1994) .
92.Cunard, op. cit., p. 1 .
93.New Leader , 26 January 1940. Further testament to Braithwaite’s war-time activism comes from another notice in the New Leader , that on 26 February 1943, he was billed to speak on ‘Colonial Blacks on the move’, at the anarchist-run Freedom Press Rooms at 27 Belsize Road in London. See New Leader , 6 February 1943
94.‘Two Negro leaders’, New Leader (23 August 1941). On E. N. Mackenzie, see Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, eds, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited (London, New Beacon Books, 1995), p. 141 .
95.Bush, op. cit., p. 222. Padmore, op. cit. Letter from Ambassador Subasinghe to James R. Hooker in 1964, quoted in Hooker, op. cit., p. 77 .
96.On the relief efforts for Braithwaite’s children, see Reynolds, op. cit., pp. 120–1; Makonnen, op. cit., p. 148; Ethel Mannin, ‘Our debt to Chris Jones’, New Leader (10 February 1945), New Leader (24 February 1945), New Leader (10 March 1945), Socialist Leader (30 November 1946) and ‘Chris Jones’, Socialist Leader (26 August 1950), the latter of which includes a photograph of two of his daughters. Braithwaite’s youngest son Reginald George took his names after Reynolds and Padmore. See Hooker, op. cit., p. 77; and Huxter, op. cit., p. 79 .
97.John McNair, ‘The late Chris Jones’, New Leader (2 December 1944) .
98.Tabili, op. cit., p. 81 .
99.Horne, op. cit., p. 40. Those at the Pan-African Congress who had once worked at sea included Peter Abrahams (South Africa), Surat Alley (India), M. I. Faro (Nigeria), Rupert Gittens (Trinidad), I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson (Sierra Leone), J. M. King (Barbados), Ras T. Makonnen (Guyana), Ernest Marke (Sierra Leone), George Nelson (Ghana) and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana). See Adi and Sherwood, op. cit .
100.Padmore, op. cit .
101.C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: the story of Herman Melville and the world we live in (London, University Press of New England, 2001), p. 17. The passage can be found in Moby Dick , Chapter 26, ‘Knights and squires’ .