Standard accounts of postwar race relations in the UK begin with the arrival of Jamaican immigrants on the Empire Windrush in 1948, while the anti-black riots of 1958 in Notting Hill (in London) and Nottingham are said to be the first postwar ‘race riots’. But this account of postwar immigrant Jamaican workers (many pre-dating the Windrush), who were housed in the wartime hostels of the National Service Hostels Corporation, reveals an earlier history of conflict, often with European and Irish migrant workers. Drawn from archival sources, it shows the early trend of postwar government policy in attempting to limit numbers of black workers in the hostels, keep them apart from others and blame them for attacks instigated by others. In this, it foreshadowed a more fully fledged ‘commonsense’ racism that posited the numbers of black workers as the problem, rather than any lack of social provision. And it hints that the contours of black settlement, taken for granted today in places such as Brixton and Birmingham, may have been initially determined by the location of those early hostels and labour exchanges.
The major, broad-based historical studies of the black presence in Britain have not mentioned what the local press would describe as the ‘racial rioting’ at the Causeway Green hostel. These studies usually describe the events at Nottingham, and then Notting Hill, in 1958, as the first racialised disturbances to take place in the postwar British hinterland, or imply that they were the first incidents of unrest (see, for instance, Peter Fryer, Staying Power: the history of black people in Britain (London, Pluto Press, 1984), pp. 376–81; Dilip Hiro, Black British, White British: a history of race relations in Britain (London, Paladin, 1992), pp. 38–40; Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: the irresistible rise of multi-racial Britain (London, HarperCollins, 1998); Ron Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Aldershot, Gower, 1987), pp. 204–10; John Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 3rd edn)). Studies of public disorder, or ‘riots’, in the twentieth century have also failed to include the incident at the Causeway Green hostel and the other NSHC hostels (see, for instance, Joshua et al., To Ride the Storm: the 1980 Bristol riot and the state (London, Heinemann, 1983), pp. 137–55; Michael Rowe, The Racialisation of Disorder in Twentieth Century Britain (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998); David Waddington, Contemporary Issues in Public Disorder: a comparative and historical approach (London, Routledge, 1992), pp. 74–94)). The incident at Causeway Green has not, however, been entirely absent in the literature, and has been briefly noted in Edward Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country: West Indians and the Notting Hill white riots (London, I. B. Tauris, 1988), pp. 49–51; and Shirley Joshi and Bob Carter, ‘The role of Labour in the creation of a racist Britain’, Race & Class (Vol. 25, no. 3, 1984), p. 60. This article aims to examine it in greater depth.
2.
The National Archives (TNA): Public Records Office (PRO) LAB 26/198.
3.
Cabinet Man-Power Working Party Memo (30November1945), CAB 134/510, cited in Joshi and Carter, op. cit., p. 55.
4.
IrvingDennis, ‘The race dispute in the Midlands: Polish workers – are we fair to them?’, Birmingham Gazette (12August1949).
5.
In particular, there was difficulty finding people to work in the armaments industries, as workers had to be sent from their homes to places where there was not enough accommodation (for more information, see the National Archives (2011), ‘National Service Hostels Corporation: Papers’, available at: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/SearchUI/details/C10137?descriptiontype=Full (accessed 27 April 2012).
6.
Ruth Glass observes that, although, in the early 1950s, there were migrants who were initially put up in temporary accommodation, such as Salvation Army hostels and similar institutions, chain migration would become the most common form of migration, where new migrants would travel to the address of a friend or relative, and ‘[t]heir houses became, virtually, hostels for newcomers from the West Indies’ (see Newcomers: the West Indians in London (London, Centre for Urban Studies, 1960), pp. 45–7).
7.
HarrisClive, ‘Post-war migration and the industrial reserve army’, in JamesWinstonHarrisClive, Inside Babylon: the Caribbean diaspora in Britain (London, Verso, 1993), p. 21.
8.
Birmingham Mail (22June1948).
9.
The ellipsis that follows the headline, ‘They met at Elmdon …’, arguably invites a voyeuristic assumption about what happened in the period between their meeting and the photograph of the couple with their two children. The description of the Jamaicans as job seekers, but in quotation marks, almost implies an ulterior motive for migration which, in the context of the story, is made more obvious (Birmingham Mail, 23June1948).
10.
Birmingham Gazette (24June1948).
11.
The fact that there was a colour bar in postwar Britain has been well documented elsewhere (see Hiro, op. cit., pp. 26–34; Pilkington, op. cit., pp. 45–52; Anthony Richmond, Colour Prejudice in Britain: a study of West Indian workers in Liverpool, 1941–1951 (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), pp. 84–6. Richmond describes non-white migrants socialising together in Somali cafés in Liverpool (p. 95). However, this wasn’t so much the case for many of the black and white migrants who would share social spaces in NSHC hostels.
12.
TNA: PRO LAB 26/198, 31December1946.
13.
Ibid., 26February1947.
14.
Ibid., 26January1948.
15.
Ibid., 9December1947.
16.
Ibid., 9August1948.
17.
The NSHC mentions that, ‘The nationals of the Baltic States were strongly opposed to each other.This was an antagonism of several centuries and it could not be dissipated merely by bringing them all together for a few weeks in a hostel’ (TNA: PRO LAB 26/198, 22 March 1948). The NSHC also voiced concern at ‘mixing warring races’, such as a number of German former prisoners of war, in a hostel with Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs and others, in Totley Wells, Scotland, in January 1949 (ibid., 10January1949).
18.
TaylorSimonA Land of Dreams: a study of Jewish and Afro-Caribbean migrant communities in England (London, Routledge, 1993), p. 105.
19.
TNA: PRO LAB 26/198, ‘Racial disturbances at Causeway Green Hostel: Jamaicans and Poles’.
20.
Birmingham Gazette (10August1949).
21.
Ibid.
22.
Birmingham Gazette (10August1949).
23.
Daily Mirror (10August1949).
24.
Birmingham Gazette (10August1949).
25.
TNA: PRO LAB 26/198, ‘Racial disturbances’, op. cit.
26.
Birmingham Gazette (10August1949).
27.
Birmingham Gazette (9August1949).
28.
TNA: PRO LAB 26/198, ‘Racial disturbances’, op. cit.
29.
Ibid.
30.
Birmingham Gazette (11August1949).
31.
TNA: PRO LAB 26/198, 9August1949.
32.
Ibid., 16August1949.
33.
TNA: PRO LAB 26/198, ‘Racial disturbances’, op. cit.
34.
Ibid.
35.
Ibid.
36.
Ibid.
37.
Ibid.
38.
Ibid., 11August1949.
39.
Ibid., 22August1949.
40.
Ibid.
41.
Birmingham Gazette (27August1949); Birmingham Mail (22August1949).
42.
Birmingham Gazette (27August1949).
43.
TNA: PRO LAB 26/198, 11November1949.
44.
Ibid., 3September1949.
45.
Ibid., 28November1949.
46.
Ibid., 26October1949.
47.
Ibid., 28November1949.
48.
Joseph Chamberlain famously said, ‘I believe that the British race is the greatest of governing races that the world has ever seen. [Cheers.] I say this not merely as an empty boast, but as proved and shown by the success which we have had in administering vast dominions …’ (cited in Fryer, op. cit., p. 183); see also Fryer (op. cit., pp. 165–90) for more on Teutonic and other forms of pseudo-scientific racism.
49.
Ibid., 28December1949.
50.
Ibid., 5January1950.
51.
Ibid., 7March1950.
52.
Ibid., 13March1950.
53.
Ibid., 4September1951.
54.
Kay and Miles write: ‘From 1 January 1951, those volunteers who had been three years in Britain were freed from all restrictions. By December 1952 no male EVWs and only a small number of women EVWs were still subject to restrictions. In January 1953 it was decided to discontinue using the term “European Volunteer Worker” and to refer instead to Foreign Workers recruited under the Westward Ho scheme’ (Diana Kay and Robert Miles, ‘Refugees or migrant workers: the case of the European Volunteer Workers in Britain (1946–1951)’, Journal of Refugee Studies (Vol. 1, nos 3/4, 1988), p. 230).
55.
The National Archives (2011), op. cit.
56.
TNA: PRO LAB 26/198, 25May1954.
57.
Ibid., 26May1954.
58.
Ibid.
59.
Ibid., 14December1954.
60.
Ibid., 21December1954.
61.
Ibid., 11January1955.
62.
Ibid.
63.
Ibid., 14January1955.
64.
Ibid., 28January1955.
65.
Ibid., 1February1955.
66.
Ibid., 29April1955.
67.
Ibid., 12May1955. The limit was also said to have interfered with the placing of black workers at the Staveley and Eastwood hostels in the North Midlands region, London Colney Hostel and the Summerfield hostel in Kidderminster (ibid., 1November1954).
68.
David Waddington argues that the history of twentieth-century urban rioting in Britain occupies two distinct phases, ‘a period, from 1900–62, where violence was interracial in form’, and ‘a period, lasting from the 1970s to the present day, where violence has taken the form of confrontations between black youths and the police’ (op. cit., p. 74). Joshua et al. (op. cit., p. 13) also make a perhaps similar distinction between pre-war and postwar riots, although they highlight that ‘neither of these periods nor the categories of violence are discrete’. The truce between capital and labour forms an important characteristic in explanations of the riots that took place in British port towns during the first part of the twentieth century (cf. Joshua et al., ibid., p. 36; see Ramdin, op. cit., p. 200; also Waddington, op. cit., pp. 75–9). Joshua et al. (op. cit., p. 36) argue that, in order to understand ‘the circumstances that shape the concerns of white crowds we must look to the nature of race, class and power in the seaport city’: The political threat followed from the economic. The majority of colonial labour, though outside the union, was yet very much within the industry. This labour significantly structured power relations between capital and organised labour, it limited the ability of the union to pursue better wages and conditions for its members, and enabled capital to resist union demands. In the eyes of organised white labour resident colonial seamen not only represented a threat to jobs and wage levels, they were also perceived as an unwitting tool in the hands of capital through which the unions could be contained, even undermined. Thus there were sufficient reasons to oppose colonial labour in its own right, but additionally, to oppose colonial labour was also to oppose capital.
69.
Birmingham Gazette (9August1949).
70.
Ibid.
71.
Birmingham Gazette (12August1949).
72.
Kay and Miles, op. cit., p. 216.
73.
SivanandanA., A Different Hunger: writings on Black resistance (London, Pluto Press, 1982), p. 4.
74.
See, for instance, Joshi and Carter, op. cit.
75.
TNA: PRO LAB, 22August1949.
76.
See, for instance, Glass, op. cit., pp. 46–7; Patterson, op. cit., p. 55; Phillips and Phillips, op. cit., pp. 81–8; see also South London Press and the Voice, Forty Winters On: memories of Britain’s postwar Caribbean immigrants (London, Lambeth Council, 1988), a collection of life-story testimonies by African Caribbean migrants, who were initially accommodated in the Clapham Shelters and helped to establish the community in Brixton.
