This article explores the forms of activism forged by seafarers’ organisers from the Caribbean in interwar Britain to problematise dominant ways of thinking about ‘race’, labour and place. It focuses on Guyanese Harry O’Connell, who was to become one of the most prominent organisers of Cardiff’s multiethnic seafaring community in the 1920s and 1930s. He was influential in struggles against the forms of ‘white labourism’ adopted by the National Union of Seamen. A committed Communist, O’Connell drew on the networks of the Comintern-affiliated International of Seamen and Harbour Workers (ISH) and International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) to contest such white labourism, whilst simultaneously negotiating the racialised forms of internationalism constituted through Communist networks. The piece contributes to a broader ‘reparative’ approach to history which explores the terms on which labour, space and place are articulated.
Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Minutes of Executive Council of NUS –11January1922 Mss 175/1/1/4.
2.
Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Minutes of Executive Council of NUS –11January1922 Mss 175/1/1/4.
3.
AdiH., Pan-Africanism and Communism: the Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939 (New Jersey, Africa World Press, 2013); HøgsbjergC., ‘Mariner, renegade and castaway: Chris Braithwaite, seamen’s organiser and Pan-Africanist’, Race & Class (Vol. 53, no. 2, 2011), pp. 36–5; HøgsbjergC., Mariner, Renegade and Castaway: Chris Braithwaite, seamen’s organiser and militant Pan-Africanist (London, Socialist History Society and Redwords, 2013).
4.
On O’Connell, see SherwoodM., ‘Racism and resistance: Cardiff in the 1930s and 1940s’, Llafur (Vol. 5, no. 4, 1991), pp. 51–70; Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism, op. cit., especially pp. 260–3; and WeissH., ‘The International of Seamen and Harbour Workers – a radical labour union of the waterfront or a subversive world wide web?’, Comintern Working Paper, 29/2013, available at: http://www.abo.fi/fakultet/media/29133/cowopa29weiss.pdf. For a useful discussion of the Cardiff context shaped by active involvement in the Butetown Arts and History Centre, which ‘preserves and interprets the history of immigrants and minorities in Wales from the Victorian period to the present’, see JordanG.WeedonC., Cultural Politics: class, gender, race and the postmodern world (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995), pp. 134–73. On the Butetown Arts and History Centre, see: http://bhac.org/.
5.
HyslopJ., ‘The imperial working class makes itself “White”: white labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa before the First World War’, Journal of Historical Sociology (Vol. 12, no. 4, 1999), pp. 398–421.
6.
SherwoodM., ‘Strikes! African seamen, Elder Dempster and the government, 1940–42’, Immigrants and Minorities (Vol. 13, nos. 2−3, 1994), pp. 130–45.
7.
Ibid.
8.
JonasA., ‘Local labour market control regimes: uneven development and the social regulation of production’, Regional Studies (Vol. 30, no. 4, 1996), pp. 323–38, p. 325.
9.
BalachandranG., Globalizing Labour? Indian seafarers world shipping, c. 1870–1945 (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 255.
10.
PutnamL., ‘Citizenship from the margins: vernacular theories of rights and the state from the interwar Caribbean’, Journal of British Studies (Vol. 53, no.1, 2014), pp. 162–91, pp. 170–1.
11.
See GordonP.ReillyD., ‘Guestworkers of the sea: racism in British shipping’, Race & Class (Vol. 28, no. 2, 1986), pp. 73–82 for a detailed account of the ways in which racism structured the organising practices of the NUS until the 1980s.
12.
TabiliL., We Ask For British Justice: workers and racial difference in late imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 43; HyslopJ., ‘Steamship empire: Asian, African and British sailors in the Merchant Marine c. 1880–1945’, Journal of Asian and African Studies (Vol. 44, no. 1, 2009), pp. 49–67; Balachandran, Globalizing Labour?, op. cit.
13.
PadmoreG., ‘Colonial … and Colored Unity (the report of the 5th Pan-African Congress)’, in AdiH.SherwoodM., eds, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Re-visited (London, New Beacon Books, 1995), pp. 51–124, p. 67. Moselle, a leading Cardiff pan-Africanist, had left Philadelphia at the turn of the century and had worked for a while in southern Africa before settling in South Wales; he was Paul Robeson’s uncle by marriage and according to St Clair Drake was president of the Cardiff branch of the South Wales Miners’ Federation during the 1926 General Strike (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, St Clair Drake Papers, 60/8).
14.
LinebaughP.RedikerM., Many Headed Hydra (London, Verso, 2001).
15.
Høgsbjerg, ‘Mariner, renegade and castaway’, Race & Class, op. cit., and his Mariner, renegade and castaway, Socialist History Society, op. cit.
16.
BresseyC., ‘Geographies of solidarity and the Black political diaspora in London before 1914’, in CareyJ.LydonJ., eds, Indigenous Networks: mobility, connections and exchange (London, Routledge, 2014), pp. 241–61, p. 255.
ChenA., ‘People of colour like me have been painted out of working-class history’, Guardian (16July2013).
20.
CruddasJ.RutherfordJ., One Nation: Labour’s political renewal (London, One Nation Register, 2014). For accounts of Welshness alive to such plural political identities, see WhittakerG., ‘Developing a plural nation? Black and minority ethnic participation in the 2011 Welsh referendum’, Ethnicities (Vol. 15, no. 3, 2015) and WilliamsC., Sugar and Slate (Aberystwyth, Planet Books, 2002); see also WilliamsC.EvansN.O’LearyP., A Tolerant Nation: exploring ethnic diversity in Wales (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2003).
See especially SivanandanA., ‘From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain’, Race & Class (Vol. 23, nos. 2−3, 1981/82) which was particularly significant in articulating the black struggle against racism and the links to colonialism; also the essays collected in A. Sivanandan, Communities of Resistance: writings on Black struggles for socialism (London, Verso, 1990).
23.
See SherwoodM., ‘Racism and resistance’, op. cit., and Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism, op. cit., especially pp. 260–3; WeissH., Framing a Radical African Atlantic: African American agency, West African intellectuals and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (Leiden, Brill, 2014), pp. 357, 359.
24.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, St Clair Drake Papers 62/3 Cardiff Diary and Notes; Sherwood, ‘Racism and resistance’, op. cit., p. 60; WilliamsG. A., ‘Mother Wales get off me back’, Marxism Today (December1981), p. 6.
25.
RodneyW., A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1981), pp. 190–216.
26.
Sherwood, ‘Racism and resistance’, op. cit.; JenkinsonJ., Black 1919: riots, racism and resistance in imperial Britain (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2009), pp. 1, 93–5; EvansN., ‘The South Wales race riots of 1919’, Llafur (Vol. 3, no.1, 1980), pp. 5–29; HøgsbjergC., ‘Rufus E. Fennell: a literary pan-Africanist in Britain’, Race & Class (Vol. 56, no. 1, 2014), pp. 59–80; ByrneD., ‘The 1930 “Arab riot” in South Shields: a race riot that never was’, Race & Class (Vol. 18, no. 3, 1977), especially p. 263; and R. May and CohenR., ‘The interaction between race and colonialism: a case study of the Liverpool race riots of 1919’, Race & Class (Vol. 16, no. 2, 1974), pp. 111–26.
27.
St Clair Drake, Value Systems, Social Structure and Race Relations in the British Isles, University of Chicago, PhD, Anthropology, 1954, p. 402.
28.
Ibid., p. 396.
29.
Ibid.
30.
PadmoreG., ‘World congress of seamen’, Negro Worker (Vol. 6, no. 2, 1932), pp. 23–5. On the activity of Seamen’s Minority Movement activists in challenging collusion between the NUS and shipping companies in South Shields in 1930, see Byrne, op. cit., especially pp. 270–2.
31.
On Ada Wright, see PennybackerS., From Scottsboro to Munich: race and political culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009).
32.
For discussion of the contested representations of this multiethnic dockside community, see JordanG., ‘Down the Bay’: Picture Post, humanist photography and images of 1950s Cardiff, photographs by Bert Hardy (Cardiff, Butetown Arts and History Centre, 2001).
33.
See EvansN., ‘Regulating the reserve army: Arabs, blacks and the local state in Cardiff, 1939–1945’, Immigrants and Minorities (Vol. 4, no. 2, 1985), pp. 68–115.
34.
McKayC., A Long Way From Home (London, Pluto Press, 1985).
35.
MorganK., ‘The trouble with revisionism: or Communist history with the history left in’, Labour/Le Travail (Vol. 63, Spring2009).
36.
Ibid., p. 147.
37.
International of Seamen and Harbour Workers, The World Unity Congress of the International Water Transport Workers and It’s Decisions (Hamburg, 1932).
38.
‘Intercepted correspondence of the Seamen’s Minority Movement’, The National Archives (TNA), CO 323/ 1164/14.
39.
O’ConnellH., ‘Race prejudice in England’, Negro Worker (Vol. 3, nos 4–5, April/May1933), pp. 24–5.
40.
KrebsR., ‘Letter to Albert Walter’ (1932), TNA, KV2/1102/ 5c.
41.
MakalaniM., In the Cause of Freedom: radical Black internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2012), p. 185. See also SherwoodM., ‘The Comintern, the CPGB, the colonies and black Britons, 1820–1938’, Science and Society (Vol. 60, no. 2, 1996), pp. 137–63.
42.
Makalani, op. cit., p. 185.
43.
Cardiff Coloured Seamen’s Committee, ‘Coloured seamen’s struggle against de-nationalisation memorandum’, Negro Worker (Vol. 5, no. 9, 1935), pp. 10–11.
44.
Jonas, op. cit., p. 325.
45.
File on ‘Treatment of Coloured Seamen on Subsidized Tramp Ships Under British Shipping (assistance) act 1935’, British Library India Office Records, L/E/955, p. 425.
46.
Ibid., p. 441.
47.
‘Future of coloured seamen: what will happen to Cardiff’s 8,000?’, Western Mail (16April1935).
48.
O’ConnellH., ‘Coloured seamen: the meeting with Capt Arthur Evans MP’, Western Mail (3May1935).
49.
‘Future of coloured seamen’, op. cit.
50.
O’Connell, ‘Coloured seamen’, op. cit.
51.
Evans, ‘Regulating the reserve army’, op. cit., p. 70.
52.
Negro Worker (April/May1933), op. cit.
53.
Balachandran, Globalising Labour, op. cit., p. 193.
54.
St Clair Drake, Value Systems, op. cit., p. 497.
55.
In this sense, following Partha Chatterjee’s account of ‘political society’, O’Connell was constructed as only ‘tenuously and contextually’ a rights-bearing citizen. ChatterjeeP., Politics of the Governed (New York, Colombia University Press, 2004).
56.
St Clair Drake, Value Systems, op. cit., p. 433.
57.
Ibid.
58.
Ibid.
59.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, St Clair Drake Papers, 62/5.
60.
DerrickJ., Africa’s ‘Agitators’: militant anti-colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918–1939 (London, Hurst & Company, 2008), p. 404.
61.
AdiSherwood, Pan-African Congress, op. cit., p. 160.
62.
St Clair Drake, Value Systems, op. cit., pp. 401–2.
63.
Jordan, ‘Down the Bay’ op. cit., p. 12.
64.
Western Mail (11July1935).
65.
Harry O’Connell, ‘Black seaman answers white captain’, Daily Worker (13July1935), p. 2.
66.
For an insightful discussion of such relations, see McKittrickK.WoodsC., ‘No one knows the mysteries at the bottom of the ocean’, in their (eds) Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (Cambridge, MA, South End Press, 2007), pp. 1–13.
67.
Files on Welfare of Colonial People in the UK, TNA, CO 859/76/9.
68.
Mid Glamorgan Record Office, P/S CBO 3/210 Friday 18October1935.
69.
Hull History Centre Archives, National Council of Civil Liberties, Minutes of the British Overseas Sub-Committee, DCL 275/1, notes of meeting on 28October1940.
70.
Files on Welfare of Colonial People in the UK, TNA, CO 859/76/9.
71.
Hull History Centre Archives, National Council of Civil Liberties, Minutes of the British Overseas Sub-Committee, op. cit.
72.
Hull History Centre Archives, National Council of Civil Liberties, Minutes of the British Overseas Sub-Committee, DCL 275/1, notes of meeting on 22November1940.
73.
Hansard Written Answers (23January1941), p. 332. This took place in the context of what Hakim Adi has described as ‘many cases of racial discrimination during the war years’ which ‘alienated large sections of the students and other black people in Britain, as well as those in West Africa and the colonies’. AdiH., West Africans in Britain, 1900–1960: nationalism, pan-Africanism and Communism (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1998), p. 91.
74.
See VirdeeS., Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
