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Introduction

About fifty years from now, future historians – in Asia, in Africa and perhaps in England – writing about Europe in the nineteen fifties and sixties will presumably devote a chapter to the coloured minority group in this country. They will say that although this group was small, it was an important, indeed an essential one. For its arrival and growth gave British society an opportunity of recognising its own blind spots, and also of looking beyond its own nose to a widening horizon of human integrity. They will point out that the relations between white and coloured people in this country were a test of Britain’s ability to fulfil the demands for progressive rationality in social organisation, so urgently imposed in the latter half of the twentieth century. And the future historians will add that Britain had every chance of passing this test, because at that period her domestic problems were rather slight by comparison with those of many other areas of the world.

Ruth Glass, Newcomers, 1960¹

The historian seeks to abstract principles from human events. My approach was the other; for the two years that I lived among the documents I sought to reconstruct the human story as best I could.

V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, 1987²

Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art-form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind’s eye. All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.

Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means, 1963³

You jacked in your part-time job digging ditches for the County Council in Mayo, or helping out on your uncle’s small farm in Galway, and bought your ticket for Holyhead. You queued – and queued – in the refugee camp in Germany’s British Occupation Zone, for a place on one of the labour schemes which would bring you to a job in a mill in Bradford, or a mine in Wales. You applied by post to a hospital in Lincolnshire from Kingston, Jamaica, and when the letter of acceptance came you borrowed the fare. You sold your plot of land in Jalandhar in the Indian Punjab and paid the money over to an agent who arranged the ticket and passport which would land you at Heathrow. Unless you were a refugee trying to find a way out of the post-war German camps, and had no home in Poland or Latvia or the Ukraine to go back to, you did not imagine spending more than two, or at the most five, years in Britain. You thought of yourself as a migrant rather than an immigrant. You were prepared to give up day-to-day life at home in order to get the training or earn enough money in England to make home viable again. But you did not return. You became a long-term immigrant, a practised reader of the British psyche, adept at living between two cultures, and an expert in geographical gains and losses.

The refugees and migrants who arrived in Britain in the immediate post-war years had to develop new ways of making sense of their lives. They gave up their everyday immersion in the ordinary world of family, village and small-town life for the sake of a future which they could only dimly imagine. They left familiar environments and, as they disembarked at Tilbury, Southampton, Liverpool or London Airport, instantly became strangers. They were marked as outsiders by their language, accents, clothes, customs and, sometimes, their skin colour. Even fifty and sixty years after their arrival in a still largely mono-cultural Britain it is rare to meet post-war immigrants who feel a straightforward sense of belonging, however happy and successful their lives have been. They will always be from elsewhere.

An immigrant history of post-war Britain is in part a history of foreigners, but of foreigners who have given up their place in their own national history in order to play a role in the history of Britain. When I began this book I intended to write an account of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s from the perspective of the many thousands who moved from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean to power the country’s post-war recovery. I wanted to put the migrants back at the heart of post-war British reconstruction, where they belonged. But I quickly realized that to try to map the stories of immigrants against the established background of British politics and society was to miss something fundamental about migrant experience. Immigrants from Europe and the Commonwealth differed in all sorts of ways but what they shared was the experience of belonging securely neither to the places they had left nor to the place they had chosen to make their home. It was not simply that they lived between two cultures but that they lived in a third space – the limbo of migrant culture. This was a world which grew at the meeting point between the hopes, desires and strategies for survival of the immigrants themselves, and the opportunities made available to them. First-generation immigrants’ lives were circumscribed in all sorts of ways which set them apart from mainstream British culture, and to simply add them in to the story of Britain’s recovery from the war and the boom years of the 1950s would be to miss both what was unique about their experience, and the ways in which they transformed the mainstream.

The world of the post-war immigrant operated in what was not only a geographical but also a temporal limbo. Migrants left home because they wanted a better future, but they mostly imagined that future would be safely back at home, not in Britain. They thought of their present-tense, everyday lives in Camden, Southall, Birmingham or Bradford as a kind of interregnum, a period to be endured or enjoyed because it would make possible a future that was envisaged, as often as not, as a return to a past made viable again. We all plot our lives by projecting ourselves imaginatively into the future, but for those of us who stay in the culture into which we were born, the set of decisions we are called upon to make is relatively contained: this job or that job; this partner or that partner, or no partner at all; this way of life or that one. The decisions made by post-war migrants were similar, but vastly more grand: this world or that world. Living and working inside the domain of the migrant was in part a way of not having to choose. They effectively dwelled in several places at once, and in several time zones. This book is an attempt to describe the migrant worlds which came into being in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the characters who lived in them. And like the migrants themselves, in order to write about them I have had to forgo the reassuring structures of standard national, public narratives and even the established chronology in which the past leads to the present and eventually the future.⁴ The series of miniatures I offer here are close-ups of the disorienting and exhilarating novelty of the metropolis for the rural and small-town migrant, a kaleidoscope of the fragmentary experiences of metropolitan migrant life. But they are also accounts of the ways in which those experiences intersected and began to converge with the main current of British politics and society, and change it in its turn.

What has been called ‘the Windrush generation’ was comprised not only of people from the Caribbean, but also Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Italians, Maltese, Cypriots, Indians and Pakistanis, plus the largest immigrant group, the Irish, who alone arrived at a rate of approximately 40,000 every year during the 1950s. The experiences of those 1950s and 1960s arrivals – those who were to form the vanguard of multi-culturalism – were as varied as the places that they came from. The post-war immigrants came as refugees, as economic migrants and, in the case of the ‘European Voluntary Workers’ – who were shipped in to man essential industries in the late 1940s – as something between the two. Forced labourers, victims of concentration camps, former prisoners of war, the millions displaced by the redrawing of boundaries in Eastern Europe – by the end of the war there were nearly 7 million displaced people in Germany alone, all searching for a place of greater safety. These were white Europeans, stranded in the heart of Europe. Yet the history of their resettlement – and deportation – does not easily dovetail with the comforting story Britain likes to tell itself of compassion and concern for the victims of war. For despite the work of the international relief agencies, the acceptance of refugees in Western Europe and the United States was rarely powered by humanitarian concerns. The vast bureaucratic machine developed to decide who would be sent back, and who welcomed, operated according to a kind of hierarchy of need. Just as refugees arriving in Greece today are advised to get rid of their Iraqi passports so they can claim to be Syrians, in order to access help more quickly, so Ukrainians pretended to be Poles, and everyone tried to claim Latvian or Estonian nationality, hoping for better treatment. In the end, however, the needs of the refugees were neither here nor there beside the needs of the countries offering refuge. People were accepted in so far as they would be useful to the economies of Britain, Belgium, France and the United States. In effect, asylum seekers were turned into economic migrants. Those who had skills were welcomed, so long as they were healthy. Those most in need (the old, the sick) were left behind.

Governments were wary of the refugees, and popular opinion was often fiercely antagonistic to the displaced. In fact, the bitter post-war arguments about how, or indeed whether, to share out the depleted resources of a near-bankrupt Britain formed one model for attempts to differentiate between ‘genuine’ refugees and economic migrants, in effect to grade the most and least deserving. Ironically, however, those deemed to be driven by work-hunger were favoured over the most desperate and broken refugees. For although Britain – together with the rest of Europe – was going through a period of crippling austerity in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was also in desperate need of labour. And it was primarily for this reason that the new settlers from Europe and the former colonies were tolerated, and in some cases even encouraged.

As the migrants arrived, destined in the main for low paid, unskilled work, so others left. Throughout the late 1940s very large numbers of Britons packed the trains out of London, and the boats out of Liverpool and Southampton, intent on making the move to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In 1947 Winston Churchill blamed two years of socialist rule for the fact that ‘half-a-million of our … most lively and active citizens in the prime of life’ had applied to emigrate. ‘We cannot spare you … at a time when we are scouring Europe for 20,000 or 30,000 or more of unfortunate displaced persons of the great war to come in and swell our labour force.’ Nonetheless, they kept on going. Over 650,000 people left Britain, mainly heading for the white Commonwealth countries, during the 1950s. All over the world, people were looking for a better break.⁵

All this coming and going – especially the going – did not sit well with the image of a proud island nation rebuilding domestic life after the chaos of war. The rhetoric of the new Labour government put across the idea of the war as, among other things, an interruption in family life. The conflict had accustomed men and women across the globe to huge displacements, not only of refugees but of members of the armed forces: British, Nigerian and Indian troops fighting in Burma, for example; GIs in Europe and the Far East; Italian prisoners of war in Scotland. But the end of the war was supposed to mean the end of disorder and disruption – the return home to Britain captured in images of demobbed soldiers being greeted by waiting wives and children waving flags proclaiming victory, in front of terraced houses and pre-fabs which stood for a frugal and prudent security. For these were to be family homes re-made for the post-war world. The determination never to return to the poverty and unemployment of the 1930s was to require collective effort and sacrifice – rationing was tightened, and shortages of food and fuel increased in the two years after the war – but the rewards would be legion. Full employment, the ‘social’ wage, welfare reforms in education and health, an end to sub-standard housing – home was to be a place of comfort and refuge in a state which properly looked after its own.

‘Really, they’re just like us, they want a home of their own’, read the pamphlets distributed to local residents to reconcile them to the several thousand Poles billeted in former army camps near Bedford and Leicester in 1946 and 1947.⁶ It was an attempt to domesticate the aliens, and in the long run, as intermarriage became more common and social contacts increased, it worked. But all the talk of house and home masked the real nature of the social transformation which was under way. Although its imperial power was waning rapidly, Britain lay at the centre of a network of international relations that worked themselves out not only at the level of high politics but of everyday experience. The international character of everyday life was no longer limited for most people to admiring the ‘red bits’ on the map of the world, which signalled the king’s imperial dominion, or to the availability of bananas, oranges and cloves – not to mention tea and sugar – in the shops. For a start, many of the men returning from war brought with them a familiarity with (and in some cases an understandable resentment of) far-off places and cultures which they would never have encountered otherwise. The legacy of war, and the beginnings of the Cold War, took physical shape in the thousands of ‘displaced persons’ unable or unwilling to return home to Soviet-occupied Europe. For the majority of Britons too, the shrinking Empire meant not less but more contact with elsewhere. Naturally, the overwhelming impact of Independence for India and Pakistan in 1947 lay in the region itself, where vast and violent population movements quickly transformed the social and political geography of the two states. But over the next fifteen years the effects would also be felt in London, Leeds and Birmingham as Mirpuris, Punjabis and Sylhetis all sought their livelihoods in Britain. The desperate search for wages by people living in rural poverty in southern Italy, Cyprus, Ireland and the Caribbean all meant the collapse of the boundaries between here and elsewhere.

It was true that the post-war migrants were ‘just like us’. They wanted homes, a secure livelihood, and a brighter future. Their desires were in many ways minimal, as the title of a 1957 study of West Indians newly arrived in London put it: ‘They seek a living’.⁷ Yet what has struck me most forcibly while writing this book is the disappearance, buried under all the rhetoric, of any sense of the migrants as ordinary people, the near-universal contemporary focus on them as unlike us, as strangers, aliens and outsiders.

Histories of post-war Britain, and more detailed studies of immigration, have focused obsessively on two or three aspects of the story: the initial, distrustful, encounter with the strangers on their arrival in the late 1940s; the rise in ethnic tensions, culminating in racially motivated riots in 1958; and the subsequent development of restrictive racial legislation intended to curb immigration of non-whites. This focus cannot be separated from the tendency among contemporary historians to interpret post-war British social history through a framework set out for them by post-war British politicians – through the lenses of the Cold War, political consensus, austerity and affluence, the rise of welfarism, the growth of youth culture and the demise of deference. In this story about never-having-had-it-so-good the migrant appears incidentally, and always in the context of black–white race relations. Despite the work of oral historians we have ended up with a largely ‘public history’, emphasizing the politics of racial prejudice, assimilation, integration, multi-culturalism and, most recently, the failure of multi-culturalism.

The story of post-war immigration is indeed in part a story about race. The account I offer here begins in the late 1940s, as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation operations were being wound up in Europe, and the newly formed NHS began seeking Continental, Irish and, later, Caribbean workers. It ends in 1968, a landmark year, when the Labour government under Harold Wilson effectively ended the right of Commonwealth citizens to enter Britain by pushing through emergency legislation (in three days) limiting entry to those with a parent or grandparent born here. By the late 1960s the immigration debate had become limited to a debate about race, and colour, whether articulated by Enoch Powell, the Race Relations Board, or the British Black Panthers, in ways which would have been inconceivable twenty years before.

This political and legislative history clearly formed part of the way that migrants lived their lives. Legal milestones, such as the 1948 British Nationality Act, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 and the 1965 Race Relations legislation, transformed everyday life, at what must have felt like the stroke of a pen. Domestic political issues also intervened, such as trade union struggles to maintain control over the shop floor and to bar immigrant labour, the growth of far-right groups and the Notting Hill riots, the 1964 Smethwick election result, which saw a safe Labour seat overturned by the Conservative Peter Griffiths, who ran on an explicitly anti-immigration ticket, or the rise of Enoch Powell. These all had real-life, and sometimes catastrophic, effects. But whether written from a sympathetic standpoint or not, the political history – and its social impact – tend to overshadow what migration might actually have felt like for those concerned.

Many of the popular assumptions about the lives of migrants get us no closer. It is only partly true, for example, that immigrants took the jobs that British people, basking in the new affluence of the later 1950s, did not want. That suggests a natural process, but what really happened was anything but natural. More often the mechanization of factories in the drive towards greater productivity created new, entirely unskilled labouring jobs. People were needed to heft coal and iron ore around the foundries, to back up men working the modern machines, and the unions fought bitter battles to ensure that immigrant workers were kept out of the better paid grades. Or take another common-sense assumption: that as the years passed, immigrants from the Caribbean and Asia became more assimilated into British culture. Again this is only partly true. For the first settlers from Sylhet and the Punjab, for example, it was common to have relationships with English women, and dietary and religious customs were often ignored by young men fitting themselves into Western culture as best they could. But perhaps the most striking thing about the people who came in the 1950s was that most of them didn’t think of themselves as immigrants at all. As they did not plan on settling permanently, the question of assimilation did not arise. The clash between British political rhetoric about the immigrant problem and the immigrants’ own experience could not have been greater.

Writing in 1960, in the immediate aftermath of the Notting Hill riots, the sociologist Ruth Glass – acutely conscious of the steadily rising tide of racial prejudice – noted ruefully how it could all have been so different. Precisely because Britain had escaped the devastation visited on much of the rest of Europe, because the economy quite quickly recovered and set in train the industrial boom of the 1950s, because manpower was needed, and because the migrants worked hard, there was no rationale for the panic over resources, and the suspicion of the newcomers made no sense. With so little economic foundation the crisis could have been avoided, if only people had been prepared to see things differently. This question of perspective – what the West Indian novelist and migrant George Lamming called alternative ‘ways of seeing’ – has been fundamental to the conception of this book. Beyond the calculation of economic costs and benefits, Glass argued that the post-war migrants were necessary to Britain because they provided an opportunity for reflection. Through the eyes of strangers Britons could look at themselves. They could see themselves from the point of view of others, and even attempt to live up to outsiders’ expectations. It was a test of the values and organization of British society, and society – in large part – failed the test. As she puts it, Britons remained trapped by their own very limited perspectives, accepted their blind spots, and failed to look beyond their noses and take a broader outlook in which refugees and migrants – whatever their colour – could be welcomed into an expanding and thriving democracy.

Can hindsight offer a clearer perspective on those uncomprehending looks, and allow us to look not at but through the eyes of the stranger? It should be clear from these remarks that my interest in this book is in what V. S. Naipaul calls ‘the human story’, although my aim is to tell that story in tandem with the political history of post-war migration, and to investigate the multiple, local, immigrant worlds created both by the movement of European refugees and economic migrants, and the arrival of people from non-European former colonies. Naipaul’s remark is embedded in a fictionalized memoir in which he reflects on the moment in 1950 when he arrived in London, an eighteen-year-old migrant from Trinidad, en route to Oxford, and bent on a career as a writer. As he gives his account more than forty years later, he berates his former self for searching for a ‘grand’ subject which would measure up to his expectations of England, and for ignoring the people he encountered every day, people who were at once too ordinary, and too strange. He regrets his ‘way of looking’:

The flotsam of Europe not long after the end of the terrible war, in a London house that was now too big for the people it sheltered – that was the true material of the boarding house. But I didn’t see it … and in the Earl’s Court boarding house, as fellow guests or as friends of Angela’s, there were at least ten or twelve drifters from many countries of Europe and North Africa … men and women, some of whom had seen terrible things during the war and were now becalmed and quiet in London, solitary, foreign, sometimes idle, sometimes half-criminal. These people’s principal possessions were their stories, and their stories spilled easily out of them. But I noted nothing down. I asked no questions. I took them all for granted, looked beyond them; and their faces, clothes, names, accents have vanished and cannot now be recalled.⁸

Recovering those stories, the local narratives which have become buried under the larger political history, has involved a process of excavation combined with something more like ‘misreading’, or ‘reading from the inside out’. As far as possible I have tried to narrate the history of migrants’ and refugees’ encounters with Britain through the experience of the immigrants themselves, and through contemporary accounts of that experience: contemporary interviews, articles and letters in the local and community press; manifestos; short stories; autobiographies; political essays; as well oral poetry and folk songs ranging from Irish ballads to Trinidadian calypso, Punjabi qisse and bhangra lyrics. Some migrant communities are undoubtedly better served than others by this form of documentation. The first wave of post-war Caribbean migration included significant numbers of well-educated men and women, many on university scholarships, who were eager to turn their hands to all sorts of writing, whether for local papers, the Caribbean programmes on the World Service, or for more political and intellectual movements: the Caribbean Artists Movement, New Left Review, or the movement for a West Indian Federation. Polish, Cypriot, Italian or Maltese migrants lacked any kind of comparable cultural scene, yet, for example, letters sent by recent Italian immigrants to the newspaper of the Italian mission, asking whether dating a non-Catholic was permitted, or whether it was possible to get married by phone, offer some insights into the world of those first arrivals. And some excavation has taken me further afield. Punjabi letters, articles and short stories about the experience of migration were published in newspapers in India and Pakistan in the early post-war years, before several newspapers were founded in Southall and the Midlands in the mid-1960s that offered further outlets to a growing circle of short-story writers and essayists.

Letters and stories like these can take us back to the post-war smog, the overcrowded lodging houses, the cafés selling dried eggs and spam alongside curry and Indian sweets, the bombed areas and construction sites, the prostitution rackets and greyhound race tracks and, perhaps most alien of all to us now, the networks of small engineering firms, foundries, rubber factories, family owned mills, sweat shops and manufacturing concerns which were dotted throughout industrial cities in the 1950s and 1960s. Rural immigrants, so often described as ‘pre-modern’ or savage outliers to industrial society, not only lived in the negative underside of the new suburban affluence, they also powered it – building the roads, cars and goods which made English suburban lives possible.

But this writing needs to be set alongside official and quasi-official documents – the records of police constabularies investigating ‘coloured’ crime, reports of interracial tension inside government hostels, statements by police and the judiciary on the Notting Hill riots, parliamentary debates on immigration and race relations legislation, ethnographic and sociological surveys of attitudes to race in relation to the housing crisis, and employment. It is here that ‘misreading’ comes in to play. For these documents are saturated with stereotypes of migrants, both ethnic and racial; they are absolutely confident about migrants’ ‘unlikeness’ to the home-spun British, despite a superficial (and sometimes deep) commitment to integration and inclusion. These records offer plenty of insight into and information about attitudes towards the newcomers. They are eloquent when it comes to blind spots. But in order to tell us anything about the immigrants themselves they need to be held up before a mirror, and interpreted for what they tell us but do not say.

The principal problem with these documents for the historian of migrant experience is that they approach the problem (and it is nearly always as a problem) from the perspective of ‘us’, discussing ‘them’. And what is striking is that, however positive the take, this perspective has carried through into more recent histories: for example, accounts of the influence of traditional Irish music on the folk revival and 1960s counter-cultural movements, of Caribbean music and style on the mods, of Sylheti cooks on British cuisine. It is not that these influences, and confluences, are not interesting. They are. But they crowd out the story told from the perspective of the new arrival, which is rarely about what they bring to others but about what they gain – and lose – for themselves. The stories spilling out of those European and North African ‘drifters’ encountered by Naipaul were about their pasts, their families and the homes they had left behind. In this, of course, the migrants were indeed ‘just like us’. They were undergoing the universal experience of being cut off from the past, but with far greater intensity. My focus is on the people who came to Britain during the relatively short-lived period of the Commonwealth ‘open door’, rather than on the hyphenated identities of their Black-British, Polish-Irish, or Asian-British children. Unlike today’s immigrants, these frontiersmen arrived into almost entirely mono-cultural communities; of necessity theirs were pioneer settlements. The vast distances, the cost of transport, the unavailability of things we take for granted, such as phones, all meant that for most migrants home was irrevocably lost, and thus reinvented. These were international journeys, but they were emphatically not taking place in the global village. And ‘just like us’, their lives in Britain were oriented towards an uncertain future.

In attempting to do justice to the migrants’ post-war present, I have shaped this history around various characters – the lover, the scrounger, the troublemaker, the broadcaster, the bachelor, the dancer – which I try to interpret from both sides, from the perspective of the ordinary British person looking from outside in, and from that of the ordinary migrant, looking from inside out. My cast of characters is by no means comprehensive. Many facets of migrants’ professional, religious and domestic lives are touched on only lightly here. But I offer this shifting kaleidoscope as a counterbalance to the tendency to see the history of post-war immigration in monochrome, as primarily a story of the relationship between black and white. Whenever I lost the thread I found myself returning to the wonderful passage which opens Muriel Spark’s novel The Girls of Slender Means, where she paints a portrait of the poverty and destruction of post-war London. This never failed to remind me of two things: first that, cushioned or not by wealth, everyone experienced the same post-war Britain; everyone was us in that present of the 1940s and 1950s, wherever they had come from. And, secondly, that dismantling the wall between inside and outside, although it may make unusual demands on the mind’s eye, can bring into focus a new understanding of the vernacular. How did the fabric of the blitzed city, what Spark calls a new art form, work its way through the fabric of people’s lives, and how might we begin to read the fabric of post-war experience through those new urban art forms – the buildings, the documents, the reports, the stories and the songs that migrants and their hosts wrote about each other? The story is not of immigrants as ‘dark strangers’, or, still less, ‘bloody foreigners’, but of the lives lived and imagined by immigrants themselves. Put bluntly, not how did they appear to the British but what did the British, those white strangers, look like to them?

Clair Wills

LOVERS AND STRANGERS

An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain

PENGUIN BOOKS

Introduction

Part One

FUTURES