Black People in Britain: Response and Reaction, 1945-62
History Today
Volume 36, Issue 1 (January 1986)
Paul B. Rich
Paul Rich argues that while the official response to post-war immigration was slow to develop, the tensions and white backlash of the late fifties marked its emergence as a national political issue.
The Settlers from the West Indies and South Asia who arrived in Britain from the late 1940s up to the 1960s found a society remarkably unprepared for their incorporation into its elaborate class and cultural networks. Almost from the very start of this post-war migration, when the SS Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in June 1948 with 492 passengers from the West Indies, there was a mixture in governmental circles of either panic and fear of impending racial conflict or a more detached dismissal of the whole issue as a storm in a teacup. One Home Office civil servant minuted for example that ‘sooner or later action must be taken to keep out the undesirable elements of our colonial population’, for otherwise their presence in Britain would present ‘a formidable problem’ to the various government departments concerned, such as the Home Office, the Colonial Office and the Ministry of Labour. Some government ministers, including the Prime Minister Clement Attlee, refused to take the ‘Jamaican party’ to the United Kingdom ‘too seriously’, though the worry in official circles continued to increase over the following years. It was pointed out, however, to the Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, as early as 1948 that any attempt by legislation to restrict this immigration would have to come from Britain itself rather than in the Colonial context, since otherwise there would be massive opportunities for evasion. ‘In the case of Jamaica’, some ministerial notes pointed out, ‘the next country would be Cuba, and obviously we cannot control the Government of Cuba’…
…The local councils of social service up and down the country approached the area of black immigration with a very limited fund of experience. The ideal of ‘social service’ had quite a long tradition in British philanthropy and can be traced to the rise of a secularised Anglican conscience at the end of the nineteenth century centred around the notion of ‘duty’. The National Council of Social Service was established in 1919 and had developed the notion of ‘community service’ in the inter-war years in response to growing patterns of sub-urbanisation around housing estates. Local councils of social service had concerned themselves with local community centres, clubs for the unemployed and rural community councils in villages. They had not been concerned with ‘multi-racial” issues, which had been mainly confined to the seaport towns where, in Liverpool for example, the local university settlement had got involved in the issue in the late 1920s and 1930s through the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children. Other issues surrounding colour like the problems confronting black students in Britain, had been taken up either by activist bodies like the West African Students Union (WASU) in London, run by a Nigerian, Ladipo Solanke, or the various universities concerned. In addition, the Colonial Office had taken a welfare interest in students during the war years through fear of rising colonial nationalism, but by the early 1950s had devolved its responsibility in this sphere to the British Council. In the early 1950s, therefore, the councils of social service approached the issue of post-war black immigration with few clear guidelines and tended to resort to whatever ‘expert’ advice there was available – whether from missionaries with a colonial experience of race, a small number of interested social workers or social anthropologists and sociologists who were by this time becoming interested in the new subject area of ‘race relations’…
…This association of the black presence with moral decline became to some extent popularised through the popular media, such as the 1959 film Sapphire which still linked the mixed race ‘half-caste’ with prostitution and the underworld (though the film did contain many useful documentary aspects which pointed out the social diversity of the immigrants and the problems of white racism). The National Council of Social Service tried to defend the immigrants, especially the West Indians, from charges of ‘loose living’ in its circular, Nacoss News, but nevertheless admitted ‘of all the possible causes of difficulty and tension… differences of outlook and ways of living remain the most intractable’, and noted the charges of some whites of ‘the noisy social habits’ of some immigrants. ‘Race relations’ began to become a serious industry as growing ties were forged with the newly established Institute of Race Relations in London, which had hived off from the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1958 under the Directorship of Philip Mason and developed a British interest as well as a wider international one. The recognition, though, that social work and the easing of racial tensions in many inner cities required increasingly specialised expertise which the older generation of voluntary workers in the local councils of social service did not possess, encouraged a climate favouring immigration control in order that resources could be geared to coping with those immigrants who had already settled in Britain. There was, therefore, a concern about the ability of the social services to maintain an adequate level of social control in the inner city areas which enhanced the back-bench Conservative and constituency pressure by 1960 in favour of legislative restriction. After years of resisting these appeals through fear of antagonising opinion in the West Indies and India, the Conservative government finally decided to introduce a bill in the Autumn of 1961. Speaking in support of the measure, the Home Secretary, R.A. Butler, noted that the essence of the bill was ‘control’, for the voluntary sector could ‘deal with limited numbers only, and, if the numbers of new entrants are excessive, their assimilation into our society presents the gravest difficulty’.
The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act thus reflected an important new government determination to intervene in the area of Commonwealth immigration and initiate a measure of restriction on the numbers of black immigrants. There had been previous measures before the First World War to control alien immigration through the 1905 and 1914 Alien Acts, and in 1925 the Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order had been passed to restrict the entry of black ‘alien’ seamen, some of whom claimed British citizenship but were unable to produce the necessary documentation. But there had traditionally been powerful political pressures inhibiting the restriction of Commonwealth immigrants, and it was this concern for the Commonwealth connection which the 1962 Act overrode. Initiating a new pattern of restriction of immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia, the legislation in some respects brought Britain, as the former imperial mother country, into line with her more racially conscious colonial daughters. Restriction of black immigration had first been initiated in Australia and New Zealand in 1901 to exclude Asian and Chinese immigrants and prevent competition with white labour. Based on an education test developed in Natal, these restrictions had been initiated in a militant climate of racial Anglo-Saxonism and belief in the inherent superiority of white racial stocks. The supporters of the 1962 legislation (apart from an extreme right-wing fringe) desisted from justifying it in such terms, but the measure did nevertheless echo some of the previous patterns of restriction in the white dominions, even though the criterion of admittance was through a voucher system gearing the numbers of likely ‘newcomers’ to the likely number of jobs available for them…
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