1910-1939 Mixed Britannia

When I first met Nicky, I just saw this beautiful woman with these

great big brown gorgeous eyes. She was coming home from work and I put

a lot of candles out in the lounge, and she came in and I got down on

my knees and I said, I love you, will you marry me. This is Nicky

Mehta's big day. The vivacious 34 year-old is getting married to

Nicholas Tegg. He is the nervous- looking one waiting in Coventry

registry office. They are one of thousands of mixed-race couples to

get married each year. He is definitely my soulmate. I can't

wait to spend the rest of my life with him. I'm here because this

wedding symbolises one of the truly great changes in British life. Once,

and it's not so long ago, such a relationship would leave you

It now gives me the greatest of pleasure to announce that you are

husband-and-wife. Would you like to seal it with a kiss?

British marriages are changing. They are no longer about bringing

two people together, quite often it is a mingling of two cultures. The

in-laws have not just come from another part of the country. Quite

often they might have started their journey in another part of the

world. 100 years ago, it took far less than a marriage to have the

fingers wagging. If you danced with a black man you were discriminated

against, because people didn't like it. The boys didn't like it, the

girls didn't like it. They came to the front door and said, where is

he? Where is the ligger? And she said, he's not here, so they

slapped my grandmother. Yet, through it all, mixed-race

communities have not just survived, they have flourished. We had seen

half of the picture of Shirley Temple, but we had to race home on

Well, they measured our heads like that and like that. And colour of

eyes and noted our complexion. Britain we have today, vibrant and

mixed, would not have been possible were it not for the brave couples

who fell in love in a much colder racial climate. I stopped and asked

this boy the way to Queen Street and he said I was losing my way to

the docks, and we started talking and I think we fell in love there

and then. One in 10 children in this country now lives in a mixed-

race family, and mixed race people are becoming one of the fastest-

growing ethnic minorities. Born in Sri Lanka, I met and married an

Englishwoman. This is our story, but it is also the history of our

Francis and I met at university and that was over 30 years ago. And I'm

not sure that we ever talked about colour or anything like that. I

think when he got married we were aware of a sort of meeting of

cultures. You can see that in the We've got two sons, Adam and

The recent history of mixed race Britain starts in port towns like

this one in South Shields. True, there were Africans in Britain

since the time of the Romans. Asians settled on the shores in the

1600s, and of course, there were freed slaves, but it is not really

until the turn of the last century that mixed-race communities, small

as they were, began to shape our collective history. Trade was the

great magnetic force, a booming economy based on coal and ships

sucked in workers from the Empire. Our ports, London, Liverpool and

Cardiff, and others, resounded with foreign tongues. In South Shields

there were Arab seamen from Aden, today's Yemen, recruited by the

Merchant Navy. As residents of the British Empire and its

protectorates, they were entitled They would spend months at sea,

stoking the fires of commerce When they came ashore, these men

were put into lodgings run by the private shipping companies. In 1909,

some of the men lived here in the Leigate district in what were then

boarding houses. It wasn't that they wanted to live separately,

they didn't really have a choice. The seamen were not actually

The reason? The age-old fear that this army of single men thousands

of miles away from their families would look for company and more

This is one of the last boarding houses that remain in South Shields.

Friends still meet to talk over the If it didn't have one household

where there was one married, they would stay at a bed and breakfast,

so they used to call them boarding houses and people used to meet

their as well. It wasn't just a bed and breakfast, it was like a little

community cafe as well. You have to remember they were not allowed to

go in English cafes. Were they not? Not when they first came. They

couldn't go in there or a tea shop, so they had to set their own place

up where they could meet. For years, the segregated groups of foreign

workers were too small to have any great impact, but that would change.

When Britain went to war in 1914, it needed sailors, lots of them, to

work on its merchant ships and the Empire was the obvious pool of

labour. With German U-boats picking off our ships and threatening the

British supply chain, these men played a vital part in the war

They are growing in numbers. Some of them would work in factories,

but they would arrive in ports like London, Cardiff, Liverpool and they

increased from a few hundred to a few thousand. It became ever more

difficult to prevent social mingling, and British women, who

played their part in the war effort no longer fitted the demure

stereotype. I think it transformed women's lives, because they had to

take on jobs that had been designated as jobs for men. Women

across the class from upper-class women who previously had been

chaperoned everywhere, the younger women, through to working-class

women, took on all sorts of work. They were tram drivers, road

sweepers. They went out and about, they went to pubs, they went to the

cinema. They learned a lot not just about themselves, but also about

sexuality and birth control, about things that were previously taboo

for many of these women. And then relationships start happening

between these foreign men and the white women. Why is that? Well, the

white women have not got the usual white men to have relations with,

and they found a lot of these black and Asian and Chinese men very

attractive, not least because they are different, they often are very

generous with money. Some of them come onshore with money to burn and

are kind. A lot of them talk about how kind these men are, relative to

the men they are used to. So they start having relationships with

So, by the end of the war, many of these men decide to stay. In ports,

you see the beginning of mixed-race communities, no longer isolated

individuals, but families with local roots. There were now perhaps

20,000 men from the Caribbean, the Imagine what it was like for the

Tommies returning home. They found new neighbours and things seemed

strange, including the women they had left behind. It goes up from

fivefold from 1913 to 1919. They just find they are not speaking the

same language, so they feel the gulf, that these women are kind of

alien and the women, I think, resent the men and resent the fact

that they want to go back to some status quo pre-war in which they

got to be the good little woman in the home, or whatever. So they say

You couldn't turn the clock back. Jobs were scarce. These war-weary

men were bristling with resentment and then they see their women with

foreigners. It is enough to tip them over the edge. In 1919,

rioting broke out in the port areas around Glasgow and spread to South

You've got to imagine hundreds of seamen here on the dockside, the

whites easily outnumbering the Arabs. Both sides had guns, bottles,

Most of the firing was into the air. Nobody actually got shot, but both

groups threw their missiles at each other. A local woman called Dora

Sharp who worked in one of the boarding houses was a witness to

the violence. In court, she spoke up for some of the Yemenis saying

she had seen a white man pointing a gun at an Arab in the heat of the

right. Magnificently she declared, I wouldn't leave the Arab house for

20 of you. I'm probably going to marry one of them tomorrow. Happy

days! The riots spread to Cardiff, another port city that had changed.

Before the war, there had been about 700 foreign seamen in the

city. By 1919, there were 3,000. One summer's evening a group of

these foreign men and their white girlfriends were travelling home

after a day out. It was like a challenge to local masculinity.

White men threw insults and then stones. It was the spark that lit

the Cardiff tinderbox. Within hours, violent disorder spread across the

city. The white mob split up into gangs and roamed the city,

attacking black and Arab men. Even On the day of the riot, one of the

neighbours ran to the front door and knocked the door and say to you

better get Joe out of there because they are coming to get him. Neil

Sinclair's grandmother was Agnes Jolly. She lived in Somerset Street

with a West Indian husband Joe Hedley and their eight-year-old

daughter, Beatrice, who passed the story on to her son, Neil.

grandfather didn't want to leave the house and leave his wife and

child alone, but Agnes Jolly said, they are after you, so get out. He

went out of the back garden wall Apparently there were 1,000 white

men in the street. They came to the front door and started banging on

the front door, so my grandmother and my mother went upstairs to the

landing and they could see the shadows and the lights as men broke

in through the front door. And then men just ran into the downstairs

and into every room and started to ransack the hall. So eventually

they got up to my grandmother and were saying, where is he? Where is

the ligger? She said, he's not here, so they slapped my grandmother.

They left and then my mother said her mother was very distraught,

because all her little china ornaments and knick-knacks in her

cosy home had been wrecked. Police came the following day and they

said to my grandmother it was her It is impossible to be certain, but

something like 15,000 people were involved in the riots in 1919. They

affected not just South Shields and Cardiff, but London, Barry, Newport

and Hull. In all, five people were killed and they have gone down as a

landmark in the history of mixed race Britain. You see, whatever the

wider social and economic problems of the time, it was the sight of

foreign men with white women that A letter appeared in The Times

shortly afterwards. Just listen to this. "Intimate association between

black or coloured men and white women is a thing of horror. It's an

instinctive certainty that sexual relations between white women and

coloured men revolt our very "What blame," it goes on to say,

"to those white men who, seeing these conditions and loathing them,

I think there was deep resentment and they felt not simply that these

men were taking their women, but they were taking their jobs. In

fact, that wasn't true. Actually, after the war, there was higher

unemployment amongst black men and Chinese men than white men. So the

definers of working class masculinity, which is linked to the

ab ility to get a job, the ability to get a woman, that is really

being challenged. In direct response to the riots, the

authorities resorted to some stringent legal measures. Laws

designed to restrict German nationals during the war now

covered all foreign seamen. It would limit their movements,

subject them to curfew, control employment and last for decades. In

You have to understand, in those days it must have been hard for the

British to accept mixed marriages. We used to say foreign devils in

those days. They didn't understand Chinese ways and Chinese customs.

Just a foreigner come to England to Doreen and Lynne's father Stanley

Ah Foo came to Liverpool back in 1912. Back then there were roughly

1,200 Chinese men in the city. He fell in love with and married their

mother Emily. Stanley's job on the steam ships took him away for long

periods of time. But when he returned, he was king of the

kitchen. Dad was a marvellous cook. Yeah, he was a good cook. And it

was lovely when he came home because we had the Chinese food.

Although my mother learned to cook Chinese. But my dad was special.

His cooking was really good. Doreen, when he was back home, what was he

like? He was always playing tricks on us. He was quite jolly. Very

jolly. He'd sort of flick your hair when you were walking past. He'd

jump out. We'd have real fun with him, yeah. Is that your memory of

childhood then? Yeah, happy. It was a very happy childhood. It was

Their carefree home life was a contrast to the restrictions that

Stanley faced when he stepped outdoors. Ever since the 1919 riots,

Stanley, like all foreign seamen, had had to register with the police

and carry an ID card bearing a Even Emily was not immune from this

humiliation. An early nationality law had a rather vicious sting in

its tail. Every inch an Englishwoman, once she had married

Stanley she lost her British Well, when my mum married my dad,

she became an alien. Your mum, who was British? Yes, she was an alien.

Here's a book that will tell you. That's my mum's. Once she married

my father, she was an alien. Looking back at the thought of your

mum, British born and bred, having to go and register, what do you

think of it now? I think it was disgusting, really. She was born

and bred in England. She was English, white. So why should she,

because she married an alien, have The law was applied differently

around the country. Liverpool had a curfew, and men had to report to

Incredibly, these restrictions remained on the statute books until

Doreen and Lynn remember the day when even watching a film was

interrupted by the curfew. We'd gone before the curfew and we'd

seen half the picture of Shirley Temple. And they suddenly realised,

my dad and his friend, it's 8pm, we'll have to go now. It was

disappointing, because we didn't see the end of the film. We had to

Despite the rules and regulations, mixed communities in port towns

The Yemeni enclave in South Shields, Norman and Maureen Kaier have been

married for 37 years. They are both second-generation mixed-race

Yemenis, though you'd be hard pushed to tell in Maureen's case.

Both have Yemeni grandfather's who came to South Shields. Maureen

remembers how hard the Yemeni men tried to fit in. I know when they

came here they were very smart. When they changed clothes, they had

to be very, very smart. They wanted to try and be like the English

people. They wanted to blend in. You always seen them in a trilby

hat. Lovely, immaculate shoes. Waistcoats. And it was all to help

them to blend in, so that they didn't stand out. And they were

One of these men was Norman's grandfather Mohamed Hussan. He

married Elizabeth Taylor, a Geordie. Their love affair was all the more

incredible given what was happening all around them. It would have been

very difficult for them because if you were in a mixed marriage, you

were called some dreadful names. You were classed as a prostitute.

Women were known to have been spat on in the street and verbally

South Shields was by no means unique. Prejudice towards mixed-

In London's Docklands, home to 700 Chinese people, intolerance coupled

with ignorance made for some dark Connie grew up in London's

Limehouse, the capital's original Chinatown. If you look at the

literature of the time, they talk about Chinatown. It was an opium

den and there were nightclubs and there were strange things going on.

You're laughing at me. Well, I used to read these rubbishy books when I

was in my teens. And I used to go to piano lessons and I used to have

to walk down these narrow turnings. And I used to look for the mist

rising from the river. And these earthy people standing in the

doorways. But I never ever found them. It was all fiction, was it?

Yes, yes. It must have been weird, as a teenager growing up in

Chinatown, reading these books about starlets coming, about drugs

and so on. But you're saying it just didn't happen like that?

we were just ordinary kids looking for a job after we left school,

No matter. Chinatown still attracted those with a taste for

the illicit. The opium dens and gaming houses, whether real or

imagined. Writers and film-makers made for Chinatown, drawn to the

exotic and forbidden possibilities In 1919, the American film director

DW Griffith's interest was aroused after reading a story, The Chink

And The Child, taken from Thomas This tale of love between an opium

smoking Chinaman and a teenage white girl was initially banned by

WH Smith refused to stock it because they felt it was salacious

In his film version, Broken Blossoms, Griffith had to work

around the unwritten rule that they could never be any kind of physical

When the film was released here in 1920, the Birmingham Mail received

a letter from a female reader in Edgbaston written, it's said, on

behalf of herself and her friends. She described the film as nothing

but the lowest type of sordid drama and she was particularly horrifying

that the hero of the film was a Chinaman and the villain, an

But two white women married to Chinese men wrote to the Daily

Graphic challenging this type of prejudice.

"We women dare not take our children out because people point

to us and laugh. And please remember these half-castes, as they

call them, are well fed, well clothed little kiddies who are as

good as most and better than many This film Broken Blossoms painted

quite a kind relationship between a Chinese man and a white, very young

woman. Was that real, did you think? Yes, but it was quite normal

in Limehouse. You didn't think it was controversial at all? No, no. I

think the Chinese liked the British In 1924, there were signs that

official attitudes towards the Chinese were hardening. They were

added to a list of nationalities to be avoided by potential brides.

Marriage registrars were supposed to warn women that some of the men

might be bigamists and not trustworthy. The original list

drawn up in 1913 by the Colonial Office, already include Hindus,

And pretty soon, the Home Office would join in, complaining that the

Chinese men were being far too choosy. Just listen to this.

"It is such a pity that a Chinaman is fastidious. He will not take a

battered old prostitute of the sea port, but want something young,

attractive. Above all, clean and free from venereal disease." Now,

even if you allow for the stilted, official language of the day, it's

All this in an age of inventiveness. The wireless and the flying machine

with their potential for shrinking the world were breaking through old

boundaries. Science seem to have the answer to all questions, even

Before long, the thoroughly scientific sounding British

Eugenics Society developed a controversial theory. It ran like

this. If the poorest classes could be discouraged from breeding, the

sum total of intelligence and virtue in the country would

increase. Eugenics saw itself as a new science for human advancement.

Influential writers like HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, cabinet

ministers like Winston Churchill, they all thought it would save

Britain from moral and physical decline. There were similar

movements in America and Scandinavia. And in Germany, there

was the charmingly named Racial At a meeting in London in 1919, the

chairman of the British Society, Leonard Darwin, son of Charles,

announced that they would also look "What is urgently needed," he said,

"is a thorough scientific study of the mental and physical

characteristics of mixed races". Mrs Sybil Gotto, the society's

general secretary at the time, agreed saying, "Although I'm quite

ready to look upon the coloured races as our brothers, I do not

want to look upon them as our The inference, of course, was that

they were inferior. If they were proved right, the logical

conclusion would have been for Britain to introduce laws banning

mixed-race relationships. Following where others had led. Some American

states had laws dating back to 1661 preventing whites marrying native

Americans and African Americans. In Southern Rhodesia, a law was passed

in 1903 that made it an offence to have sex outside marriage between

And in Australia, the state had recently begun a policy of removing

so called half-castes from their parents to imbue them with European

values and, I quote, "Breed out COMMENTATOR: many of them are half

Japanese. Daughters of pearl fishing fathers and Aboriginal

mothers. Many again are almost So the British Eugenics Society

decided to investigate families of what they called mated Chinese and

English or Irish, and mixed race children with black fathers, to

test the theory that racial mixing led to inferior stock. The

unfortunate mixed-race children of Liverpool would be the first

guinea-pigs on which the theory Eugenics seeks to apply the laws of

heredity to examine the race. Everybody sound in body and race

should marry and have enough children to perpetuate their stock

and carry on the race. Just listening to the language they use,

they talk of native and stock, the kind of words you would use to

describe animals. The survey comprised just 15 families and 45

children. At its head was a wealth anthropologists -- Welsh

anthropologist. Along with his colleague he began to measure the

shape and size of the children's heads, noses, they years, even the

fold on their upper eyelids. They made careful notes of the colour of

the skin, their hair and the eyes. They were being treated as if they

were some so -- sort of exotic specimen. They were just boys and

girls, sons and daughters, all rooted in the local community.

is a period when many people, including scientists, geneticists,

etc, believed that Inter racial relations between races who were

deemed to be very far apart. That would become detrimental and would

lead to degeneracy. We looked in a mixed-race family and think, well.

It is beautiful and energetic and flamboyant. They thought exactly

the opposite. The word degeneracy was widespread. They thought people

would be inferior in every sense. They look to see if there was a

relation between physicality and intellect. They were subject there

in this poor house. They had rooms upstairs and we were told to go to

the rim. Ladies measured us and took our photographs. They asked us

questions. When you say measured, what did they do? They measured our

heads like that and like that. They looked at the colour of the eyes

and noted our complexion. That sort thing. When the results were

published the sample included the children of black fathers. The

professor was in for a surprise. Perhaps even disappoint. Did the

results support the basic idea that this was a bad thing to have?

interestingly, the so-called yellow-white hybrids produced

children of high intelligence. was a bit of a shock. But the black

and white hybrids, they were problematic, because they said the

children inherited the worst of both, inherited a happy-go-lucky,

carefree, lazy - and these were the words they used - of the Father,

and the slovenly, immoral nature of the mother, because it was assumed

the women were keen to prostitutes, if not prostitutes. They also came

to another conclusion about mixed race children. They wanted to see

to what degree they could pass as English, but the implication was

that none of the children could ever be English. In the first case,

even if they could pass, there might be 2% that could pass, but

given that their parentage was not English and their fathers were not

English, they could never truly be And if that flirtation with science

did not come up with all the answers they expected, they were

still good old-fashioned prejudice. -- there was still good old-

fashioned prejudice. You could depend on that. Even the Civil

Service was not immune. You would search in vain for its renowned

detachment when it came to matters of race. A memorandum in 1925 from

the Home Office to the Foreign Office summed up the feelings. "the

Negro is said to be more largely developed than the white man and a

woman who has been with a negro is said to find no satisfaction with

anything else. Those already inclined to resent them were goaded

on by newspapers. One reported that certain white women here in the

district were say that black men were better at six and white men.

As it happened, one group of white women seem determined to prove the

civil servants and newspapers right. The genie of Inter racial relations

was well and truly out of the bottle, and as the 20s roared on,

it was the upper classes leading In 1928, Nancy Cunard, the writer

and heir to the cruise line was scandalising high-society with

their relationships with black men. At one lunch party, Margot Asquith,

the wife of the former Liberal prime minister Henry was said to

have greeted Nancy's mother with the words, well, what is Nancy up

to now? Is it dope, drink or Was one of the sultans of door

managed a Scottish divorce. She was the latest in a long string of

whites. -- wide eaves. Incredibly the mosque had been built in the

1800s and was patronised by British aristocrats who had converted to

Islam. It was the venue for marriages between upper and middle-

class white women and Asian or Arab Shortly after the ceremony, the

Sultan and his latest wife, Helen Wilson travelled to Malaysia where

she was crowned the Sultana. The World Press fawned over the Salton,

even when he ditched the unfortunate Helen for someone new.

-- the Sultan. Upper-class licence and foreign wealth seem to freedom

of social taboos. -- free them of social taboos. But there were

limits. I cannot speak enough of this containment. It stops me here.

It is too much a Tchoyi and this, and this, the greatest discord that

our hearts shall meet. On 19th May, 1930, Paul Robison that the African

American singer and actor came to play her fellow here in Britain.

to play a fellow. If it were now, I would be most happy, and might

heart would be so absolute that not another night succeeds unknown.

who was Desdemona? She was a rather sheltered middle-class 23-year-old.

And her name was Peggy Ashcroft. That song tonight will not go from

my mind. I have much to do but to go all but one side and sing it by

-- like Paul Barber. In rehearsals, fear of public reaction made Paul

Robeson and comfortable. After all, his father had been a slave. That

girl could not get near to me, he said later. I was backing away from

her all the time. I was like a plantation hand in the parlour.

On that opening night, Peggy Ashcroft got rave reviews and the

audience, well, they were just ecstatic giving Paul Robeson at no

less than 20 curtain calls. But the sight of a black actor actually

kissing a white woman, well, that was rather too much for one

newspaper editor. He just walked out. Paul Robison himself told the

New York Times," I would not care to play those scenes in some parts

of the United States. The audience would get rough. In fact it might

become very dangerous. ". One at Southern paper agreed. He knows

what would happen, and so do the rest of us. And who knows what

would have happened here if they knew what was actually going on

offstage between the a fellow and his Desdemona. What the press and

public did not know was just how close the pair had become. 50 years

later, Peggy Ashcroft said that what happened between Paul and

myself was possibly inevitable. How could one not fall in love with

such a man. The whole episode was, she said, more than a theatrical

experience. It put the significance of race straight in front of me and

Hundreds of miles away in Cardiff, some have already made their choice.

Racial mingling, as some called it, was crying. -- growing. By the mid-

thirties, Tiger Bay was home to around 3,000 foreign sailors,

mainly Africans and Arabs. Many of them had been born and bred in

Cardiff, but were still treated as Nonetheless, they and their

descendants would go on to create one of the country's most proud

League mixed communities. My dad had just opened at the Cafe, not

long, and he happened to be standing outside on the front door.

And my mother, she was a nurse at the time. She had been to the

cinema. And she was trying to get back to the Cardiff Royal Infirmary.

That was where she lived. That was where her accommodation was. Olive

was 15 years old when she moved from the small town of -- a small

town in the Rhondda Valley to train as a nurse in Cardiff. I stopped

and asked this boy eat the way to Queen Street, and he said I was

losing my way to the docks and we started talking, and I think we

fell in love. The boy she met and asked for direction was a young it

Yemeni working as a chef in his own cafe. We got married when I was 16

and three weeks, actually. I had five children before I was 21! We

got -- had 10 children, five boys and five girls. When I got married

there was a great need to stay at home because the priest from the

church even came to say I was marrying the heathen. There was

I used to go in the Cairo cafe, and in the back they had a little Arab

school. Many of the kids used to go to the Arab school, even though we

were not Arabs or Muslims, but because your friends were going,

you wanted to go along. But we were a very integrated community. What

Tiger Bay was home to many different races. They all came

together to celebrate festivals like the end of Ramadan. We would

wake up and you might hear the sound of chanting. You would think,

So you ran out there, and you look for your friends and all of the

people of the Arab community, and they would be in their native dress.

They would parade in their street with flags in one hand and we would

follow along the parade and be part Then, when it came to the food,

they would off either foot or you could run home and actually get a

part and you would get curry and rice and you could take home --

Britain's mixed-race families were sharing each other's customs and

making their own rules. It was genuinely multicultural, but that

It was like that for Norman Kaier's mother Margaret in South Shields,

who was married to a Yemeni seaman, Abdo. My mother, she wasn't a full

practising Muslim, if you like. She still held a lot of the beliefs.

would your mother have run the house as if it was a Muslim house

as far as eating pork and that kind of thing? My father never ever ate

pork. My mother, on the other hand, to a certain degree... Why are you

giggling away? There's a little secret going on here. A lot of the

English women would eat pork when their husbands were out. When they

were out at sea or something? when they actually left the house.

Oh, really? During the day. For me, it was different because my mam

would eat what she wanted. So we had a separate frying pan, which

she had to keep in a separate cupboard from my father. You

couldn't use that. And he knew that. And he would often swear in Arabic

if he had seen the frying pan out. Because she had been cooking bacon

and that. But, the same as what Norman's mam did. But your mum was

These couples were makng it up as they went along, sharing some

customs and quietly ignoring those that didn't work for them. It was,

if you like, a delightful free for all and that just didn't suit some

people. In Cardiff, one man above all wanted to put a stop to this

The City's chief constable, one James Wilson, was becoming

increasingly concerned about Tiger Bay's reputation for immorality and

mixed-race marriages. And he reported his worries to his local

police committee saying that coloured men were coming into

contact with the female sex of the Their progeny, he said, were half-

caste with the vicious hereditary taint of their parents. Not one to

The picture the Chief Constable painted of the area was very

different from the reality. It had a bit of a reputation because there

was a lot of street gambling that used to go on. Being a port, there

was prostitution and that. But the actual people from Bute Town, they

were the nicest people you could When the Cairo Cafe was in its

heyday, we employed a lot of the women that lived in the Bay. They

came to work in the Cairo Cafe. And some of them would be babysitting

My mother was also, believe it or not, chairman of the Conservative

Club in the docks. Which caused great problems amongst the

In 1929, James Wilson started to call openly for a new form of

social control. Anti-miscegenation laws similar to those which have

been introduced in South Africa, banning sexual contact between

He was playing the race card and he put all his cards on the table.

"The time may come," said the chief constable, "when public opinion

will awake to the fact that our race has become leavened with the

colour strain. Someone must have the courage to strike a warning

note." And he clearly thought of himself as the man to do it. The

The issue erupted onto the front pages and many journalists actually

supported the chief constable. With one of them writing, "I feel that,

in the interests of our town's purity, it would be a good thing if

our swarthy friends were given the For the mixed-race communities, it

was an explicit attack on their families and their whole way of

life. The newspapers would say things, this promiscuity between

blacks and whites. Obviously, the white women could not be women of

good repute. They had to be women of ill-repute. They had to be

prostitutes or immoral women, which was quite untrue of my grandmothers

and many of the matriarchs of the old Tiger Bay community who made us

go to Sunday school, made us go to church, dress up on Sunday and so

on. And visit our aunties and In the end, Britain avoided the

kind of draconian measures the chief constable had in mind. Calmer

heads recognised that a law banning sex between races would be

impossible to enforce. And, ironically, the prospect of an

angry reaction in the Empire, those lands full of foreigners, played a

part too. Never again would Britain consider the idea of an outright

So, by the mid-1930s, Britain's mixed-race communities were pretty

well established. They had proved that they could defend themselves

and support themselves. And, crucially, they had seen off the

threat of those anti-miscegenation laws. In short, they were here to

Britain had played with science and flirted with repression but,

thankfully, never followed the path On the night of January 30th, 1933,

a huge torchlight parade marked the appointment of the new Chancellor.

Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, his blueprint for the Third Reich, that

race mixing was not only an affront to national identity and culture,

Soon, so called race scientists in Germany obsessed with the idea of

keeping the national bloodline pure, would begin visiting schools and

youth clubs in the Rhineland where many French African troops have

For the scientists, the very existence of mixed-race German

children threatened to contaminate The children were identified and

then taken to a local hospital where at least 385 of them were

You've got eugenics taking this rather sinister route in Germany.

That doesn't happen in Britain. We don't have race laws flowing from

eugenics. Why is that? Why are we different? One would like to think

it's because we're much more tolerant society and clearly,

Britain claims to have a history of liberalism and fighting for human

justice. But, on the other hand, we have a different relationship to

the presence of black peoples, because they are a small minority.

They weren't seen as kind of There may not have been a threat to

white culture, but there were places that were genuinely mixed

race. Take Liverpool in 1939. A young English novelist and

playwright arrived in the city. He'd been travelling through the

country to take stock of industrial and rural England for a new book.

The author's name was JB Priestley and, amidst all the paranoia about

racial mingling, he found cause for In Liverpool, he came across a

local primary school. He said all the races of mankind were there

wonderfully mixed. In fact, he described it as being like a

miniature League of Nations The children, he said, were all

shades with Africa and Asia peeping In his book, English Journey,

Priestley is clearly moved by what he found in the mixed-race

community in Liverpool. His writing helped to create a new version of

The tolerance he so admired in Liverpool was in stark contrast to

COMMENTATOR: Who are these men in flannels? West Indians of African

descent. They are keener and better cricketers than any, except a few

teams of European origin. Certainly better than any team of Scotsman or

Dutchmen, for example, who are much closer to the English than they are.

So, you see, all this Aryan nonsense and race superiority

business of Hitler's just isn't When the full extent of the horrors

of Hitler's final solution were discovered, the British followers

Our dalliance with race science was All I know is, the Tiger Bay

experience taught me what it was to be a true human being. The pseudo-

scientific studies measuring the size of our heads to see if we had

the right intelligence, brain size, what have you, these were fascist

concepts. And it has no bearing on how people come together and live

When I started looking at all of this, I thought, like most people,

but Britain's mixed-race communities only really began in

the late 1940s or so with the arrival of immigrants from the

Caribbean. But, in fact, as we have seen, you've got to go back much

further to those years before and after the Great War when some white

women, perhaps only a handful at first, allowed their hearts to rule

their heads. And, in so doing, felt the full wrath of so-called

I've been thinking quite a lot about those women. Just imagine how

brave they had to be. Not just brave but free-spirited and open-

minded. And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that women like

Olive Saloman here in what was Tiger Bay were heroic pioneers of

And, because of those women, many mixed-race people grew up with a

unique British identity which prospers today. I've always felt

very strongly about my colour. And I've always defended it. And I've

never ever pretended I was anything other than a half-caste Arab. And I

am quite proud of the fact. I'm an Arab. I can't get away from that.

And I'm proud of the fact. I class myself as an Arab Geordie really.

Geordie with an Arab heart. Geordie with an Arab heart. Yes.

If I had my life again, you know, honestly, I was so happy being in a

mixed family. I'd like to do it And what of James Wilson, the Chief

Constable of Cardiff who wanted to ban into racial sex and had once

described mixed race children as half-castes with the vicious

Well, in 1946 he was knighted. But after the horrors of Nazi Germany

were made public, he was soon saying something very different

about Tiger Bay. He now held it up as a symbol, a good example of

Which is just as well, because what Sir James Wilson could not have