The 'desegregation' of English schools

Bussing, race and urban space, 1960s–80s

Olivier Esteves

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526148018
  9781526124852
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526124876
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Dispersal, or 'bussing', was introduced in England in the early-1960s after white parents expressed concerns that the sudden influx of non-Anglophone South Asian children was holding back their own children's education. It consisted in sending busloads of mostly Asian children to predominantly white suburban schools in an effort to 'spread the burden' and to promote linguistic and cultural integration. Although seemingly well-intentioned, dispersal proved a failure: it was based on racial identity rather than linguistic deficiency and ultimately led to an increase in segregation, as bussed pupils were daily confronted with racial bullying in dispersal schools. This is the first ever book on English bussing, based on an in-depth study of local and national archives, alongside interviews with formerly-bussed pupils decades later.

1
“To allay people's fears on numbers”:¹ the introduction of dispersal in Southall

The national picture

Bussing's introduction followed the vote of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962), which aimed to close the door on further immigration from the New Commonwealth by issuing work vouchers to specific countries and commensurate with specific skills. Therefore, the 1963 visit to a Southall primary school by education secretary Edward Boyle, which is at the heart of this chapter, took place in a context when immigration and the pressing need for “integration” had become a red-hot topic in parliamentary debates as well as in the mainstream media. Restriction was the order of the day, and the 1962 legislation was only the logical outcome, precipitated by the racial outbreaks of violence at Notting Hill and Nottingham (1958), of years of immigration control programmes debated at Parliament and Whitehall. As Abigail Beach and Richard Weight put it, the law “was the culmination of the politics of citizenship and nationhood operative in Britain since at least 1945 and by which some Britons were perceived to be more British than others”.² Rather than constituting an actual disruption, the urban disturbances of Notting Hill and to a lesser extent Nottingham in 1958 were needed catalysts to introduce legal distinctions which would dent the very concept of British citizenship. This was itself a postcolonial manifestation of a national identity resting on race and on a race-based “Anglosphere”, which was “distributed across the metropole, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, East Africa, Central Africa, and most problematically of all, South Africa”.³ West Indians as well as Asians, those likely to be bussed, were outside this race-based national identity, regardless of their passports or Commonwealth affiliations. Later legislation on citizenship and immigration would only serve to emphasise this (in 1962 of course, then 1971, and 1981).

The local picture

Southall, until it was incorporated into Ealing in April 1965 (see Figure 2), was a middle-sized western borough of London. Geographically, its strategic position on the Uxbridge Road (London to Oxford) and on the main railway line to Reading had attracted many light-engineering companies and various manufacturing plants, not to mention Heathrow airport's huge business magnet to the south-west, past the borough of Hounslow.

Figure 2: The borough of Ealing after the 1965 reforms

For all these assets, the borough's population had been on the decline since about 1945, from 55,896 (1951 census) to 52,983 (1961 census). In 1951, only 300 (0.6%) of the whole were born in Commonwealth countries, colonies and protectorates. One decade later, the figure had risen to 2540 (nearly 4.8%), with 2259 from India, Pakistan and the West Indies. In the years that followed 1961, Southall's overall population increased slightly again, but this was due to the migrant influx. The Town Clerk's department, basing its estimate on health, sanitary and education figures, reckoned that the number of “coloured immigrants” had nearly trebled from 1961 to 1964, from about 2500 to about 6500, with a great majority of Punjabi Indians from the districts of Jalandhar and Hoshiarpur to the east of Amritsar, and some four hundred West Indians as well as four hundred Pakistanis.⁴ From 1960 to 1964, the number of immigrant children locally soared from 1% to 15% of the whole, being established at 1130 by January 1964 (with one hundred West Indians, and the rest Indians).⁵ Taken together, these figures – added to the local concentration of South Asians in a limited number of streets within Southall – must be kept in mind when considering the backlash leading to bussing's introduction. In just a few years, Southall would host the largest Punjabi community in Britain.

Most immigration-related tensions revolved around housing and education, not so much employment issues. As elsewhere in the country (Bradford, Birmingham), Indians made up the great bulk of labour employed in some factories, the best-known case being Woolf's Rubber plant in Hayes next to Southall. Most whites were reluctant to do these jobs post-1945, whereas it was routinely argued that Indians were “naturally” less disturbed than natives by the high temperatures and humidity at Woolf's.⁶ Local history has it that in this one factory, personal contacts between the management and the Indian subcontinent dating back to the Second World War⁷ facilitated large-scale recruitment after 1955, a time when, in fact, most Middlesex boroughs contained more immigrants than Southall.

In political terms, Southall was a rather safe Labour seat, until and even after its incorporation into Ealing. George Pargiter was the local MP from 1950 until his retirement in 1966, at which time Sydney Bidwell succeeded him as Ealing Southall MP until 1992. Despite this long hold on power, Labour often walked a political tightrope, having to sound tough on migrant overcrowding and other race-related issues to their core white working-class electorate whilst needing to placate Indian interests, locally embodied by an Indian Workers Association whose influence on elections was to become pivotal like nowhere else in the country. In the 1960s, the Tories trailed behind political actors who played the race card more uninhibitedly than they did, whether the British National Party itself⁸ or the Southall Residents Association (which never actually ran for elections). Given this polarised situation, it is no coincidence that MP George Pargiter, partly to appease the Indian electorate, was one of the most vocal opponents of the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill (1961), which many immigrants denounced as an outright colour bar, whereas Barbara Maddin, the local Conservative leader in Southall, was counted among its most outspoken advocates. Nevertheless, the very same Pargiter, at an SRA meeting held on 10 January 1964, recognised that it was only natural, among British natives, to “be entitled to look after our own people” and that “there cannot be this free-for-all any longer”.⁹ This ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 “To allay people’s fears on numbers”:1 the introduction of dispersal in Southall
• 2 Improvisation in high places? Setting the national framework for bussing
• 3 “Before it gets out of hand”: the introduction of dispersal in Bradford
• 4 Reluctant cities: how London and Birmingham said no to dispersal
• 5 Dispersing in diverse places: how the other LEAs fared
• 6 Taking the bullying by the horns: the emergence of resistance to bussing
• 7 Babylon by bus: the quotidian experience of being bussed
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index