British Immigration Policy Since 1939

The Making of Multi-Racial Britain

Ian R.G. Spencer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415136952
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134776610
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the first survey of British immigration policy to include both its pre-World War Two origins and its development after the crucial 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. It is an accessible introduction to a subject of increasing popularity with students and academics. It also integrates the results of extensive archival research. Offering a different perspective to sociological approaches, British Immigration Policy since 1939 will be of interest to historians, political scientists, and those studying public and social policy.

1 The origins of multi-racial Britain

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY STORY

The black soldiers who comprised a small part of the Roman armies that invaded Britain, the African slaves who were not freed by Mansfield’s much misunderstood judgment of 1772 and the Asian and black seamen who lived in multi-racial dockland communities are evidence of a longstanding element of racial diversity in Britain. London, for three centuries the metropolitan centre of a vast worldwide Empire and successor Commonwealth, was host to countless visitors and residents from it. The idea that Britain has for long been a multi-racial society is one that has been widely aired and is now widely believed, fostered principally by liberally minded people associated with spreading and reinforcing the multi-culturalist approach to education and race relations.¹ In their campaign for the acceptance of the highly laudable idea that Britain is a multi-racial and multi-cultural society which should recognise and respect the cultures of minority ethnic communities, the ‘discovery’ of the ‘hidden’ history of the Asian and black presence in Britain provided a heritage and even a legitimacy for contemporary settlement. The long history of the Asian and black presence in Britain then made even more inexcusable the racist response that greeted Asian and black settlement in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Historians had already taken up the challenge of providing an account of the past against which contemporary movements and issues could be discussed. In their effort to supply historical background for the post-war Asian and black presence in Britain many writers asserted or implied that Britain had always been a multi-racial society. In recent years the works of Folarin Shyllon, Rosina Visram, Peter Fryer and Ron Ramdin, for example, have done much to illuminate the early history of Asian and black people in Britain but, perhaps unwittingly more than deliberately, have left the impression that those communities were more important historically than they were.² Residents of late eighteenth-century England would surely have been rendered speechless with incredulity by the recent claim of a historian that, by 1772—considered by many to have been the apogee of black society—Britain had ‘ceased to be a white man’s country’. At that time blacks were, perhaps, a fraction more than one in a thousand of the population.³

It is clear from even a cursory glance at Britain’s past that it has become a multi-racial society only very recently. Whilst prejudice has, no doubt, tended to suppress the history of Asian and black Britain, another important part of the explanation for the fact that it has remained hidden is that, until the last thirty or forty years, the size of the Asian and black communities has remained very small, their location scattered and their influence slight. Over the three centuries down to the Second World War the Asian and black population fluctuated in size, probably reaching a more sizeable proportion of the population as a whole in the latter half of the eighteenth century before declining. Contemporary guesses then—at the size of a population notoriously difficult to estimate—put the largely slave-related black population of Britain at anything between 10,000 and 40,000 and London’s black population most often at 20,000. Recent research indicates that the size and composition of Britain’s black population was quite volatile but that a figure upwards of 10,000 for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is most likely to be accurate.⁴ After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 very few black people were brought to Britain and inter-marriage by the largely male black population appears to have been the cause of its visible decline. By the outbreak of the First World War the size of the permanently settled black population had fallen to ‘several thousands’.⁵

It is certainly the case that Asian and black residents played an interesting and occasionally important part in British society through the centuries. Much has been made of exceptional individuals of the nineteenth century—such as William Cuffay, the Chartist leader, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the composer and conductor, and Mary Seacole, the nurse—but it would be an exaggeration to say that collectively their part in British life was of any great significance. The most eminent Indians in public life were the four Indian members of Parliament, Dadabhai Naoroji (1892–5), Mancherjee Bhownagree (1895–1905) and Shapurji Saklatvala (1922–3 and 1924–9) in the Commons and Baron Sinha of Raipur (1919– 28) in the Lords. Abdul Karim, Queen Victoria’s moonshee, was not without influence in the last years of the nineteenth century. However, better known to a much wider public were Ranjitsinhji, Duleepsinhji and the two Nawabs of Pataudi who collectively brightened many an English summer. For the period up to the Second World War the Indian population of Britain has been characterised as one comprising ayahs, lascars and princes; additional categories might be added for students and pedlars.⁶ However, for the very large majority of members of these groups, permanent settlement in Britain was never in view. Princes, after spending the hottest months of an Indian summer at the Savoy or the Dorchester—or students, after three or four years of the rigours of the London School of Economics or the privileged enclaves of Oxbridge—would almost always return to India.

The main concentrations of Asian and black settlement were to be found in the multi-ethnic dockland areas of seaports such as London, Liverpool, Cardiff, South Shields and Glasgow. The community in London’s dockland appears to have sixteenth-century origins. Though substantial foundations for most of the communities were laid in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when they began to take on the appearance of permanency, many of their members remained transients, living in Britain between seagoing jobs. The development of the steamship, the emergence of the ‘tramp steamer’ and the huge expansion of Britain’s overseas trade supported a very large and rapid increase in maritime employment opportunities to which seamen from the Empire had access, even if it was largely on the bottom rungs of the new ladder. Largely as a consequence of the First World War and the economic conditions that followed it, increasing numbers looked for jobs ashore and formed permanent relationships with local women.

People who derive from the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Caribbean were, until very recent times, a tiny fragment of the permanent, settled population of Britain—a fraction of one per cent of the wholeuntil the changes in migration and settlement patterns in the 1950s. For an era when the census did not identify race or ethnicity, it is very difficult to assess accurately the size of minority communities of any kind. The problems of estimation are made more complex by definitional difficulties relating to the identification of race and ethnicity and to the nature of permanence. As recently as 1939 the permanent Asian and black population of the United Kingdom was officially estimated at about 7,000 people.⁷ Even allowing for a large degree of inaccuracy in an estimate based on police reports, it would be stretching the definition of ‘multiracial’ to absurd limits to apply it to Britain at a time when its Asian and black population was so small and so concentrated, and largely temporary. In the early 1950s half of Britain’s population had never even met a black person. Until the mid-1950s the large majority of cities in Britain remained almost entirely white, as did most parts of the few major cities in which Asian and black settlement was a feature. In the leafier suburbs of London in the late 1950s, non-white people were still such a curiosity that it was not unusual for them to be stopped by local people curious to know about their background.⁸

Without denying in any way the presence in Britain of small, isolated Asian and black communities of very long standing, care must be taken not to place the inception of multi-racial Britain too far back in time. The appearance in most major towns and cities Britain of permanently settled, substantial minorities—clearly distinguishable by appearance, traditions and customs and practice from the very large majority of the populationis a development of the very recent past, of the late 1950s and succeeding decades. If the sharp decline in Asian and black movements into Britain that occurred at the end of the 1950s had not been reversed, or if legislation had been introduced at that chronological point effectively to prevent further significant inward movement, Britain would not have become a multi-racial society. At the start of the 1960s, the Asian and black population of Britain still represented only about 0.25 per cent of the whole. By the time the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill became law in 1962 that population had doubled and was set to increase further. If there was a watershed in the growth of Asian and black communities in Britain it occurred in those years immediately before and after the Act. Before it the size of the Asian and black population was tiny and its presence was regarded by many, some of the minorities included, as temporary. After the 1962 Act the communities continued to grow rapidly and quickly began to regard themselves and be regarded by others as a permanent part of British life. By the late 1960s, for the first time in British history, non-white communities of a significant size had established themselves in many of the major cities of the north and Midlands, a basis on which, over the next two decades, these communities were to make themselves into major players in local politics and economies and become a manifest influence on the formation of national culture.

However, any study of the making of multi-racial Britain must give some attention to the origins and early history of Asian and black Britain, particularly in so far as early settlements were to a limited extent significant in providing the foundations for the major migrations of recent decades. Pioneer settlers from Jullundur/Hoshiapur, Sylhet and Mirpur first established themselves, even if not on a permanent basis, in the period 1850–1939. Also, for the purposes of this study it is important to examine the policy of the British government towards those small numbers of Asian and black migrants and settlers. Before the substantial inward movement of the post-Second World War period began, official policy displayed a clear hostility towards the settlement in Britain of non-white communities of any significant size. Whilst it can be said with the highest degree of certainty that Britain became multi-racial against the wishes of successive governments, it can only be hypothesised that multi-racial Britain might have been created rather earlier without such consistent opposition to the formation of Asian and black communities. Perhaps this hostility provides part of the explanation of why Britain, at the centre of a vast multi-racial Empire within which there was apparently free movement, did not become a multi-racial society sooner.

THE FIRST SETTLED COMMUNITIES, 1850–1939

No doubt sailors of a wide range of ethnic origins have been a feature of many major British ports for centuries. Cardiff, Liverpool and London, with long-standing connections to the Caribbean, West Africa and India, had already, by the middle of the nineteenth century, acquired a diverse multi-racial population with deep roots. Although seamen from the Indian sub-continent had been recruited since the seventeenth century, it was the large-scale expansion of the British shipping industry in the latter half of the nineteenth century that brought much enlarged communities of mainly transient seamen from Africa, the Indian sub-continent, China, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Malaya to British ports. Lascars, krus and seedees, as sailors from India, West Africa and the Middle East were popularly known, were employed mainly in roles which required no skills of seamanship—firemen and coal trimmers, cooks and stewards—though lascars were often employed as deck ratings, and seedees very seldom as cooks and stewards. The requirements of the imperial myth of white supremacy combined with racial stereotyping to ensure that, whereas the engine room could contain all races, the officers’ mess was a white-only preserve.⁹

It is perhaps worth asking what controls there were on lascars settling in Britain and why lascars did not figure more prominently among settled dockland communities before the Second World War. During the Napoleonic Wars, when the number of lascars coming to Britain increased substantially—on occasion over a thousand were housed in the barracks set aside for them—a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry was set up to examine their plight. It recommended both better conditions for the men but also stricter regulation of them while ashore and tighter controls to ensure that they returned to the sub-continent. The 1823 Merchant Shipping Act which resulted from the inquiry made it compulsory for shipowners to provide customs authorities with a list of their ‘Asiatic’ sailors. The Act made owners liable to a fine if Asiatic sailors were left in port and it made the East India Company responsible for their repatriation, a charge which it could in turn levy on the shipping company. Recruited in India since 1855, on contracts which required the employer to repatriate the sailor to the original port of embarkation in India (usually Bombay or Calcutta), lascars were often required by their company to change vessels in British ports. From 1871 the Board of Trade appointed to each major port in Britain a ‘Lascar Transfer Officer’ (a function of the office of the Superintendent of Mercantile Marine), a post created and maintained largely in order to oversee this transfer and to prevent ‘leakage’ of lascars into permanent or semi-permanent residence. From 1858 the India Office paid the Strangers’ Home (a charitable institution which offered cheap shelter to Asiatic and African sailors) £200 a year to maintain lascars prior to them finding a vessel on which to return to India. Though as a group among seamen the lascars appear to have been uniquely well supervised, the vagaries of war and an abundance of employment opportunities led to lascars taking up jobs ashore on Merseyside and Clydeside in the last years of the First World War. It has been suggested that Indian sailors stranded in Glasgow at the end of the war and unable to find employment on eastbound liners were forced to look for work in the local iron and steel industry. Attempts by the shipping companies through the local Mercantile Marine Offices to secure the return of the lascars to sea were neither immediately nor entirely successful.¹⁰

Until almost a decade after the end of the Second World War the most substantial part of the settled Asian and black population of Britain was still occupationally related to the sea.¹¹ Although its growth was stimulated significantly by the two world wars, the settled dockland communities remained very small. In Liverpool the combined size of the black and Chinese populations in the inter-war years was considerably less than one thousand. Cardiff’s minority population was much larger and more ethnically diverse, possibly due to the attractiveness of its clement climate but much more likely because Cardiff was a centre of the tramp trade and a seaman with his home base there was likely to get more regular employment. In 1930 the total ‘coloured’ population of Cardiff, including those at sea and those ashore, was just over two and a half thousand, three-fifths of whom were Arabs or Somalis. Its African and Afro-Caribbean population was in the region of seven hundred, with the largest number of Africans coming from Sierra Leone whilst Barbados and Trinidad were the best represented of the Caribbean territories. Many of the settled seamen were married or in permanent relationships with local women and by the outbreak of the Second World War several hundred children resulting from those unions had swollen the size of the community.¹² Overall, in the dockland settlements before the Second World War, the largest of the Asian and black communities was Arabic-speaking, often referred to as ‘Adenese’ or ‘Somali’ and deriving mostly from Yemen or, to a much lesser degree, from the Aden Protectorate and Somaliland. When ‘coloured’ seamen were forced to register as ‘aliens’ in 1925 almost 7,500 were recorded, though this did not represent an accurate count of all Asian and black seamen, at sea and ashore, operating from British ports.¹³

Even though for most of the community, foundations were laid and first built upon during the period of rapid development of modern shipping from the mid-nineteenth century, the most dramatic period of growth took place during and immediately after the First World War. The war gave a considerable boost to the Asian and black population of Britain. The impetus was provided by the recruitment of large numbers of merchant mariners of European origin to the expanded Royal Navy, the requisitioning of many ships with black crews for Government work (their discarded crews being left behind in British ports) and the formation of labour battalions abroad for wartime service in Britain and who were subsequently ‘demobbed’ (demobilised) in Britain. Men were brought from the colonies to work in munitions and chemical factories in Manchester and elsewhere. It appears that at the end of the war, with the closing down of wartime industries, many men found themselves in—or they made for—seaports such as Cardiff where there were, temporarily as it transpired, some employment opportunities. Taking into account both men at sea and people ashore it is unlikely that there was a great change in the total size of the Asian and black dockland communities in the period between the wars. However, the size of the communities actually ashore almost certainly grew quite significantly, primarily as a consequence of the very high rate of unemployment that persisted in the dockland areas after the initial, and very brief, post-war boom. This was caused by the long term depression in the British shipping industry, a shift from coal-fired to oil-fired power (which disproportionately affected Asian and black seamen) and discrimination against ‘coloured’ seamen by both employers and unions.¹⁴ Numbers were boosted from the 1920s by the arrival of small numbers of men, mostly from Punjab, who intended to make a living in Britain. Some of them were soldiers who had served in Europe in the First World War, others were relations and friends of seamen who had knowledge of conditions in Britain.

Research in Scotland has provided an account of the early phases of settlement of a mainly seamen-derived Asian community in Glasgow that may be taken as broadly representative of developments in many other major seaports. Long waits between engagements and some desertions created the basis for the permanent South Asian population in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Several boarding houses established towards the end of the century provided the first discernible focal point for the largely transient community and probably attracted a small number of men who had been brought over from India as servan...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• ABBREVIATIONS
• PREFACE
• 1 THE ORIGINS OF MULTI-RACIAL BRITAIN
• 2 IMMIGRATION POLICY IN PRACTICE, 1945–55
• 3 THE MAKING OF POLICY, 1945–55
• 4 POLICY AND PRACTICE UNDER STRAIN, 1955–62
• 5 THE MAKING OF MULTI-RACIAL BRITAIN, 1962–91
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY