Black and Blue

One Woman's Story of Policing and Prejudice

Parm Sandhu

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781838952679
• eBook ISBN: 9781838952662
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

'Inspiring... Important' Observer 'A page-turner which everyone who cares about policing and justice in Britain should read.' Meera Syal At the point of her retirement from the Metropolitan Police Service in 2019, Parm Sandhu was the most senior BAME woman in the capital's police force. She was also the only non-white female to have been promoted through the ranks from constable to chief superintendent in the Met's entire history. In this enthralling memoir, Parm chronicles her journey from life on the outskirts of Birmingham as the fourth child of immigrants from the Punjab to the upper echelons of the Met. Forced into an abusive arranged marriage aged just 16, Parm made the decision to escape to London with her newborn son and later joined the police as a constable. During her thirty-year career, Parm worked in everything from crime prevention to counter-terrorism, and she also served in the Met's police corruption unit. She played a senior organizing role in the London Olympics and was the superintendent on duty when Lee Rigby was beheaded in the street in Greenwich. However, Parm's time on the force was chequered throughout with incidents of racial and gender discrimination, and, after deciding to make a stand, she found herself facing a spurious charge of gross misconduct. Black and Blue tells her shocking story and of her quest for justice in her police work and for herself. It is a story that cannot fail to inspire anyone who has experienced prejudice or abuse of any kind.

CHAPTER ONE

A Difficult Child

Both my parents, Malkit and Gurmaj, were born in the small village of Rurka Kalan in the Tehsil Phillaur area of Jalandhar in the Punjab. One day, sometime in 1951, a group of strangers arrived in the village carrying a message for the young men of the community. Any man willing to travel to the land of the former colonial ruler, they promised, would find work and would prosper, so that he would be in a position to send money back home to support his family. Since supporting the extended family was seen to be one of the main duties of the men of the Sikh community, there were plenty of volunteers.

My dad, Malkit, always told us he was chosen to come to Britain over any of his four brothers because he was known to be the hardest worker. He and my mum, Gurmaj, had been married by arrangement between their families when she was just 10 years old, and she’d given birth to their first child – my eldest sister – Jindo, while still in her teens.

Being an entirely rural community where everyone lived off the land, life was very hard. These were the years before investment in agricultural technology and developments in seed fertilizers boosted the production of wheat and rice in the region, and tilling the soil and the constant need for irrigation called for heavy manual labour. A woman bearing a son added a useful pair of hands to the joint effort, whereas a woman bearing a daughter simply introduced an extra mouth to feed. If that was not bad enough, there would later be the potentially huge expense of getting together a dowry, which must be provided when the girl came to be married. This would inevitably include a set of clothes, gifts for all the husband’s family, and something in gold – nothing less than 24 carats would do. Unfortunately for Gurmaj, she had two more children in quick succession, but one of them was another girl, Balbiro. The family of farmers had already experienced one of the deprivations of poverty in a land recently partitioned following independence from Britain; Jindo suffered from an eye infection as a child, and the failure to have it treated led to permanent blindness.

All of this was such a serious disappointment that some members of her community told Gurmaj she was worthless, and that the best service she could perform for her hard-pressed family would be to commit suicide. Taking her two daughters with her would reduce the hungry mouths by three. So great was the pressure on her that, one day, she took Jindo and Balbiro to the edge of the well in her village, and was at the point of throwing my two sisters and herself down. Just in time, she stopped and thought, ‘No, we are worth more than this,’ and decided to spare her own life and that of her two girls. It was a story from the past which she told me many times as a child growing up years later in Handsworth, and which I would have many occasions to bring to mind way into the future.

My dad was one of approximately 7,000 Sikhs from the region who came to Britain that year. No-one from the family today is quite sure how he managed it, but he travelled on an illegal passport in the name of Amar Nath, with a made-up date of birth. The village all contributed to the cost of the air fare on the understanding that they would be repaid from his future earnings, which eventually they were. Dad was immediately shipped to the Smethwick area of Birmingham, where he quickly got a job as a labourer at Birmid Industries. Birmid was an iron, aluminium and magnesium foundry, one of the largest employers in Smethwick, providing jobs to thousands of local people. It was hard, hot and dirty work, involving long hours and sometimes dangerous conditions – a million miles away from Dad’s harsh but essentially rustic life back in the Punjab. These young men worked six or seven days per week in fourteen-hour shifts. If, and when, they did take any time off, there was nowhere for them to go for relaxation or to practise their religion. They felt themselves abandoned in a country where they couldn’t speak to anyone other than fellow Indians, and they also couldn’t speak freely to each other at work because safety requirements meant they had to wear ear protectors.

It was tough to find somewhere to live because many of the local people didn’t want to rent rooms to immigrants. Signs on pubs and lodgings featured variations of ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’, and Dad used to say that the British treated dogs better. Eventually he got a place in a shared house where he ‘hot-bedded’ with other shift workers. It was not unusual in those days for twenty-five young men to share a house, with those working on the night shift sleeping by day and those on the day shift sleeping by night. After a while, groups of men circumvented the system by pooling their resources to buy a house for one of them, who would then assist the others to buy the next house, and so on.

Conscious that his status as an immigrant might not stand up to the closest scrutiny, Dad was always terrified of authority. He’d been advised by others in the community that he should never look a white person in the eye, and always seemed to lower his head when he spoke to outsiders. That didn’t save him from encountering racism on his way to and from work, and in later years he told me that he and his friends were regularly kicked, punched and beaten by gangs of white youths, as well as by the police. One time he was knocked off his bike by a car and he apologized to the driver. It turned out that he had broken his leg, but Dad was afraid of doctors so wouldn’t go to hospital. The leg healed itself after a time but after that he always walked with a limp.

Despite having to shoulder the burden of taking financial care of a family he now never saw, Malkit made a decent wage for the times, and tried to make the best of his new life in a strange country. For the first time, he was independent and living far away from the tight religious observance of his homeland. Heavy consumption of alcohol became normalized within the community, especially among manual labourers, and local publicans eventually saw the opportunity to stage cabaret acts targeting the needs of young men living a long way from home. Within limits, my father became ‘one of the boys’, enjoying drinking beer and other freedoms. This went on for eleven years – until 1962, when the imminent prospect of new restrictions in the form of the Commonwealth Immigration Act meant it might well be ‘now or never’, and he was finally ready to send for his wife and children.

When Gurmaj arrived in Britain to join my father, Jindo was 15, my brother Faljinder was 13 and Balbiro was 11. None of them spoke any English, but by then Dad had managed to save enough money to put down a deposit on a small house in Tiverton Road, Smethwick.

Due to the shortage of manpower after the Second World War, Smethwick had already attracted a large number of immigrants from Commonwealth countries, and Sikhs from the Punjab were the biggest ethnic group. These minority communities were unpopular with many in the white British population of the borough, which had become home to a higher percentage of recent immigrants than anywhere else in England. The boom in job vacancies had proven to be short-lived, and in the same year that my mother and my older sisters and brother arrived from India, a series of factory closures and a growing waiting list for social housing caused race riots in the town. Just two years after that, in the 1964 general election, the Labour MP, shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker, lost his seat on a 7 per cent swing to the Conservatives. His defeat followed a campaign in which the slogan ‘If you want a n––––– for a neighbour, vote Labour’ had been used in support of the winning candidate, Peter Griffiths. In his maiden speech in the Commons, Griffiths drew attention to the fact that 4,000 families in his constituency were in the queue for local authority accommodation.

Notwithstanding the prejudice prevalent in parts of the wider white society, my mum and dad lived in an area where all their friends and neighbours were from the same region of India, so they saw no reason to integrate with the host community, or indeed to learn to speak English. They also experienced no pressures to conform to the ways of their adopted country, so their thoughts quickly turned to arranging a marriage for their eldest daughter Jindo. The problem was that her blindness meant that making an advantageous match was not going to be a simple matter. Eventually the couple agreed that 16-year-old Jindo should be married to an older man from West Bromwich.

It was into this culture and mindset that Malkit and Gurmaj’s first child to be born in Britain arrived on 5 December 1963 in St Chad’s Hospital, Birmingham. They named me Parmjit but always called me Pummy, although my Western name was Parm as I got older. All my life, I’ve been told what a difficult child I was. My mother later described me as ‘the most miserable child ever’ and regularly said she wished she’d killed me at birth. Even today, I’m not completely sure whether or not she was serious.

I was followed by my younger sister Sarj in 1965, and my younger brother Satnam in 1966. With Jindo no longer living with the family, my parents and their other five children squashed into the two-up two-down house in Tiverton Road. The congestion was made worse because my dad, being the head of the family and still working shifts at Birmid, slept alone in one of the two bedrooms. This left my mother and the children to sleep together in the other, which had so many beds squeezed together that you had to jump from one to another. I remember that several of the beds were second-hand from hospitals, and there were no gaps to walk in between so the whole room looked and felt like a giant trampoline. The overcrowding was made still more difficult because we were seldom allowed to go into one of the downstairs rooms because it was ‘for best’. Despite the best efforts of my mum and dad, there were constant infestations of rats and mice. There were no carpets on the floors, which were covered instead with linoleum. The kitchen had stone flags and they used to drag in a tin tub from the back yard, fill it with hot water boiled on the stove, and all of us children would have baths on Friday nights.

There was no dining table, so all of us sat cross-legged on the floor to eat our food. Most of the plates had hotel names on them and were mismatched with enamel cups and bowls that had been bought second hand from the local market. Nothing in our house was new; there were no toys for any children and no celebrations for Christmas or for birthdays. Birthdays were said to be ‘for gurus’ (disciples of god), which we certainly were not.

I have a memory that everything was covered in brightly covered fabric which made it seem happy. My mum used to buy material at the local market, and she would knit or crochet covers for the furniture. She also had an old Singer hand-operated sewing machine, and so very little of our clothing was shop-bought, and was either homemade or handed down from siblings or neighbours. Four yards of multi-coloured material would be enough to make a complete outfit, consisting of a long dress, with matching trousers and a headscarf. Often, she would unravel jumpers and then reknit them for us, which was as close as we got to wearing new clothing.

The family had brought very few possessions from India other than a few old quilts. What they had brought with them was a strong culture which put the family at the centre of all aspects of life. Having lived as a Sikh minority in a region long dominated by Muslims, loyalty to the family was considered to be not so much a matter of social convenience, but more one of survival. A family’s esteem within our community was measured by its prestige and honour, or behzti, which in turn were a function of the family members’ izzat – their ability to garner wealth, especially land, but also the obedience and chastity of the daughters, for whom advantageous marriages must be procured.

Our house was separated from next door by a narrow alleyway, and on the other side of the divide was another family from the same area of India. Two of our neighbours’ children, known to us kids as Bubby and Juggi, were more or less my age, and so were natural playmates. No-one from the Indian community was given individual surnames at the time – all the men added ‘Singh’, meaning lion, to their names, and the women ‘Kaur’, meaning princess. As children, we’d play hopscotch and games of chase, but mostly we would ride our bikes around the block. Dad was always pretty useful at mechanical things, and made my bike himself from spare parts he’d managed to collect.

One day, the people next door had a telephone installed, which was a rare and amazing thing, so there was even more traffic across the alleyway. Family members were constantly going back and forth, making and taking calls with friends and relatives from the locality or sometimes from the sub-continent.

I also remember that Dad brought home an old black-andwhite television which was propped up high on a cabinet. Needless to say, there was no remote control, so the children had to climb up if we wanted to change the channel. I enjoyed The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Blue Peter and cop shows like Starsky & Hutch, but I wondered why the programmes featured so few people who looked like me, unless of course they were criminals. We could never find the right place for the aerial, and so my younger sister Sarj would be required to stand and hold it in position above her head –a grievance I don’t think she’s forgiven to this day.

Dad was still working long hours and incredibly hard, and occasionally we’d go to visit him at the foundry at the weekend. We were mesmerized as we watched our father wearing a protective mask and goggles, while hot sparks flew all around him and molten metal was poured nearby. On Sundays, we would pick the fragments of metal out of his work-clothes.

Apart from cutting his hair and shaving his beard for reasons of safety at work, Dad’s only real concession to integration was to abandon the turban which was so emblematic of the Sikh faith of his forefathers. Many of his contemporaries preferred not to follow suit, and in August 1967, just down the road in Wolverhampton, a bus driver named Tarsem Singh Sandhu (no relation) returned to work after a period of sick leave wearing a turban. He was sacked for failing to observe rules on uniform, and subsequently some 6,000 Sikhs marched through the streets in his support. There were significant signs of a white backlash, and a letter appeared in the local paper in which the correspondent claimed, ‘It is time they [the Sikhs] realized this is England, not India.’ After two further marches, the leader of the local Sikh community, Sohan Singh, declared his intention to set fire to himself on 13 April if the Wolverhampton Transport Committee did not change its policy. Four days before the deadline, the Mayor of Wolverhampton, describing the threat as blackmail, reluctantly gave in, having been ‘forced to have regard to the wider implications’.

Meanwhile, our dad still liked a drink and loved music, playing the radio for much of the time, and also kept a reel-to-reel tape recorder with Indian music for special occasions. I suspect he was ‘a bit of a lad’ during his time in England alone, but once our mum and his children and responsibilities arrived, he struggled with depression. Later, as I was growing up, he was in and out of a number of mental institutions, and I vividly recall the trauma of standing outside a treatment room as he underwent various rather primitive ‘electro-therapies’. For the moment, though, his wage was steady, and so our parents began to allow themselves a few luxuries. Mum’s pride and joy was a highly ornate tea-set with gold detailing, bought at the market for £20, which was a week’s wages. It was kept in a display cabinet and only used once or twice a year for special occasions.

It was soon very clear to the family that I wasn’t conforming with the quiet, unassuming and almost invisible role traditionally played by young girls from the Sikh community. I would speak without waiting to be spoken to, and would not readily merge into the background, allowing my brothers to take centre stage. I was always wanting things, and continuously getting into trouble. (A prized china dog which was kept on a window-ledge was mysteriously broken and the culprit has never been identified to this day.) Nonetheless, I was entrusted to walk to the off-licence on the corner of the road carrying a two-pint glass jug which would be filled with mild ale and carried home for my dad. Mum used to manage all the money, and on Friday nights she would give Dad a small amount for beer at the pub, and then he would bring back a bag of chips.

On Saturday mornings, Dad would walk me down to Smethwick library. Although he still spoke no English himself, and the whole family spoke only Punjabi at home, he ensured that all three of his British-born children had learned the English alphabet before we started at primary school.

Later, the house in Tiverton Road was the subject of a compulsory purchase order and our family moved a mile and a half to 22 Paddington Road, Handsworth. Another tiny terraced house, but this one had three steps from garden gate to front door, and three upstairs bedrooms. Still, every Saturday, Dad would walk me, and later also my sister and brother, to the library. He would never come in with us, preferring to wait outside whatever the weather, feeling that his working clothes were not suitable. The librarian once said to me that he could come in and wait. I went out and told my dad, but he said that people like him couldn’t go into places like that. He didn’t complain, even if we took a long time choosing books.

I spoke some limited English when I first went to school at Parkside Infants in Smethwick, but it hardly mattered because most of the community was Indian. Although the lessons were in English, all of us children spoke Punjabi to each other. Gradually, as we learned more English, my younger brother and sister and I began to speak it among ourselves, but our mother would tell us off – believing, often correctly, that we were talking about her. Since almost everyone around us was Indian, and since we girls in particular were being raised to be obedient wives and mothers and seamstresses, what need of English?

Looking back on it no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Authors’ note
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1 A Difficult Child
• 2 Hostage
• 3 Escape
• 4 ‘Managing my shame’
• 5 ‘You’ve not had your bum stamped!’
• 6 ‘A spade in uniform’
• 7 Zulu
• 8 ‘Prisoners, prostitutes and plonks’
• 9 ‘Never apply again’
• 10 ‘Shi-ites and shitties’
• 11 A Death a Day
• 12 ‘Police officer or single parent’
• 13 The Diversity Directorate
• 14 Making History
• 15 ‘It’s you!’
• 16 Croydon
• 17 The Cannabis Farm
• 18 The Pope and I
• 19 The London Olympics
• 20 Own Goals
• 21 ‘Help for Heroes’
• 22 ‘He went berserk!’
• 23 ‘Belittle, intimidate and bully’
• 24 ‘Your Indian heritage’
• 25 Gross Misconduct
• 26 ‘You have personally failed!’
• 27 ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’
• Acknowledgements
• Illustration credits
• A Note About the Authors