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Documentary, BBC Two Mixed Britannia Part 2 of 3- 1940-1965
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00:00MUSIC
00:08Cambridgeshire, and a quintessentially English village.
00:11I'm here to tell the story of a boy born back in 1946.
00:16He was a little different to the others,
00:18a mass of curly black hair.
00:26That baby was the result of a love affair
00:29between a white mother and a black American GI,
00:33one of almost 1,000 or so born during the war and just after.
00:37In Britain, they were called war casualties.
00:40In America, the offspring of the scum of the British Isles.
00:44Well, I'm on my way to meet that baby now.
00:47Of course, he's in his 60s, and his name is Tony Martin.
00:51To me, he's never been a statistic.
00:54He's never been a victim.
00:56He's simply the man who married my sister.
00:59He's my brother-in-law.
01:05Hi, George.
01:07Seeing him now, you'd never have guessed it,
01:10but like so many other mixed-race war babies,
01:13Tony was put into care by his unmarried mother.
01:16I met my mother, real mother, when I was nine, I think.
01:20She came to see me.
01:21And I think then she asked me
01:22if I wanted to go back and live with her.
01:24And what did I know?
01:26I said, no, I was happy where I was.
01:28I think I felt a little sad, I think,
01:31that she'd...
01:33Sorry for her, that she'd come back for me.
01:35But I felt I was...
01:38Well, where I was was fine.
01:44The Second World War turned lives upside down.
01:47People from different races worked together
01:50and played together.
01:52Building this history of mixed-race Britain,
01:55the young found forbidden love
01:57and the old, well, they just couldn't understand it.
02:00I do remember my father saying,
02:04now you've taken up with this black man,
02:08you will never get a decent boyfriend.
02:14Never.
02:15The decades after the war
02:17saw society go from official contempt...
02:20The black man has a different set of standards,
02:23values, morals and principles.
02:25In many cases,
02:26their grandfathers were eating each other.
02:28To grudging acceptance.
02:31I'm not racial,
02:32I'm not any prejudice of any kind.
02:34But I wouldn't let my children intermarry.
02:39Through it all,
02:40love across the racial divide would prevail.
02:42To me, it was just wonderful
02:44meeting all these different people.
02:46I thought they were beautiful-looking
02:47because I always loved people with dark skin.
02:50I think they're so attractive
02:51and they look so healthy.
02:53I thought I had won the jackpot.
02:56I really did.
02:59It was like a new day in my life.
03:01Something that I've been looking for
03:04and I think I've clinched it.
03:09In the decades after the war,
03:11mass immigration meant Britain
03:12would never look the same again.
03:14Mixed-race families were appearing
03:16all over the country,
03:17no longer just confined
03:19to their little enclaves in port cities.
03:21Behind them, of course,
03:23lay the discredited pseudo-science
03:25of racial difference.
03:26But ahead of them,
03:27an almighty battle
03:29to be treated like anyone else.
03:31With the freedom to meet,
03:32to fall in love
03:33and live life to the full.
03:35From the workplace to the big screen,
03:37the 50s and 60s would see the colouring of a nation.
03:51From the four corners of the earth they come.
03:53Men from the far-flung British Empire
03:55upon which the sun never sets.
03:57African troops of the desert lands
03:59are in the front line
04:00in the defence of democracy.
04:02Black men fighting and dying for the cause.
04:06What better way to show
04:07how different we were to the Nazis?
04:10They are not conscripts,
04:12but volunteers
04:13who have found the Union Jack
04:14worth living under
04:15and worth fighting for.
04:17What about back home?
04:19Britain's small mixed-race population
04:21was keen to do its bit for Britain.
04:27But what many mixed-race people discovered
04:29was that being born in Britain
04:31or even having a British mother
04:33didn't necessarily qualify them
04:35to serve their country.
04:44In 1939,
04:45a 22-year-old mixed-race man
04:47made his way to an office in Whitehall.
04:49He'd come to be interviewed
04:50by a recruiting officer
04:52from the British Army.
04:53Charles Arundel Moody,
04:58loyal to king and country,
05:00thought of himself as perfect officer material.
05:03He wasn't prepared for what happened next.
05:06The recruiting officer told him,
05:08you may be born in Britain,
05:10but we can't make you a British officer
05:12because you're not of pure European descent.
05:15It was like waving a red rag at a bull.
05:18Charles Moody wasn't a man to take no for an answer,
05:27and neither was his father,
05:29Dr Harold Moody,
05:30a Jamaican-born GP
05:32who'd married a white English nurse,
05:34Olive, in 1913.
05:39In 1931,
05:40he'd set up the League of Coloured Peoples,
05:42Britain's first black pressure group.
05:45So, when he heard about his son's rejection,
05:54a furious moody immediately contacted
05:56the Secretary of State for the Colonies,
05:58Malcolm McDonnell.
06:00If the colour bar is not broken down now,
06:03it will break down the empire,
06:05he explained in no uncertain terms.
06:08We're proud of our heritage
06:10and do not want to be subjected to any experience
06:12which will rob us of that pride
06:15or which will cast a slur there upon.
06:21After weeks of lobbying and letter-writing,
06:23Moody got what he wanted.
06:25At least for the duration of the war,
06:27the government scrapped the clause
06:29in the 1914 Manual of Military Law
06:31which barred people of colour
06:33from becoming commissioned officers.
06:35So, in 1940, Charles Moody was finally accepted
06:40as an officer in the Royal West Kent Regiment,
06:43the first mixed-race Britain to achieve this rank
06:46during World War II.
06:50Recruits from the Empire didn't just fight overseas,
06:53many were stationed here in Britain.
06:56While serving in the RAF, Jake Jacobs from Trinidad
07:01met and fell in love with Mary,
07:03a young Jewish girl from Liverpool.
07:06Jake was one of more than 6,000 black servicemen
07:09from the colonies who came here.
07:14They were here to help in the war effort,
07:16but they did much more.
07:18Their presence transformed Britain forever.
07:21These young, uniformed men set hearts aflutter.
07:25Mary remembers what it was like.
07:28Well, it was exciting
07:30because we hadn't seen anybody like that before.
07:35I'd never had close contact with anybody of a different colour.
07:40They were very different from the local boys that we'd seen
07:44and we were interested to get to know them better.
07:47They were young.
07:49They were quite dashing, really.
07:51Rowan Air Force, of course we were dashing.
07:53Well, the RAF.
07:54The RAF.
07:55I mean...
07:56So, Jake, just describe for me,
07:58what were your first impressions of this woman
08:00you were going to end up living with?
08:02Jet black hair, tanned face and beautiful eyes.
08:08What else could you...
08:10What else more could you wish for?
08:12He sort of was more friendly with me than the others were.
08:16Are you used to quote Shakespeare?
08:19Used to quote Shakespeare?
08:20Yes.
08:21Wow.
08:22That really got me because I love Shakespeare.
08:26Just think of it.
08:27Here's a man.
08:28You know, he's dashing.
08:29He's in a uniform and he quotes Shakespeare.
08:31It's enough to turn any girl's hair.
08:33Yeah.
08:34Love affairs like theirs were still relatively rare.
08:40But that changed when our American allies arrived in 1942.
08:45Many more of these mixed-race romances blossomed.
08:49These images of black GIs dancing with English girls so alarmed the American government,
08:55it deemed them material calculated to unduly inflame racial prejudice.
09:02The publication of any photographs conveying what was described as boyfriend-girlfriend implications
09:08was subsequently banned.
09:10And no wonder, back in the US, mixed-race marriages were illegal in two-thirds of the states.
09:18No such laws existed in Britain, but here too the arrival of black Americans en masse began to cause concern in some quarters.
09:27Over 100,000 African-American servicemen were stationed all over the country.
09:35Anything new in the way of drill is news nowadays.
09:38And a company of colored troops in Kettering give the town quite a show every time they march through on their way to Charles.
09:44For many Britons living in villages and market towns, it was the first time they'd ever seen a black face.
09:50And for some, it caused panic.
09:57Take Mrs. May, for example, a vicar's wife from Western Superman.
10:03According to an article in the Sunday Pictorial, the minute she heard that black American troops had reached her husband's parish,
10:10she called an emergency meeting of the WI to advise local women about how they should behave towards the black Americans.
10:18Just listen to what she had to say.
10:20Move if seated next to them in the cinema, cross the road to avoid them, have no social relationship,
10:27and on no account must colored troops be invited into the homes of white women.
10:35Unfortunately for the Mrs. Mays of this world, more and more young women were choosing to ignore her advice.
10:41They not only invited black GIs into their homes, but also into their beds.
10:48And now it wasn't only the self-appointed guardians of British morality that were alarmed.
10:54In Parliament, the Conservative MP Maurice Petherick warned the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden,
11:03that the Blackamores consorting with white girls will result in a number of half-caste babies when they're gone.
11:10A bad thing for any country.
11:12But in dance halls up and down the country, British women made their own choices.
11:22My mother always had a real liking for dancing.
11:25And she would go to the Grafton dance hall, and that's where my mother and father met each other.
11:34She obviously took a liking to my father.
11:37I mean, he was a very handsome fellow.
11:40I honestly think, looking back, that she was in love with my father.
11:50Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies.
11:58The black GIs had been in Britain for three years when the war ended.
12:02When it was time for them to leave, many of their girlfriends were distraught.
12:07Don't fence me in
12:11Early in the morning on August of 26, 1945, a bunch of screaming girls descended on a barracks in Bristol,
12:18where black American GIs were preparing to go home.
12:23Singing the Bing Crosby hit, Don't Fence Me In, they clamoured at the gate.
12:28Eventually, a fence was broken in, and they ran into the arms of their departing sweethearts.
12:34To hell with your U.S. Army colour bar, a plucky 18-year-old was quoted as saying.
12:40We're going to give our sweeties a good send-off, she said, and what's more, we're going to go with them to America.
12:47I want a ride to the ridge, where the west can make sense...
12:52Sadly, this was rarely the case. GIs had to get the approval of the U.S. Army to marry, and permission was usually denied because of America's attitude to mixed-race marriages.
13:06And it wasn't just heartbroken girlfriends they left behind.
13:19About a thousand mixed-race babies were now fatherless.
13:26Those earlier warnings about black GIs leaving babies behind had become a reality.
13:31A concerned Harold Moody sponsored a survey through his League of Coloured Peoples to assess the scale of the brown baby problem as it came to be known.
13:42Of the 184 women interviewed, nearly half had been unfaithful to their British husbands.
13:53The stigma of having brown babies, plus the fact that they were illegitimate, turned many of these women into social pariahs.
14:05I'm shunned by the whole village, wrote one desperate mother.
14:08The inspector for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has told my friend to keep her children away from my house.
14:16As didn't she know, I had two illegitimate coloured children.
14:20So for many of these women, and it didn't matter whether they were married or single,
14:25hanging on to their brown babies in the face of widespread disapproval was just too difficult.
14:31A shocking number ended up in care.
14:38My mother Sheila had me when she was only 16 years of age.
14:41And the fact that she was from a strict Catholic family,
14:47and then, of course, the fact that she had a baby out of wedlock,
14:52it didn't go down very well.
14:54Shortly after he was born in Liverpool in 1944,
15:00Brian was put into care by his mother.
15:02I think she had this deep-rooted conscience about it.
15:09I'd never been able to forgive herself, but I've never been able to blame her,
15:13because she was so young.
15:15The thing would have been taken out of her hand by her parents, really.
15:23Brian's mother took him to one of the few places open to babies like him at the time.
15:30Sheila was just one of hundreds of desperate mothers who came knocking on the door
15:34of the African church's mission here in Liverpool.
15:38It was actually opened back in 1931 to help African seamen who'd fallen on hard times.
15:44But within a few years, it was turned into an unofficial care home for abandoned mixed-race children.
15:51Now, the building itself is long gone, but memories of the place and the extraordinary man who ran it
15:57are still vivid for many of those who passed through it.
16:04The minister of the mission, Daniel Zacate, to me, he was my idol.
16:09He had this African smile.
16:13Once he smiled at you, you could do anything for him.
16:17You know, it really motivated you to behave.
16:22Now, Ebony was a very famous magazine for black people in America.
16:26Mm-hm.
16:27And they did a feature on the home, didn't they?
16:29Yes, they came.
16:30Yes, they came to the home.
16:31This is Mrs. Roberts here.
16:33She was the housekeeper.
16:34She was the housekeeper, yes.
16:35And this is me in the other bed.
16:37Oh, in bed?
16:38Yeah.
16:39It's quite a normal scene, really, like a mum bringing a kid to bed.
16:41Yes.
16:43So where are you in this?
16:45Well, this is obviously tea time, and I'm just here.
16:48The cup is nearly as big as my face.
16:51You were tiny.
16:52I was very tiny, yes.
16:53When you have a look at that picture, what goes through your mind now?
16:57When I first saw these pictures, I cried for the simple reason that I saw how vulnerable I was as a child.
17:09And I never really, I never really perceived how small and little I was.
17:16Pastor Daniels undoubtedly did an enormous amount of good, but as the Ebony article made clear, he simply did not have the money or resources to take in all those on his waiting list.
17:32The Ebony article really got to the heart of the problem.
17:37What was to be done with a large number of what it called brown babies in care?
17:42Who would be responsible for them? Who would pay for them?
17:45It would be, as the writer said, a crucial test of Britain's racial liberalism.
17:50Harold Moody argued that the children should be treated as war casualties, whose care should be jointly funded by the British and American governments.
18:03Send them to the States to live with their black fathers or with other black families, said others.
18:09But America didn't want its mixed-race war babies. A Republican congressman at the time, one John E. Rankin, described them as the offspring of the scum of the British Isles.
18:23You've got to remember, America had race laws at the time.
18:26So in the end, any thought of shipping these children across the Atlantic had to be shelled because of what the Home Office here itself described as America's appalling discrimination.
18:36No, this was a problem that Britain would have to deal with by itself.
18:46In the early hours of June 3, 1949, local authority health officials, accompanied by the police, descended on the African church's mission.
18:59They came without any notice. They locked Pastor Ricardo up in his office.
19:04And they forcibly removed us. Not after a fight, of course. We were only little children, but we knew these houses back to front.
19:16And when these officials came, well, we just gave them the runaround, hiding in the cellars and the attics and screaming.
19:24I can remember biting a few of the officials in my skulls for them not to take me, you know.
19:34There's something you'll never forget. I mean, I know I was approaching five, but you'll never forget those occasions.
19:46It's on your mind all the time.
19:48But even now?
19:49Even now. So it happened yesterday.
19:51Really?
19:52And I'm 66 years of age.
19:58So, you know, you always remember that kind of trauma.
20:01The Home Office had decided it was time to shut down Ecate's makeshift orphanage.
20:13Brian and all the other brown babies in Liverpool would be cared for in state-run care homes from now on.
20:20My brother-in-law Tony started his life at Barnardo's, a private charity.
20:35After five years, he was placed with a foster family, the Tabers who lived in the village of Balsham, near Cambridge.
20:42It was the beginning of a lifelong closeness, especially to his adopted sister, Joyce.
20:56Do you remember Tony arriving at Boston?
20:59Yes, I do.
21:01It was like going home from school and finding you've got another brother or sister.
21:05It was fantastic.
21:07And Joyce, did you notice that he was different from you?
21:10No. Really?
21:12No.
21:13I mean, he was a little brown baby with frizzy hair.
21:15Yeah, but no, I didn't.
21:16And it wasn't until we went swimming one day and I said,
21:20well, why does my hair go like rat's tails?
21:22And he shook his head and it was dry.
21:24And I thought, wow, but no.
21:27Was Tony in any way, I mean, was he a troubled child?
21:29He was agitated.
21:31When you say agitated, what was he like?
21:32But Dad would just cuddle him.
21:34And that's when he used to say, all he needs is loving.
21:38He needed to feel he belonged.
21:41And he did belong.
21:43Describe the tables who brought you up here in Bolsham.
21:46My father was very quiet.
21:48He loved his dog.
21:49We had a lovely dog called Barrington Dorby.
21:51My mother was always there for me.
21:53She was there for everybody.
21:54We treated all the same, my brothers and sisters.
21:57It was a happy place.
21:59It was a very happy place.
22:01But while Tony settled happily into his new family, his birth mother clearly had regrets.
22:11I met my mother, real mother, when I was nine, I think.
22:14She came to see me.
22:15And she asked me, did I want to go and live with her?
22:18And I said, no, I was quite happy where I was.
22:21I think I felt a little sad, I think, that she'd, sorry for her, that she'd come back for me.
22:28But I felt I was, wearables was fine.
22:32I was happy that it was with my family.
22:34Do you think about her now at all?
22:37No, I don't really.
22:40It's an awful thing to say.
22:43But, you know, I was so ensconced at home.
22:46But that's the place I wanted to be.
22:49And what about your, your father, your natural father?
22:53There were some periods in my life where I'd like to have found out, you know.
22:58When I went to America on business and went to New York and so on, you know.
23:02But as a whole, no, I didn't really.
23:04I was happy.
23:05My home was in Bolsham.
23:09Tony was one of the lucky ones.
23:11He'd found his place in a loving, happy family and never looked back.
23:15But for others, not knowing who their real parents were, proved to be a more haunting experience.
23:23This little girl's father was one of the thousands of seamen from across the world
23:27who flocked to Britain during the war.
23:30But he was never to be a part of her life.
23:33I grew up thinking I'd been deserted.
23:37Our mothers died thinking they'd been deserted because they didn't know this story.
23:43What happened here on the streets of Liverpool in the summer of 1946 was one of the most shameful episodes in Britain's post-war history.
24:00In a number of dawn raids, the police descended on the area, their mission to round up any Chinese seamen they could find.
24:07They went from house to house, loaded the men onto trucks which took them down to the docks where a boat was ready and waiting for their journey to China.
24:17As a port city, Liverpool had long been a magnet for seamen from all over the world.
24:24But during World War II there was a huge influx of foreign sailors.
24:31Around 2,000 Chinese sailors settled in Liverpool after serving in the merchant navy.
24:41Many had married local women and had started families, boosting the city's already established mixed-race community.
24:49They thought they were here to stay.
24:56But the government had other ideas.
24:59Despite their undoubted contribution to Britain's war effort, ministers decided the Chinese seamen had to go.
25:06It made no difference whether that broke up families or not.
25:10Home office minutes made their reasons clear.
25:16The Chinese seamen have caused a good deal of trouble to the police, but it has hitherto not been possible to get rid of them.
25:24Now, however, the China coast is open again and it's proposed to set in motion the usual steps for getting rid of foreign seamen whose presence here is unwelcome.
25:40In total, 1,362 Chinese men were forced to leave. Of those, some 300 were married.
25:51Somewhere between 500 and 1,000 children were left fatherless.
25:59One of these was Yvonne Foley, who grew up unaware of her Chinese heritage.
26:05When I was about seven, I made friends with somebody who I thought was a full Chinese boy who'd just come to live in the neighbourhood.
26:12And I ran home to Mum and said,
26:15Oh, we've got a new lad in the street, he's Chinese.
26:18And my mother sort of said,
26:20No, no, no, he's like you, half Chinese. Half English, half Chinese.
26:24And I thought, Huh? What's that about?
26:27Really, it came from a pizza price?
26:28Yeah, I sort of, well, OK.
26:30And then my mum said, Well, your dad is not your real dad.
26:35Your dad is a Chinese dad.
26:37And I didn't think anything of it.
26:39And then snippets of information came as I got older.
26:45What Yvonne discovered was that her real father had been a ship's engineer from Shanghai,
26:51who'd met her mother in Liverpool during the war.
26:54But by the time Yvonne had been born, he'd disappeared.
27:00I have a photograph of myself as a baby.
27:03And I discovered on the back of it is a date, which is, I was born in February 46th.
27:09And on the back of my photograph says March 23rd, 1946, to Daddy.
27:16I obviously never got it.
27:19And why do you think that so many women, including your mother, thought that they had been deserted by their menfolk?
27:27Well, I think when they went away to sea, I mean, you know, they would go on long-term contracts.
27:32I mean, most of the contracts were, say, two years.
27:34They didn't hear from their husbands one way or the other.
27:37And in my mother's case, she had felt she'd been deserted because she'd heard nothing.
27:43So Yvonne, what do you think actually happened to your father?
27:51I'm convinced he's one of the men that were forced back.
27:54I've got nothing to prove this at all, as most of us don't.
27:59We can't find any names on any list.
28:02But I believe he was one of those that was forced to leave. Yeah. Yeah.
28:10The whole murky episode has scarred the families those Chinese men left behind.
28:15Yvonne has talked to others who found themselves in the same position as her.
28:19I actually did an interview with one lady who said to me, it was quite emotional.
28:28Sorry.
28:35It's okay.
28:41What she actually said was,
28:43it's nice to think at my age of 86 that I might not have been deserted.
28:51And a lot of our mothers went to their grave thinking that they had been.
29:06Ironically, just as Britain was sending some people packing,
29:09others were being welcomed into Britain.
29:16The arrival of more than 400 happy Jamaicans.
29:19They've come to seek work in Britain,
29:21and are ready and willing to do any kind of job
29:23that will help the motherland along the road to prosperity.
29:26They're all full of hope for the future,
29:28so let's make them very welcome as they begin their new life over here.
29:33Now came the years of mass immigration following a change in the law in 1948,
29:39giving British citizenship to anyone from the Commonwealth and the colonies
29:43and the right to settle here.
29:45Thousands of single men arrived looking for work.
29:49They'd left their families and sweethearts behind.
29:52Inevitably, they found solace in the arms of local white girls.
29:56Britain's racial landscape changed forever.
29:59Amongst those new arrivals was Jake Jacobs, recently demobbed from the RAF.
30:06He left Trinidad for good in 1948.
30:09He headed straight for Birmingham, where there were plenty of jobs.
30:14He is here because he's heard there are jobs for coloured men in Birmingham,
30:19a city with a reputation for kindness to its immigrants.
30:22In those days, you had to go to the labour exchange and fill the form in,
30:29and they'd pick a job out for you and send you on.
30:32And then the labour exchange offered me the post office or the railway.
30:41What was that like in the early days?
30:43Well, it wasn't easy in a sense.
30:46In those days, there was a lot of projects, without a doubt.
30:50And you got all the dirty jobs.
30:52You got the worst shift as well.
30:54But, like everything else, once you make your name, you're treated well.
31:00And I went with them and I worked for 38 years.
31:04Fantastic job.
31:06It wasn't only the prospect of a good job that had lured Jake back to Britain.
31:12All the time he'd been away in Trinidad, Jake had been writing love letters to Mary in Liverpool.
31:19And now he was determined to pick up where he'd left off.
31:23Was she as pretty as you remember?
31:26Oh, yes, it was as beautiful as ever.
31:28Yes.
31:30What was that day like, I mean, from your point of view?
31:31Oh, fine. It was like a new year for me.
31:35That's the way I can put it.
31:37It was like a new day in my life.
31:40And that was it.
31:44Something that I've been looking for through my life, sort of thing.
31:49And I think I've clinched it.
31:51How did you go about wooing this woman again?
31:54He said things.
31:56What did you say to him?
31:57To be or not to be, would you please marry me?
31:59That was your proposal?
32:02My proposal.
32:04Shakespeare came to the rescue.
32:06Of course.
32:08But though Jake and Mary were sure they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together,
32:14Mary's father was against their love affair.
32:17My father wouldn't acknowledge it.
32:20What do you mean he wouldn't acknowledge it?
32:21He just didn't look at me.
32:24Didn't say anything.
32:26And I just, I didn't know what to do.
32:30What was going through your mind?
32:32I mean, this is your dad, but this is also the man you love.
32:35You're caught in the middle.
32:36Yes.
32:37And I, oh, I do remember him saying, whether it was at that point or earlier, I remember him saying that now you've taken up with this young man from Trinidad, this black man, you will never get a decent boyfriend. Never.
33:02Did your father actually say that to you?
33:05Yes.
33:06He said, don't come back here.
33:07I don't want to ever see you again.
33:10And my mother and I were both crying.
33:13And, erm, I came away thinking that that was the end.
33:19That I would never see my family again.
33:21Despite that, in 1948, Mary and Jake got married.
33:28No family whatsoever were there.
33:31We had no one, it's only friends that was there.
33:37It's quite a tough way to start a marriage, isn't it, without the support of family?
33:42That's correct.
33:43And it hurts.
33:44You look around and think to yourself, well, this, this is, is this what life is all about?
33:56Mary and Jake were brave enough to follow their hearts.
34:00Others were more timid.
34:02A letter from a Liz of Cardiff to a woman's magazine in 1951 sums up the situation pretty neatly.
34:09I'm very much in love with a coloured man.
34:12He's the nicest, kindest boy I've ever met.
34:15And I know he'll make a splendid husband.
34:18But my parents are against our marriage.
34:20Can they stop me marrying?
34:21And the agony answer reply, not unless you're under 21, but I hope for your own sake that you think things over very carefully.
34:31Many coloured men are fine people, but scientists don't yet know if it's wise for two such very different races as white and black to marry.
34:41For sometimes children of mixed marriages seem to inherit the worst characteristics of each race.
34:52In fact, such thinking put forward by the eugenics movement before the war was outdated.
35:02Take me, I'm just a plain and simple citizen of Europe.
35:07I can see that this race theory has caused misery and suffering.
35:11But you really mean that there's nothing in it?
35:14It's all just a lot of bunk?
35:16In 1950, the UN's Education and Science Agency had ruled that there was no biological justification for prohibiting intermarriage between persons of different ethnic groups.
35:28This official stamp of approval for mixed-race marriages was soon to be tested by a very high-profile wedding.
35:35In 1953, the ever-so-respectable 32-year-old Peggy Cripps, daughter of Labour MP Sir Stafford Cripps, got married.
35:47Her wedding took place in London's fashionable St John's Wood and was the Society Wedding of the Year.
35:53But this was a society wedding with a difference, because Peggy Cripps's groom was not some British toff. He was Joe Appiah, a Ghanaian chieftain's son.
36:05An African with some kind of a snake charm, said to bring luck, was well in the picture at the church.
36:15When a journalist asked her why she was marrying a coloured man, Peggy replied,
36:20Because I love him and love is greater than colour, creed or race. What she was saying, so simply yet so eloquently, is that love can cross all racial barriers.
36:35Actually, their wedding said even more than that. It showed that mixed-race relationships were happening at all levels of society.
36:43For left-leaning liberals, Peggy and Joe's union symbolised the ideal of a multicultural society.
36:51But when their wedding photos were syndicated around the world, many were outraged.
37:00Charles Schwartz, South Africa's Justice Minister, and one of the architects of the country's apartheid system,
37:06brandished their wedding photograph in Parliament and declared,
37:10It's a disgusting photograph of a wedding between the daughter of a former British cabinet minister and a black native.
37:18If such a thing were ever to happen in South Africa, it would be the end.
37:23Of course, the reaction in Britain was nowhere near as extreme, but neither were we quite ready to welcome this couple with open arms.
37:38After the ceremony, the happy pair smilingly faced the cameras once more.
37:42It's understood that Mr and Mrs Appiah, after spending their honeymoon in Paris, intend to live in the Gold Coast.
37:47When the couple announced that they planned to start their new married life together in Ghana, not Britain, you could virtually hear the sighs of relief.
37:59The problem of this high-profile mixed-race marriage was about to be exported.
38:09But the problem, as some saw, it wasn't really going away. Far from it. Across the country, it was getting bigger.
38:15Lambeth and Brixton have been much in the news recently, following the controversy that has raged over the immigration of West Indians to this country.
38:24On average, 12,000 West Indians were entering Britain each year, and more and more were settling down with local women.
38:33To help solve the problems raised when white and coloured people live in the same neighbourhood, the borough of Lambeth organised a no colour bar dance.
38:42By the time this film was made in 1955, the total black population in Britain had risen to 125,000.
38:53But the sight of mixed-race couples on the dance floor was still something that caused a stir.
38:57East had met West on common ground. A few were wallflowers for very long. The rhythm of the Mambo was doing its bit towards racial unity.
39:06Officially, scientific racism had been rejected, but amongst the general public, prejudice was still widespread.
39:14Now, Mary, dancing was a big part of your courtship and your early years of marriage. When you went into the dance hall, were you free of discrimination?
39:26No. No, you weren't. If you danced with a black man, you were discriminated against because people didn't like it.
39:37Did you feel people were making a judgement on you because you were on the arms of a black man?
39:41Yes. Oh, yes.
39:43And were you aware that people might be looking at Mary and making a judgement about her?
39:48Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Well, I mean, some people used to, more or less, come to your face, tell you straight, without a doubt.
39:57What we found...
39:58Tell you straight what?
40:00What you going with that black bastard?
40:01What we found, yes, they would say.
40:02Oh, yes.
40:03Really? In a new language like that?
40:04Oh, yes.
40:05On a bus, people would comment.
40:07Oh, yes.
40:08You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
40:10Oh, yes.
40:11As you walk past.
40:12As you walk past.
40:13People like my mother, you know, people my mother's age would, I suppose, would be thinking,
40:18or wouldn't like my daughter to do what she was doing.
40:26Mary and Jake's experience was not unique.
40:31In Birmingham, when we walk around in town, they have cousins, black this, black that,
40:36why should they be married to an English woman, where you come in this country for all that,
40:41they're telling us.
40:43But it didn't deter the growing numbers of mixed-race couples.
40:48I am married to a coloured man, and I am proud of him.
40:53In Lyssey, he helps me with all my work.
40:57He helps me to do the washing.
40:59He's very good to me and my baby.
41:02I wouldn't find it in an Englishman.
41:06And as more and more of the new arrivals from the West Indies settle down with local white women,
41:11Pathy News was on hand to reflect just how fundamentally British families were changing.
41:18In what are clearly some outtakes, there's no sound.
41:21You see these young white women with their black husbands,
41:25with their happy little children, and the fathers engaged with the kids,
41:28and the mothers engaged with the kids.
41:30They were intended to show this is ordinary.
41:33It's an ordinary, everyday thing that's happening here.
41:36It's like any other married couple.
41:39Sure, they probably have their ups and downs, but at heart, you know, they're a loving couple.
41:43So in many respects, it's kind of antidote to some of the forms of stigmatising of these relationships,
41:51and saying, look, it's kind of ordinary, what are you worried about?
41:56But apparently plenty of people were.
42:03A poll taken by a vicar in his North London parish at this time had asked the question,
42:08would you approve of your sister or daughter marrying a coloured man?
42:1391% had said they wouldn't approve.
42:17Shortly afterwards, the vicar, Reverend Clifford Hill, who was also a part-time sociologist,
42:24made his way to the British Broadcasting Corporation to give a radio interview about his findings.
42:30When the Reverend himself was asked by the radio interviewer if he'd mind if his own daughter married a black man,
42:42he said, I wouldn't worry if my grandchildren were half-caste.
42:46I wouldn't mind at all.
42:47The next day, the words nigger-loving priest and raced-mixing priest were daubed on the pavement outside his house.
42:55Sadly, that might have been the real Britain speaking.
43:01Mixed-race relationships have become an issue of national debate.
43:05ITV pitched in.
43:08People in trouble.
43:12People say that the colour bar is beginning to fade, but I wonder if it is.
43:17I think if we were honest with ourselves, that we'd admit it would be a bit of a shock
43:22if we were told that our sister or daughter was going to marry a coloured man.
43:27Conservative parliamentary candidate James Wentworth Day certainly had strong feelings on this matter.
43:34My view is this, that no first-class nation can afford to produce a race of Mongols.
43:39That is what we're doing.
43:41Too much mixed blood.
43:43Look at the other angle.
43:45The black man, and I refuse this humbug of talking about the coloured man, he's black and we're white,
43:50has a different set of standards, values, morals and principles.
43:54In many cases, their grandfathers were eating each other.
43:57In some inner city areas, prejudice was being fuelled by tension over jobs and housing.
44:15On Friday, August the 29th, 1958, there was a petty domestic dispute between Jamaican Ray Morrison
44:22and his pregnant Swedish wife May Britt in London's Notting Hill.
44:30The rowing couple were seen by a group of white teddy boys who started to heckle Ray.
44:35They were about to go even further, but were shocked by May Britt's reaction.
44:39She shouted at them and told them to leave her husband alone.
44:43The next night, and it was after pub closing time, the gang spotted May Britt again.
44:48She was out on her own.
44:50There goes the black man's trollop, they shouted.
44:53They chased her, and she was hit with an iron bar.
45:04Over the next few nights, violent scenes erupted all over Notting Hill.
45:09A fear that West Indians were not only taking their jobs and housing, but their women as well,
45:14led to vicious nigger hunts by white teddy boys.
45:22In the early 60s, a rash of British feature films tackled the racial prejudice
45:27that had been so graphically exposed by the 58 riots.
45:31In Roy Ward Baker's 1961 film, Flame in the Streets,
45:37the bunch of teddy boy thugs are lifted straight from the streets of Notting Hill.
45:45Go.
45:46Hold up, that'll send them crackers.
45:50But the real focus of the film is the interracial relationship
45:53between factory worker Gabriel Gomez and his pregnant wife Judy.
45:58You all right? How are you feeling, woman you ain't see?
46:01No, I'm just tired.
46:04I feel like I'm carrying an elephant.
46:07I'll get you too.
46:09This film was truly groundbreaking.
46:12It was the first time cinema goers would have seen a black man kissing a white woman.
46:18All those fears about the perfect British family being invaded,
46:22while they were being played out on the big screen.
46:24Listen, now won't I do the shopping, see?
46:29I'll let you carry them heavy loads up the stairs, woman.
46:31Actor Earl Cameron was himself in a mixed-race marriage
46:34when he appeared in Flame in the Streets.
46:37For him, the film was just a mirror of real life.
46:40That kiss that you give your wife Judy.
46:44Yeah.
46:45That was a pivotal moment, wasn't it?
46:47I suppose so, but not all the set.
46:49It didn't mean anything.
46:51We didn't rehearse it.
46:53It just came natural.
46:55You're kidding, that kiss that has since been looked at over and over again,
46:59so that's a first screen kiss, that wasn't in the script?
47:02No.
47:03In fact, I even thought afterwards I should have kissed her a little stronger.
47:10I mean, it was a natural thing for me to have kissed the girl.
47:14Well, it's happening every day in life, isn't it?
47:19Since the late 50s, progressive, young, white people, trendsetters, if you like,
47:24had immersed themselves in black music and culture.
47:28And mixing was by no means limited to the dance floor.
47:33London at that time, it was very mixed.
47:35I mean, the clubs and so on, all classes.
47:39A lot of society, women, would come to places like the Caribbean club,
47:43just to mix with black men.
47:46Very high-class women go there from time to time.
47:49Yeah, it was all rather decadent and very honest,
47:52but that's what the 60s was all about.
47:55Good sex was the thing that really attracted them to us.
47:59Yeah, I think sex played a great part in it.
48:02It's stamina.
48:04I don't know, that's why they call me King Dick.
48:08Well, the dick gone now, but the king still remains.
48:11Yeah.
48:21In the mid 60s, the sight of a mixed-race couple kissing would still have been offensive to many.
48:29But what about beaming it into the nation's homes?
48:33In 1964, ITV set the nation's pulse racing, with a television first.
48:40Silly, you couldn't have known. We both thought it was the same thing.
48:44For weeks, the story of the relationship between Dr. Mahler and Dr. Farmer
48:48had been building to this critical moment.
48:50What are you doing?
48:54I want to kiss you.
48:56What for?
48:58Just because.
48:59Emergency Ward 10 was then one of Britain's most popular soap operas,
49:15regularly pulling in audiences of 15 million and up to 24 million at its peak.
49:21Now, the film Flame in the Streets had already featured mixed-race relationships some three years earlier.
49:26But this was the first time a mixed-race couple was actually seen kissing on British television.
49:32This was different. This brought the issue right into people's living rooms.
49:37Ellie, call for me tomorrow.
49:40Yes, and me.
49:42I remember it at the time, and I remember the huge furore that happened.
49:46I mean, there were headlines in the newspapers the next day about this kiss.
49:50And I think it was partly because this was coming into people's homes.
49:53The television is always much more intimate, isn't it?
49:56And all of a sudden, you've got this intrusion that you hadn't expected or anticipated.
50:04Emergency Ward 10 proved to be right on the button.
50:09By the mid-60s, the NHS was playing matchmaker.
50:13Mixed-race romance was blossoming in hospitals up and down the country.
50:16Maureen Walsh from County Clare in Ireland was just 18 years old and working as a trainee nurse at Burnley General Hospital when she met her future husband.
50:31We had a wonderful social life, as we thought then, in the 60s.
50:36We may have a party once a year.
50:38And that's when I first met him.
50:40And I think he asked me to dance.
50:43And was it, what, love at first sight?
50:45Well, I did think he looked very nice.
50:49My heart used to miss a beat.
50:51When you saw him?
50:53Yes, it did.
50:55Yes, it did.
50:57What do you think, Bez?
50:59To me, when I met Maureen, I thought she's a beautiful girl, beautiful mind. I fell in love.
51:06At that first meeting?
51:07Yes.
51:08Oh, you just found that out now, I didn't know.
51:09Wait.
51:10Wait.
51:11Wait.
51:13By the mid-60s, Britain's immigrant population had expanded.
51:17As well as West Indians and Africans, over 100,000 Indian and Pakistanis had entered the country.
51:20Despite the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which sought to stem the flow.
51:37Some were young Asian doctors who, like Dr. Besbara, had come to Britain to find work in the expanding National Health Service.
51:45Remember your first day, what it was like being amongst other members of staff?
51:55Yes, I enjoyed it straight away, because doctors, nurses, consultants, they're all friendly. They all knew each other.
52:06We all lived in, so really the hospital was like its own community, and we felt like brothers and sisters.
52:18The NHS was a magnet for people of all nationalities, many of whom were still a novelty for the young English and Irish nurses like Maureen.
52:27So, Maureen, what attracted you to these Indian doctors, people like Bez?
52:34Well, I thought they were beautiful looking, because I always loved people with dark skin.
52:38I think they're so attractive and they look so healthy.
52:40And was there a sense of excitement meeting people like Bez?
52:42Yes.
52:43Oh, I was, yes.
52:44They looked different, they acted different, they cooked different, and it was absolutely wonderful.
52:53We were trying things we'd never tried before or heard of before, you know?
52:59You make it sound like a really exciting period.
53:01It really was. It was so simple, but it was so exciting.
53:05After a two-year courtship, Maureen and Bez got married.
53:16It was very well received by my family, but my father, he was just concerned in case there would be any repercussions from people because of a mixed marriage and he was obviously protecting me.
53:34What about your mum?
53:35My mother said to me, Maureen, I married the man I loved and you must do the same.
53:43She said she didn't want me to go through life and not have married the man I loved and perhaps be unhappy forevermore, so she couldn't live without, so.
53:56What a mum to have.
53:57She's still alive at 89.
53:59Once you got married and you've got kids, was that a challenge at all?
54:09I didn't think so.
54:11No, it never worried me. Never.
54:13With wonderful neighbours, nobody left to my children and maybe I wasn't looking because I was so happily married with my baby.
54:23She looked beautiful, her colouring was gorgeous and I was so proud of her.
54:29By 1968 there were two race relations acts which outlawed discrimination in jobs and housing, protecting the rights of immigrants wanting to make a life for themselves in this country.
54:44Prejudice amongst the public had certainly not eradicated, but a new liberalism was in the air.
54:57The late 60s saw the summer of love, the questioning of old ideas and the changing attitudes towards sex to gender and race.
55:15In 1968 the BBC screened this pioneering documentary.
55:24Donald Raymond, will thou have this woman to thy ready wife to live together after God's ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony.
55:34Another screened kiss, but unlike all those fictional clinches in the films and soaps that went before it, this was the first time a genuine kiss had been seen on British television.
55:52These weren't actors going through the motions, this was a real couple in love.
56:00The editor of the Radio Times Magazine refused to use a photo of the couple kissing to publicise the programme.
56:06He said it was too provocative. Instead, he opted for this.
56:15But despite the flurry of headlines this caused in the popular press, the programme itself was well received.
56:22It attracted huge viewing figures and the broadsheets called it moving and compassionate.
56:29By the late 1960s Britain had undoubtedly changed.
56:33We'd gone from calling children like my brother-in-law Tony war casualties to having mixed-race relationships on primetime television.
56:42Post-war Britain was finally coming to terms with just how diverse it had become.
56:48The new race relations legislation was a sign of that.
56:50But, in many ways, this was still tolerance rather than celebration.
56:56It would be some time before we really embraced the idea of a mixed Britain.
57:01That would not come till the 70s and beyond when I started to make my way in this country.
57:06In the next programme, aristocratic adoptions, rock-style marriages, the search for identity and forbidden love.
57:18Forbidden love.
57:19Forbidden love.
57:20Forbidden love.
57:25Forbidden love.
57:26Canada
57:28com
57:31Lulululuku
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