Abstract
Though the overall social climate in Britain during and immediately after the Second World War was one in which racial prejudice and practices were highly ingrained and prevalent, there could often be a level of disconnect between the generally disapproving and oppositional wider social attitude to interraciality and that demonstrated on a local, everyday basis. The few first-hand accounts of the wartime parents in mixed relationships who gave up their mixed race children and subsequent accounts of these children in adulthood reveal a picture of emotional distress as well as the wrench of abandonment that lay behind the details of official and media reporting. Yet, at this time interraciality was both normalised and supported via the visibility, networks and social spaces of mixed race families and multiracial communities.
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Notes
- 1.
Concerns, mostly from white British men, about the willingness of white British women to engage in interracial relationships being an indicator of a decline in female morality have been a constant refrain from the eighteenth century onwards. See, for example, Fryer (1984) and our Introduction.
- 2.
Western Daily Press and Bristol Mirror, 10 March 1943.
- 3.
Laurie and Marion Phillpotts, Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4. Broadcast 7 January 1987.
- 4.
The Voice, 20.01.2016.
- 5.
- 6.
Derby Evening Telegraph, 28 July 1945.
- 7.
Brown Babies, Channel 4. Broadcast 11 October 1999.
- 8.
Gordon Willis, interviewed in Brown Babies, Channel 4. Broadcast 11 October 1999.
- 9.
WW2 People’s War is an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The archive can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/
- 10.
Brown Babies, Channel 4. Broadcast 11 October 1999.
- 11.
Derby Evening Telegraph, 28 December 1945.
- 12.
Few details of the father of Martha’s baby are given; however, the considerable sum of money he gave Martha (equivalent of almost £800 in 2017) suggest that he had access to financial means as well as cared about the security of Martha and his child-to-be.
- 13.
The costs are reported differently in press accounts: 34s (Chester Chronicle, 19 July 1941) and £1.14s (Cheshire Observer, 19 July 1941).
- 14.
The Cheshire Observer, 14 June 1941 and 19 July 1941; Liverpool Evening Express, 16 July 1941; Chester Chronicle, 19 July 1941.
- 15.
The Mary Seacole Statue Appeal was launched in 2003 in an effort to recognise the contributions of the Jamaican businesswoman and nurse Mary Seacole - of mixed Jamaican and Scottish ancestry - to aiding British soldiers during the Crimean War. After over a decade of fundraising, the appeal reached its target and an erected statue of Seacole was unveiled in June 2016 in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital, the first public statue dedicated to a named woman of black heritage in Britain.
- 16.
As may be recalled from Chap. 5, Doris, a white East End resident who reminisced about growing up with mixed race families in the 1930s, recalled that ‘during the war, most of them went’.
- 17.
See interviews with Olive Salaman in Tamed and Shabby Tiger, BBC Wales (broadcast 1 March 1968) and with her son Daoud Salaman in Mixed Britannia, BBC2, broadcast 6 October 2011. Also Gilliat-Ray, S., & Mellor, J. (2010). For more on the general history of Muslims in the UK, see Ansari (2009) and for local histories, including intermarriage, see Lawless (1995) on Tyneside, Gilliat-Ray and Mellor (2010) on Wales, and Holland (2017) on Sheffield.
- 18.
Neil Sinclair, interviewed in Mixed Britannia, 6 October 2011. The same episode includes an interview with Daoud Salaman, one of Ali and Olive’s children. Olive herself is interviewed in the BBC Wales programme, Tamed and Shabby Tiger, broadcast 1 March 1968.
- 19.
Charles Jenkins, Millennium Memory Bank, 10 October 1998.
- 20.
Nora Glasgow, interviewed in History of Butetown, Black Film and Video Workshop in Wales with Butetown Community History Project, 1987. Accessed at Butetown Arts & History Centre.
- 21.
Lancashire Daily Post, 1 May 1946.
- 22.
Laurie and Marion Phillpotts, Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 7 January 1987.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Charles Jenkins, Millennium Memory Bank, 10 October 1998.
- 26.
My Black Uncle, WW2 People’s War, www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar [date accessed 01.02.2017].
- 27.
A reference to Noel Coward’s popular 1931 song ‘Half Caste Woman’, as discussed in Chap. 4. The song appeared in Charles Cochran’s 1931 Revue.
- 28.
Recorded interviews with Butetown residents in their own home, Butetown History & Arts Centre pilot, Undated. Accessed at Butetown History & Arts Centre, 2007.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Aberdare evacuees—a panel of nine evacuees brought together in Aberdare, a cultural event organised by BHAC filmed by BBC Wales, 2006. Accessed at Butetown History & Arts Centre, 2007.
- 31.
There are indications that the children’s lives in London were similarly not blighted by racism either: in the comments on the British Film Institute’s video of the event, a commentator remarks that she had recently met Stephanie who had said that ‘at the time they lived in London, only three Black families lived there. I asked her whether there had been perceptible racism in London at that time; she said it was there (imagine the word there is underlined) but not obvious.’ (Whit 2009).
- 32.
Observer, 21 June 2009; Guardian, 26 August 2009; Northamptonshire Telegraph, 17 August 2009. As a result of the film being made available to view by the British Film Institute, Stephanie was reunited with Joy Smith, her best friend, from the village and she and her daughter visited Joy in Stanion.
- 33.
- 34.
Alfred Lawes, Millennium Memory Bank, 5 November 1998.
- 35.
Charles Jenkins, Millennium Memory Bank, 10 October 1998.
- 36.
Oral interview featuring Nora Glasgow, Black Film and Video Workshop in Wales with Butetown Community History Project, 1987. Accessed at Butetown Community History Project.
- 37.
Veronica Robinson, interviewed as part of the Butetown Remembers the Homefront project, Butetown History and Arts Centre, 2005–2006.
- 38.
Sunday Pictorial, 9 December 1945.
- 39.
On Doreen, see Daily Mirror, 2 March 1940 and Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 9 March 1940. On Stephanie, see Northampton Mercury, 5 May 1944.
- 40.
Daily Mirror, 2 May 1944.
- 41.
Birmingham Daily Gazette, 29 January 1940; Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 2 February 1940.
- 42.
Daily Mail, 9 April 1940.
- 43.
Daily Mirror, 27 June 1941.
- 44.
The story of the Khamas was the subject of the 2016 film A United Kingdom which opened the London Film Festival that year.
- 45.
Success occurred both in England and the USA, the latter somewhat to Shute’s surprise given his approach to racial themes. McCandless (2017).
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Caballero, C., Aspinall, P.J. (2018). Conviviality, Hostility and Ordinariness: Everyday Lives and Emotions in the Second World War and Early Post-war Years. In: Mixed Race Britain in The Twentieth Century. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-33928-7_8
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