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This wedding symbolises one of the truly great changes in British life. Once and it’s not so long ago such a relationship would leave you ostracized and officially condemned. George Alagiah, Mixed Britannia 1/3: 1910-1939, BBC 2011
Yet through it all mixed race communities have not only survived they’ve flourished. ibid.
One in ten children in this country now lives in a mixed race family. ibid.
There were now perhaps 20,000 men from the Caribbean, the Middle East and Asia here. ibid.
The [South Shields] riots spread to Cardiff, another port city that had changed ... White men threw insults and then stones. ibid.
Something like 15,000 people were involved in the riots in 1919. ibid.
Ever since the 1919 riots Stanley like all foreign seamen had had to register with the police and carry an ID card bearing a photograph. Even Emily was not immune from this humiliation. An earlier nationality law had a rather vicious sting in its tail: every inch an Englishwoman, once she married Stanley she lost her British nationality. ibid.
The law was applied differently around the country. ibid.
In London’s docklands home to 700 Chinese people intolerance coupled with ignorance made for some dark myths about the community. ibid.
Eugenics saw itself as a new science for human advancement. ibid.
The unfortunate mixed-race children of Liverpool would be the first guinea pigs on which the theory would be tested. ibid.
On 19th May 1930 on this very stage Paul Robeson, the African-American singer and actor, came to play Othello here in Britain. ibid.
These couples were making it up as they went along sharing some customs and quietly ignoring those that didn’t work for them. ibid.
In 1929 James Wilson started to call openly for a new form of social control, anti-miscegenation laws similar to those which had been introduced in South Africa. ibid.
In his book English Journey Priestley is clearly moved by what he found in the mixed race community in Liverpool. His writing helped to create a new vision of Englishness. ibid.
Our dalliance with race science was suddenly over. ibid.
Some white women, perhaps only a handful at first, allowed their hearts to rule their heads and in so doing felt the full wroth of so-called respectable society ... Imagine how brave they had to be. ibid.
Heroic pioneers of mixed-race Britain. ibid.
Like so many other mixed race war babies Tony was put into care by his unmarried mother. George Alagiah, Mixed Britannia 2/3: 1940-1965
The Second World War turned lives upside down. People from different races worked together and played together. ibid.
Mass immigration meant Britain would never look the same again. ibid.
Dr Harold Moody – a Jamaican born GP who’d married a white English nurse Olive in 1913. In 1931 he’d set up the League of Coloured Peoples – Britain’s first black pressure group. ibid.
Jake [Jacobs] was one of more than six thousand black servicemen from the colonies who came here. They were here to help in the war effort, but they did so much more. ibid.
About a thousand mixed-race babies were now fatherless ... A shocking number ended up in care. ibid.
Harold Moody argued that the children should be treated as war casualties whose care should be jointly funded by the British and American governments. ibid.
Liverpool in the summer of 1946 ... In a number of dawn raids police descended on the area – their mission to round up any Chinese seamen they could find ... A boat was ready and waiting for their journey to China. ibid.
One thousand three hundred and sixty-two Chinese men were forced to leave. Of those some three hundred were married. Somewhere between five hundred and a thousand children were left fatherless. ibid.
Peggy Cripps’ groom was not some British toff – he was Joe Appiah, a Ghanaian chieftain’s son. ibid.
Pathé News was on hand to reflect just how fundamentally British families were changing. ibid.
Mixed race relationships had become an issue of national debate. ibid.
Vicious nigger hunts by white teddy boys. ibid.
Actor Earl Cameron was himself in a mixed-race marriage when he appeared in Flame in the Streets. ibid.
Emergency Ward 10 proved right on the button. ibid.
As well as West Indians and Africans, over 100,000 Indian and Pakistanis had entered the country. ibid.
The NHS was a magnet for people of all nationalities. ibid.
By 1968 there were two Race Relations Acts which outlawed discrimination in jobs and housing. ibid.
Britain today has one of the most ethnically diverse populations in Europe. George Alagiah, Mixed Britannia 3/3: 1965-2011
Between 1962 and 1971 there had been a succession of Immigration Acts. By that time the number of south Asians stood at almost half a million. ibid.
There were many more mixed-race children than you’d expect. ibid.
By the early 1980s there was a hot debate about transracial adoption. ibid.
Should mixed race children be defined by their colour or by their need? ibid.
The story of the De Souza adoption process soon broke nationally causing outrage in the media. ibid.
I was telling you I went down a coalmine the other day. We sank into a pit half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain, and we did about three-quarters of a mile with rock and shale above us. The earth seemed to be straining around us and above us to crush us in.
You could see the pit-props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibres split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way, and then there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites: the whole pit is deluged in fire, and the breath of life is scorched out of hundreds of breasts by the consuming flame. In the very next colliery to the one I descended just a few years ago three hundred people lost their lives in that way. And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords, and say to them: Here, you know, these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse? They scowl at us, and we say: Only a ha’penny, just a copper. They say: You thieves! And they turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who at the risk of life create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand. Lloyd George, address Edinburgh Castle, Limehouse, London
Enjoying rudeness became so much easier. Rude was now in your front room. Rude Britannia 3/3: You’ve Never Had It So Rude, BBC 2010
We now lived in a mass democracy of rude. ibid.
Cartoonist Gerald Scarfe drew the prime minister naked ... Private Eye’s Romantic England: Macmillan Issue. ibid.
A tradition of rude cartooning come back to life. ibid.
Plays like Entertaining Mrs Sloane and Loot [Joe Orton] with their assault on taboos of sex, class and death were a challenge to theatre audiences. ibid.
Orton’s last piece of notorious rude theatre was What the Butler Saw. ibid.
Radio was at its rudest in Round the Horne. ibid.
A counter-culture: house-journal of this underground movement was Oz which first surfaced in the Summer of Love 1967. ibid.
Inside School Kid’s Issue: Oz was a comic strip featuring the head of the much loved children’s character Rupert Bear superimposed on an X-rated cartoon by American Robert Crumb. Words and pictures were a rude provocation. ibid.
The Oz Three... were found guilty and sent down with harsh sentences ... A successful appeal. ibid.
Television ... a mass democracy of rude. ibid.