Special Relationships: mixed-race couples in post-war Britain and the United States

ABSTRACT

This article uses a transatlantic lens to reassess interracial relationships in 1950s Britain. Although mixed-race couples in this country suffered serious discrimination, Britain appeared relatively progressive to African Americans on the other side of the Atlantic engaged in a struggle for recognition of their constitutional rights. In contrast to the United States, there were no laws in Britain that prohibited interracial marriage. The British also appeared more open to public discussion of relationships that crossed the colour line including the production of several films that focused attention on this controversial subject. This apparently more inclusive attitude towards gender and race relations provided an inspirational model to African Americans in their fight for equality.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Claire Langhamer and Wendy Webster for their critical advice on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes on contributor

Clive Webb is Professor of Modern American History and Head of the School of History, Art History and Philosophy at the University of Sussex.

Notes

1 ‘U Aims at Negro Press for “Sapphire”’, Variety, 16 September 1959, p. 18.

2 David Dabydeen, John Gilmore & Cecily Jones (2007) (Eds) The Oxford Companion to Black British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 495; John F. Lyons (2013) America in the British Imagination 1945 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp.76–79; H. L. Malchow (2011) Special Relations: the Americanization of Britain? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 161–193.

3 Geoffrey Gorer (1965) Britain and the New Immigrants, Box 72 (SxMs52/2/5/4/4), Geoffrey Gorer Archive, The Keep, Falmer, Brighton.

4 ‘Negroes in the Charming South’, The Times, 10 June 1954, p. 9; ‘Vanishing Taboos: Change in the Deep South’, Manchester Guardian, 26 April 1955, p. 1.

5 ‘There's NO bar on love’, Daily Mirror, 9 June 1960, p. 10. For further examples of the British press ridiculing white southern fears of interracial relationships, see ‘Black and White’, Guardian, 8 June 1958, p. 16; ‘Demagogic Dynasty of Louisiana’, The Times, 1 July 1959, p. 10. An example of similar criticism of white South Africans can be found in ‘Marriage Law in South Africa: harmfulness of colour bar’, Guardian, 12 October 1959, p. 7.

6 For further information on the prohibition on racial intermarriage in the United States, see Renee C. Romano (2003) Race Mixing: black-white marriage in postwar America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press); Phyl Newbeck (2004) Virginia Hasn't Always Been for Lovers: interracial marriage bans and the case of Richard and Mildred Loving (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press).

7 Paul D. Rich (1986) Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 127–128.

8 For a rare report on ministerial opposition to intermarriage, see Jet, 20 December 1962, p. 20. See also Wendy Webster (1998) Imagining Home: gender, ‘race’ and national identity, 1945–64 (London & New York: Routledge), p. 49.

9 G. C. L. Bertram (1958) West Indian Immigration (London: Eugenics Society).

10 Albert Hyndman (1960) The West Indian in London, in S. K. Ruck (Ed.) The West Indian Comes to England: a report prepared for the trustees of the London Parochial Charities by the Family Welfare Association (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 128. See also social anthropologist Kenneth Little's letter to the editor, Guardian, 17 September 1958, p. 6.

11 Clifford S. Hill (1965) How Colour Prejudiced is Britain? (London: Victor Gollancz), p. 209.

12 Cited in James Walvin (1973) Black and White: the negro and English society 1555–1945 (London: Allen Lane), p. 55.

13 Lucy Bland (2005) White Women and Men of Colour: miscegenation fears in Britain after the Great War, Gender & History, 17(1), pp. 29–61; Jacqueline Jenkinson (2008) Black 1919: riots, racism and resistance in imperial Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press).

14 Cited in Susan D. Pennybacker (2009) From Scottsboro to Munich: race and political culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press), p. 255.

15 David A. Reynolds (1985) The Churchill Government and the Black American Troops in Britain during World War II, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 35, pp. 128–130.

16 Royal Commission on Population (1949) Report (London: HMSO) Cmd. 7695.

17 Esme Wynne-Tyson (1959) Thoughts on the Colour Problem, Contemporary Review, p. 43. See also Chris Waters (1997) ‘Dark Strangers’ In Our Midst: discourses of race and nation in Britain, 1947–1963, Journal of British Studies 36(2), pp. 210, 229.

18 ‘Marry a Negro?’, Picture Post, 30 October 1954, pp. 21–23.

19 Edward Pilkington (1988) Beyond the Mother Country: West Indians and the Notting Hill white riots (London: Tauris).

20 Sheila Patterson (1965), Dark Strangers: a study of West Indians in London (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 248.

21 Bernard Hollowood, ‘Race and Face’, Punch, 10 September 1958, p. 333.

22 Michael Banton (1959) White and Coloured: the behaviour of British people towards coloured immigrants (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 127; Marcus Collins (2001) West Indian Men in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain, Journal of British Studies, 40(3), pp. 406–407.

23 Listen, for example, to the Mighty Terror's licentious Women Police in England of 1956, a recording of which is available on Various Artists (2013) London is the Place for Me: Afro-cubism, calypso, highlife, mento, jazz, the music of young black London, 5 & 6 (Honest Jon's Records, HJRCD61).

24 Wallace Collins (1965) Jamaican Migrant (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 67. See also pp. 64, 65, 85.

25 Collins, ‘West Indian Men’, p. 392.

26 Barbara Maria Nnaemeka (2013) Granddaughter of the Windrush (Brighton: Book Guild).

27 The concept of an ‘emotional revolution’ is the theme of Claire Langhamer (2013) The English in Love: the intimate story of an emotional revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

28 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (2001) Mixed Feelings: the complex lives of mixed-race Britons (London: Women's Press), p. 69.

29 Webster, Imagining Home, p. 92. See also Claire Langhamer (2005) Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain, Journal of Contemporary History, 40(2), pp. 341–362.

30 One of the most infamous articulations of this is Muriel E. Fletcher's (1930) Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports (Liverpool: Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children).

31 People in Trouble (1958). Documentary. UK: Associated-Rediffusion, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybqLRF1zFUI (accessed 17 July 2015).

32 James Jupp (1969) Immigrant Involvement in British and Australian Politics, Race, 10, pp. 323–340. For further evidence of the way that opposition to interracial relationships informed calls for immigration control, see Lord Elton (1965) The Unarmed Invasion: a survey of Afro-Asian immigration (London: Geoffrey Bles), pp. 75–76.

33 The song was originally released on the flip side of the single ‘Don't Tickle Me, Dorothy’ (Melodisc, 1229). It is also available on Various Arists (2002) London is the Place for Me: Trinidadian calypso in London, 1950–1956 (Honest Jon's Records, HJRLP2).

34 Both songs feature on Various Artists (1997) Kings of Calypso (Pulse, PLS CD 229).

35 Available on Various Artists (2002), Trojan Calypso Boxset (Trojan Records, TJETD033).

36 Philip Carter, Roberts, Aldwyn (1922–2000), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2012 (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/73811, accessed 12 May 2015).

37 Kitch! BBC Radio 4, 17 January 2015.

38 Lord Kitchener (1953) If You're Not White You're Black, Melodisc 1260. The record appeared the very year that the musician married.

39 See, for example, Frederick Douglass (1979) England Should Lead the Cause of Emancipation: an address delivered in Leeds, England, on December 23, 1846, in John Blassingame (Ed) The Frederick Douglass Papers: series one—speeches, debates, and interviews (New Haven: Yale University Press), Vol. I, p. 474.

40 Sarah L. Silkey (2015) Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, lynching & transatlantic activism (Athens: University of Georgia Press).

41 Graham A. Smith (1980) Jim Crow on the home front, 1942–1945, New Community, 8(3), pp. 317–328; Christopher Thorne (1974) Britain and the Black GIs: racial issues and Anglo-American relations in 1942, New Community, 3(3), pp. 262–271.

42 See the observations of African American author and activist Langston Hughes in Christopher C. De Santis (1995) (Ed.) Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: essays on race, politics, and culture, 1942–62 (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press), p. 137.

43 Brenda Gayle Plummer (1996) Rising Wind: black Americans and US foreign affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), pp. 71–72.

44 One black newspaper, for instance, celebrated the Labour Party's victory in the general election of 1945 as heralding the demise of Britain's ‘greedy empire’, which had practised ‘Jim Crow with a cockney accent': ‘England Leaps Ahead’, Chicago Defender, 4 August 1945, p. 12. Elsewhere in the same issue, the paper quoted black activist and actor Paul Robeson as declaring the Labour victory the beginning of a ‘new era’. For evidence of African American animosity towards Churchill, particularly because of his refusal to extend the provisions of the Atlantic Charter to non-European peoples, see ‘World View: An Anglo-American Axis’, Chicago Defender, 16 March 1946, p. 15.

45 ‘Intermarriage Will Be Common’, Jet, 18 September 1952, p. 8; ‘British Court Permits Girl, 17, To Marry Negro’ 11 June 1959, p. 13; ‘Sex Change Woman, Black Man Rewed In England’, ‘White Drummer Defies Father To Wed Pearl Bailey’, 27 November 1969, p. 23; 27 November 1952, p. 21.

46 ‘Groom-To-Be At Party’, Jet 2 July 1953, p. 21; Doris Garland Anderson (1938) Nigger Lover (London: LN Fowler).

47 ‘Interracial Marriages Booming in Britain’, Chicago Defender, 19 September 1953, p. 4.

48 ‘Intermarriage Flourishes in South Shields, England’, Plaindealer (Kansas City), 25 February 1955, p. 4.

49 ‘South African Leaders Object To Mixed Marriages In England’, Crusader (Rockford, Illinois), 17 July 1953, p. 3; ‘Words of The Week’, Jet 30 July 1953, p. 18.

50 Sam Selvon (1959) The Lonely Londoners (London: Allan Wingate, 1956); G. A. Fazarkerley (1959) A Stranger Here (London: Macdonald).

51 Island in the Sun (1957). Film. Directed by Robert Rossen. USA: Twentieth Century Fox. For a contemporary review emphasising the film's many failings, see The Times, 24 July 1957, p. 5.

52 Alec Waugh, Island in the Sun (London: Cassell, 1956).

53 Borderline (1930). Film. Directed by Kenneth Macpherson. Switzerland: The Pool Group.

54 Pool of London (1950). Film. Directed by Basil Dearden. UK: Ealing Studios. A rare US review of the film dismissed the ‘artificial’ nature of the interracial romance: New York Times, 28 November 1951, p. 50.

55 Sapphire (1959). Film. Directed by Basil Dearden. UK: Artna Films. This and all subsequent quotations from the film are taken from the shooting script, 31 July 1958, JG/8/1, Janet Green Papers, Reuben Library, British Film Institute, London.

56 Green informed the American press that she had toured black neighbourhoods ‘dozens of times'. San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 6 February 1960.

57 The pressbook for the film also emphasises the otherness of Sapphire in class terms by luridly contrasting what the underwear reveals about her in contrast to how she has been perceived by her fiancé's ‘respectable’ parents. Sapphire Pressbook, JG/8/4, Janet Green Papers.

58 ‘The Film That Slipped Past the Faceless Ones’, Daily Mail, 8 May 1959, p. 12; ‘Spirit of Ealing Persists in “Sapphire”: “whodunnit” with topical slant’, Manchester Guardian, 9 May 1959, p. 5.

59 ‘Thriller and Social Study: an awkward film mixture’, The Times, 8 May 1959, p. 6.

60 ‘Almost the Perfect Mystery’, Daily Mirror, 8 May 1959, p. 19.

61 San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 6 February 1960. For further information on US distribution of the film, see G. E. Pickett to Basil Dearden, 28 May 1959, JG/8/3, Janet Green Papers.

62 New York Post, 3 November 1959. This review is, along with the other New York newspaper articles cited below, a clipping from JG/8/6, Janet Green Papers.

63 New York Mirror, 3 November 1959.

64 New York Tribune, 3 November 1959. Other laudatory reviews appeared in New York Journal-American, 3 November 1959; New York News, 3 November 1959; New York Telegram, 3 November 1959.

65 For more information on US distribution and critical and commercial reaction, see box office reports in Variety, 7 October 1959, p. 9; 14 October 1959, p. 9; 18 November 1959, p. 24; 9 March 1960, p. 8; 16 March 1960, p. 3.

66 ‘The Bull (John) in it May Ban Pix: Londoners very frank attack on segregation real theme of picture’, Chicago Defender, 15 August 1959, p. 19; Ebony, December 1959, p. 51.

67 ‘London and Little Rock’, Chicago Defender, 8 September 1958, p. 11.

68 Los Angeles Tribune, 23 October 1959.

69 ‘Movie of the Week: Sapphire’, Jet, 1 October 1959, p.65.

70 Baltimore Afro-American, 21 November 1959, p. 26.

71 For examples of this criticism, see Paul Carter Harrison, ‘Black Theater and the African Continuum’, Black World (August 1972), p. 45; Andrea Benton Rushing, ‘The Changing Same’, Black World (September 1975), p. 19.

72 ‘Sapphire: thrilling British film combines murder with an interracial love affair’, Ebony, December 1959, pp. 51–54, p. 51.

73 ‘Negro Singer Weds Britain's Top Bandleader’, Jet, 10 April 1958, p. 23; ‘Briton Sues Paper For Linking Him With Bias’, 25 December 1958, p. 21; ‘Bandleader and Bride’, 20 August 1959, p. 59.

74 ‘The Bull (John) in it May Ban Pix’, Chicago Defender, 15 August 1959, p. 19.

75 ‘Fresh Talent: at 19 Shelagh Delaney looks at life honestly in “A Taste of Honey”’, New York Times, 6 November 1960, p. X1.

76 ‘A Taste of Honey: daring British play is Broadway hit’, Ebony, February 1961, p. 71.

77 ‘“A Taste of Honey” Opens at Blackstone Theatre Mar.5’, Chicago Defender, 3 March 1962, p. 10; ‘“A Taste of Honey” At Blackstone Solid Smash’, 12 March 1962, p. 16; ‘Taste of Honey Drawing Well’, 19 March 1962, p. 17; Lorraine Hansberry (1959) A Raisin in the Sun: a drama in three acts (New York: Random House).

78 A Taste of Honey (1961). Film. Directed by Tony Richardson, Woodfall Film Productions; Jet, 17 May 1962, p. 65; ‘“Honey” Drawing Throngs To Cinema Centre’, Chicago Defender, 24 July 1962, p. 16.

79 ‘Review: “A Taste of Honey”’, New Orleans Times Picayune, 20 July 1962, p. 44.

80 Flame in the Streets (1961). Film. Directed by Rob Ward Baker. J. Arthur Rank.

81 ‘The colour bar’, Guardian, 24 June 1961, p. 5. Critics made similar observations of the stage play produced three years earlier: see Alan Brien, ‘Putting Up Black’, Spectator, 5 December 1958, pp. 808–809, 811.

82 ‘Film About Race Prejudice’, The Times, 23 June 1961, p. 6.

83 ‘“Flame”-With a Glimmer of Hope’, Daily Mirror, 23 June 1961, p. 19.

84 ‘Coloured Man Can Wed Girl, 18, Court Rules’, Daily Mail, 24 June 1961, p. 9.

85 ‘Screen: Racial Conflict: “Flame in the Streets” New British Import’, New York Times, 13 September 1962, p. 32; ‘Racial Film's Flaws Eclipse Its Artistry’, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 5 November 1962, p. 30.

86 ‘Advertisement’, New Orleans Times Picayune, 22 January 1963, p. 20.

87 ‘Acclaim Film of London Interracial Love’, Jet, 13 July 1961, p.62.

88 Daily Mirror, 23 June 1961, p. 19.

89 ‘Hot Scene’, Jet, 20 September 1962, p. 61; ‘Advertisement’, Baltimore Afro-American, 20 October 1962, p. 18; ‘Interracial Film to Open at World’, Chicago Defender, 2 February 1963, p.10.

90 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). Film. Directed by Stanley Kramer. Columbia Studios.

91 For more information on Jones and the Gazette, see Bill Schwarz (2002) Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette: reflections on the emergence of post-colonial Britain, Twentieth Century British History, 14(3), pp. 264–285; Donald Hinds (2008) The West Indian Gazette: Claudia Jones and the black press in Britain, Race & Class 50(1), pp. 88–97.

92 Selvon, Lonely Londoners, pp. 20–21.

93 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown & Anne Montague (1992) The Colour of Love: mixed race relationships (London: Virago), p. 74.

94 Langhamer, English in Love; Josie McLellan (2011) Love in the Time of Communism: intimacy and sexuality in the GDR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Deborah A. Field (2007) Love and Communist Morality in Khrushchev's Russia (New York: Peter Lang).

95 See, for example, Timothy Scott Brown & Andrew E. Lison (Eds) (2014) The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: media, counterculture, revolt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); Martin Klimke (2009) The Other Alliance: student protest in West Germany and the United States in the global sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); Jeremi Suri (2007) The Global Revolutions of 1968 (New York: WW Norton).