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Newly arrived West Indian immigrants to the UK wait in Southampton customs hall in May 1956.
Newly arrived West Indian immigrants to the UK wait in Southampton customs hall in May 1956. Photograph: Haywood Magee/Getty Images
Newly arrived West Indian immigrants to the UK wait in Southampton customs hall in May 1956. Photograph: Haywood Magee/Getty Images

Lovers and Strangers by Clair Wills review – the making of modern Britain

This article is more than 6 years old
Personal stories from the first generation of Britain’s postwar immigrants have much to teach us as we seek to close our doors to the EU

“One of the great temptations for an Irishman, and for an Irish girl away from home, is that of drink.” So warns A Catholic Handbook for Irish Men and Women Going to England. The 1953 handbook warns new arrivals that the pub and dancehall are dens of iniquity. “The homesickness you will feel at times can make your lodgings seem very lonely indeed and, if you do not know a good Catholic family on whom you can call, you will be tempted to spend your leisure time in public houses.”

Using source material that both endears and disturbs, this is the story of the first two decades of postwar immigrants to the UK or, rather, a collection of stories, vividly told, of West Indians, Poles, Latvians, Ukrainians, Italians, Maltese, Cypriots, Indians, Pakistanis and Irish arriving on these shores after the war. Most were seeking to make some money and send their remittances home and never thought they would stay.

For many, this was the colonial mother country and the shock set in the moment they walked off the gangplank of the ship, with the drabness of the sky and the sight of impoverished, working-class, white people. Previously, they had only met colonial officials dressed in whites and speaking in plummy voices. As one unnamed witness recalls: “My images of white people were of a race that had all the good jobs and therefore lots of money. A people whose menfolk work while their woman stay at home or play tennis.”

Clair Wills, an academic of Irish descent, knits together memories such as these in a vivid account that mercifully eschews contemporary moral judgments. Her account begins with the 1948 establishment of the NHS and ends in 1968 – a year that saw Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, riots in a number of UK cities and the establishment of the British Black Panther movement.

Even though she tries to avoid drawing parallels with the present day, they are evident on virtually every page – economic workforce demands versus identity politics; attempts at integration running up against the permissiveness of racism; governments that turn on the tap of immigration, then panic and seek to turn it off again (usually failing).

No matter how bad the problems, the lure of supposed wealth was strong. Governments in the Caribbean tried to dissuade young men from leaving, emphasising the difficulties they would face in Britain. Loan sharks and travel agencies egged them on, often causing acute problems with debt. In India during the 1950s, the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, complained that a third of Indian emigrants were travelling on false documents.

Meanwhile, the NHS and other public bodies openly assessed the value of particular ethnic groups. Women from the Baltic states were deemed to be “of great benefit to our stock”. Wills notes: “It was a market in bodies, a piece of social and demographic engineering in which British officials aimed to solve both the labour and population crisis by controlling the entry of pure, clean, strong Europeans.”

In 1953, amid overcrowding in terrible housing, the government began the first of several attempted clampdowns. The Home Office established a committee to look at the most effective means of restricting further immigration and to deal with social problems arising from those already prevalent in the UK. The police provided much of the evidence. Chief constables, who generally saw immigrants as “trouble”, were asked to grade them, to evaluate their moral fibre as well as any criminal conduct. They focused on the problems linked with prostitution and betting houses. The Irish had the highest rates of crime, but that was largely because they were over-represented among the urban poor.

From the role of the washing machine in the lives of Indian housewives to the painful and uplifting stories of the early mixed marriages, this book is at its strongest when it allows the immigrant story to tell itself, when it veers away from statistics and focuses on the individual memoir.

When it came to the dating ritual of a Friday night, some dancehalls were so alarmed by the success rates of young black men with white women that they imposed colour bars, either overtly or tacitly. “The habit among Caribbean men of making an entrance was one that riled their English peers. From the smartly tailored suits, the trousers high-waisted, wide-legged and cuffed, the braces, the two-tone shoes and the pork pie hats, to their confident insistence on jive and swing rhythms on the ballroom dancefloor, they were bound to enrage their rivals.”

In 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was passed. Designed to stem the inflow, in the short term it had the opposite effect. Families, particularly from the Indian subcontinent, used the two-year lead-time to reunify families, with wives and children or grandparents travelling to Britain in greater numbers than ever before. In 1964, a Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths, bucked the national swing, sweeping to victory in the West Midlands seat of Smethwick with the slogan: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour”. His party denounced his campaign and two years later he lost.

In considering how post-Brexit Britain is coping with race, it is salutary to delve back to the not-so-distant past.

Lovers and Strangers by Clair Wills is published by Allen Lane (£25). To order a copy for £21.25 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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