In the United Kingdom during WW1, several thousand foreign colored men were hired to fill the vacant positions of native British men who had gone off to fight. Some were Middle Eastern. Some were West African. Others were technically from the West Indies, but racially that just meant West African. Many were from British territories, but a large percentage were from Portuguese and French colonies. The overwhelming majority of these foreigners again were males, and most had no established roots in the UK. During the course of the war, however, they gradually began to form their own tiny colonies in various port cities, mainly Liverpool and Cardiff. All in all, the total population may have amounted to somewhere around 10,000, certainly no more than 15,000. Indeed, there was never a substantial non-White population living in the British Isles, until after World War II. [1]
Many of these colored men had been engaged in maritime and dock work centered around shipping. A few had served in the imperial navy and were demobilized in Britain when the war finally ended. The presence of these foreigners caused serious friction with many native British men who upon returning home found that they now had to compete for jobs and housing with thousands of foreigners who had taken up residence in their port towns.
Often these foreigners would work for lower wages, because they were overwhelmingly single and had no families to support. Yes, some had married local White girls and started families, but most of the interactions with local females were of a dubious nature, as I will later show. Naturally, the situation gave rise to interracial strife. Tensions culminated with a series of riots in the summer of 1919, coincidentally at the same time race riots were occurring in the US, in places like Chicago and Washington D.C.
Now, curiously, the riots of 1919 in the UK are not a prominent feature of mainstream British cultural memory, but to the extent that they’ve been discussed, media outlets such as the BBC have cultivated a very one-sided narrative in which Blacks are seen as the absolute unquestionable victims of irrational nativist backlash and White mob violence. You can watch a short BBC video on them here, wherein a Black man begins by stating that he “loved history in school but what he got taught didn’t resonate with [him,]” essentially because none of the kings and queens he learned about looked like him. Should we be surprised by this? And more importantly, should the British people be guilted for this?
The Black man then accuses native Brits of lynching another Black man named Charles Wootton, (Sometimes written as Wootten or Wooten) a 24-year-old Bermudan. Wootton is portrayed as an innocent bystander chased into the Liverpool docks and drowned by a mob of angry White men. Then afterwards the racist police and court system are seen as having covered it all up. But as usual, there’s more to the story.
If you dig into British newspaper archives, the circumstances surrounding Wootton’s death turn out to be quite relevant and played a significant role in the formation of the “mob.” The Manchester Evening News explains the initial sequence of events on June 5th, 1919 that preceded Wootton’s death.
About half past nine last evening a number of Danes were leaving a public-house in the neighborhood of Great George's Square when one of them was attacked by several negroes and badly stabbed. A constable on duty interfered, whereupon he was assaulted, the negroes using razors and knives and cutting his face and back in terrible fashion. Alter battling courageously with his assailants the officer sank exhausted to the ground. Then somebody summoned assistance, and the police came in force from Argyle street station. In the meantime the negroes had fled from the scene and gone to their headquarters in Upper Pitt-street, where they are to be found in abundance. [2]
The police pursued these men to a lodging house in Upper Pitt street, and while doing so, they were fired upon with revolvers. Four of the constables were seriously wounded. One was shot in the mouth and the bullet exited the back of his neck and struck the constable behind him. Another was badly slashed across the face with a razor. [3] Charles Wootton was in the lodging house that police raided, and he fled when the police tried to apprehend him. The Manchester Evening News even tells us that Wootton may have fired on the police himself, and that this is what incensed the crowd. [4]
The details after Wootton fled the lodging house are hard to determine with absolute certainty, because the various sources report slightly different versions or variations. But we can say with confidence that a crowd did form, and it pursued Wootton as he fled down to the docks where the police eventually caught him. The police were attempting to escort Wootton back to the station, but somehow, he ended up in the water and drowned.
The Leeds Mercury reports the following:
Whether he jumped, was swept, or was thrown into the water, witnesses were unable to say, but subsequently he was seen swimming about, and the crowd threw things at him. Suddenly he disappeared, in spite all efforts made to save him. His body was recovered nearly an hour later. [5]
The Liverpool Echo of June 6th states that Wootton was wrenched from the police, but then escaped the crowd by jumping into the water. A constable climbed down a ladder and was attempting to pull him out of the water, when a stone thrown from the crowd struck Wootton in the head, causing him to sink and drown. [6]
Clearly there was some extent of vigilantism, but we don’t really know that the crowd had intended to kill Wootton. Ultimately at the inquiry, the authorities felt there was insufficient evidence to determine how Wootton ended up in the water or how he drowned. [7] If you read all the available accounts, this seems reasonable.
Nevertheless, some historians make a big fuss over the fact that no one was charged for Wootton’s murder. But this wasn’t unique to Wootton’s case. Ultimately, no one was charged either with the murder of Harold Smart, a 20-year-old native of Cardiff, who on June 11th walked up to a police constable and asked for help after a Black man had slit his throat in the street with a razor. The Western Mail of July 1st informs us that several witnesses testified as to the presence of Blacks assaulting Smart and others, but eventually they fled the scene and were never caught by the police, and thus no charges were ever filed against any individual. [8]
In fact, of the five people killed during these riots, three were White: John Donovan, Harold Smart, and Frederick Henry Longman. Wootton was actually the only Black man killed. The other non-White was an Arab. Yet, videos like that of the BBC don’t mention this, and they disingenuously imply that “lynchings” of Black men were a pandemic. This simply wasn’t the case. Again, Wootton was literally the only Black man killed during these riots, excluding unrelated Black-on-Black murders. But let’s go through the circumstances of the deaths of the White men involved, starting with Harold Smart.
The White Deaths
The Western Daily Press’s July 1st issue informs us that Harold Smart was attacked by a Black man with a razor after Smart and the other man had quarreled over a nearby White woman. The Western Mail of Tuesday July 1st, 1919 tells us the following:
Police-constable Thomas Davies deposed that at 10.20 p.m. on June 11 he was on duty in The Hayes. He saw a crowd of people at the end of Caroline-street, nearest the Hayes Bridge. About 10:35 p.m. he saw the deceased man Smart coming towards him with his hands to his throat. "A nigger has cut my throat," he told the officer, who immediately put him in a taxicab and took him to King Edward Vll Hospital. Subsequently he endeavored, without success, to find out who had inflicted the injury.
The next witness, Patrick Linahan, of 11 Mill-lane stated that he saw a black man and a young fellow "arguing the toss," and a white girl was standing by. Five or ten seconds after witness saw the nigger turn around and he seemed to strike the white man across the face. As his hand came away witness noticed that it contained a razor. Witness immediately rushed at the black man, called him a "dirty black —," and struck him on the side of the face. The black man fell, and witness called upon two white men to hold him, while he (witness) attended to the injured man. A few minutes later he turned round and found that the black man had vanished in the direction of Caroline-street. Witness thought he would be able to identify the black assailant again. [9]
The July 1st issue of The South Wales News reported on the local inquiry into Smart’s death:
Bert Lewis deposed that he was with the deceased, when seven or eight coloured men came running towards them, and one said, "If any of you white bitches want to fight, come on." Witness ran away, and on looking back, when 15 yards away, saw Smart on the ground, with one coloured man on top of him and another bending over him. The coloured men appeared to be ill-treating deceased.
On the advice of the Coroner the jury returned a verdict of "Wilful murder” against some person or persons unknown. [10]
So there you have it. Harold Smart, a White man, was potentially killed by a mob of Black men, and legally speaking, the authorities did nothing about it.
Regarding the death of John Donovan, The South Wales News stated the following on June 14th:
John Donovan, who was shot in Millicent street, and who died on Thursday night after admission to the King Edward Hospital, was a single man about 28 years of age. He was a Cardiff man, and was the son of Mr John Donovan, boilermaker, who at one time lived at 45, Mary Ann-street, where the victim of Thursday night's Affair was born. He wag formerly well-known in Cardiff as a footballer and runner, and won several cups and other prizes on the track. He was a boilermaker prior to the war, but for some time past had been serving as a driver in the Royal Field Artillery, from which he was only a few weeks ago demobilised.
Since his return from the war Donovan had been working for the Taff Vale Railway Company, and had lived of late in Grangetown, where a sister lives. He was engaged to be married to a girl in the Mary Ann-street to area and the banns had been put up.
One or two residents of Mary Ann-street were chatting with Donovan about ten o'clock on Thursday night about the black men, and Donovan said, "If there's any trouble up here tonight I'll come and help an you to protect your house."
Almost immediately Donovan had said this there was a rush of the crowd to Millicent
Street, and Donovan went off in that direction.
"It wasn't ten minutes after that." added the Mary Ann-street resident,"that news was brought that poor Donovan had been shot, and that they believed ha was dead."
The deceased served for over four years in France. [11]
As to why the crowd had formed, several newspapers reported that a Somali man had threatened a White woman. [12] The crowd pursued the Somali to a local boarding house where several Black men resided. The Blacks inside fired on the crowd with revolvers, killing Donovan in the process. The White crowd retaliated by throwing stones and ginger beer bottles. When the police entered the premises, they were also shot at, but were not hit. [13]
If you read through enough of these accounts, a pattern begins to emerge revealing that Blacks and Arabs were actually much more heavily armed than Whites and more disposed to firing freely into unarmed crowds and using razors in what were otherwise low-intensity fist fights.
Various newspapers commented on this. The Taunton Courier on June 18th said the following:
The fact that the negroes are nearly all armed and fire on the slightest provocation intensifies the swiftness with which isolated encounters swell into street battles. [14]
The Globe said on June 14th that:
It has been proved during the recent riots that most lower-caste coloured men in England go about armed, and are ready to ‘loose off‘ on the slightest provocation. A regulation might easily be enforced making it illegal for a coloured man to carry any arms, and a heavy penalty should be inflicted for any breach of the order. [15]
During the riots, Blacks repeatedly assaulted the police and were often reported to have been yelling incendiary comments like "Down with the white race" and “kill any White man.” (See images below) On the same day that John Donovan was killed, six Arabs were brought up on various charges including firing pistols at unknown persons and three police constables. [16]
Consider as well that at the end of May, a Black man had been arrested in the Liverpool docks after he slashed several White people with a razor, including a woman. He even bit a man’s finger who tried to restrain him. All throughout 1919, Black men repeatedly attacked individuals and police constables with razors and revolvers. [17] (See images below) These sorts of behaviors probably instigated the formation of White mobs who nevertheless don’t appear to have resorted to stabbing or shooting any of their victims. Academics who cover these events assert that these men were well armed because of the White mobs, but we can see in the newspaper archives that this trend predated the summer riots, and that the crowds often formed in response to the flagrant use of weapons.
Moving on to Frederick Longman’s death, the Yorkshire Post on June 13th tells us the following:
Longman, who was about 30 years of age, and had only recently been demobilised after serving four and a half years in the R.F.A. Valentine, Egypt, Salonica, and France, was, it appears, returning home at about ten o'clock on Wednesday night. He had almost got to his own door when two coloured men sprang on him. A struggle ensued, and one of the coloured men is stated to have caught Longman by the throat, held him against the wall, and taking a long knife out of his pocket, stabbed him with it. [18]
At the inquest a Black female witness, Louisa Richards, who was a friend of Emmanuel, claimed that Longman approached Emmanuel and told him to find his own street to walk in and then began hitting him in the face. Perhaps this is true, but Emmanuel purportedly was visiting other Blacks who lived on that same street, so why would Longman have singled out Emmanuel?
A White witness, Elsie Rudman, stated that Longman was on his front door stoop when she exchanged greetings with him. She had gone no farther than 10 yards, when she heard a scuffle behind her. She turned around and saw Emanuel had pinned Longman against a wall and was choking him. In response to seeing this, Rudman screamed. [19]
The screams alerted two other local Cardiff men nearby who came to Longman’s aid. This is where the witnesses’ accounts start to seriously conflict. But essentially, the two White men got Emanuel to let go of Longman, and then Emanuel pulled out a knife, stabbed Longman and then ran off. Eventually, he was stopped by a police constable who arrested him. Per the Western Mail on June 21st, the Black witnesses claimed that Longman had made a final lunge toward Emmanuel which is what prompted Emmanuel to stab Longman. [20]
Charles Emanuel said the following at trial:
I defend myself with a pocket-knife. I was coming down the street for little walk, after signing on, and this man (deceased) said, “Why don't you go in your own street?” I say, “Behave yourself.” By the time I turn around to him, I speak to one coloured woman, and he came behind me, and hit me one clout in the eye. Three more hit me, one with poker, and I defend myself with knife. I run away shouting "Murder." [21]
As an aside Emanuel was from the French West Indies, hence his poor English. So again, a lot of these foreigners in Britain weren’t even British subjects, and so the spurious argument that these men had a right to be in Britain, because they were subjects, can be dismissed in many cases.
The Western Mail states the following details concerning the testimony of the other two White men involved, James Yeoman and John Hopkins. In the interests of clarity I have replaced some pronouns and other terms like witness and prisoner with surnames:
James Yeoman, a painter, deposed to hearing a woman scream and seeing [Emmanuel] holding Longman by the throat against a wall. [Yeoman] rushed up and said to Emanuel, "Why don't you leave him alone?” [Yeoman] then struck [Emmanuel] a blow on the face, and [Emmanuel] then let go of [Longman] and took a knife out of his pockets, with which he attempted to strike [Yeoman] and Hopkins. Failing to do this, [Emmanuel] stabbed Longman, who was standing in the roadway in a dazed condition. [Emmanuel] then ran off, and Hopkins, fetching a poker, threw it after him, striking Emanuel on the back.
Mr. Marley Samson: Is it true that Longman made a rush at [Emmanuel]—No, sir.
In cross-examination by Mr. Hugh Jones, [Yeoman] would not admit that [Longman], after being let go, followed [Emmanuel] into the roadway.
John Charles Hopkins of Lee-road, Barry, a ship's painter, gave corroborative evidence, and said that Longman, as far as he was aware, did nothing to the accused at the time he was stabbed. [22]
The White witnesses essentially claimed that Emanuel attempted to stab them after they were able to free Longman, and that after he failed to do so, he returned to Longman, who was in a dazed state and stabbed him. In other words, Emanuel really wasn’t acting in self-defense, since Longman wasn’t a clear and present danger.
Ultimately a jury found Charles Emmanuel guilty of Man Slaughter, which seems an appropriate verdict. Emanuel’s life was not in danger, and even if the other two men had attacked him first with a poker, he ended up stabbing Longman, who was unarmed and not an immediate threat. He probably could’ve run off to the police at several points prior, since he himself was never restrained by the witnesses or the deceased. Curiously, a judge gave Emmanuel a mere five years in prison. Such a sentence was extremely lenient, particularly so for a man who wasn’t even a British subject. Emmanuel murdered a native Cardiff man who himself had served his nation for over four years in WWI, and the sentence was a mere five years in prison.
Nevertheless, academics who have discussed this case have their own unreasonable takes. Jacqueline Jenkinson in her 1987 thesis for the University of Edinburgh notes that Charles Emmanuel’s sentence was “the most severe sentence handed out to anyone as a direct result of the race rioting in 1919.” [23] While this might be technically true, if we were able to subtract race from the equation, I think most people would find such a sentence quite lenient, yet she uses it to argue that the courts were racially biased, because no White person received such a sentence. But there really wasn’t a corresponding case that matched the particular circumstances wherein the races were reversed.
Jenkinson does highlight a separate case wherein a White man, named John Flynn Marden, was charged with kicking a policeman and threatening him with a knife. She tells us that Flynn received one month imprisonment whereas an Arab named Mohamed Abouki was charged with attacking a constable with a stick, yet received six months imprisonment. Now even were this particular case a definitive example of racial bias, Jenkinson assumes that because there was racial bias in the Marden/Abouki case, there had to be bias in the Longman/Emmanuel case. She is essentially swapping one stereotype for another, namely that Whites are always racist, and Blacks never do anything wrong.
Jenkinson dedicates a fair amount of her paper to highlighting racial bias in the local police, but then she also notes how the courts often ruled in favor of Blacks and went against the police recommendations and arrest patterns.
If the police showed a degree of bias in their treatment of Blacks in this period, the courts apparently were not so consistently the same… [24]
Essentially, her paper posits that whenever the courts, police or newspapers ruled unfavorably for Blacks, arrested them more often, or said something disparaging, this was the result of racism. But whenever these same courts ruled in favor of Blacks or said things that could be perceived as lessening their culpability, she sees them as more reasonable.
Regarding the Abouki case, she states that:
This instance of apparent racial bias on the part of the courts should not be taken as typical. It is possible that the magistrate on this, the first day of hearings as a result of the racial riots, was acting according to an in-built bias, which, as the court proceedings progressed, became less notable. [25]
Perhaps they did have an in-built bias, and even if they did, so what? But it’s also possible that the colored men initially arrested, tried and convicted during the riots didn’t have any mitigating circumstances. But Jenkinson assumes that the judges just became less racist and overcame their “in-built bias.”
She merely asserts in so many words that all unequal, negatively perceived outcomes involving Black men were the fault of White racism. Like so many other academics, she is predisposed to posit disproportionate negatively perceived behavioral patterns in Whites, but never in Blacks. Perhaps this is a form of bias, yes?
Note that if you examine her paper in detail you will notice that she has a blatant pattern of capitalizing “Black” and lowercasing “White” no matter the context. (See the image below that I’ve attached.) Jenkinson, despite being White and British herself, is clearly not impartial.
Jenkinson goes to great lengths to defend Charles Emmanuel. She highlights that Longman had 20 convictions in the local court system for summary offenses prior to serving overseas in the war. [26] I suppose this is notable, but these were minor offenses, meaning they never required a jury trial. Moreover, this hardly indicated that Longman had intended to murder Emmanuel.
Let’s recall here what happened when in recent years members of the public tried to highlight George Floyd’s, Treyvon Martin’s and Michael Brown’s criminal past? Such efforts were seen as victim blaming. They were simply seen as another manifestation of so-called “systemic racism” and “White supremacy.”
On this note of criminal pasts, it’s a curious coincidence that the local police in 1919 stated that they had a history with Charles Emmanuel as well. [27] To be fair, they never explicitly qualify what kind of history it was. If I had access to the local Welsh criminal archives, I would look into it more, but this likely means Emmanuel had gotten into trouble with the police before. It appears that Jenkinson glossed over it.
Jenkinson takes issue with the fact a newspaper commented on the general Black disposition toward violence. Or at least, that’s how she frames it. In the June 13th issue of the Barry Dock News, they mentioned that Charles Emmanuel had recently arrived from Manchester where he had been a witness in another murder case.
The alleged murderer came from Manchester, a fortnight ago, having given evidence at Assizes thereat in a stabbing case from Barrow-in-Furness, in which a number of coloured men were concerned. [28]
Jenkinson saw this article as a way of smearing the Black community and the individual Charles Emmanuel. She claimed it furthered the “well-established white stereotyped view of Blacks as inherently violent…” [29]
She shares the details of the particular murder case in her thesis. It turns out that it wasn’t a stabbing, but an instance in which a Jamaican shot a West African in the head in a personal dispute on a ship. Of course, it’s possible that there was more than one Black-on-Black murder that Emmanuel had witnessed, but let’s assume Jenkinson referenced the murder mentioned by the Barry Dock News.
Jenkinson says that this case…
…was hardly proof of an innate tendency to violence among Black people in general. Rather it was the story of a victim standing up to a recognised bully, with a gun it is true, but without any proved intent to murder. Yet by 'economising with the truth' the local South Wales press report implied that Emmanuel, and Black people in general, were prone to violence. [30]
So Jenkinson can clearly see a pattern of racial bias in White people, but not a pattern of violent behavior in Blacks. Or more precisely, she can entertain patterns of negatively perceived behavior in Whites, but not in Blacks.
But Jenkinson goes further here. She even highlights Frederick Longman and his criminal record as “an archetype for the white mobs during the riots.” [31] This is amusing, because she posits elsewhere, as do many other academics, that much of the White mob violence stemmed from White men’s sexual jealousy of Black men, but Frederick Longman was married to the same woman for 18 years and had three kids, and John Donovan was engaged to be married. [32]
Again, what’s notable about the literature on these events is how when the historical material presents a negative depiction of Blacks, it’s taken as evidence of racism, but when the same material presents a positive image of Blacks, it’s seen as unquestionably accurate. The court system, police reports and newspapers are all seen through this lens.
Take for example what Jenkinson says about the local police relations with Blacks:
Even before the rioting began then, there is ample evidence of friction between the Black community and the police, an undeclared state of war which was only overshadowed when the white crowd's aggressive stance against the Black population became so severe that Blacks were driven into police custody for their own protection… [33]
Jenkinson’s thought pattern is somewhat self-contradictory. Blacks felt comfortable going into police custody for protection, even though the same police force was in an “undeclared state of war” against them.
The British government in response to these riots did place several hundred Blacks into camps and deported them, which is something political activists will focus on incessantly as some crime against humanity. But these men had been paid for services rendered, and many of them were not even British subjects. It was a completely reasonable notion to repatriate them and give local men job preference. For some reason, certain White academics feel that Britain owed all these foreign men permanent, unqualified residency. This is fairly absurd. No one would argue today that Australians or Canadians who served during WWI had an unqualified right to stay and live in Britain.
Overall though, with regards to conduct of the British police force in 1919, the historical evidence suggests that they largely did their stated job, in an impartial manner. Plenty of Whites were arrested for their participation in the riots. Plenty of Whites were arrested for assaulting colored persons. I will reiterate here that three of the five people killed in the riots were White, and yet the pattern we see in the analytical literature is the tendency to assert that when the British press, police or authorities said something in favor of Blacks, they were telling the truth, and when they said something negative, they were simply biased.
Take for example, the following line in The Times on June 13th which stated:
"Some of the more sober-minded citizens of Cardiff consider that the coloured men are not alone to blame for the disturbances, although, at the same time, they deplore the familiar association between white women and negroes which is a provocative cause." [34]
Another article in The Times on June 10th stated that “While it is admitted that some of the men have made good husbands, the intermarriage of black men and white women, not to mention the other relationships, has excited much feeling.” [35] (See images below)
Academics who cite this are quick to capitalize on these utterances as evidence that the blame for the disturbance rested on racist, sexually jealous White men. But these statements are from the same newspapers that those same academics accuse of unfairly disparaging Blacks and other persons of color.
In fact, note how disparaging these same articles are when other facets of them are explored. The June 10th article from The Times tells us that six Arabs were brought up on charges for shooting at the police, and that Blacks freely used razors. The author describes how a police constable “had a struggle with a big coloured man, who took out a razor and drew the blade across the constable's neck. He was so badly wounded that he had to be taken to hospital.” The author finishes by explaining how the Black man’s chief failing is his “fondness for White women.”
These are the same sorts of articles people like Jenkinson will highlight in order to assert that “sexual jealousy was again a major factor behind the violence…” [36] Yet, at the same time, they view the idea of Black men lusting after White women as a racist trope.*
*Later I discuss author Lucy Bland’s assertion that it was a “racist assumption” that the attraction wasn’t mutual.
Here’s another example of the academic bias. A police report historians tend to focus on is the one regarding the aforementioned scuffle in Liverpool on June 4th between Blacks and Scandinavians. This is the scuffle that preceded the incident on June 5th wherein Black sailors jumped Scandinavian sailors exiting a pub in Liverpool, which in turn led to the death of Charles Wootton in the docks.
A Black man accused the Scandinavians of having attacked him after he refused to give them a cigarette. The local Watch Committee didn’t think him very credible. I don’t have access to the original documents, so I can’t review them myself, but Jenkinson argues that the authorities were unjustly dismissive… that is, that they were “racist” for not taking the Black man at his word. But she really doesn’t offer any evidence for this claim. [37] (See the image below.)
Essentially, the academic analysis of every situation begins with the prejudice that the actions and comments of local Brits can only be seen as sincere and accurate when they defend or reflect positively on colored people. This repeatedly leads to conclusions as biased and one-sided as the ones supposedly being condemned.
Rufus Fennell
To highlight further how biased the academic literature can be, I’ll discuss how it tends to depict Rufus Fennell, the so-called representative of Black Britons in 1919.
Marxist historian Peter Frye called Fennell “an outstanding leader of Cardif ’s black community.” [38] Christian Hogsbjerg, a PhD from the University of Brighton called him “a remarkable black intellectual and activist…” [39]
As Jaqueline Jenkinson herself wrote:
The organising ability of one Black individual, Dr. Rufus Fennel!, also should be highlighted in aiding the voices of ordinary Black people to be heard. Rufus Fennell was a West Indian, medically trained in the United States, but not qualified in Britain where he was working as a dentist. He had much medical experience in 314 days spent in the trenches where he was wounded three times and he attended thousands of British soldiers. He had been living in Pontypridd but came to Cardiff during the riots and quickly assumed leadership of the coloured community. [40]
Yes, Rufus initially appears to have been a very a noble, larger than life character, but upon investigation it becomes obvious that the man was a charlatan who told different media outlets a variety of stories. Curiously, Christian Hogsbjerg, who himself praises Fennell as a remarkable intellectual, reveals how various facets of Fennell’s life story don’t add up:
In September 1950, the black American magazine Ebony interviewed the 62-year-old Rufus E.Fennell, noting he was ‘born in Savannah, Georgia’ and originally left the US ‘seeking [a] job opportunity’. According to the Liverpool Echo in November 1917, Fennell ‘was a tailor by trade’, though whether he was trained in the US or elsewhere is unclear. In October 1917, the same paper had reported Fennell declaring himself ‘an American subject, [who] had been in the American army, and had served at the Dardanelles as a volunteer in the British Navy, from which he had got his discharge’. And before that, in August, according to the Echo, Fennell ‘described himself as a music hall artiste, a master mechanic, tailor, and a former employee of the Admiralty Department’… The Ebony profile from 1950 described him as a ‘one time ship’s cook’. However, in June 1919, the South Wales News described Fennell as ‘a coloured medical man … who has been in the trenches for 314 days, was wounded three times while serving in Mesopotamia, and who attended to thousands of our British soldiers’. [41]
In his bibliography, Hogsbjerg places doubt on Fennell’s supposed medical background:
It is true that in July 1919, Fennell told a Western Mail reporter that ‘he was a fully-qualified doctor under American law, but that since leaving the States he had not practised’. See Western Mail (23 July 1919). However, the South Wales News in late July 1919 questioned whether it was correct to describe Fennell as ‘Dr. Fennell’, as it had also done in an earlier report, given that he now only ‘described himself as “an expert dentist”’. See South Wales News (28 July 1919). Peter Fryer explains this anomaly by suggesting of Fennell that after arriving in Britain he had moved to Wales, but ‘lacking British medical qualifications, he had been practising as a dentist in Pontypridd’. See Fryer, op. cit., p. 308. However, one might question even Fennell’s claim to specialist knowledge of dentistry, let alone medicine. We have seen that in 1917 Fennell was more modestly simply claiming his skills and professional work as a ‘music hall artiste, a master mechanic, tailor’. [42]
As a noteworthy aside here, upon returning to the US, where Fennell was supposedly fully licensed as a medical doctor he was working as a doorman at the black-and-tan Alhambra Club, according to Jet magazine. [43] (See images below.)
The bizarre nature of Hogsbjerg’s paper, however, isn’t that he highlights this. It’s that he makes endless excuses for Fennell’s behavior. Regarding Fennell’s allusions to being West Indian, and denying his American birth, Hogbjerg says:
…admitting he was a black American would have only created unnecessary confusion, weakening any political demands he advanced during the riots. Describing himself as being ‘from the West Indies’ (and so like most of the rest of Cardiff’s black community) meant he was now able to challenge the British government amidst and in the aftermath of the riots from the apparent perspective of someone who was speaking as a ‘British subject’. Fennell’s claims, made in 1919, to being a ‘Dr’ and some sort of highly respectable medical professional – rather than simply a music hall artist – might also need to be seen in this light. [44]
Hogsbjerg concludes his paper by asserting that Fennell’s life of “reinvention amidst adversity deserves to be recovered and remembered.” [45] In other words, Fennell was a liar, but for all the right reasons.
Rufus had also been in involved in a number of legal cases prior to 1919. Earlier in July of 1917, a White electrician, Thomas Oldfield, supposedly struck Fennell with a chair for harassing White women at the Southport Music Hall, where both men worked. Fennell pressed charges for assault.
As the Liverpool Echo reported:
It was no use hiding the fact that the employment of a black man at the Pier Pavilion had caused prejudice in the minds of the staff. Complainant was not accustomed to deal with white women in the manner in which they should be dealt with. Two women had left the place because they refused to be driven by him. [46]
It would seem that Fennell had somehow been given some sort of authority position over White women who resented the fact and resigned in protest, although they might have been more upset about what he was ordering them to do than they were about him being Black. The Manchester Evening News reported that:
[Thomas Oldfield] had resented Fennell giving women employees work to do which they had no right to perform” and that Fennel “followed him as he came in the pavilion, challenged him to fight, grinned in his face, and he got his ‘horrible breath.’” Thomas claimed that “he did not strike [Fennell] with the chair, and Fennel hurt himself through falling down the steps of the stage as he ran away when he (defendant) picked up the chair. [47]
In the Liverpool Echo, Fennell claimed that Oldfield had followed him on stage without invitation and threatened to settle him, if they went outside. Despite the fact that Oldfield had now openly threatened Fennell, he somehow surprised Fennell with a blow from the chair. Fennell additionally claimed to have been a professional boxer , boasting that “if he had known he was going to be struck - he could have avoided the blow” and that he had been in several boxing matches but had never been struck as fierce a blow as the one Oldfield had landed on him. His accounting of events gets quite colorful as the Echo reported: “If [Oldfield] had had a revolver [Fennell] would have defied him to draw it at six feet distance.” To be fair, Eric Longden, the music hall’s manager, said “he discharged Oldfield because he had also laid out another man previously.” Oldfield himself denied this, but ultimately the court appears to have sided with Fennell and fined Oldfield £5. [48] So if Rufus suffered racial prejudice from men and women at the Music Hall, he certainly didn’t suffer any in the local courts. Nevertheless, Fennell resigned or was fired from his position two days after Oldfield was fired. It’s not entirely clear.
Now maybe Fennell was the victim at the Southport Music Hall, but there does seem to be a pattern of him getting involved in these sorts of situations. In 1924, Rufus found himself in another physical altercation with someone who denied his version of events, though this time the altercation was in London and concerned a native of Guiana.
As the Daily Herald reported:
An exciting scene in a café off Tottenham Court-road, London, which has since been raided by the police, was told at Marlborough-street yesterday, when James Rich (26), labourer, a British subject, but a native of British Guiana, was bound over for maliciously wounding Rufus Fennell, another man of colour, with a hammer.
Fennell had previously stated that they were plaving dice at Erskine's Café at Whitfield-street, when, after an altercation, he received a violent blow on the head. Rich strenuously denied the charge, stating that when he asked Fennell for money he owed him Fennell pulled about £140 in notes and a lot of silver from his pockets, saying if he touched he (Fennell) would blow his brains out. The detective-sergeant said the cafe was a very bad place, and had been raided to teach them a lesson. [49]
A month after the Southport Music Hall incident, Rufus was back in court at Southport for failure to pay £9 in arrears of maintenance, i.e. child support. [50] Christian Hodsbjerg, in his paper, tries to create an air of sympathy for Rufus by blaming his inability to pay child support on the incident at the Southport Music Hall. Presumably the angle is that the resignation was forced on Fennell by racist staff members, and thus left Rufus unable to pay child support. Perhaps this is true, but as Hogsbjerg himself mentions, Rufus had already failed to pay the arrears back in August as well, when he told the court that he was a “Free Mason” and had no plans to return to the Entertainment industry, which he immediately proceeded to do. [51]
At the November hearing, Rufus claimed to have a contract to make 59,000 blouses but was indebted some £115 for the machinery required, hence he couldn’t pay the arrears. As the paper reports: “The probation officer said he had been to defendant’s premises, and saw two sewing machines there. A warrant was issued, to be suspended so long as defendant found 10s a week.” [52] Now, the presence of the sewing machines lends some credibility to Fennell’s claim, but I’m not entirely sure that two sewing machines would cost £115 in 1917. (See attached images below.) That seems a bit excessive. Advertisements from 1917 indicate that a hand-operated machine ran for about £3, and maybe around $35, if they were electric. Perhaps Fennel had spent the rest of the money on materials?
Or maybe, even the court found his story incredible, and this explains why they issued a warrant to be suspended so long as Fennell found 10s a week. Regardless, by December, Rufus was back working in the entertainment industry, [53] and it seems doubtful that one man, despite being a Free Mason, a doctor, a dentist and an expert mechanic, was going to make 59,000 blouses in such a short span of time.
In July of 1919, Fennell was charged by an Arab lodging house owner for “obtaining £2 by false pretences.” [54] Academics have highlighted the fact that at trial Fennell’s lawyer called him a “respectable man” and believed that “certain persons were anxious to have him sent to prison.” [55] This is seen by academics as evidence that the racist powers at hand were intentionally thwarting Fennell’s pro-black activism. Jacqueline Jenkinson states that the Chief Constable of Cardiff was “out to get” Fennell, [56] but why would the racist Chief Constable of Cardiff be out to get a man, who Jenkinson highlights herself “believed that the solution to the problem of rioting in the city was repatriation.” [57]
Indeed, part of Rufus Fennell’s Black activism was to argue for the repatriation of Blacks. I suspect this was the case, because there were public funds being allocated by the British government for this purpose, and Rufus was trying to get a cut. Jenkinson even notes that the local repatriation committee had given Fennell access to these funds to enable Black men to reach ports to depart on repatriation ships.[58]
As the Western Mail reported on July 19th:
“The charge on which the warrant was issued is that of obtaining money by false pretences, and arises out of the alleged payment of the return fare of a coloured man who was sent from Cardiff to Plymouth for repatriation, but insisted on returning on the ground that someone in Cardiff owed him money.” [59]
It does seem plausible, that Rufus could’ve been taking money for facilitating the repatriation of Blacks, while in fact those Blacks weren’t being repatriated. Ultimately, though, as the academics highlight, the charges in this case against Rufus were dismissed after he explained to the Court that “he had not paid the money, because he had been very busy.” [60] Once again, if Rufus indeed suffered racial prejudice in his daily life, he certainly didn’t find much in the courts.
In 1929, Rufus got into trouble for “wilfully obstructing the footway at Salisbury Street.” On Friday, August 9th, The West London Observer reported the following:
The police stated that the defendant was in Salisbury Street on Sunday morning in the centre of a large crowd. which blocked the foot way and part of the carriage way. He was advertising a patent medicine. Other stall-holders were prevented from carrying on their business. Defendant made no attempt to comply with a request of the police to reduce the obstruction, and continued to address the crowd.
Defendant said he was a licensed manufacturing chemist with a laboratory at lslington. He had no business premises at present, and so was selling his medicines in the streets and marketplaces. It was necessary for him to demonstrate his wares. Of course a crowd collected: it was his object to collect a crowd in order to sell his goods. He was doing so on this day. The constable told him if he had nothing to sell, he would have to pack up. Defendant said he replied that he was not going to pack up, because he had been standing there for years and had never been interfered with before. He held several licences and was applying for one for this district, and a conviction for obstruction might interfere with him obtaining it.
The Magistrate said it was a difficult matter he could see. The defendant had an attractive way of addressing people with the result that he got a large number of listeners. It was possible to be the victim of too great success . Defendant could not be allowed to collect a big crowd and cause an obstruction. He must exercise his discretion, and begin to sell before he got too many people around.
The summons was dismissed under the Probation of Offenders' Act on payment of 2s. costs. [61]
Once again, the charges against Fennell were dismissed. But note Fennell admits to having practiced his unlicensed peddling in that very spot for “years without interference.” The paper claims that he held several licenses for other districts, but was in the process of obtaining one for this district. So naturally the question arises: why did he insist on peddling his wears here for several years and not in the districts where he held a license? To be clear, the paper likely didn’t verify any of this, but rather just reported on what Fennell had told them.
It should be noted that these peddlers would work a crowd with an initial pitch, before actually offering the sale of their often dubious goods. Nevertheless, all the police wanted Fennell to do was to get on with the actual sale, and not block the carriage way. Yet he refused. While the Magistrate wanted Fennell to exercise “discretion,” again Fennell clearly refused to do this, hence the interference of the police, who again didn’t even care that he didn’t have a license. The point here isn’t to highlight that Fennell had committed some grave crime. Rather it’s to illustrate his general character.
Rather than a renaissance man whom a racist Britain thwarted at every turn, he was more likely an entertainer who would lie or embellish the truth in order to be the center of attention and advance his own interests. In fact, many of the times he appears in the local papers, it’s for announcements of entertainment related performances in which he participated. Although in 1932, when he appeared again in the paper, it was because he stole a mailbag and set it on fire. He even admitted to it in court. [62] (See the images below.)
In 1935, he appears in the credits of a production called “Stevedore” [63] and again in 1937, for his role in the Paul Robeson film, Jericho. [64] Then again in 1939, he appears in the paper for being drunk and disorderly in public. [65]
After this, Rufus doesn’t show up again in the British press, but before returning to the US in 1951, he supposedly worked as a mushroom farmer according to Ebony magazine. [66] And in all this time, somehow he never managed to get his medical credentials validated, which one could argue was due to a “racist” Britain, but considering how lenient and “fair” the courts treated him, I suspect he simply didn’t have any credentials to validate.
All in all, Fennell was married as many as four different times and fathered a number of children. [67] Yet, curiously Fennell’s British wife and four children who all “crossed the coloured line,” left him “an embittered old man with no family ties” when he moved back to America. [68]
Now surely some of the things Rufus claimed were true, but clearly he lied a lot about his achievements and personal life, and it is perhaps telling that so many academics have attempted to craft such a noble image out of this clearly dubious persona. What does it say about the mainstream historical analysis of the 1919 race riots, if the academics involved have this man in such high regard? What other Black historical figures have academics reinvented, revised or repurposed to fit their ideological perspectives?
The Sexual Jealousy Mythos
Again, there’s a narrative of White male sexual jealousy that various academics like to entertain regarding Britain’s 1919 race riots. We’ll address this more directly now. But this narrative isn’t really unique to the coverage of these race riots. It’s often a prominent feature of any discussions surrounding any time period wherein the Whites voiced opposition to miscegenation. The general idea pushed is that Black men were very popular with local White women, and local White men became jealous and lashed out.
Now, If you read through old newspaper archives from 1919, there certainly was concern expressed over colored men interacting with and race-mixing with White women, but over and over again, what we find in the primary source material is a very particular phrasing: “a certain type of White woman” or a White woman of a “certain temperament” and so on and so forth. In other words, a subset or a minority. In fact, if anything, most local women were as angry about this phenomenon as were local men.
The South Wales News on June 16th reported that a crowd of mostly White women formed at the house of a Black and White couple who had moved in with the White woman’s parents.
A lively scene occurred at Taff's Well on Saturday evening over a coloured man and his white wife. Both left Cardiff the previous day in consequence of the riots, and came to stay at the home of the woman's parents in Cemetery-road, Taff’s Well. When this became known the people of the locality took objection to the presence of the man and made a noisy demonstration in front of the house. The crowd, which consisted mainly of women, became so threatening that the police had to interfere. The man's father in-law, it is stated, was struck, but beyond this there was no actual violence or damage done. Sergeant Thomas got the man to return to Cardiff in a taxi, and peace was thereupon restored. [69]
The Times, on June 16th, 1919 reported that when a crowd of White men set fire to a Negro-boarding house on Homfray Street, a crowd of women formed and became angry with a woman found in the company of Blacks:
A young white woman was rescued from the premises, and the police, who escorted her away, had some difficulty in protecting her from other white women. At another point a group of police were fired at by negroes, and a bullet passed through the tunic of Police constable Clarke. [70]
The Western Daily Press reported on June 17th that a White woman, who was on trial for participating in the riots, told another White woman who had married a Black man: “You ought to be burnt.” [71]
Insofar as to the most frequent context in which White women were associating with colored men, consider that The Times had reported back in May on a police raid of a local Negro Gambling House:
At midnight on Sunday a gambling house in Chestnut-street, Liverpool, was raided by the police, and as the result 14 negroes and three white women appeared before the Liverpool stipendiary magistrate yesterday. It was stated that the negroes put up a desperate struggle before being arrested, and several of them appeared in Court wearing bandages. The occupant of the premises, HIENRY WILLIAMS, a negro, was lined £25 with two months imprisonment for carrying on a gaming house. For assisting in its management two other coloured men were fined £10 each. The other negroes and the women were bound over. Five of the men were sentenced to 14 days imprisonment with hard labour for assaulting the police. [72]
Now to be fair, The Times, in an aforementioned article from June 10th, referenced the associations of Black men with local women, and stated that “some of the men have made good husbands." This is of course highlighted as the norm by the academics covering these events, but it would seem that the women who did associate with foreign men in the port cities were more often prostitutes or some variation thereof. The same article actually hints at this, when it says “not to mention other relationships.”
The Leicester Daily Post on June 17th reported that locals became indignant and wrecked an Arab café that was clearly serving as a brothel.
Mohamed Rabol, an Arab from Aden, was summoned at the Thames Police Court, yesterday afternoon, for allowing a restaurant kept by him in Cable-street, St. George's East, to be frequented by women of loose character. The evidence of police officers was to the effect that white women of a certain class were in the habit of sitting in the place, getting into conversation with coloured men, leaving with them, and returning shortly afterwards. It was further alleged that acts of gross indecency took place in the shop. Incidentally, it was mentioned that the defendant's shop had since been wrecked by a crowd of indignant white men. The Magistrate (Mr. Forbes Lankester, K.C.) said he was not clear in this case, and dismissed the summons. [73]
Considering the vague language here and that the summons was ultimately dismissed, this clipping may seem inconclusive to some. It may even appear that White men were in fact, “just jealous.” So some explanation is required. These newspapers were not in the habit of explicitly stating certain indecent acts. They wouldn’t even publish swear words. (The n-word at the time wasn’t pejorative.) However, contemporary readers would’ve readily understood that the author was discussing prostitution, and indeed, it is a commonly accepted fact that Maltese men in particular became well known for running café-brothels in Butetown, Cardiff, an area known to locals as Tiger Bay.
In his 1948 thesis for the University of London, Negroes in Britain, Kenneth Little gave a detailed outline of how the model went. To summarize, these men were using cafés as a cover business in order to whore out local women out to Black sailors. Prostitutes, employed as waitresses, would engage in conversations with patrons and invite them to a back room where the transaction would take place. Basically, pimps would often get away with running these brothels, because the police and the courts couldn’t prosecute them effectively due the nature of providing proper evidence. But there was little doubt that these were clandestine brothels. [74]
To be fair, many of these prostitutes were older, willful participants, (see above photos) who were fully cognizant of their actions and what this lifestyle entailed, but many were also young victims of coercion, trafficking and exploitation. In fact, these events have an eerie similarity with the grooming gang phenomenon today in places like Rotherham. Kenneth Little shared an anecdote in his notes.
The following example of one Cardiff girl is probably fairly typical of many others. A young girl of good-class family had her pocket-money stopped by her father, who did not approve of her expenditure on cosmetics. Mainly, no doubt, with the object of “keeping up with her friends”, the girl proceeded to steal some money, and was subsequently sent to an approved school from which she ran away. She was then “picked up” by one of the Maltese proprietors while he was in another town. He proceeded to buy clothes for her, and gradually to “break her in” (that is, accustom her to the life, art and technique of prostitution) whilst looking after her. After this she was more or less in the toils for good. She felt she could not return to her parents, and was in constant fear lest the authorities should discover her. Lacking in experience of the world and without any means of coping with the situation in which she found herself, she simply accepted it as the only life open to her. [75]
Little was mostly discussing the period between 1920 and 1930, long after the 1919 race riots, but in November of 1918, in Coventry, a colored herbalist, Benjamin Myro Smith, was charged with raping a 15-year-old girl in his employ. The particulars of the case suggest that he had engaged in grooming-like behaviors with several girls. He was eventually tried and convicted, but it took over a year, because the victim couldn’t attend court due to the fact she had developed peritonitis as a result of being repeatedly and brutally raped.
The Coventry Standard reported the following in July of 1919:
Benjamin Myro Smith, aged 36, was indicted for a serious offence against a girl aged 15, at Coventry, on September 26th, Mr. R. A. Willes was for the prosecution, and Mr. Nelson (Manchester) appeared for the prisoner, who pleaded not guilty.
Under direction of the Judge the Jury gave consideration to the most serious aspect of the case, and returned a verdict of rape. Previous convictions were recorded, but not for offences of this character.
Superintendent Bassett, of the Coventry City Police, said the prisoner was a man of very low character. His method was to take a small shop and advertise for girl typists, and in that way he got several young girls into his clutches and seduced them, two being mentioned who had given birth to black children. Scotland Yard Criminal Investigation Department described Smith as a procurer of white girls for immoral purposes.
The Judge, in sentencing the prisoner to three years penal servitude, said he was convinced that the prisoner was one of the pests of society and a regular corrupter of girls who got into his clutches and were unable to escape because of their tender age. [76]
Benjamin Smith appealed the verdict on the grounds that there was no material evidence, as put forward by his lawyer, Mr. Nelson, who was also a “man of color,” but the conviction was upheld in December, and Smith was sent to prison. [77]
In September of 1916, The South Wales News said some of the following about the overall situation in Cardiff the trafficking of young girls:
But the greatest evil of all is the importation into Tiger Bay of young girls from the hills and valleys of South Wales. They are tempted to come as domestic servants to the alien boarding-houses, and it is not unusual to find sometimes as many as three or four of them from 15 to 17 years of age ostensibly! employed as domestics in a place packed to the roof with foreigners. Their degradation, is all too frequently only a matter of weeks. They become part of the boarding-house keeper's stock-in-trade, an attractive business asset, and if questioned on the subject they will tell you that they are engaged or married to one of the lodgers.
It is pitiable to see some of the victims of this revolting system. Everyone with whom, I discussed the matter said the evil could not be exaggerated. It baffled description, and no terms that could be used would be too strong to denounce it. I came away with the firm conviction that the authorities should absolutely prohibit the employment of white girls by aliens in this area. No girl should be allowed to enter these establishments. Let the occupiers employ male labour or women of mature years. To permit girls in their teens to enter is to send them to certain ruin. [78]
Even back in 1908, there was talk from locals about how Black men in Cardiff essentially exploited local White girls. In the July 8th issue of the Western Mail, a local shared his appraisal of the situation:
There are a large number of houses in Nigger Town which are of undisguised disreputability, and in which the white women are, in the accepted sense of the phrase, the white slaves of black men. The master of the house is black; the mistress of the house, who pays the rent and earns it, is white. [79]
The work of Nancie Sharpe a local woman who wrote a report on Blacks in Cardiff in 1932 may be informative here. I currently do not have access to her papers, but Simon Jenkins, a leftist academic, references her numerous times in his own work. His doctoral thesis, Prostitution in Cardiff, 1900-1959 is 400 plus pages of him mostly pathologizing nativist backlash and celebrating prostitution as a form of female liberation. But he quotes Sharpe directly at one point, stating that her accounts spoke of men who were…
“’hot-blooded’, ‘extremely interested in sex’, and [more] desirous of a sexual outlet, and often in their wish for this they make use of a girl of 17, 16, or even 15, whom an Englishman would still consider a child. Th[is is because] people from hot countries mature before people in more temperate climates, and the social customs are different.” [80]
Nancie Sharpe was convinced that this behavior was a pronounced trend among Blacks and stemmed from aggregate racial differences. While it may offend people, you can find several modern studies from Liberal institutions reaffirming these “racist” notions. For example, it is commonly accepted today that Black girls reach menarche significantly earlier than White girls. On average, a full year earlier.
Beyond any of these notions of innate racial differences, it is simply a matter of the historical record that Europeans married much later in life, exercised a great deal of abstinence until doing so, and largely remained monogamous. For more information on this, see Kevin MacDonald’s Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, specifically Chapter Four: The Familial Basis of European Individualism.
As MacDonald highlights in his work, historically, it was a perfectly normal thing in Britain to have your young sons or daughters go out and work in the households and businesses of nominal strangers in your community without any concern for possible mistreatment. The peoples showing up in Britain in the early 20th century were very alien in this sense. They were from polygamous societies that often saw girls as sexually available at much younger ages. The aforementioned Benjamin Myro Smith was able to take advantage of British norms to exercise his sexual inclinations on young girls the local community had passively assumed he would respect.
Getting back to the work of Simon Jenkins, he also posits that cultural differences contributed to the interracial strife in the UK race riots, although he does so through an anti-nativist lens. He subtlety criticizes the notion of local authorities that monogamy was central to British moral code, and he takes issue with how they contrasted their local morality against other “forms of masculinity to mark out racial difference.” He posits that their worldview echoed “colonial notions of alternative sexualities as being immoral or amoral.” [81] He repeatedly psychoanalyzes the Chief Constable of Cardiff, James Wilson, who said the following in one of his reports concerning Maltese sex-cafes:
No. 212 Bute Street is kept as a café by a Maltese named Jack Gauci and his wife who was formerly a prostitute. They have living with them another Maltese named Tony Ferrugia and his wife who was formerly a prostitute. A fortnight after the marriage of Mrs Ferrugia she was found in the act of prostitution with an African negro with the knowledge and consent of her husband who was keeping observation outside the door of the room whilst immorality took place. [82]
Now Jenkins does acknowledge these practices as fact, but he takes issue with Wilson’s assertion that these behaviors were alien and not normatively British. Of interest here is another element of Kenneth Little’s 1948 thesis, where he comments on the polyandrous practices of the colored community in Cardiff and the UK during the interwar years:
…a number of households are run on more or less “polyandrous” lines. In addition to either a legal or socially recognized husband, such a woman may have one or even two other temporary “husbands”, whom she accommodates in her house on their return from sea. In some cases, she is virtually a professional “freelance”. In a few cases the husband connives at the practice; in others, where it is less frequent, he may be unaware of what is going on. In any case, the woman concerned is in receipt as a rule of at least two and sometimes even more separate allotments, which in a general sense may be regarded as “retaining fees”. The business, though precarious, can be a very profitable one while it lasts. [83]
Now of course, this renders the female actors here much less a victim of exploitation and more calculating in their actions. It should be stressed, however, that what Little is describing is not the organized café model. He is describing one aspect of the behavior of the subset of local women who married foreign men. It by no means discounts the other stories of exploitation. If anything, it highlights a larger point which is that these people were often not married in a traditional British sense, even when they appeared to be. Of course, people like Simon Jenkins might respond by placing traditional British sense in quotations. In their minds, the only aspect of British culture that is set in stone is some sense of colonial racism and exploitation.
Jenkins also highlights how local British women in some instances helped run the Maltese brothels. In one of his papers he notes:
Court records also reveal that Maltese men sometimes ran cafés in conjunction with their British wives or partners, an aspect almost wholly overlooked in the vitriolic rhetoric of the police and the press. As such, while some Maltese were clearly involved in the organization of prostitution, the perception that this was something ingrained in all Maltese men negatively impacted upon the socio-economic experiences of Maltese seafarers as a whole. [84]
First off, note that Jenkins’ primary concern is not that local women were being exploited by foreigners, but rather his main concern is the socioeconomic repercussions for individual Maltese sailors who may have become unjustly associated with the sexcafés due to nativist backlash. Jenkins highlights what he sees as a blind spot; Because some British women were active in the exploitation of other British women, this somehow meant that Chief Constable Wilson should’ve ignored the fact that, as Jenkins states himself, Maltese men owned up 67% of these cafes. [85] In terms of who was running the rest, Kenneth Little stated in his book, that “Cafe proprietors are mostly Maltese, but there are other nationalities in the business, such as Indians, Jews, and Africans.” [86]
Yet, I doubt Jenkins would argue that Southeast Asians can’t complain about British sexpats or draw broad conclusions, because some local women there are pimps. Likewise, I doubt Jenkins would argue that because some Africans captured and sold fellow Africans to British slavers, and because the overwhelmingly majority of British people didn’t participate in slavery, that most British individuals shouldn’t have to cater to collective Black grievances. And if people wish to fixate on the idea that the British people nevertheless benefited in an ancillary fashion from slavery, we can argue that Maltese sailors who didn’t run sexcafés themselves nevertheless benefited from them in an ancillary fashion.
As Kenneth Little highlighted in his work, these foreign-owned lodging houses and cafes functioned as a de facto workers union or ethnic coop of a sort that would provide their coethnics with credit as needed, and would even procure job opportunities by bribing officials. [86] (See the image below.)
Little states in his notes the following:
Another “back-handing” practice of far less antiquity sometimes took place in connection with the boarding of alien seamen in boarding houses whilst serving on articles. In this case, the crew-master would receive a “commission” from the boarding-house master on each batch of men boarded with him out of the 5/- per head allowed by the shipowner for their billeting {communicated). [87]
So yes, the very funds these whore houses made off local women, indeed could benefit Maltese sailors, beyond the obvious sexual access it granted them to local women. Jenkinson actually praises the ability of foreigners to organize as a bloc against locals. [88] (See the cited passages below.)
Now insofar as is concerned the notion that local British women ran some of the sex cafés, it should be considered here that Maltese “husbands” may have placed the businesses in their “wives’” names in order to avoid certain legal consequences. One of the laws at the time was that no man could live on the earnings of a prostitute. [89] Thus it seems highly plausible that some of these so-called wives were whores whom Maltese men were using to circumvent legal punishment. Jenkins highlights himself that “of the thirteen brothels recorded at the petty sessions in 1930, only three were not linked to Maltese men. Likewise, of five men convicted for living on the earnings of prostitution in 1930, four were Maltese.” [90]
Concerning Nancie Sharpe’s observation of the hypersexuality of Black men, this may have actually played a role in the motivations of the more willful and cognizant prostitutes or freelance wives during the period insofar as is concerned any assertion that White girls actually favored Black men, which again is something you hear quite often from these leftist academics who assert White men rioted because they were sexually jealous.
Note that local newspapers repeatedly commented that Black men would more freely spend their money. As one policeman noted in April of 1919, “The coloured sailor draws a lot of money when he is paid off, and he spends it freely. To get through £50 in the first week is a common occurrence.” [91] The first week here is a reference to the sailors’ first week ashore after a stint at sea. It seems somewhat obvious that prostitutes might be more likely to pursue any group of men who had more disposable cash and a greater desire for sex. Again, Black men in Cardiff were overwhelmingly single and had few financial obligations.
Simon Jenkins states that one motive claimed by women accused of prostitution at the petty sessions was that they “had sold sex to replace income lost through unemployment.” [92] At one point he states that “Women facing magistrates were often from impoverished backgrounds, and utilized prostitution as part of a makeshift economy of precarious labour.” [93] If these were Black women engaging in such a contextual form of prostitution with White men, I would wager that most people would find the situation deplorable and exploitative, especially if the women involved were willful participants primarily due to economic pressures and depravity.
Moving on from these considerations, many of the historical sources cited as evidence of White women favoring Black males are liberally misconstrued, exaggerated or recontextualized for ideological purposes. One of the more prominent writers on Black history in Britain, James Walvin writes in his work, The Negro and English Society, that relationships between Black males and White women in Britain “flourished” wherever the two groups met, and refers to English concerns over miscegenation as male “phobias.” [94] As an aside, we should ponder here if male chimpanzees are engaging in similar “phobias” when they defend their territory from the incursions of out-group males?
Regardless, some of the sources Walvin cites are flat out dubious. For example, J.A. Rogers, a Jamaican American who claimed, in his book, Sex and Race: Negro - Caucasian Mixing, that Charlotte Sophia and Beethoven were Black or had African ancestry. [95] Alongside such colorful claims are cherry-picked quotations from sources that if read in full argue something quite different.
As evidence of White male insecurity demonstrated in “the popular press,” both Walvin and Rogers cite an old issue of the English Review from 1919. There’s an article in it entitled Black Men and White Women. [96] The author, Stephan Black, states at one point that “There was no concealment of the affectionate attitude of a certain type of white female towards the brown, black, or yellow male.” Both Walvin and Rogers seem quite taken by this quotation. But this sentence, even on its own, evidences very little beyond the fact that, as the author states, a certain type of White female is affectionate toward Black men. In other words, a small minority or subset of White women. It doesn’t say hordes of White women or even a substantial amount of White women. Later on, the author even states “… it is generally a very low type of Englishwoman who will consort with the Negro.”
Moreover, the same article goes on to highlight Black male insecurities.
In describing the Negro as repulsive there is here no intention of being either unkind or critical. It is a cold statement of physiological fact, admitted by the friends of the blacks, and indeed put forward by their most responsible and intelligent writers as the real cause of all Negro misery on earth.
The author then quotes a Black professor, Renner Maxwell:
I am a Negro of pure descent; I have travelled a little; I have been educated at Oxford, where students congregate from all parts of the world ; I have been at the Inns of Court, where I have also seen and formed the acquaintance of many members of the various races who are linked together by allegiance to the British Crown, but I must confess with regret that, except the Chinese, I have never seen another race approaching, even within a measurable distance, the Negro in ugliness.
The English Review piece continues on highlighting other intellectuals who apparently “realized” their own race’s “hideousness,” and asserted that the only way to ameliorate their condition was to breed with “the superior races.”
Now, I am not claiming that there were no White British girls who found Black males attractive, but to get a sense of the proportion, let’s consider that during WWII, there were as many as 150,000 African Americans stationed in Great Britain. If relations “flourished” wherever these two groups met, then how many pregnancies might we expect to have resulted? Certainly more than 2000 which is the highest estimate I’ve ever seen. Feminist author and researcher Lucy Bland informs us:
By 1948 letters sent by the LCP to welfare organizations of each county in England and Wales uncovered 775 such children. The LCP recognized however that many babies would not have fallen within the remit of a welfare agency. If we look comparatively at the German experience, we can conjecture that it was probable that well over half of the British “brown babies” were kept by their birth families, and were thus unlikely to have been registered by welfare officials. However unlike in Germany no centralized demographic statistics were recorded, so it is impossible to know exactly how many “brown babies” were born. In 1947 George Padmore estimated 1,700. In 1949, Dr Malcolm Joseph-Mitchell, who was “General and Travelling Secretary” of the LCP, estimated the number of children of white women and “coloured serviceman” to be approximately two thousand, although he might have been including children with West Indian fathers. [97]
Honestly, the numbers aren’t very remarkable. Britain’s total population in the 1940s was about 48 million. Let’s assume roughly half of that was female. That’s 24 million White women to 150,000 Black males, and the result was maybe 2000 babies. That’s not very remarkable. Now, some people might argue here that Britain’s de facto or implicit support of Eisenhower’s segregation policy helped limit the ability of Black men to mingle with all the White women who supposedly found them irresistible. [98]
We should consider here that American GIs made something like five times the amount that British soldiers did, [99] and that they had access to all sorts of commercial goods that the British civilians didn’t due to rationing. WEB Du Bois, an African American intellectual and activist, wrote at the time that “American Negroes treated for the first time in their lives ‘like white folks’…so eager to find someone to spend their incredible wealth on, could give the girls fun and luxuries their husbands had never been able to give them.” [100] Du Bois seemed convinced that Blacks had complete and unrestricted access to White women.
Indeed, the African American press at the time enjoyed portraying Black men as exceedingly popular with British women, due to things like being able to jitterbug better than White men.
The English girls took to Americans of all complexions, found them generous with their money, pleasant and easy-going. In the scramble for girl friends, the average Negro GI had one advantage over his white Army brother: he knew how to jitterbug. English girls love to dance. Result was that they flocked to dances given by Negro units, were thrilled by jitterbug experts and hot music. [101]
Du Bois and Black outlets such as Ebony may have fantasized about Black men cuckolding British men off fighting the Nazis, but the numbers don’t speak to this being very widespread. Indeed, despite the stress of war, the absence of their husbands, and the economic advantages Black GIs had over their British male counterparts, White British women still didn’t find Black males all that appealing.
Now, I do think the British people were amicable toward and relatively accommodating to Black GIs compared to their American counterparts. Various modern articles and historians have asserted this. But this fact often gets mischaracterized in order to convince modern Brits that historically their ancestors never thought of themselves as “White” unlike their misguided and socially backward kinsmen across the Atlantic.
Yet, a cursory search of any British newspaper archive will readily reveal a whole assortment of articles referring to Brits as “White” to differentiate them from non-Whites. It might give some modern Bourgeois White Liberal in the UK a temporary dopamine drip to engage with these narratives, but these narratives ultimately have no effect on BAME activism’s desire to keep native Brits in a state of perpetual penance for the sins of colonial racism. In other words, no one believes in the narrative that the British were colorblind during WWII except a select few self-loathing White people.
So what was the case during the war? How did Brits actually feel toward Black GIs? Well, as David Reynolds highlighted in a paper on the matter, locals saw the Black GIs as temporary guests, who would eventually leave. There were instances in which British locals rejected America’s explicit Jim Crow policy, but this doesn’t mean they saw Blacks as their social equals or peers. In fact, David Reynolds tells us that “the evidence suggests that black popularity waned as the war progressed and that most Britons drew the line firmly at miscegenation.” [102]
Why would it wane? Well, if you dig through the British newspaper archives, you will notice a pattern of Blacks raping and murdering locals, and additionally you can find a fair amount of cases wherein local women voiced their disapproval of White girls mingling with Black troops, and young teenagers being sent away to reform schools after they were found associating with Black troops. Going through all these case by case would elongate this article too much for its aims, but here are two articles for you to digest. [103]
In the West Sussex case, the Black soldier had essentially tried to drag a young British girl off the side of the road to rape her. In his version of events he denied stabbing her to death and claimed that somehow the girl slammed her neck down on his knife. He was found guilty of murder and executed.
Disparate Attraction
Again regarding the whole sexual jealousy mythos, Lucy Bland asserted in her work that historically it was a:
“…racist assumption that darker races were physically attracted to the fairer, but not vice versa…” [104]
The problem, however, is that we have modern data on dating preferences in multi-racial societies with extreme egalitarian, anti-White leanings, and on average members of either sex of all races still seem to prefer White partners.
A study by Cornell University entitled, Debiasing Desire: Addressing Bias & Discrimination on Intimate Platforms, compiled data from online dating sites in the US and found that “heterosexual women of all races prefer white over nonwhite partners” and that “White men and women of all ages are more likely to pursue dates with white rather than non-white partners and are least likely to date outside their race.” Shockingly, it turns out that Black men and women are, as they report, “ten times more likely to message whites on an intimate platform than whites are to message blacks.”
The authors found it “troubling” that so many user profiles were “laced with phrases like ‘No blacks, sorry,’ ‘No Indians, no Asians, no Africans,’ or ‘Only here to talk to white boys.’" Curiously, however, the study’s authors felt that certain groups were inappropriate for intervention, namely Jews. [105] See the attached image below:
Census data in the UK from 2011 involving interracial dating, marriage and cohabitation reveal that White British (4%) were least likely to be in inter-ethnic relationships, followed by Bangladeshi (7%), Pakistani (9%) and Indian (12%) ethnic groups. The census does claim that “of all people in inter-ethnic relationships, 4 in 10 (40%) included someone who was White British,” however, note that the most common inter-ethnic pairing was between other White and British ethnicities (16%). So you can see how people might play fast and loose with this last fact to raise the appearance of how popular so-called “inter-ethnic” pairings are. The fact is White Brits typically stick to their own, even if the media wants to portray a different picture.
Summaries and Conclusions
So to wrap this all up, I think it’s clear that the indigenous peoples of the British Isles are some of the most tolerant, trusting and fair-minded people on the planet, and yet their academics who’ve covered historic race relations have been extremely biased, or more precisely antiwhite. Non-white migrants in 1919 were mostly rootless men who engaged disproportionately in activities that went against British sensibilities and cultural norms. They clearly collectivized against local White men, and the academics rather than condemn this, celebrate it as they vilify local backlash as “racist.”
These academics likely have a religious-like adherence to “racial egalitarianism” that prevents them from accepting this obvious fact. Throughout the postwar years, such attitudes have progressively worsened and taken on an explicitly antiwhite character wherein all explanations for the failures of equal outcomes rest on so-called “racism.” All intelligence and reasoning abilities seem to work their way outward from this basic premise, and as this happens we get increasingly distorted historical interpretations.
While it is fair to say that White men and women in the United Kingdom were concerned over miscegenation, no group of males, other than White males, would ever be expected to suffer an influx of foreign men who had such grotesque sexual access to their women. The fact that such behavior is still tolerated today in Britain indicates that we have a very serious problem on our hands that goes back over a 100 years.
The academics who cover the 1919 race riots are so intent on denying this that they often seek to reorient the harsh life experiences of native British women in the early 20th century and interwar years who, due to economic necessity were forced to engage in prostitution. They celebrate their suffering as a form of female liberation in ways they would never do if they were dealing with a non-White racial group.
Perhaps at one point Western academia embraced a sincere notion of egalitarianism, but for the past several decades, it has morphed into antiwhite particularism, and often the worst offenders are White. Indeed, all of the academics discussed here were White and born and raised in Britain. In order to get an accurate and fair historical reading of their past, native Brits are going to have to uproot and replace most of the individuals in their modern academia and confront the very serious problem of antiwhite particularism which is born out of a misguided, dogmatic adherence to egalitarianism.
Citations and Notes:
1. The Churchill Government and the Black American Troops in Britain during World War II. David Reynolds. Cambridge University Press. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 35. 1985. Page 117.
2. Manchester Evening News - Friday 06 June 1919.
3. Sheffield Independent - Saturday 07 June 1919.
4. Manchester Evening News, Friday, June 6, 1919.
5. Leeds Mercury - Wednesday 11 June 1919.
6. Liverpool Echo - Friday 06 June 1919.
7. Leeds Mercury - Wednesday 11 June 1919.
8. Western Mail - Tuesday 01 July 1919.
9. The Western Mail - Tuesday 01 July 1919.
10. South Wales News -Tuesday 01 July 1919.
11. South Wales News - Saturday 14 June 1919.
12. Dublin Evening Telegraph - Friday 13 June 1919, Dundee Evening Telegraph - Friday 13 June 1919, Shields Daily News - Friday 13 June 1919.
13. Dublin Evening Telegraph - Friday 13 June 1919 & Shields Daily News - Friday 13 June 1919.
14. Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser - Wednesday 18 June 1919.
15. Globe - Saturday 14 June 1919.
16. Evening Mail - Friday 13 June 1919 & Irish Weekly, Ulster Examiner - Saturday 21 June 1919.
17. Dundee Courier - Monday 02 June 1919, South Wales News 16 July 1919.
18. The Yorkshire Post - Friday 13 June 1919.
19. The Western Mail - Saturday 14 June 1919.
20. The Western Mail - Saturday 21 June 1919.
21. Barry Dock News - 20 June 1919.
22. Western Mail - Wednesday 28 July 1919.
23. The 1919 Race Riots of Britain. Jacqueline Jenkinson. University of Edinburgh. 1987. Page 259.
24. Ibid, page 163.
25. Ibid, page 227.
26. Ibid, page 258.
27. Ibid, page 258.
28. Barry Dock News - 13 June 1919.
29. The 1919 Race Riots of Britain. Jacqueline Jenkinson. University of Edinburgh. 1987. Page 258.
30. Ibid, pages 258-259.
31. Ibid, page 258.
32. Belfast Telegraph - Friday 13 June 1919, South Wales News - 14 June 1919.
33. The 1919 Race Riots of Britain. Jacqueline Jenkinson. University of Edinburgh. 1987. Page 162.
34. The Times - Friday 13 June 1919.
35. The Times - Tuesday 10 June 1919.
36. The 1919 Race Riots of Britain. Jacqueline Jenkinson. University of Edinburgh. 1987. Page 114.
37. Ibid, pages 167-168.
38. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. Peter Fryer. Pluto Press. 1984. Page 313.
39. Christian Hogsbjerg. Rufus E. Fennell: a literary Pan-Africanist in Britain. Race & Class. Vol 56, Issue 1. 2014. Page 59.
40. The 1919 Race Riots of Britain. Jacqueline Jenkinson. University of Edinburgh. 1987. Pages 222-223.
41. Rufus E. Fennell: a literary Pan-Africanist in Britain. Christian Hogsbjerg. Race & Class. Vol 56, Issue 1. 2014. Page 61.
42. Ibid, page 78.
43. Jet Magazine. 19 June 1952. Page 40.
44. Rufus E. Fennell: a literary Pan-Africanist in Britain. Christian Hogsbjerg. Race & Class. Vol 56, Issue 1. 2014. Page 65.
45. Ibid, page 78.
46. Liverpool Echo - Monday 08 October 1917
47. Manchester Evening News - Monday 08 October 1917
48. Liverpool Echo - Monday 08 October 1917
49. Daily Herald - Thursday 04 December 1924
50. Liverpool Echo - Monday 12 November 1917
51. Liverpool Daily Post - Saturday 25 August 1917
52. Liverpool Echo - Monday 12 November 1917
53. Western Daily Press - Saturday 01 December 1917. Fennell appears in the credits of a show entitled “All Black.”
54. Daily Herald - Monday 28 July 1919, Western Mail - Saturday 19 July 1919.
55. South Wales News 23 July 1919, Western Mail - Saturday 19 July 1919.
56. The 1919 Race Riots of Britain. Jacqueline Jenkinson. University of Edinburgh. 1987. Page 224.
57. Ibid, page 223.
58. Ibid, page 224.
59. Western Mail - Saturday 19 July 1919.
60. Daily Herald - Monday 28 July 1919.
61. West London Observer - Friday 09 August 1929.
62. The Times - 23 December 1932, Western Daily Press - Wednesday 11 January 1933.
63. The Stage - Thursday 09 May 1935.
64. Surrey Mirror - Friday 03 December 1937.
65. Lincolnshire Echo - Tuesday 03 October 1939.
66. Ebony Magazine. September, 1950. Page 70.
67. See Hogsbjerg’s paper. He discusses various instances of marriage.
68. Jet Magazine. 19 June 1952. Page 40.
69. South Wales News 16 June 1919.
70. The Times - 16 June 1919.
71. Western Daily Press - Tuesday 17 June 1919.
72. The Times - Wednesday - 13 June 1919.
73. Leicester Daily Post - Tuesday 17 June 1919.
74. Negroes in Britain. Kenneth Little. University of London. 1948. Pages 50-51.
75. Ibid, pages 49-50.
76. Coventry Standard - Friday 11 July 1919.
77. Kenilworth Advertiser - Saturday 27 December 1919.
78. The South Wales News, September 4th, 1916.
79. Western Mail - Thursday 24 September 1908.
80. Prostitution in Cardiff, 1900-1959. Simon Jenkins. University of Cardiff. 2017. Page 160.
81. Ibid, page 157.
82. Inherent Vice? Maltese Men and the Organization of Prostitution in Interwar Cardiff. Simon Jenkins. Journal of Social History, Volume 49, Issue 4. 2016. Page 156. Jenkins cites: GA DCONC/7/7 Report from Wilson to the Home Office, October 14, 1930.
83. Negroes in Britain. Kenneth Little. University of London. 1948. Pages 137-138.
84. Inherent Vice? Maltese Men and the Organization of Prostitution in Interwar Cardiff. Simon Jenkins. Journal of Social History, Volume 49, Issue 4. 2016. Page 19.
85. Prostitution in Cardiff, 1900-1959. Simon Jenkins. University of Cardiff. 2017. Page 153.
86. Negroes In Britain. Kenneth Little. University of London. 1947. Pages 38-39.
87. Ibid, page 39.
88. The 1919 Race Riots of Britain. Jacqueline Jenkinson. University of Edinburgh, 1987. Page 92.
89. See the 1898 Vagrancy Law Amendment Act.
90. Inherent Vice? Maltese Men and the Organization of Prostitution in Interwar Cardiff. Simon Jenkins. Journal of Social History, Volume 49, Issue 4. 2016. Page 18.
91. Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette - Wednesday 23 April 1919.
92. Prostitution in Cardiff, 1900-1959. Simon Jenkins. University of Cardiff. 2017. Page 119.
93. Ibid, page 137.
94. Black and White: The Negro and English Society. James Walvin. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. 1973. Pages 214- 215.
95. Sex and Race: Negro - Caucasian Mixing, Vol 1. J.A. Rogers. Helga M. Rogers Cahill Law Firm. On page 206 and 207 Rogers discusses Queen Charlotte Sophia. On pages 10 and 11, he discusses Beethoven. He also posits that both Churchill and Hitler had Black African ancestry.
96. The English Review. October 1919. Pages 352-357.
97. Interracial Relationships and the “Brown Baby Question”. Lucy Bland. Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol 26, issue 3. 2017. Page 19.
98. See David Reynolds’ 1984 paper entitled The Churchill Government and the Black American Troops in Britain during World War II for a good explanation of Britain’s racial policies at the time.
99. Interracial Relationships and the “Brown Baby Question”. Lucy Bland. Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol 26, issue 3. 2017. Pages 8-9.
100. The Winds of Change. Chicago Defender. 15 June 1946.
101. Fatherless Children Check the Liberalism of British. Ebony Magazine. 19 November 1946.
102. David Reynold’s review of Graham Smith’s book: When Jim Crow met John Bull:Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain. Journal of American Studies, Vol 22, Issue 3. 1988. Page 500.
103. Dundee Evening Telegraph - Tuesday 09 November 1943, West Sussex Gazette - Thursday 07 December 1944.
104. White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War. Lucy Bland. Gender & History Vol. 17, issue 1. 2005. Page 36.
105. Hutson, Jevan and Taft, Jessie and Barocas, Solon and Barocas, Solon and Levy, Karen, Debiasing Desire: Addressing Bias and Discrimination on Intimate Platforms (September 5, 2018). Forthcoming in Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. v. 2 (CSCW) Article 73 (November 2018), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3244459