roots1937

The Past Is Now – Birmingham Museum Exhibition

One third of Historycal Roots visited Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery last week to view The Past is Now – Birmingham and the British Empire exhibition.

The exhibition makes links between famous figures from the city’s past and the slave trade. For example, Birmingham-born Francis Galton who coined the term eugenics which involved forced sterilisation, controlled breeding and restricting marriages.

Another is Joseph Chamberlain who as a former Colonial Secretary of Britain was considered by many to be responsible for British brutality in South Africa particularly during the 2nd Boer War in 1899 which was known as “Joe’s War”. Ironically the Museum is situated in Chamberlain Square, named after Joseph.

The exhibition also shows how some of the products of Birmingham’s thriving industry in the 19th century was used to support the slave trade. This included guns and leg irons.

The exhibition doesn’t attempt to impose views on others but encourages visitors to think. There is a white board where people can write down their feelings.

The rest of the Museum and Art Gallery has much of interest in terms of Black History. You can learn about William Davidson who, after being born a slave moved to Scotland where he became a lawyer before moving to Birmingham in the early 1800s where he became a cabinet maker. Or another former slave Peter Stanford. Born in America, he became Birmingham’s first black Christian minister in 1887.

If art is your subject then look out for the painting of Joseph Sturge and a young black girl (below). Sturge was a prominent member of the Birmingham Anti-Slave Society.

The Past is Now runs until 12 March 2018 and is worth a visit. But be warned, there is very little publicity about it in the Museum itself and nor is it well sign-posted so don’t give up if at first you can’t locate it.

You should be able to find out more about the exhibition here:

http://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/bmag/whats-on/the-past-is-now-birmingham-and-the-british-empire

In Praise of Ivor Cummings

Ivor who? Precisely! Read on to find out more about an unsung hero of the Empire Windrush story.

Ivor Cummings was a Civil Servant working at the Colonial Office in London when news reached the Ministry in May 1948 that the Empire Windrush would soon be leaving Jamaica with several hundred men (and some women) bound for England in search of work.

It’s a widely held misconception that the men were coming at the invitation of the British Government to help rebuild the country’s shattered infrastructure. According to his obituary in The Independent newspaper (he died in 1992) ‘Cummings was one of the first waiting to greet the initial shipload of Jamaicans arriving to help rebuild war-torn Britain at the government’s behest’. As we shall see the last part of that sentence was far from accurate.

The authorities in Jamaica knew how unwelcome the news of the Windrush’s imminent departure for England would be: ‘Very sorry indeed that you and your staff will be put to all the trouble that the arrival of this large number … will involve … it is an appalling thing with which to be saddled‘ wrote H Lindo from the Colonial Secretary’s Office in Jamaica on 29th May. Elsewhere in files held at The National Archives at Kew the imminent arrival of the Windrush is described as ‘a formidable problem’ and ‘a first class problem’.[1]

The Windrush passengers were most definitely not coming at the ‘behest’ of the Government!

Why was their imminent arrival seen as so problematic?

To answer this you need to consider the context of the time. This was a Britain still reeling from the effort involved in winning the war against fascism. Everything was in short supply, the housing stock had been decimated and food was rationed. The arrival of over 400 people from the Caribbean posed very real logistical problems: where were they to be housed; how would they be fed; and what would they do?

Mike and Trevor Phillips in their outstanding book ‘Windrush – The Irresistible Rise Of Multi-Racial Britain’ (still available from Amazon), argue that the British authorities’ reaction was driven by ‘paroxysms of anxiety’ about these questions rather than racism. Close examination of the files at Kew confirms that there was no overtly racist language used in discussing the issues, but there is no doubt that the overall tone is often patronising and many of the civil servants of the time had low expectations of the people the Windrush would bring (Cummings himself is not immune to this criticism). It’s also worth pointing out that the same concerns did not seem to apply to the thousands of White European workers, mostly Poles, who were arriving at this time. An official at the Ministry of Labour, M A Bevan, commented:‘as regards the possible importation of West Indian labour, I suggest we must dismiss the idea from the start.’ Among the reasons the Ministry cited were that such workers: ‘would be unsuitable for outdoor work in winter owing to their susceptibility to colds’ and, in a nice example of heads we win, tails you lose, those working underground in coal mines would find conditions ‘too hot.’ [2] Phillips and Phillips were perhaps a little too forgiving in their assessment.

Civil Servants at the Colonial Office, Ivor Cummings prominent among them, fought hard against the apathy and even hostility of other Government departments. At one point Cummings wrote: ‘I consider the Ministry of Labour’s attitude unwarrantable, and a further example of their anti-colonialism.’

The general view at the Colonial Office was that the people rapidly steaming towards Tilbury on the Windrush must be helped: ‘to avoid a political fuss and undue hardship to the men’ and ‘the scandal of having them on the streets without anywhere to sleep.’ Cummings and his colleagues worked tirelessly to ensure satisfactory arrangements were put in place to meet those on board the ship, only achieving success when they pressed the matter at the highest levels of the Government (the Cabinet, with the Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, himself becoming involved)

It was not until 16th June (just 5 days before the Windrush arrived) that the Clapham Deep Shelter gets mentioned for the first time as a possible solution to the problem of where to house the new arrivals. On the 17th, Cummings reports that the War Office had agreed that the Shelter could be used and he visited Clapham himself that same day noting: ‘in all the circumstance, I think we are lucky to get it and we should not grumble. The Manager of the accommodation told us that his canteen only supplies very light refreshments but he thought they might be able to provide tea and buns for breakfast in the mornings and provide sandwiches and liquid refreshment at nights.’[3]

Cummings went to meet the Windrush when it docked at Tilbury and reported that the men: ‘are a mixed bunch, but on the whole rather better than the type we had anticipated.’

The file records that initially 180 men were accommodated at the Clapham Shelter, although that number increased when others found that the accommodation they had expected elsewhere in London was not available to them.

Most of the men found the Shelter acceptable, it served it’s purpose. Mike and Trevor Phillips include a quote from Oswald ‘Columbus’ Dennison, one of the Windrush passengers, which perhaps summed up the views of people who used the Shelter: ‘it wasn’t bad … it was a good arrangement really.’

On 30th June the Cabinet Office file closed with a comment from Cummings ‘the general situation with regard to the placing of these men is most favourable.’ Job done!

What makes Cummings particularly interesting was that he himself was Black, indeed, according to ‘The Turning Point in Africa: British Colonial Policy 1938-48’ he was first Black civil servant at the Colonial Office. His role there gave him special responsibilities for Commonwealth citizens, it was a role he pursued diligently and, before and after his involvement with the Windrush, he made it his lifetime’s work to serve the interests of people of African descent.

He himself was born in West Hartlepool in 1913, his mother was an English nurse, his father a doctor from Sierra Leone. They met at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary where she was a young junior matron and he, a senior house officer. Discouraged from studying medicine by her father, Joanna Archer had followed women’s traditional route into nursing, but she broke convention when she had a child out of wedlock with Ishmael Cummings. He, the son of a wealthy African merchant, had two siblings who married Taylors, thereby establishing the prominent Freetown family of Taylor-Cummings and making his own child, Ivor, a relative of the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Ivor Cummings grew up with his mother in Addiscombe, Surrey, where they were befriended by Coleridge- Taylor’s widow, Jessie. Through her, Ivor got to know his cousins Avril and Hiawatha who both followed in their father’s musical footsteps. There is a well known story that Coleridge-Taylor had faced prejudice in Croydon and that some boys had set fire to his hair ‘to see if it would burn.’ Ivor Cummings experienced similar treatment when other boys at Whitgift School in Croydon conducted the same experiment.

With the onset of war, he joined the Colonial Office and rapidly earned the reputation of someone who would help any person of colour, whatever their social standing.

We have focused here on Cummings’ role in connection with the Windrush, but there is a lot more to be said about him. He deserves, and will get, his own page on Historycal Roots. For now though, we salute Ivor Cummings, an unsung hero of the Empire Windrush story.

[1] The reference for the file at Kew that the quotes in this article are taken from is CO 876/88

[2] These quotes come from: ‘Austerity Britain’ by David Kynaston (page 273)

[3] At one point, a disused airbase in Essex was suggested. Cummings ruled this out when he was told it would take him three hours to drive there. How different might the history of South London have been if the Windrush arrivals had been directed to Essex instead of Clapham?!

A House Through Time

David Oulsoga, one of our favourite historians, has a four part series starting on BBC2 on Thursday, 4th January. The programmes will trace the history of 62, Falkner Street, Liverpool from the time it was built in 1840 up to the present day: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2018/01/a-house-through-time. As this is a Liverpool house, built in early Victorian times you can be sure that a ‘trader in slave-produced cotton’ will feature somewhere in the house’s history.

David describes this as ‘a unique television experiment.’ For television, maybe, but there is no doubt this approach has been tried previously in books. There may be many, but one that I have is ‘A House By the Thames and The People Who Lived There’ by Gillian Tindall, which traces the story of a house on the south bank of the Thames opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. There is no Black history connection as far as I recall but it’s still a fascinating read.

Writing in the Observer newspaper, David’s words demonstrate why we like his work so much: ‘History, to me, is all about those shiver-down-the-spine moments … when you hold in your hands an object created hundreds of years before your time and feel the vague presence of the hands that held it in the past.’ In talking about what a historian is, David speaks of ‘early morning trips across overgrown cemeteries’ – we’ve done our share of that (although perhaps not ‘early morning’!), I wonder if that makes us ‘proper’ historians? Apparently ‘Historians also have to be nosy’ – step forward Bill Hern!

David closes his article by saying: ‘the history I was taught at school was largely one of great men and great deeds, a history that took place in palaces and battlefields. It was silent about our shared, inner and domestic history, the stories of the rest of us, the un-great, who live quietly and privately.’

Each and every one of us contributes to history as did each of our ancestors regardless of their class, colour or gender. Long may historians like David strive to bring these forgotten histories to light and, if you ever want to join the Historycal Roots team, David….

Postscript Books

You know what it’s like, Christmas is over for another year and the cold, dark days of January loom ahead like a tunnel with no light at the end. Your credit card is in intensive care and you’ve promised to give it a month-long period of rest and recuperation. Then a book catalogue drops through the letter box. You know you should throw it straight into the box for recycling paper but you can’t / don’t and you find yourself flicking through its pages.

Postscript books specialise in ‘high quality overstocks and out of print books’. I’ve bought books from them before, but not for a while, you have to admire their persistance.

I’m irritated to see that the catalogue includes ‘The World’s War’ by David Olusoga. Irritated because this book shouldn’t be appearing in a pile of ‘remaindered’ titles, every last copy should have been sold, but also because this handsome hardback can now be had for £4.99 and we paid, an already heavily reduced, £10 for our copy two years ago. Resisting the urge to hurl the catalogue into the bin, I identify a dozen or more titles that look really interesting.

But the house isn’t getting any bigger, the walls aren’t magically expanding to accommodate an ever growing trove of books and so I narrow my selection down to just two: ‘Caribbean Volunteers at War’ by David Johnson (£19.99 from Amazon but on offer from Postscript at just £7.99); and ‘Caribbean Roots’ a double CD of poetry, read by the poets themselves, from the British Library archive (Amazon price: £15.94, Postscript price: £5.99).

I find myself apologising out loud to my credit card but, I explain, even allowing for postage, I am ‘saving’ £20. I know my card understands.

If you would like to join me in my folly, here is a link to Postscript Books eclectic, something for everyone, catalogue: https://www.psbooks.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAyZLSBRDpARIsAH66VQKgzN6IVn-59MaEWH9fq9H1D61s2PAYsUNbAQdLnydhWC-r8euwiMMaAln2EALw_wcB

I’m sorry if I am leading you astray!

They came before the Windrush

Most people reading this will be well aware that the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury on 21st June 1948. A whole generation has been named after the Windrush but less well known is that other ships had arrived earlier. One such ship was the Almanzora which docked at Southampton on 21st December 1947. Among the 200 or so people who disembarked was Allan Charles Wilmot.

Seventy years to the day after disembarking, Allan Wilmot spoke at an event in Brixton: ‘They came before the Windrush’. Born in 1925 in Jamaica, Wilmot is now 92 but is still in very fine form and it was a privilege to hear him speak.

His book: ‘Now You Know’ may be hard to come by (I couldn’t find it on Amazon or ABE books) but, if you can get hold of a copy it is well worth reading and includes a number of lovely photographs. One, showing Wilmot in his Navy uniform in November 1941, shows a very young man who looks little more than a boy (at the event Wilmot said he had lied about his age as he was so keen to enlist).

Wilmot served in the Royal Navy on a minesweeper in the Caribbean. He described this as a ‘suicide mission’. It was alright during the daylight hours when you had a good chance of seeing the mines you were searching for, but at night… Later he joined the RAF and was based at RAF Calshot, near Southampton where he was involved in Air-Sea rescue work.

So, when the Almanzora docked, Wilmot was returning to a country he had already visited and served during the war. He found the welcome far less hospitable than it had been when he was in uniform. Finding accommodation was difficult (landlords were openly hostile: ‘no Irish, no coloureds, no dogs’) and sometimes he resorted to catching the last tube train at night and sleeping on it until the morning. Employment opportunities were also limited and he did his share of dish washing before securing work in a book shop and subsequently with the Post Office.

Wilmot was also able to carve out a successful career as a musician, principally with a group called The Southlanders. You may think you don’t know any of their songs but, if you are of a certain age, you may recall their novelty hit that featured Wilmot growling ‘I am a mole and I live in a hole’! Allan spoke enthusiastically about the many showbiz personalities he had met during his career, from Bob Hope to Shirley Bassey and Sammy Davis Jnr.

OK, so you couldn’t be at the event, but you can see an interview with Allan Charles Wilmot here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9-Fbz7Qed8

It’s the next best thing to seeing him in person.

Black Music in Europe: A Hidden History

If you missed the first programme in Clarke Peters’ series on the hidden history of Black music in Europe you can still listen to it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09jd32b (not sure how long this link will work, so catch it while you can). This programme covered the years 1900 to 1910 and the next episode (on Radio 4, Boxing Day at 9.00) will continue the story into the years of the First World War.

Peters visited Bonn in Germany where he met Rainer Lotz, a collector with the most amazing collection of early Black music. At its peak his basement contained maybe 60,000 discs. He has slimmed it down to about 25,000 ‘to save my marriage’! Recordings include one fragile disc that is the only surviving copy as well as a song recorded by Fela Kuti’s grandfather.

Truly fascinating stuff, even before it touched on our favourite classical composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Well worth a listen.

John Edward Parris – A Black soldier in World War One

In recent years historians have become increasingly interested in documenting the part that Black people played in the 1st World War. For almost a century their contribution has been ignored. As David Olusoga commented recently, there comes a point where ‘the omission of Black people from history begins to look less like an accident and more like a deliberate strategy.’

Historians like Stephen Bourne (in his book ‘Black Poppies’) and Ray Costello (in ‘Black Tommies’) have, along with Olusoga and others, been attempting to redress the balance.

One problem historians face is how you identify whether a historical figure actually was Black. Generally the available records do not include any reference to ethnicity and so other means must be used.

Family history can play a part, as it did with our recently published book ‘The Walker Brothers and their Legacy’. That book came about because a lady, Maria Downer, recalled that her father and his two brothers had all served in the so called ‘Great War’. Research online and at the National Archives at Kew was able to put flesh on the bones of Maria’s story.

Another avenue is to look at Black people who achieved a degree of fame and trace their stories back through time. There are many examples, for instance Randolph Turpin, who was briefly a Black boxing world champion, had a Black father, Lionel, who is known to have served in the British Army in France (both Bourne and Costello have written about Turpin). We are proud to be able to add another ‘discovery’ to the list -John Edward (‘Eddie’) Parris.

Eddie Parris (junior) is believed to have been the first Black player to represent Wales at football. But, as far as we know at Historycal Roots, no one had thought to trace the story of Eddie’s parents. Bill Hern has now done so and, as a result, we have successfully identified another Black man who served in the 1st World War. Eddie Parris (senior) now has his own page in the ‘Forgotten History’ section of the Historycal Roots site and you can read his story there.

Well done to Bill Hern for bringing Eddie’s contribution to light.

Bajan soldiers in World War One

Bill Hern’s review of Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) graves from the First World War on Barbados is now complete – there are articles on the Historycal Roots site covering the twelve soldiers who are commemorated on the island by a CWGC headstone. The articles are arranged in alphabetical order from Archer to Yard.

The first to enlist was Martin Luther Taitt (September 1915), the last was Fitz Grandison (in May 1917). Taitt also has the distinction of having served the longest – he died in a military hospital in Trinidad on 31st August 1919 having served almost exactly four years.

Bill has no further excuse to visit Barbados which makes his decision to go again early in 2018 all the more strange, perhaps it isn’t just the opportunity to do research on behalf of Historycal Roots that attracts him?!

Congratulations to Bill on completing his project and do please contact us if you are a descendent of any of these brave men..

Call Mr Robeson

Just how well known is the name Paul Robeson these days? That was a question Tayo Aluko asked during the Q&A session that followed his one man show ‘Call Mr Robeson’ in South Norwood’s Stanley Halls recently. And is he better remembered in the UK than in his native USA?

If the knowledgeable audience that filled the Stanley Halls was anything to go by the name of Paul Robeson is far from forgotten but Tayo commented that when he spoke to people in America about the singer, actor and political activist he often got blank looks. This is a state of affairs that Tayo is determined to change.

Born in New Jersey in 1898, Robeson was the son of a man who had been born as an enslaved person. Robeson became only the third Black student to attend the prestigious Rutgers College. He fought racism and injustice throughout his life, making himself exceptionally unpopular with the American authorities by closely associating himself with communism.

Perhaps best known for singing ‘Ole Man River’ in the film ‘Showboat’ he enjoyed a successful film career (a personal favourite is ‘Proud Valley’ filmed on location in a South Wales mining community) and as a singer. He also performed on stage, for instance taking the title role in a London production of ‘Othello’.

Tayo Aluko’s one man play is a powerful evocation of Robeson’s life. The stage is littered with Robeson memorabilia, all from Tayo’s personal collection. Occasionally during the play he picked up a letter or theatre bill and used it as a prop to support the narrative. His singing voice was powerful but, probably inevitably, could not quite match Robeson’s own deeply resonant tone.

There is a DVD of the show, it was available on the night but I’m not sure where else it can be obtained. So here is a short extract from the show:

An Evening With Maria Downer

The Guyana High Commission recently hosted ‘An Evening with Maria Downer’. Maria, her husband, Patrick and the Historycal Roots team did a presentation to a packed house:

Maria is co-author of ‘The Walker Brothers and Their Legacy’ which tells the story of her father’s service in World War One. Her two uncles also served, making this the only example that has yet come to light of three Black brothers serving in that war. There must have been other examples and we would love to hear about them.

The brothers, who were born in Barbados but moved to British Guiana when their father died, enlisted with the British West Indies Regiment. Maria’s father, Milton, was one of the first to join the newly established regiment, his service number was 272 and he enlisted in October 1915. His brothers, Leonard (service number 6519) and Clarence (number 9221), enlisted later but all three served in the campaign in Egypt and Palestine during 1917 and 1918. There is no way of knowing but it is lovely to think that they re-united at some stage and truly became ‘brothers in arms’.

Maria concluded the evening by urging everyone present to think about their own family history because what the story of the Walker brothers has shown is that there is a lot of fascinating Black history hidden away in the minds (and attics) of the current generation, history that needs to be recorded before it is lost forever.

After the presentation the authors signed copies of the book before everyone tucked into the food and drink provided by Maria with the help of her friends.

We would like to thank the High Commissioner, His Excellency, Hamley Case, for making the High Commission available for this event.