I wonder how many remember a series of monologues shown on the BBC in 2019? ‘Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle’ followed the stories of succeeding generations of a family of the Windrush generation. The first story featured Eunice, who, speaking directly to camera, describes what it was like when she first arrived as a passenger on the Empire Windrush in 1948. Set in 1949, a year after her arrival, the synopsis for this first episode describes her experience: ‘the year has not been easy: her aspirations and confidence have been battered by the reality of employment and living conditions in London.’
Subsequent episodes feature different characters from succeeding generations including marriages both within the growing black community and also with the white community. By the time we get to the eighth monologue Michaela takes up the story. Michaela self identifies as black but in appearance she is white. She remembers fondly her great grandmother Eunice and, holding up a photo of Eunice, says ‘most people don’t even realise that we are family.’ The monologues were fictional but they vividly illustrated the experiences of the Windrush generation, the aspirations, the hopes, the disappointments, the compromises and the struggles. Of course there are many real life examples that mirror the fictional ones portrayed.
Some of the early post-War arrivals were already married, men left their wives at home in the Caribbean and set off for the Mother Country in order to establish a foothold and then bring their wife to join them. Lucilda Harris, passenger number 127 on the Windrush passenger list, was one such wife. Lucilda and her husband would go on to become established as elders in the black community in Brixton. A little over six years later Audley Anderson disembarked at Plymouth from the SS Auriga on 12th October 1954 and made his way to Nottingham where his sister-in-law was already living. Audley’s wife, Myrtle, joined him five months later having also sailed to Plymouth on the Auriga. One of the Anderson’s children, Vivian Alexander Anderson, would go on to be England’s first black football full international.
Others had sweethearts in the Caribbean who came to join them in England. Pearl Mogotsi disembarked from the SS Ariguani at Avonmouth on 14th April 1948 (two months before the Windrush arrived at Tilbury). She was unmarried but that changed when she tied the knot with fellow Trinidadian, Edric Connor at Paddington Register Office on 26th June 1948. Pearl and Edric became important figures in black Britain’s cultural life (Edric, for instance, became the first black actor to perform for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford when he appeared in a 1958 production of Pericles).
But the majority of new arrivals did not have wives or sweethearts to bring over and had to look beyond their own community where there were few eligible women of colour. A calypsonian, Lord Beginner, addressed the issue directly in ‘Mix Up Matrimony’. Beginner, travelling under his real name of Egbert Moore, was passenger number 762 on the Windrush passenger list. Several of Lord Beginner’s calypsos captured the zeitgeist in memorable style, ‘Cricket Lovely Cricket’, celebrating the West Indies first ever victory over England in a test match at Lords in 1950, is one of his best known. But it is ‘Mix Up Matrimony’ that we feature here:
The song takes a very optimistic, ‘rose tinted spectacles’, view of the situation, in reality mixed couple were usually viewed with hostility, particularly by the white community. One of the black footballers we interviewed for our forthcoming book ‘Football’s Black Pioneers’, Lloyd Maitland, described how his, white, mother scarcely ever left the house because of the hostility she faced in Birmingham, and Lloyd himself was subjected to bullying on account of his colour.
In researching the book we came across a classic illustration of the ‘soon gone’ storyline. We wanted to identify the first black player at each of the 92 English Football League clubs. We thought we had identified Tranmere Rover’s first black player when we found that a Nigerian, Elkanah Onyeali, had played for them in 1960, however, our friend, the Liverpool historian, Ray Costello, alerted us to a black goalkeeper who played for Rovers at least a decade earlier. The goalkeeper in question turned out to be George Payne but, in fact, we discovered an even earlier black player for Tranmere.
The player we identified was Albert Charles Payne who made his debut for Rovers on 31st August 1946. We met Albert’s son, David, who, unlike the fictional Michaela at the start of this article, has never considered himself to be black. But David is a direct descendent of this man:
On 1st November 1853, on the Caribbean island of Barbados, Joseph Stanley Payne (pictured above) was born. As a young man Joseph took to the sea and, as so many seamen did, eventually made Liverpool his home port. It was here that he married a local white girl, Sarah Ann Mansfield, in 1880. On 28th June 1884 Joseph and Sarah had a son, Albert Ernest, who joined the growing ranks of Liverpool’s mixed heritage community.
On 12th February 1920, Albert Ernest married Lilian May Tranter and Tranmere’s first black player, Albert Charles Payne, was born three years later in Liverpool on 11th November 1923.
Albert made only ten appearances in the Football League (more than enough to earn him a place in ‘Football’s Black Pioneers’), but his cousin, George Payne, the man Ray Costello originally drew to our attention, made a total of 467 in goal for Rovers in a career that started in 1947 and ended in 1961. Albert and George were cousins who could both claim the distinguished looking gentleman in the picture as their grandfather.
We don’t have a photo of Albert in his playing days but his cousin George is seen here (back row, third from the left).
You may think that George ‘doesn’t look black’ but, as we have seen, he and Albert had a black grandparent. This illustrates the point that the black contribution to British history is not always readily apparent, all the more reason to explore this hidden history.
‘Football’s Black Pioneers’ can be ordered from the publishers: https://www.conkereditions.co.uk/product/footballs-black-pioneers-subscriber-copies-for-pre-order/, or from Amazon, Waterstones and all good bookshops.
