Abstract
Accounts from those who were themselves mixing and of mixed race during the period 1900–1939 directly challenge those put forward by the media and arts to reveal a picture of visibility and acceptance in intimate, everyday interracial lives, albeit against a backdrop of racism. Insider accounts and contemporary photographs of interracial domestic settlement frequently reveal substantial commitment and domestic contentment between partners; however, the emotional and psychological toll of dealing with complex family dynamics, institutional and other racisms, as well as, at times, racial and cultural differences are plain to see. Yet insider accounts also reveal the ways in which such prejudiced practices and portrayals were refuted and challenged by the individuals and families, as well as how local attitudes towards mixedness could fluctuate between acceptance and antipathy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Daily Express, 18 March 1930.
- 2.
Anita Bowes, in Bourne 2001: 39.
- 3.
Cited in Padfield (1999: 103).
- 4.
For a fascinating look at this diversity in Edwardian England, for example, see Green (1998).
- 5.
The Evening Post, 17 June 1902.
- 6.
Green (n.d.); The Nottingham Evening Post, 3 February 1908.
- 7.
Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 14 February 1922 and 8 July 1924.
- 8.
Gloucester Chronicle, 10 December 1904; The Standard, 21 May 1938.
- 9.
The Manchester Evening News, 31 March 1915.
- 10.
Dundee Evening Post, 22 August 1901; Yorkshire Evening Post, 22 August 1901; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 23 August 1901.
- 11.
Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 26 April 1907.
- 12.
Supplement to the Manchester Courier, 26 April 1907; Hull Daily Mail, 23 October 1929.
- 13.
The Worcestershire Chronicle, 31 March 1900.
- 14.
After serving three years hard labour, Edalji was paroled and received a pardon in 1907, it being held that Doyle’s intervention likely playing a significant role. Doyle noted that he felt race and class had had a part to play in both Edalji’s conviction and the poison pen attacks that the family had experienced, for 'though the vicar was an amiable and devoted man, the appearance of a coloured clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situation’ (Lahiri 2000: 85). Also see Lahiri for an in-depth discussion of the case.
- 15.
Western Mail, 5 November 1900.
- 16.
Such was her popularity that the theatrical magazine The Era featured her in a prominent interview on 9 November 1901.
- 17.
See www.mix-d.org/museum/timeline/1900-john-milne-and-tone-noritsune [date accessed 06.07.2017].
- 18.
Derbyshire Courier, 18 November 1911.
- 19.
St. James Gazette, 12 February 1903.
- 20.
Burnley Gazette, 22 November 1911.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
Shields Daily Gazette, 23 March 1923 (cited in Lawless 1995: 185–186).
- 24.
Hull Daily Mail, 28 February 1929.
- 25.
Cited in Wong (1989: 30).
- 26.
Dundee Evening Telegraph, 14 November 1916.
- 27.
Western Gazette, 23 April 1920.
- 28.
Dundee Evening Telegraph, 28 January 1925.
- 29.
Lingard was later acquitted, however, due to her ‘emotional state’—the petition for her acquittal was signed by 7,000 people. It is interesting to consider whether the same leniency would have been shown if her child had been white. Evening Telegraph and Post, 7 March 1916; Western Times, 10 March 1916.
- 30.
See for example the turbulent case in Odiham, Hampshire of a ‘highly educated’ half-caste Indian woman married to a British soldier who, after having been sentenced to two months hard labour for child neglect, had taken her husband to court for maintenance as he was refusing to take her back (Reading Mercury, 14 July 1900); the dramatic suicide of a black father of eight children from Maltby, Yorkshire whose estranged white wife would not take him back (Louth and North Lincolnshire Advertiser, 22 January 1910); the six-month sentence of hard labour given to a black father living in Trethomas, Caerphilly for beating his 11-year-old ‘half caste’ daughter with a knotted rope (Dundee Evening Telegraph, 5 June 1922); and the case of an Arab husband living in South Shields who was sentenced to three months for assaulting his white wife (Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 29 October 1923).
- 31.
Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 3 October 1934; Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 5 October 1934.
- 32.
Cited in the Hull Daily Mail, 17 September 1918.
- 33.
Nottingham Evening Post, 10 June 1932.
- 34.
Cited in Killingray 2003: 59.
- 35.
For more on the fascinating life of Oei Hui Lan, see Flores (forthcoming).
- 36.
The Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury, 7 September 1906.
- 37.
Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 13 February 1903.
- 38.
Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture [edited by Carole Elizabeth Boyce Davies p. 928.].
- 39.
The Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald, 10 December 1904. The article also notes that ‘the Chinese Ambassador likewise consented and congratulated the couple’.
- 40.
Sunday Post, 28 September 1919; 11 April 1926.
- 41.
World’s News, 18 April 1914, p. 9.
- 42.
Poor Law was the only form of assistance offered to unemployed black workers who refused repatriation. Jenkinson (2009: 195).
- 43.
Oral interview featuring Nora Glasgow, Black Film and Video Workshop in Wales with Butetown Community History Project, 1987. Accessed at Butetown History & Arts Centre.
- 44.
Nottingham Evening Post, 17 June 1919; Dundee Courier, 17 June 1919.
- 45.
Sunday Post, 11 April 1926.
- 46.
Gloucester Citizen, 27 August 1926.
- 47.
Yorkshire Evening Post, 13 June 1919.
- 48.
Interview featured in Struggles for Black Community: Tiger Bay is My Home, directed by Colin Prescod, Channel 4, 1984.
- 49.
Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 19 March 1921.
- 50.
Nottingham Evening Post, 10 June 1932.
- 51.
Sheffield Independent, 19 May 1908.
- 52.
Sunday Post, 11 April 1926.
- 53.
Reported in Nottingham Evening Post, 7 October 1920.
- 54.
Nottingham Evening Post, 7 October 1920.
- 55.
Hull Daily Mail, 16 July 1919.
- 56.
Hull Daily Mail, 28 July 1919.
- 57.
Hull Daily Mail, 13 October 1919.
- 58.
Until recently, it was believed that Archer was the first person of colour in Britain to be elected as a mayor; however, it appears that this achievement actually belongs to Allen Glaisyer Minns, originally from the Bahamas, who was elected as Mayor of the borough of Thetford, Norfolk in 1904 (EmilySarah 2015).
- 59.
The Times, 19 June 1919. Bland (2005) notes that although the 1903 Immorality Suppression Ordinance in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia outlawed sex outside marriage between white women and black men, no such legislation prohibited sex between white men and black women until 1927 and, even then, such transgressions were perceived as a far lesser crime.
- 60.
The Nottingham Evening Post, 3 February 1908.
- 61.
Lincolnshire Standard and Boston Guardian, 21 May 1938.
- 62.
The Graphic, 21 October 1911.
- 63.
Hull Daily Mail, 13 October 1919.
- 64.
The Original Chinatowners. BBC Video Nation http://www.bbc.co.uk/videonation/articles/l/london_theoriginal.shtml [date accessed 10.02.2013].
- 65.
Cited in Parker (2001: 191).
- 66.
Sheffield Independent, 22 August 1931.
- 67.
See memories of Monolulu posted online (Chepstow n.d.). Two of Monolulu’s children—Rupert and Peter ‘Prince’ Mackay—went on to become entertainers, touring as a song, dance and comedy act called the ‘Mckay Brothers’, accompanied by a Sinhalese woman named Romayne. See The Stage, 10 August 1967.
- 68.
Oral interview featuring Nora Glasgow, Black Film and Video Workshop in Wales with Butetown Community History Project, 1987. Accessed at Butetown History & Arts Centre.
- 69.
Interview with George Lee. Accessed at the Cruel Sea Reminiscence Project, Liverpool Record Office. Ref: 387 CSR/4/3.
- 70.
See ‘Strength of Our Mothers’ project, by National Black Arts Alliance, exploring the life experiences of white mothers in mixed relationships in Manchester spanning three generations of African migration 1940–2000; and ‘The Colour of Love A Celebration of Mixed Race Relationships in Nottinghamshire 1940s–1970s’, by St Anns Advice Centre, both funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, 2017.
- 71.
Evening Despatch, 4 March 1914.
- 72.
The Sunday Post, 28 September 1919.
- 73.
24 July 1900.
- 74.
Alfred Lawes, Millennium Memory Bank, 5 November 1998.
References
Abegunrin, O. 2016. Pan African Congress, 1893–1974. In Pan-Africanism in Modern Times: Challenges, Concerns and Constraints, ed. O. Abegunrin and S. Ogbobode Abidde, 17–46. London: Lexington Books.
Alexander, I. 2001. Maid in West Ham: My Formative Years, 1924–48. Hampshire: Ivy Alexander.
Auerbach, S. 2009. Race, Law, and “The Chinese Puzzle” in Imperial Britain. New York: Palgrave.
Back, L. 1996. New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives. Oxon: Routledge.
Banton, M. 1955. The Coloured Quarter: Negro Immigrants in an English City. London: Jonathan Cape.
Belcham, J. 2014. Before the Windrush: Race Relations in 20th Century Liverpool. Liverpool: University of Liverpool.
Bell, G. 2002. The Other Eastenders: Kamal Chunchie and West Ham’s Early Black Community. London: Eastside Community Heritage Publication.
Bland, L. 2005. White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War. Gender & History 17 (1): 29–61.
Bloch, H.D. 1998. Canning Town Voices. London: Chalford.
Bloch, H. 2006. Newham Dockland. Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing. First edition 1995.
Bourne, S. 2001. Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television. London and New York: Continuum.
Bourne, S., and E. Bourne. 2012. Esther Bruce: A Black London Seamstress: Her Story 1912–1994. London: History and Social Action Publications.
Bressey, C. 2002. Forgotten Histories: Three Stories of Black Girls from Barnardo’s Victorian Archive. Women’s History Review 11 (3): 351–374.
———. 2010. Looking for Work: The Black Presence in Britain 1860–1920. Immigrants and Minorities 28: 2–3.
———. 2011. The City of Others: Photographs from the City of London Asylum Archive. 19. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (13): 1–15, 15p.
———. 2013. Geographies of Belonging: White Women and Black History. Women’s History Review 22 (4): 541–558.
Bush, B. 1998. ‘Britain’s Conscience on Africa’: White Women, Race and Imperial Politics in Inter-War Britain. In Gender and Imperialism, ed. Claire Midgley, 200. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Caballero, C., R. Edwards, and S. Puthussery. 2008. Parenting ‘Mixed’ Children: Negotiating Difference and Belonging in Mixed Race, Ethnicity and Faith Families. London: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Christian, M. 2008. The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness. Journal of Historical Sociology 21 (2–3): 213–241.
Coleridge-Taylor, J. 1943. Genius and Musician, S. Coleridge-Taylor 1875–1912: A Memory Sketch on Personal Reminiscences of My Husband. London: John Crowther.
Coleridge-Taylor, A. 1979. The Heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. London: Denis Dobson.
Collins, S. 1957. Coloured Minorities in Britain: Studies in British Race Relations Based on African, West Indian and Asiatic Immigrants. London: Lutterworth Press.
EmilySarah. 2015. Norfolk Stories: Allan Noel Minns. Accessed 30 June 2017. https://norfolkinworldwar1.org/2015/04/28/norfolk-stories-allan-noel-minns/
Evans, N. 1985. Regulating the Reserve Army: Arabs, Blacks and the Local State in Cardiff, 1919–1945. Immigrants & Minorities 4 (2): 68–115.
Fanon, F. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
Flores, W.P. forthcoming. A Biography of Madame Wellington Koo.
Gains, L. 1976. The Impossible Dream. London: Leisure Publications.
Green, J.P. 1985. West Indian Doctors in London: John Alcindor (1873–1924) and James Jackson Brown (1882–1953). Journal of Caribbean History 20 (1): 49–77.
Green, J. 1998. Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain 1901–1914. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass.
———. 2000. Before the Windrush. History Today, 29–35, October.
Holland, D. 2017. The Social Networks of South Asian Migrants in the Sheffield Area During the Early Twentieth Century. Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 236 (1): 243–279.
Hudgins, N. 2010. A Historical Approach to Family Photograpy: Class and Individuality in Manchester and Lille, 1850–1914. Journal of Social History 43 (3): 559–586.
Hyam, R. 1990. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Itoh, K. 2001. The Japanese Community in Pre-War Britain: From Integration to Disintegration. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press.
Jenkinson, J. 2008. Black Sailors on Red Clydeside: Rioting, Reactionary Trade Unionism and Conflicting Notions of ‘Britishness’ Following the First Word War. Twentieth Century British History 19 (1): 29–60.
———. 2009. Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resitance in Imperial Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
———. 2012. ‘All in the Same Uniform?’ The Participation of Black Colonial Residents in the British Armed Forces in the First World War. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40 (2): 207–230.
Jordan, G. 2001. Tiger Bay, Picture Post and the Politics of Representation. In ‘Down the Bay’: Picture Post, Humanist Photography and Images of 1950s Cardiff, ed. G. Jordan, 9–21. Cardiff: Butetown History & Arts Centre.
Killingray, D. 2003. To Do Something for the Race’: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples. In West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, ed. Bill Schwartz, 51–70. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Koo, W.M., and I. Taves. 1975. No Feast Lasts Forever. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company.
Kuehn, J. 2014. A Female Poetics of Empire: From Eliot to Woolf. New York: Routledge.
Lahiri, S. 2000. Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–1930. London and Portland: Frank Cass.
Lai, A., B. Little, and P. Little. 1986. Chinatown Annie: The East End Opium Trade 1920–35: The Story of a Woman Opium Dealer. Oral History 14 (1): 18–30.
Lamont, M., and S. Aksartova. 2002. Ordinary Cosmopolitanisms: Strategies for Bridging Racial Boundaries Among Working Class Men. Theory, Culture. Society 19 (4): 1–25.
Lawless, R. 1995. From Ta’izz to Tyneside: An Arab Community in the North-East of England During the Early Twentieth Century. Devon: University of Exeter Press.
Little, K. 1943. The Psychological Background of White-Coloured Contacts in Britain. The Sociological Review 35 (1–2): 12–28.
———. 1948/1972. Negroes in Britain: A Study of Racial Relations in English Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Livesay, D.A. 2018. Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Luke, C., and A. Luke. 1999. Theorizing Interracial Families and Hybrid Identity: An Australian Perspective. Educational Theory 49 (2): 223–249.
MacKeith, L. 2003. Local Black History: A Beginning in Devon. Exeter: Brightsea Press.
Mahamdallie, H. 2007. Muslim Working Class Struggles. International Socialism, 113. Accessed 30 June 2017. http://isj.org.uk/muslim-working-class-struggles/
Massey, D., and J. Allen, eds. 1984. Geography Matters! A Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Matera, M. 2015. Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. Oakland: University of California Press.
Miller, M., R. Laycock, J. Sadler, and R. Serdiville. 2014. As Good as Any Man: Scotland’s Black Tommy. Stroud: The History Press.
O’Mara, P. 2009. The Autobiography of a Liverpool Slummy. Liverpool: Bluecoat Press. First Published 1933.
Oram, A. 2007. Her Husband Was a Woman! Women’s Gender-Crossing in Popular Modern Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Padfield, D. 1999. Hidden Lives: Stories from the East End by the People of 42 Balaam Street. London: Eastside Community Heritage.
Parker, D. 2001. We Paved the Way’: Exemplary Spaces and Mixed Race in Britain. In The Sum of Our Parts. Mixed Heritage Asian-Americans, ed. T. Williams-Leon and C.L. Nakashima, 185–196. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Pratt, M.L. 1992. Introduction: Criticism in the Contact Zone. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 1–12. London: Routledge.
Ray, C.E. 2009. ‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa. Gender & History 21 (3): 628–646.
Rich, P.B. 1990. Race and Empire in British Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richards, Y. 2004. Conversations with Maida Springer: A Personal History of Labor, Race, and International Relations. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Richmond, A. 1954. Colour Prejudice in Britain. A Study of West Indian Workers in Britain. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Rodner, W.S. 2012. Edwardian London Through Japanese Eyes: The Art and Writings of Yoshio Makino, 1897–1915. The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV.
Rowe, M. 2000. Sex, ‘Race’ and Riot in Liverpool, 1919. Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora 19 (2): 53–70.
Rush, A. 2002. Imperial Identity in Colonial Minds: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples, 1931–50. Twentieth Century British History 13 (4): 356–383.
Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Seed, J. 2006. Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900–40. History Workshop Journal 62: 58–85.
Stoler, A. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Szerszynski, B., and J. Urry. 2002. Cultures of Cosmopolitanism. The Sociological Review 50: 461–481.
Tabili, L. 1996. ‘Women of a Very Low Type’: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Imperial Britain. In Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. L.L. Frader and S.O. Rose. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Thompson, P. 2005. The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society. London: Routledge. First edition 1975.
Twine, F.W. 2006. Visual Ethnography and Racial Theory: Family Photographs as Archives of Interracial Intimacies. Ethnic and Racial Studies 29 (3): 487–511.
Twine, F.W., and A. Steinbugler. 2006. The Gap Between White and Whiteness: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy. Du Bois Review 3 (2): 341–363.
Weeks, J., B. Heaphy, and C. Donovan. 2001. Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments. London: Routledge.
Wong, M.L. 1989. Chinese Liverpudlians: A History of the Chinese Community in Liverpool. Birkenhead: Liver Press.
Wright, R., S. Houston, M. Ellis, S. Holloway, and M. Hudson. 2003. Crossing Racial Lines: Geographies of Mixed-Race Partnering and Multiraciality in the United States. Progress in Human Geography 27 (4): 457–474.
Young, R.J.C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Caballero, C., Aspinall, P.J. (2018). Fitting In and Standing Out: Lived Experiences of Everyday Interraciality. In: Mixed Race Britain in The Twentieth Century. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-33928-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-33928-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-33927-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33928-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)