Read Family Britain, 1951-1957 for Free Online

was taken from him by Mr George Varnon, chairman of the shop stewards committee. This seemed to incense many in the crowd who demanded a hearing from Mr Nester.
    When Mr Varnon said he abided by the decision of the workpeople, somebody in the crowd said ‘You’ve got to!’
    Mr Varnon was shouted down when he tried to tell the workers again of the need for continued support of the strike. There were cries of ‘We’ve heard all he’s got to say’, ‘We want to get back to work’, ‘Put the resolution and let’s vote on it’.
    As the shop stewards convener, Mr R. Etheridge, was putting the motion to continue to strike before the meeting there were cries of: ‘You are trying to mislead us’.
    Eventually, those in the crowd of more than 6,000 who were in favour of returning to work were asked to move to the right, those against to move to the left. A ‘big majority’ moved rightwards. There were two almost immediate outcomes to this humiliating defeat for the more militant shop stewards: the ultra-astute Etheridge privately decided never to call another mass meeting, and the sacked Pegg was soon replaced as CP branch secretary by a young toolroom worker, Derek Robinson, the future ‘Red Robbo’ of tabloid demonisation.8
    Elsewhere in Birmingham, at about the time of the Longbridge dispute, a young researcher called Michael Banton took a walk along Sparkbrook Road, looking at the cards in newspaper-shop windows. He counted more cards from people advertising rooms that stipulated ‘No Irish’ than ‘No Coloured’. But his main research was in Stepney, where during the summer he sent out questionnaires to 40 employers in the clothing and building industries in order to gauge their attitude to the employment of black immigrants. He found that whereas the largely Jewish-run clothing industry saw ‘the coloured man at little disadvantage’, it was different among builders and contractors, where ‘there was a considerably greater resistance to the idea of engaging coloured workers’, particularly on the part of small firms. ‘You have to consider how other people would feel, especially the other employees,’ replied one. ‘There’s not enough work for English people and many of the coloured people only got here by smuggling themselves away.’ Overall, Banton reckoned that ‘from the small numbers employed there is probably a fair amount of discrimination in employment in this trade’, and that ‘in a time of unemployment it would increase’.
    Housing was even more susceptible to prejudice. ‘I have been carrying out a small experiment with the help of my friend O.,’ the left-wing writer Mervyn Jones related in August: ‘We copied down the addresses of ten rooms advertised as “a let” outside a Notting Hill Gate newsagent’s shop. O. went round and asked for rooms; I went to the same addresses twenty minutes later. His score: rooms available at two places, all rooms gone at eight. My score: rooms available at seven, a share offered at another, all rooms gone at two. An odd result; but whereas I belong to what E.M. Forster called the pink-grey race, O. comes from Nigeria.’ In most parts of the country, of course, a black person was still a considerable rarity. The experience of Ian Jack, growing up near Bolton and six in 1951, was probably typical. ‘The first black person I ever saw was on the Piccadilly line, somewhere near Hammersmith,’ he remembered. ‘We’d come to stay with my granny and to see the Festival of Britain. A black man, who wore a smart suit, sat across the train’s aisle and smiled at me. I think my father encouraged me to smile back. Perhaps I had been staring.’9
    The kindness of strangers was probably more common between whites. In June, barely a month after he had started at RADA (‘O bliss!’), a young aspiring actor from Leicester, Joe Orton, was taken to the bosom of another new, more prosperous student, Kenneth Halliwell. ‘Move into Ken’s flat,’ recorded