This Day In British History (Notting Hill Race Riots)

August 30, 1958—Post-imperial Britons, used to turning on “The Beeb” (that’s the BBC for us Yanks) and watching civil-rights unrest in the South in the United States, were shocked at the outbreak of their counterpart to “The American Dilemma,” in the Notting Hill riots.

The disturbances, some of the worst in British history, lasted a week, spreading to the nearby Notting Dale section of the city, with whites facing off against West Indian blacks who had settled in the neighborhood.

Earlier this year, I came across a Financial Times article that highlighted Notting Hill's current desirability as a London residence. That didn't surprise me—the 1999 Julia Roberts-Hugh Grant film Notting Hill, with its depiction of a haven for mild eccentrics and media-weary American movie princesses like Roberts, was practically a brochure for this part of West London. Had I worked for the local real estate association, I’d have ordered the DVD in bulk and sent it out all over the world (even if I did find it a lame comedown from screenwriter Richard Curtis’ prior triumph with Grant, Four Weddings and a Funeral).

It was a shock, then, to read in the article that a half century ago, Notting Hill was far from the trendy address that Grant’s typically befuddled but charming used-book store dealer—let alone Elle Macpherson, Stella McCartney, or Conservative candidate for Prime Minister David Camerson--would favor. What had happened a half century ago to bring about these terrible, American-style disturbances? How had the neighborhood become so fashionable in the years since?

Some months ago, watching the Tony Richardson film Look Back in Anger, I was struck by one of the scenes that had been added in the adaptation from John Osborne’s “Angry Young Man” play. Perhaps in an attempt to “open up” the stagebound plot, perhaps in an attempt to make its anti-hero more sympathetic to an American audience, Jimmy Porter (played by Richard Burton) goes to bat—ineffectually—for a Pakistani stall owner being hassled by a London cop.

Americans in 1959 might have felt a bit more sympathetic to the frustrated misogynist after seeing that. British filmgoers, however, would have been better clued into the import of the scene—an acknowledgement of the fact that the safe world of God and Country was yielding to a more desperate atmosphere. The film was released one year after the Notting Hill riots brought that realization to the fore.

London was not, of course, always an island of serenity. Dickens fans know as much, particularly if they’ve read his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge, his tale of the Gordon anti-Catholic riots of 1780.

You might argue that race is a far different matter than religion. Religious as much as racial prejudice, however, involves transforming one group into “the other.” In contrast to the United States, Great Britain, other parts of Europe, had been racially and ethnically homogeneous through the 19th and much of the 20th century.

Despite the labor discontent that convulsed the city and the country, a common Anglo heritage provided common ground. That would change early in the postwar era, for reasons I’ll explain shortly.

The incident that set off all of this turmoil was, as these things usually are, trivial: an argument between a husband and wife at Latimer Road Tube Station, taking place on the August bank holiday for Britain. What fanned the flames of the unrest was the identity of the couple: a Swedish woman, Majbritt Morrison, and her Jamaican husband, Ray.

There already had been some tension between the neighborhood and Ray, who was involved in pimping and had had his windows smashed recently. The whites began to come to Majbritt’s defense, but she didn’t want their support. At this point, the crowd sentiment shifted decisively the other way, as she and her husband were heckled home.

The next day—Saturday the 30th—Majbritt Morrison was not only enduring insults about her involvement in a biracial relationship but also stones, glass, and even an iron bar thrown at her back. Before long, Ray’s friends became involved. Whites were forming mobs, sometimes in the hundreds, rampaging in the streets, in an orgy of beatings, glass-breaking, and fights with a suddenly overwhelmed police force. Most blacks stayed indoors during the melee, but some began to fight back with the whites.

Guess where the height of the fighting was at this point? Totobags Café, in Blenheim Crescent – today, the site of the travel bookshop where Notting Hill was filmed.

How did this all come about? Ray Morrison typified shifting racial and ethnic patterns that were unnerving Britain at this time. Labor shortages at the end of World War II led the British government to encourage immigration—first from the Continent, then, when that proved insufficient, from what were then their West Indies possessions.

The latter proved all too amenable to the advertising pitches. With the West Indies experiencing overpopulation and unemployment, more and more people from the islands—heavily young and male at first—began to stream into the U.K—125,000 strong between 1951 and 1958.

West Indians settled next to working-class whites in Notting Hill, producing culture shock on both sides. Terrified of displacement, whites reacted with typical measures born of suspicion:

· “Colour bars” that refused to serve blacks;
· “Shebeens” that spring up – illegally—to serve West Indians; and
· Housing discrimination, including signs blatantly proclaiming, “No Coloureds.”

In a BBC report broadcast earlier this week, Velma Davis, who had come to the neighborhood as a young woman from her native Trinidad only the year before, remembered the storefront signs that greeted her and others when she came: "no blacks, no Irish, no dogs, no children."

The shock on the part of West Indians was profound. Many had been educated by British colonial administrators to believe in Great Britain as the “Mother Country.” What they found obviously didn’t match these colorblind ideals. The tense atmosphere of the time was recreated in Colin MacInnes’ novel Absolute Beginners, transformed into a 1986 David Bowie film.

The riots forced a major reevaluation of British racial policy, just as protest in the U.S. did the same thing there. Britain passed its Race Relations Act in 1965 banning racial discrimination, one year after America had done so in the Civil Rights Act.

Half a century on, Notting Hill has been transformed into the home of bankers, media types and celebrities who are enchanted by the profusion of Victorian town houses. A year after the riots, blacks created the Notting Hill Carnival, now the world’s second-biggest after the one in Rio de Janeiro.

Periodically, however, disturbances have still occurred at these events, demonstrating that the insidious aftereffects of racial and class distinctions remain as ineradicable here as they are in the U.S.—or, indeed, I would argue, anywhere in the world where people come together in mass numbers to form multicultural societies.