Stan Firm Inna Inglan: Growing up Black and British in the Thatcher Era

By Karen Sands-O’Connor

In 1978, Margaret Thatcher appeared on Granada’s “World in Action” programme to talk about her proposed policies should she win the election and become prime minister.  Asked about immigration from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan, Thatcher famously commented, “people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.”  Thatcher was making a direct link between immigration and people of colour in Britain—yet by the time she spoke, immigration from the so-called New Commonwealth (code words for “former colonies where Black and Brown people lived”) had already been severely restricted and most primary school-aged children were born in the UK, even if they had “immigrant” parents and older siblings.  In fact, this was true by the late 1960s, as Rose points out in Colour and Citizenship, 61% of the primary school-age children with immigrant parents were born in Britain, and these children would have their future “determined by the policies that are developed in housing, education, and employment, and by the state of race relations” (477).  White children in Thatcher-era Britain could grow up without thinking of themselves as white.  Black British children were always Black first, and often never considered British at all.

This sometimes-casual, often-hostile “othering” of Black British children led to their political involvement and protest during the Thatcher era, and the politics and protest of this generation was different from that of their parents.  Independent schools and publishers had been producing literature and learning materials for young Black British people for a decade, but early material tended to try and connect the second generation with their immigrant past.  Folk tales, history, fiction and poetry about the Caribbean or Africa offered Black British children a proud heritage with which they could connect, but offered few solutions for how to live, survive and thrive as Black people in Britain.  The Thatcher era, with its heavy, racist policing tactics (particularly a reliance on the “sus” law); an education system that moved toward a National Curriculum focusing on “British” values; and the rise of groups such as the racist National Front made Britain a hostile place for Black children to grow up—but this generation demanded their right to identify as Black AND British through their political activities and artistic expression.

Although racism was a problem for Black Britons, including children, throughout the 1970s, the new Black British generation became politicized largely because of the events of the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, where an excess force of thousands of police officers were deployed to patrol the weekend celebration of West Indian food, music and culture.  Farrukh Dhondy, a London teacher, described this politicization in the short story, “Go Play Butterfly” through the character of fourteen-year-old Esther.  At the beginning of the story, Esther “didn’t even know what Carnival was” (105).  As she participates in the parade, she feels a part of thousands of people, Black and white, who had “fallen under the spell of the performance” (117). But all too soon, this spell is broken by the police, who attack Jojo, an older boy on whom Esther has a crush.  “Jojo had been subdued.  He was on his knees with two policeman wrenching both his arms backwards” (125).  Jojo, though trapped, urges Esther to “Take off, butterfly! . . . We free!” (125). Esther is politicized through her connection to both her past (Carnival comes from the tradition on several Caribbean islands) and her present understanding of herself as part of a racist police state.

Similarly, Jamaican author Andrew Salkey’s Danny Jones ends with the Notting Hill Carnival and one of Danny’s friends being picked up by the police and taken to the station.  When fifteen-year-old Danny asks what he was “nicked” for, the officer tells him, “‘We haven’t nicked him, yet.  Just a precaution.  That’s all.  Nothing to start a riot about’” (135).  Danny and his friends know the police by name, and expect to get “nicked” on a regular basis—it is part of their experience in Black Briton.  The fact that some of the police are friendly to Danny does not stop the Black community from being under threat.  When Danny and his friend Joyce see Bentham, a younger cop, joining the Carnival parade, Joyce suggest that the Carnival “is a boss leveller” (131) but Danny reminds her this is only true if every cop participated, “like a real human being” (131).  The notion of humanity is critical; Danny is not suggesting that individual cops are the problem, but the inhuman institutional racism that makes Black British people objects to be erased.

And while younger children might not have the experience of police brutality, books written for them by Black British authors in the Thatcher era indicate the hostility of the British environment.  Grace Nichols’s Leslyn in London shows eight-year-old Leslyn being subject to racist teasing, including being called a “nig-nog” (23).  Lorraine Simeon’s Marcellus depicts a boy with hair in Rastafarian locks who fears that the other children will “laugh at me/ And leave me out at play” (n.p.). Being singled out, left out or erased because of their Blackness is a signifying feature of Black childhood in children’s literature written by adults.

Sometimes this results in writing that is critical of both British society and their parents’ generation. Sixteen-year-old Accabre Huntley, a poet and the daughter of Bogle L’Ouverture Press founders Eric and Jessica Huntley, indicates how her life was affected by institutional racism even when nothing violent happened.  In the title poem of Easter Monday Blues, the Black community is enjoying a fun fair in Clapham Common when “Police surrounded the common” (20).  Even though their presence does not produce violence on either side—“No bottles were hurled/ Nobody was stoned” (20)—the day is ruined and everyone forced to go home.  Despair is also expressed by Eveline Marius, a young poet in Centerprise’s community writers workshops.  She suggests that protest is pointless: “The young generation look on in vain/ Their elders can no longer convince them there’s something to gain” (“Eve’s Poem” As Good as we Make It 44).  Eventually, Marius believes, young people will move from despair to violence when “the riots start again” (44).  Both Huntley and Marius express their frustration with the older generation, whether with the police who threaten them or their ineffectual parents.

But the writing of young Black people in the 1980s show that they understood their part in British history as well, and that they were part of British society whether white people liked it or not.  Marcia, in Speaking Out: Black Girls in Britain, learned Black history from her mother, but she argued that “white people don’t think about the Blacks and what they’ve done, because if it wasn’t for the Blacks England wouldn’t be like it is now.  When Britain had all its colonies it was us who built up the factories got working” (75). Twelve-year-old Brian Collins, whose family comes from Granada, agrees.  Writing in Our City, a collection of poems written for the Greater London Council’s Year of Anti-Racism, Brian claims Britain “For all time” (“Our Country Now” 65) because “we built Britain” (65) after the war.  Young Black British writers of the Thatcher Era were born British—and they demanded that Britain recognize them as their own.

Black British childhood in the Thatcher era was not totally divorced from white British childhood—Rubik’s cube, Top of the Pops, Pac Man and Angel Delight were part of most British childhoods in the 1980s.  But Black British children were never allowed to be “just British”—and this means that their childhood was also about fighting for their right to be included in the country where they were born.  British literature, written both by and for Black British children in this time period, helped readers “stan firm inna inglan” then, and produced the current generation of writers—Alex Wheatle, Malorie Blackman, Patrice Lawrence, Catherine Johnson, among others—who are helping today’s Black British readers do the same.

Cited Literature

Accabre Huntley. Easter Monday Blues. London: Bogle L’Ouverture, 1983.
Andrew Salkey. Danny Jones. London: Bogle L’Ouverture, 1980.
Brian Collins. “Our Country Now,” in Our City: A Collection of Poems by London School Students. Ed. Chris Searle. London: Young World, 1984.
Eveline Marius. “Eve’s Poem,” in As Good as We Make It: Writing by Centerprise Young Writers. London: Centerprise, 1982.
Farrukh Dhondy. Come to Mecca. London: Cascades, 1993 (1978).
Grace Nichols. Leslyn in London. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984.
Lorraine Simeon. Marcellus. 1984. London: Writers and Readers, 1995.
Osler, Audrey (ed). Speaking Out: Black Girls in Britain. London: Virago Upstarts, 1989.

References

Eliot Joseph Benn Rose. Colour and Citizenship: A Report on Race Relations. London: IRR and OUP, 1969.
Karen Sands-O’Connor. “Punk Primers and Reggae Readers: Music and Politics in British Children’s Literature,” in Global Studies of Childhood 8.3, 2018, 201-212.

About the Author

Karen Sands-O’Connor is British Academy Global Professor of Children’s Literature at Newcastle University, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, specialising in the history of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic children’s literature and publishing. She was previously a Leverhulme Visiting Professor (2015-2016) at Newcastle, and works with Seven Stories Centre for Children’s Books as well as the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals on issues of diversity and inclusion in children’s literature.

Cite this article as: Karen Sands-O’Connor, “Stan Firm Inna Inglan: Growing up Black and British in the Thatcher Era,” in Changing Childhoods, June 11, 2020, https://changingchildhoods.com/?p=2121.