Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 13th June 1919
It began in the January in Glasgow. Violence erupted between Black and white sailors waiting in a yard on James Watt Street, hoping to be hired. As the Black sailors fled, a mob of hundreds pursued them, armed with guns and blades. The police took thirty of the Black sailors into 'protective custody' and then charged them with riot; no white men were arrested. The two white sailors who were hurt were taken to hospital, while Tom Johnson, a Black man who had been stabbed, was taken straight to court.
Over the next few months violence was perpetrated in cities across the UK, including in London, Liverpool, and Hull. On 6th June 1919, a Black man was attacked in Newport, South Wales, and the attack escalated as a white mob descended on anybody perceived to be non-white. Businesses and lodging houses were burned and eight houses were wrecked. Furniture belonging to two of the households was burned in the street. The day before, in Liverpool, a Bermudan sailor named Charles Wootton was chased by a white mob until he jumped, fell, or was pushed into the Mersey. His white attackers threw stones at him until he sank beneath the water. He was twenty-four years old. It is right and proper to call his murder what it was - a British lynching.
Charles Wootton (c.1895-1919)
The general position of most historians has been that the violence that broke out across the country in 1919 was predominantly the result of a lack of jobs. When soldiers were demobbed after serving in the First World War, so the argument goes, they returned to a nation that then experienced a surplus of labour and en masse came to believe that work was being 'stolen' by men from ethnic minorities. Certainly, the shortage of work was most acute in the dockyards and these areas were where rioting took place, but they were also the areas where the vast majority of Black and other ethnic minority people lived. Racism takes root only where it is allowed to flourish and then, as now, the media encouraged anti-Black feeling among the populace. Headlines in newspapers went far beyond the notion of job-stealing and entered the home, stoking fear about miscegenation.
Illustrated Police News, 27th June 1918
Like many dockyard areas of the UK, Tiger Bay in Cardiff had a long history as a diverse neighbourhood; as far back as the 17th century migrants were arriving from places such as Cape Verde. Until the publication of the 1921 census, the best population data available for the period is from 1911, which is not ideal as it does not take into account the numbers of ethnic minority servicemen who arrived in Britain after the war. Nevertheless, a glance at the residents of Bute Street in that year show just how many different nationalities lived side by side at the beginning of the 20th century.
Greek, Turkish, and Cypriot sailors resided at number 24, with nine more Turks at a boarding-house next-door. At number 25 there was a beer-house, operated by Antonio Radmilovic with his wife and sister, all born in Australia, but with surnames suggestive of roots elsewhere. Further along the street were two Greek tobacconists, a Greek barber, and a Greek grocer. The fruiterer at number 35, Mr Lambadares, came from Turkey, while further along, Benjamin Jemmet from Barbados ran a lincensed refreshment shop with his Welsh wife, Alice. An Egyptian lodging-house-keeper lived opposite a family of Russians who had an outfitters. Three Arabic ships' firemen lived together at a lodging house at number 70, which was run by a Greek man and his Bristol-born wife. There was a Danish hotelier, an Italian optician (with a Scottish wife), and a Finnish boarding-house keeper (with an Irish wife). That particular boarding-house was home to two seamen from Sweden and Serbia. We can also find a French typist, a family of Spaniards, a house full of Maltese sailors, and a South African restaurant-owner whose children were all born in Spain. Even the sixteen-year-old servant girl at the restaurant was from Belfast. There are Poles, Latvians, Japanese, a sailor from San Francisco and another one from simply 'Africa', and at number 167 a laundry business run by Sin Yan Chong, who was born in Hong Kong.
By this point, we have made it not quite halfway down the street. And this is only one street in Tiger Bay. The majority of foreign-born newcomers to the city were men and, naturally, those who stayed married local women and started families. At the Tiger Bay Heritage and Culture Exchange there are a number of photographs from the 20th century which show many mixed race couples and families. Despite this, racism proliferated and in the June of 1919 groups of frustrated white men took the opportunity to lash out and express their resentment towards the city's communities of colour.
On 11th June, a West Indian man named Charles Emmanuel was attacked by a dock labourer in Barry. Emmanuel drew his knife and stabbed his assailant, Frederick Longman, and served five years in prison as a result. A menacing crowd gathered at the scene and broke into a lodging house where a Black shipwright lived. Forced to flee, the man was chased and attacked by the mob. This coincided with three days of rioting in Cardiff, which littered Bute Street with broken glass and led to families fleeing onto roofs as their houses were broken into and looted. Many families spent those three nights arming themselves and trying to stay hidden. The council were faced with the equivalent of more than £130,000 worth of damage in today's money. At the infirmary on Newport Road, a twenty-one year old man named Mohammed Abdullah died of head injuries; some would later claim that he had been hit by a police officer, after a white mob broke into the lodging house where he lived. This event is recounted on twitter by @1919raceriots and there is also a petition to have a memorial plaque erected.
To finish, I would like to share an opinion piece written in 1918 by M Remback, Secretary of the Jewish Social Democratic Association.
"The cry is the old one, the aliens are snatching up the jobs of Englishmen who have gone to the Front. They are buying up all the houses in districts free from air raids, etc., etc.
The absurdity and mendacity of the job-snatching cry is obvious, and is on a par with the other cries which the gutter press has raised.
To talk now of job-stealing and job-snatching is sheer fraud, and only proves what these reptiles are capable of."
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