The first of the so-called race riots in British ports took place on Tyneside. Arab and Somali seamen are said to have settled in South Shields in the 1860s, and there were some West African and West Indian seamen in North Shields before the First World War. The war increased the area’s black population fourfold.4 In February 1919 some Arab seamen, all British subjects, having just paid £2 each to clear their union books, which had to be up to date before they could ship out, were then refused work. An official of the stewards’ and cooks’ union, J.B.Fye, incited a crowd of foreign white seamen against them; he was later convicted of using language likely to cause a breach of the peace. Fye hit one of the Arabs, who hit him back. The crowd chased the Arabs to Holborn, the district of South Shields where they lived. Here they were joined by some compatriots armed with revolvers, who fired warning shots over the heads of the at- tackers. The Arabs then turned the tables by chasing the crowd back to the shipping office, wrecking it pretty thoroughly, and beating up Fye and another union official. Army and navy patrols were called in and 12 Arabs were arrested. At Durham assizes, where the judge expressed some sympathy for them, three were acquitted, 12 were sentenced to three months’, and two to one month’s, hard labour.
That was not however the feeling in south Wales, which was experiencing at the same time ‘one of the most vicious outbreaks of racial violence that has yet occurred in Britain’. During a week of anti-black rioting, three men were killed and dozens injured, and the damage caused to property cost Cardiff council over £3,000 to repair. The rioting ‘left a scar on the race relations of the city which took more than a generation to heal’.18The trouble began in Newport. On 6 June 1919 a crowd collected when a black man was alleged to have made an offensive remark to a white woman. One account said he put his arm round her and was attacked by a soldier. There was a fight in which many people were hurt, crowds started smashing the windows of black people’s homes, and the occupants defended themselves with pokers and staves and fired warning shots over their assailants’ heads. Two houses in George Street were wrecked and ransacked by a mob of several thousands that smashed every window, tore out the window-frames, threw bedding and furniture, including a ‘valuable piano’, into a nearby railway siding, and set fire to them. In Dolphin Street, Chinese laundries and a Greek-owned lodging house were wrecked, as were black people’s houses in Ruperra Street and a restaurant in Commercial Road owned by a black man named Delgrada. Twenty black and two white men were arrested. Plain-clothes and mounted police were drafted into the town, but it took a baton charge to disperse crowds making fresh attacks on George Street boarding-houses. ‘We are all one in Newport and mean to clear these niggers out’,one rioter told a reporter.The scene in Newport, said the South Wales Argus, looked like the aftermath of an air raid: ‘Windows are smashed, furniture in the front rooms has been wrecked, blood-stains are visible.’
On 11 June, at Cadoxton near Barry, a 30-year-old demobilized white soldier named Frederick Henry Longman, a dock labourer by trade, accosted a 45-year-old seaman from the French West Indies named Charles Emanuel with the words ‘Why don’t you go into your own street?’ then punched him on the forehead. Three other white men joined in, one of whom began hitting Emanuel on the back with a poker. Emanuel took out a clasp-knife and stabbed Longman, killing him instantly. Emanuel was chased by a large crowd and arrested with the knife still in his hand; he was later found guilty of manslaughter and sent to prison for five years. After his arrest crowds gathered outside the police station, smashed the windows of black people’s homes, and ‘paraded the streets of Cadoxton looking for coloured men’ until the early hours of the morning. Next day, though extra police had been drafted in, there were attempts to wreck black people’s homes.
Cardiff ’s black population had increased from about 700 on the eve of the war to about 3,000 in April 1919. About 1,200 of these were unemployed seamen. There were at least as many demobilized white soldiers in the city, most of them unskilled. On 11 June a brake containing black men and their white wives, returning from an excursion, attracted a large and hostile crowd. Soon a crowd of whites and a crowd of blacks were lined up on opposite sides of Canal Parade bridge. A reporter saw ‘a howling mob of young fellows and girls facing the blacks at about 100 yards distance’. With shouts of ‘Come on and set about them!’ the whites made a rush from the north side throwing stones, whereupon revolver shots came from the black crowd and a white soldier was wounded in the thigh. The whites pressed forward in an attempt to reach Bute Town, the narrow cluster of streets between the Glamorganshire Canal and the Taff Vale Railway where a large number of Cardiff ’s black citizens had their homes, but police managed to stop most of them.The chief constable’s report, issued a month later, blamed whites for the original incident. ‘If the crowd had overpowered the police and got through’, he wrote, ‘the result would have been disastrous, as the black population would probably have fought with desperation and inflicted great loss of life.’Some attackers did get into Bute Street, where they smashed the doors and windows of Arab-owned lodging-houses with sticks – one shop front was ‘smashed to matchwood’ – and where a woman was arrested for flourishing a razor and ‘vowing vengeance on “niggers”’. A house in Homfray Street was set on fire and gutted, and in Caroline Street a white man died after his throat was cut – by a black man, it was alleged, though no eyewitness ever came forward, no black man was found in the vicinity, and no one was ever charged with the crime. A house owned by black people at the corner of Morgan Street and Adam Street was ransacked. Police broke into a house in Hope Street and dragged out a black man with blood streaming from his head: ‘He was greeted by a howl from the crowd, and several kicks and punches were aimed at him.’ A second soon appeared, ‘in much the same condition as his compatriot’. Last to be brought out was ‘a white girl, whose mouth was bleeding’. A black man called Norman Roberts was admitted to hospital with a severe knife wound in the abdomen. The disturbances went on until around midnight.
This was only the prelude to a much more determined and organized attack on Cardiff’s black community over the next few days. The whole of the city’s police force was concentrated in the cordoned-off area that The Times called ‘nigger town’; a company of the Welsh Regiment was secretly drafted into Cardiff and held in readiness; and the stipendiary magistrate was preparing to read the Riot Act. Contemporary reports make it clear that ‘Colonial soldiers’ (i.e. Australians) armed with rifles placed themselves at the head of the lynch mobs. ‘The methods adopted by the soldiers’, said one report, ‘were those of active service, and the men, after firing from the prone position upon the blacks, crawled back to safety.’ Some of these riflemen were in khaki or blue uniforms, others in mufti with medal ribbons. The Western Mail gave a vivid account of an attack on the former Princess Royal hotel in Millicent Street:Several Colonial soldiers present constituted themselves the ringleaders of the besieging party, which was largely made up of discharged soldiers . . .The door of the house was attacked and it was quickly burst in. Men crowded into the narrow hall and began to ascend the stairs . . .A revolver shot rang out, and with it the exclamation, ‘My God, I am hit!’ Five other shots quickly followed.The attackers dropped flat on their faces, crawling back and telling those behind to do the same. They held up a table as a shield, and the defenders backed to the wall of the room. ‘Once at close quarters, each of the surviving attackers took his man, and soon desperate struggles were in progress around the room.’ Meanwhile ‘others of the raiding party were . . . busily engaged in ransacking the premises. Kit-bags containing clothing were hastily abstracted, and there were willing “receivers” outside.’ After it had been looted the house was set on fire. It was in Millicent Street that 40-year-old John Donovan, wearing his Mons ribbon, was shot through the heart by A cornered Arab. Ibrahim Ismaa’il, a Somali seaman and poet who was living in Cardiff at this time, refers to the Millicent Street fighting in his remarkable autobiography, completed in 1928 and recently discovered by Dr Richard Pankhurst. A Warsangeli, from the eastern part of what was then the British Somaliland protectorate, Ismaa’il was between 18 and 23 years old and worked as a ship’s fireman. He and some companions had only just come to Cardiff:Shortly after our arrival the black people in Cardiff were at- tacked by crowds of white people .
A Warsangeli named ‘Abdi Langara had a boarding house in Millicent Street, right in the European part of the town. It is there that I used to have my dinner every day. ‘Abdi acted as a sort of agent for the Warsangeli, who left their money with him when they went to sea, and also had their letters sent to his place. As soon as the fight started, all the Warsangeli who were in Cardiff went to Millicent Street to defend ‘Abdi’s house in case it was attacked. But to me and to my best friend – who has since died in Mecca – they said: ‘You are too young to come, and you have never faced difficulties of this kind.’ We insisted, for we could not bear to stay away when our brothers were in danger of being killed, but our plea was of no avail . . .So we went to the Somali boarding house of Haadzi ‘Aali and there we waited, ready for an attack, as we expected that a crowd of white people might break in at any moment.In Millicent Street, the fight started at about 7:30 p.m. and lasted a fairly long time. Seven or eight Warsangeli defended the house and most of them got badly wounded. Some of the white people also received wounds. In the end, the whites took possession of the first floor, soaked it with paraffin oil and set it alight. The Somalis managed to keep up the fight until the police arrived. One of them was left for dead in the front room and was later carried to the hospital where he recovered; some escaped through a neighbouring house and came to tell us the story of what had happened, the others gave themselves up to the police, and we did not see them for a long time.
Crowds led by soldiers were surging from street to street wherever the cry of ‘blacks’ went up. One victim had a crowd of about 1,000 after him. The newspaper accounts are eloquent: ‘Always “the black man” was their quarry, and whenever one was rooted out by the police . . . the mob rushed upon him, and he got away with difficulty’ – amid cries of ‘Kill him!’ A black man spotted near the Wharf bridge was first insulted and then attacked by three whites, one of whom blew a whistle. This seemed to be an expected signal, because hundreds of persons rushed up from the neighbouring streets, including many women and girls, who had sticks and stones, and flung them at the unfortunate coloured man as they chased him along the street.Two men dragged out of their Bute Street house ‘fought desperately with frying pans and pokers’. A Somali priest, Hadji Mahomet, was prepared to face the mob, but his white wife pleaded with him to hide so he clambered up a drainpipe, hid on the roof, ‘and with true Eastern stoicism watched his residence being reduced to a skeleton’. A Malayan boarding-house in Bute Terrace was wrecked and the occupants, fleeing to the roof, were pelted with stones. In Homfray Street an Arab named Ali Abdul fired a revolver at his assailants; when he was arrested there were shouts of ‘Now we’ve got him!’ and ‘Lynch him!’ (Charged later with attempted murder, he ‘had some difficulty in walking into court owing to an injured leg, and he also bore evidence on his forehead of having received injuries’.) An Arab ‘caught and maltreated’ in Tredegar Street lay unconscious for a long time.One whom the lynch mob did succeed in killing, a young Arab named Mahommed Abdullah, died in hospital of a fractured skull after being savagely beaten in an attack on an Arab restaurant and boarding-house, used chiefly by Somalis, at 264 Bute Street. The mob charged down the street, threw stones into the building from both sides, and smashed the windows. Shots were fired from up- stairs. The mob surged in, and police arrived soon afterwards.
The inquest on Abdullah could not decide whether he had been hit on the head with a chair leg or a police truncheon. Hundreds of black people attended his funeral. Murder charges against six white men were dropped for lack of evidence. Some former members of the British West Indies Regiment were daring enough to go about the streets with their uniforms on, which afforded them some protection. But not much. One black ex-serviceman, described in a local paper as ‘a well-set-up young fellow’, ‘proved to be a brave man, and in perfect English appealed to the crowd not to molest him, but this did not prevent him receiving several blows’ before police escorted him away. For the most part however, in the words of the Western Mail, ‘the efforts of the police were confined to keeping the white men from damaging property’. Property being more important than people, the community under siege had two choices. They could leave the city; or they could turn their ghetto into a fortress. A few did leave, on the afternoon of 13 June: a sad little procession of seamen with kit-bags on their backs and sticks in their hands, escorted by police and followed by jeering crowds. The majority chose to stay and, if need be, fight.As crowds gathered again that evening in St Mary Street, Custom House Street, The Hayes, and the top end of Bute Road, the black citizens of Loudoun Square, Maria Street, Sophia Street, and Angelina Street ‘established quietly determined means of self- protection’. They posted sentries, loaded their guns, and left no one in doubt of their mood, as a South Wales News reporter who got through the police cordon testified:The coloured men, while calm and collected, were well pre- pared for any attack, and had the mob from the city broken through the police cordon there would have been bloodshed on a big scale, and the attacking force would have suffered heavily . . . Hundreds of negroes were collected, but these were very peaceful, and were amicably discussing the situation among themselves. Nevertheless, they were in a determined mood, and ready to defend ‘our quarter of the city’ at all costs. They had posted sentries at each entrance to give notice of the approach of any hostile crowd . . . An old resident of Loudoun- square told me that he and his wife had watched the negroes loading revolvers. They made no secret of it . . . As my informant put it, ‘There is enough arms and ammunition among them to stock an arsenal.’ Long-term black residents said: ‘It will be hell let loose . . .if the mob comes into our streets . . . If we are unprotected from hooligan rioters who can blame us for trying to protect ourselves?’ An outstanding leader of Cardiff ’s black community had emerged in the shape of Dr Rufus Leicester Fennell. A West Indian medically trained in the United States, he had survived 314 days of trench warfare and had been wounded three times while serving in Mesopotamia, where he had attended thousands of British troops. Lacking British medical qualifications, he had been practising as a dentist in Pontypridd. When the rioting started in Cardiff he went there.
Neil Evans, interviewing old people in Cardiff a few years ago, found that Fennell was remembered for his courage and intelligence: ‘During the riots he was said to have walked boldly into the centre of the town, despite warnings of the possible dire consequences of this action.’29 Aged 31, about six feet tall, well dressed and highly articulate, Fennell acted as the community’s spokesman in negotiations with the authorities; pressed the claims of those who wanted to be repatriated; told reporters ‘that it is absolutely necessary to grip the evil, and not to play with it’; and told one of several protest meetings held at the docks by West Indians, Somalis, Arabs, Egyptians, and ‘Portuguese subjects’ that it was their duty to stay within the law, but ‘if they did not protect their homes after remaining within the law they would be cowards, not men’.
By mid-September 600 black men had been repatriated. But not everyone involved wanted to be, and part of Cardiff ’s black population indignantly rejected the offer. What the chief constable, in a confidential report to Scotland Yard, called the ‘militant section’ insisted on their right as British subjects to get fair treatment and stay in the United Kingdom. And some of the militants, the chief constable added, ‘expressed their willingness to be repatriated but openly stated that it would only be for the object of creating racial feeling against members of the white race domiciled in their country’.32Two hundred of those who did want to be repatriated – Egyptians, Somalis, and Arabs – were sent to Plymouth by train, and Fennell went with them. It may have been Fennell who told the weekly paper John Bull how shamefully they were treated. They were penniless, but the tiny gratuity promised them was never paid. They were hungry, but were given nothing to eat on the journey. And when they went on board ship the staff were all off duty, the captain was asleep, and there was no food at all for them. ‘These coloured Britons had all done first-class war work’, commented John Bull, ‘yet they were treated worse than repatriated enemy aliens.’Soon afterwards Fennell was in London, complaining to MPs and the Home Office about the flaws in the repatriation process.
Some had been sent home before they were paid compensation for losses suffered in the riots; others, before receiving the back pay due to them. Fennell accused the Cardiff police of prejudice against black people and asked that police cease to supervise the departures. But the officials were unsympathetic. Soon after leaving the Home Office Fennell found himself under arrest on a trumped-up fraud charge. After being kept in custody in London for a while he came up in court in Cardiff on 22 July, accused of obtaining £2 by false pretences from Ahmed Ben Ahmed Demary, a boarding-house master. Fennell’s solicitor told the court that there was ‘a great deal at the back of the case’ and that ‘certain men were anxious to keep the accused in prison because of the way he had watched the interests of the coloured men’. The magistrate dismissed the charge. London was not spared sporadic outbreaks of anti-black – and anti-Chinese – rioting. On 16 April there was a ‘serious riot’ in Cable Street, Stepney. Shots were fired, a violent street fight took place, and several black seamen were injured.
On 29 May a seaman named William Samuel, described by a Colonial Office civil servant as ‘a burly negro, with an aggressive manner’,wrote from the Sailors’Home in St Anne Street, Limehouse, to the colonial secretary, complaining of attacks on black men in the London streets: ‘a sargeant of police said to us last night, why; We want you niggers out of our country this is a white man’s country and not yours.’ That same evening large crowds gathered outside the Strangers’ Home in West India Dock Road, cat-calling and insulting every black person who appeared and trying to force their way in. There were similar scenes outside lodging-houses used by black seamen. Outside the St Anne Street sailors’ hostel 29-year-old John Martin, a Jamaican on four weeks’ leave from the Royal Navy, was seized by the head from behind, knocked down by men armed with sticks, and kicked in the mouth. Alleged to have fired a revolver towards the crowd, Martin was arrested with injuries to head and face, and charged with wounding a ship’s fireman. He was found not guilty.
On 16 June a coffee-shop in Cable Street used by black people was stormed by a crowd that seized one of the customers and beat him. Next day there were disturbances in Poplar, where a gang attacked a house occupied by a Chinese family, cleared out the furniture, stacked it in the middle of the street, and set fire to it, causing a ‘huge blaze’ that gutted the house.40During that hot summer of 1919 black people in Britain were not only being attacked physically, in their homes and in the streets. They were attacked also with the pen by those who excused the aggressors by blaming their victims. The Manchester Guardian, for instance, blamed black people for daring to defend themselves against lynch mobs: ‘The quiet, apparently inoffensive, nigger becomes a demon when armed with revolver or razor.’ Above all, black men were blamed, as that Liverpool policeman had blamed them, for associating with white women. This explanation for the riots was advanced by a former British colonial administrator, Sir Ralph Williams, who had served in Bechuanaland and Barbados and had been governor of the Windward Islands in 1906–9. His recreation was ‘ceaseless travelling to far-away countries’, and when the riots reached their climax he wrote a letter to The Times summing up what he had learnt on his travels:To almost every white man and woman who has lived a life among coloured races, intimate association between black or coloured men and white women is a thing of horror . . . It is an instinctive certainty that sexual relations between white women and coloured men revolt our very nature . . . What blame . . . to those white men who, seeing these conditions and loathing them, resort to violence? . . .We cannot forcibly repatriate British subjects of good character, but we can take such steps as will prevent the employment of an unusually large number of men of colour in our great shipping centres.
- Quoted from Staying Power, History of Black People in Britain, by Peter Fryer
