Issue 95 / Dec18/Jan19

Varaidzo illustrates some of the people and stories from Liverpool’s
historic black community that she feels should not just be celebrated
during Black History Month, but always.
Varaidzo is a best-selling writer, editor, podcaster and artist from London. Her essay was featured in the award-winning anthology
The Good Immigrant in 2016, and her words have appeared in the New Statesman, Complex, Dazed and Gal-Dem, for which
she previously served as Arts and Culture Editor. Last year, her mum’s move to Liverpool sparked Varaidzo’s curiosity in our city’s
history. Upon learning that Liverpool was likely home to the oldest black community in Europe, she became interested in researching
the city’s historical black figures. As part of her Instagram project over the duration of this year’s Black History Month – where she illustrated
and profiled the lives and attainments of pre-Windrush black people from across the UK – she profiled five black people who either lived or
were born in Liverpool.
Black History Month has now ended, but our attempts as a city to educate ourselves about our past should be never stop. Liverpool’s
involvement in the slave trade is embedded into the architecture around us, built on the back of the prosperity of those times – the opulence of
St. George’s Hall and Liverpool Town Hall obscures an unacknowledged human cost. Even today, many of our street names honouring slave
traders and anti-abolitionists remain unchanged, with Penny Lane and Rodney Street being just two of the most prominent. This history of
racism has meant that the lives and successes of Liverpool’s black people have often been overlooked and undervalued.
By drawing these figures out of obscurity in the format of the times, Varaidzo offers Bido Lito! readers an education of our city’s past that
should be part of an essential history curriculum. She is now extending her research into the black people of Liverpool’s past and present for
her podcast series Search History, with an episode dedicated to Liverpool scheduled for the early months of next year.
JOHN ARCHER
John Archer was born in Liverpool in 1863 to a father from
Barbados and a mother from Ireland. In his early adulthood he
worked in the Merchant Navy, travelling the world, and ended
up marrying a black Canadian woman named Bertha. Together,
they settled in Battersea at the turn of the century, and John is
said to have worked as a professional singer. He also studied as
a medical student for a time, but abandoned the practice.
He was very involved in radical and early pan-Africanist politics
of the time and, in 1906, John was elected as a councillor to
Battersea borough council as a progressive candidate. Around
this time, he also began to run a small photography studio. In
1913, John was then elected as the mayor of Battersea winning
by one vote. Throughout the election, he was dogged by racist
reports and people casting doubts about his place of birth,
not believing he was really born in England (sound familiar?).
Although not the first black mayor in England – that was Allan
Glaisyer Minns, a doctor from the Bahamas who became mayor
of Thetford in Norfolk in 1904 – John Archer was the first black
mayor in London. In 1918 he became president of the African
Progress Union to work for equality and was a British delegate
for the second Pan-African Congress in Paris, a series of eight
conferences held worldwide to discuss peacemaking and
decolonisation in Africa and the Caribbean. John then gave up
his council seat to act as a Labour Party election agent, winning
candidate spots in 1922 and 1924 with Shapurji Saklatvala, a
communist activist of Indian Parsi heritage who became one of
the first Indians elected to British parliament. Then in 1929, John
won again acting as an agent for the Labour candidate who beat
Saklatvala after the Labour and Communist parties had split
outright.
EMMA CLARKE
Emma Clarke was born in Liverpool and worked as a
confectioner’s apprentice as a teenager. She grew up playing
football on the streets with her sister Jane who also went on to
become a professional footballer. Emma first debuted in club
football with British Ladies in 1895. Their inaugural game was
watched by 10,000 people at Crouch End and is considered to
be the first women’s football match played under association
rules. Emma was then selected for Mrs Graham’s XI, a women’s
team formed by Scottish suffragette Helen Matthews based
in Edinburgh. This team is considered to be the first British
women’s football team
Football wasn’t really seen as a safe sport for women to play,
and Mrs Graham’s XI first match was abandoned because of
violent pitch invasions. However, the team regularly attracted
thousands of spectators for their matches. They toured Scotland,
and Emma would have been paid about 12 pence a week for
that.
CHARLES WOOTTON
Many West Indian shipmen that had been recruited by the Royal
Navy during WWI settled in Liverpool after the war. One evening
in summer 1919, a West Indian man named John Johnson was
stabbed in the face by two Scandinavian sailors because he
refused to give them a cigarette. The next night, a group of black
men led a retaliation attack on the pub the Scandinavian men
frequented, which ended in a policeman getting injured. The
police then arrested several of the black seamen and carried out
raids on many black homes and hostels in Toxteth, though none
of the white sailors were arrested. Protests against these raids
turned violent and a policeman was shot in the fallout. During
subsequent raids this young guy, Charles Wootton, had been
living in one of the raided houses on Upper Pitt Street, although
he wasn’t known to have taken part in any of the brawling.
When he saw the police had come to his yard he climbed out
of a window and ran, but ended up getting chased by a lynch
mob of around 300 white people led by the police. They chased
him to the docks where the mob caught him and threw him
into the water. He tried to swim away, but the mob threw rocks
at him until he drowned. He was just 24. His death was then
reported in local news as ‘suspect found in river’, and so nobody
was arrested for his murder. In the days that followed, mobs of
thousands of white people rampaged through Liverpool burning
places where black people were known to stay, viciously beating
any black people they stumbled across. The police literally ended
up having to detain 700 (!!!) black residents in station cells
because they had no other way of protecting them. Across the
rest of the summer, racially-motivated riots erupted across the
UK in port cities such as Cardiff, Glasgow, Newport and London.
FEATURE
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