Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

HP: How did the community respond when it came to the showdown with R. Woolf in the
1965/6 dispute when a worker was sacked and the union refused to make the subsequent
strike official?
VS: The first dispute was for recognition of the union branch, so the management had to
recognise the union but after a few years there was another dispute about wages, bonuses
and working conditions in the factory. This second dispute went on for over one month. The
community massively supported the dispute in many ways: landlords, for example, for weeks
till it was over, did not ask for rent and the grocers were providing all kinds of goods to people
on strike as a sort of loan and the Gurdwaras opened their kitchens for the strikers and
the premises for us to organise meetings. The community was in many, many ways helpful to
this dispute.
HP: Can you tell us something about how the community developed, were people buying
shops in Southall by now, for example?
VS: In 1957 when I came there was only one shop, near the railway bridge, it was a cafe and
they used to deliver groceries at home in vans. Later on, people worked hard and saved,
working nightshifts, then slept for a while, then during the day [were] working at the shops
and this is how businesses started. The population grew during the mid-1960s when thousands
more people came here.
The first problem that people faced was to get places in schools for their children, particularly
those of, say, 10 to 13 who didn’t know a single word of English – so first enrolment was
an issue, and then how to deal with the language ‘problem’. The local authority was just not
ready to face these sorts of issues, although com- munity leaders had been warning the
local authority this was about to happen.
HP: So racism was rife?
VS: At this time, there was what I would call sheer hypocrisy because the politicians were
saying there is no discrimination in this country – Britain is the most tolerant country, it just
couldn’t be. But in 1963, when the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) was
formed, it studied local situations. There was for example in 1964 a team of students from
Oxford university who were testing discrimination by sending a West Indian or Indian to a
certain job to see if he was refused even at the factory gate. And later on a white person
was sent, and invariably taken in, recruited. CARD did this sort of testing not just in factories
but also in public bars which wouldn’t serve Asians or black people. (2) This kind of testing
then compelled the government to pass the 1965 Race Relations Act, otherwise there would
have been absolutely no realisation that discrimination existed in this society.
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