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

attacked.17 Kathleen Paul has also written about constructions of national identity in relation
to post-Second World War immigration to Britain. According to Paul a hierarchy of Britishness
was created in which white Britons enjoyed a unique status; with black and South Asian Britons
from the empire/Commonwealth regarded as possessing a different (lesser) British identity.18
Research into the issue of British national identity is linked to the broader study of imperial
inter-connectedness, with the relationship between colony and metropole subject to much
scrutiny. The notion of such inter-connectedness was developed by French West Indian writer
Franz Fanon who stated that empire building affected not only the colonised but also the colonisers.19
Issues of citizenship, national identity and equality were subsumed into the wider
dichotomy between colonisers and colonised. For Catherine Hall this relationship was a power
struggle: “The relations between colony and metropole were relations of power.”20 Given
the ethnic make up of Britain’s empire (in 1919 an estimated 100 million of the empires total
population of 550 million were white),21 such a notion became “colour” coded: in war and in
peace, imperial subjects with dark skin pigmentation were less well regarded than were white
colonials. According to Hall: “Metropolis and colonies, nation and empire, were demarcated by
racially defined difference: some races, it was thought, were more advanced than others.” 22
The transfer of imperial power relations into the British merchant shipping industry led ship
owners to: “… extend colonial levels of control and exploitation to workers in the metropole.”
23 Black colonial workers serving in the merchant navy during and after the war were almost
inevitably placed in a subordinate position. According to Tabili’s study of “workers and racial
difference” : “… the few thousand Black seamen living in Britain were only the most visible of a
global and multiracial colonized population whose labor sustained Britain’s imperial power.” 24
Colonial connections and power relationships were highlighted too, in the names of some
of the black people involved in the seaport riots. In Glasgow, two West Africans charged with
rioting shared the common name of “Tom Friday”, meanwhile “Sunny John” was found not
guilty of assault and riot charges in Liverpool. In Newport, five brothers from Sierra Leone, all of
whom were ship’s firemen were each called “Tom Savage”. The identical names, and indeed,
the surname “Savage”, evoke the slave trading and paternalistic missionary past of coastal West
Africa.An expanding empire and healthy global trading links brought black sailors in increased
numbers into the metropole in the decades up to the First World War. Yet by 1919 the position
was altered. Britain’s empire was shaken by the war and the end of the conflict brought incipient
decline of the merchant shipping industry. Together these events combined to make the
outbreak of the seaport riots a cause of grave concern in both colonial and metropolitan Britain.
In 1919 the British Empire was simultaneously expanding with the annexation of former German
colonies in Africa and at the same time fragile; as the declaration of martial law in Egypt and
the deaths of close to 400 political protesters at the hands of the British army under General
Dyer at the Amritsar temple in India demonstrated. According to May and Cohen “… at home
many observers pointed out that racial disturbances in England [sic] would have serious re-
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