London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City

Dedication

For – and because of – Puran Singh and Jagir Kaur Sandhu

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1. ‘In Our Grand Metropolis’

2. Sheer Chandelier

3. Coasting a Lime on the Serpentine

4. Cultural Capital

5. Pop Goes the Centre

6. Digging Our Scene

7. London’s Burning

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

A Conversation with Sukhdev Sandhu

Life at A Glance

Read On

You Should Listen To …

You Should Read …

You Should Visit …

You Should Watch …

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Lo, lovely London, rich and fortunate,

Famed through the world for peace and happiness1

THESE FLORID SENTIMENTS were ascribed to a ‘stranger from the parching zone’ by the playwright George Peele in 1585. They divert and confound: did an African really speak these lines? It seems scarcely credible for black people to have been living and working in London as far back as the sixteenth century. Yet they curiously anticipate the lyrics of ‘London Is The Place For Me’ which the calypsonian Lord Kitchener freestyled upon disembarking from the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in 1948, the year commonly thought to mark the arrival of dark-skinned foreigners to England.

The words were actually delivered by a white actor. Peele was writing for the Lord Mayor’s Pageant, a festival of London’s merchant capitalists held annually throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to mark the investiture of the incoming Mayor. Many merchants, as brash and exhibitionist as City traders and early dot-com entrepreneurs, used the occasion to show off. In particular, they liked to flaunt their success by draping negroes in fabulously expensive silks, pearls and jewels. At one pageant a pair of elaborately dressed Moors were mounted on leopards, waving the banners of the Skinners’ Company and the City of London. At another, a black youth was transported through the capital on top of a life-size model of the Grocers’ Company crest – an elaborately carved camel – while he hurled raisins, almonds and prunes at the thousands of cheering spectators. On his head he wore a feathered wreath. At his sides stood two goddesses representing Plenty and Concord.2

This cavalcade – extravagant, absurd, oddly affecting – is by no means an isolated example of how black people have been enlivening the life of the capital over the centuries. For the African presence in London spans the millennium. Writing with that strange mixture of churlishness and chiliasm, relish and repugnance, to which critics of the metropolis have often resorted, Richard of Devizes claimed in his twelfth-century Chronicle that the city was a hive of perversity and attracted ‘Stage players, buffoons, those that have no hair on their bodies, Garamantes [i.e. Moors], pickthanks, catamites, effemoinate sodomites, lewd musical girls, druggists, lustful persons, fortune-tellers, extortioners, nightly strollers, magicians, mimics, common beggars, tatterdemalions’.3

During the sixteenth century more and more black faces could be seen in the capital. A trumpeter from Africa, known as John Blanke (i.e. John White), played for both Henry VII and Henry VIII. A painted roll belonging to the College of Arms shows him blowing his horn at the 1511 Westminster Tournament held to celebrate the birth of a son, the short-lived Prince Henry, to Catherine of Aragon. In the summer of 1555 a merchant’s son called John Lok imported five Africans to London. He hoped that they might learn sufficient English for them to be able to return to the West African coast and act as interpreters for metropolitan traders eager to challenge the Portuguese control of slave-trafficking.

By the 1570s black people were being brought to England fairly regularly. They were employed as household servants, prostitutes, and court entertainers. Their visibility far exceeded their numerical presence and allowed Queen Elizabeth I to make political capital in 1601 by issuing a proclamation ordering their expulsion. In doing so she announced that she was

highly discontented to understand the great numbers of negars and Blackamoores which (as she is informed) are crept into this realm … who are fostered and relieved here to the great annoyance of her own liege people, that want the relief, which those people consume, as also for that the most of them are infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel.4

Writing Othello just two years later, Shakespeare was undoubtedly influenced by the black bandsmen he’d seen in London, as well as the growing number of African prostitutes on the capital’s streets.

As ‘Londinium’, the metropolis had prospered because it was a port city that was ideally located for exporting British slaves, both household chattel and prisoners of war, to other provinces in the Roman Empire. Now, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the traffic was reversed: it began to import slaves from Britain’s colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean. Soon thousands lived and worked here. Not only could they be spied in menial environments – serving food at lordly tables, on the streets tailing their masters and opening carriage doors for them – but they could be found embroiled in aristocratic sex scandals, niggering it up on the Drury Lane stage, servicing peruked noblemen in Covent Garden male brothels, running coal mines in Kingston upon Thames, helping to free the Newgate Gaol inmates during the Gordon Riots of 1780. Fear of their growing numbers, a lurking racial hostility, and the need to stop runaway slaves from becoming skilled and economically self-sufficient led the Lord Mayor to issue a proclamation as early as 1731:

It is Ordered by this Court, That for the future no Negroes or other Blacks be suffered to be bound Apprentices at any of the Companies of this City to any Freeman thereof; and that Copies of this Order be printed and sent to the Masters and Wardens of the several Companies of this City, who are required to see the same at all times hereafter duly observed.5

Intermarriage between blacks and whites, and also between lascars from the Asian subcontinent and whites, was so rife that a correspondent for The Times in 1867 wrote, ‘There is hardly such a thing as a pure Englishman in this island. In place of the rather vulgarized and very inaccurate phrase, Anglo-Saxon, our national denomination, to be strictly correct, would be a composite of a dozen national titles.’6 In 1900 – the heyday of an Empire often assumed to have been a foreign affair, thousands of sweltering miles away in the malarial jungles of darkest Africa and the heat-and-lust shimmer of the Raj – black and Asian people were common sights in London: peddling religious tracts in White-chapel; walking, law books in hand, to the Inns of Court where they were students; operating on sick patients at teaching hospitals; collecting fares on the city’s omnibuses; performing as nigger minstrels at children’s parties or church halls; campaigning for Parliament (in 1892 Dadabhai Naoroji became the first Asian to be elected to the House of Commons); advocating decolonization from behind lecterns at The Reform Club and Westminster Town Hall; serving cheap coffee in East End cafés to their fellow countrymen who had just finished long shifts at dock warehouses.

At Trafalgar Square, perhaps the best known landmark in all of London, a young couple from Singapore are wearing smiles and woolly hats and having their photo taken in front of the fountains; schoolchildren whoop with delight as they feed the pigeons; a lone activist protests human rights violations against the Kurds. No one stops to look at Nelson’s Column, far less the bronze relief at its south-facing base. Sculpted by J.E. Carew, it is called ‘The Death of Nelson’ and shows the Admiral stricken and dying. All around him is flurry: cannons are being loaded, the rigging tugged at, the injured carried away. At the very edge of the relief is a black mariner, rifle in hand, still busy doing battle. Who was he? HMS Victory’s master book doesn’t supply his name, but it does reveal that he was one of a small number of foreigners amongst the crew, and that at least one other was born in Africa. ‘England Expects Every Man Will Do His Duty’ reads the inscription. Many black men during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did exactly that. They were often maimed or killed in the process. After abandoning life at sea, a number of them, as this book will show, ended up in London where they sank into destitution and were forced to choose between beggary and the workhouse.

Close to Nelson’s Column can be found a statue of Sir Henry Havelock who in 1857 put down an uprising in Lucknow with barbaric savagery. Having forced villagers to lick up the blood of the relatives his troops had just killed, he then made Muslims, on pain of being whipped, eat pork, and Hindus eat beef. They were further bludgeoned and then hanged. He was honoured for his efforts in 1861 when a memorial was erected in Trafalgar Square, paid for by public subscription. On its back can be found the exhortation, ‘Soldiers! Your Labours Your Durations Your Sufferings And Your Valour Will Not Be Forgotten By A Grateful Country’. Clearly they have. In October 2000 Mayor Ken Livingstone proposed that the statue be removed and admitted that he did not know who Havelock was. If the role of black and Asian people in shaping English history, both its high and its low points, can be so easily overlooked even at so visible and central a location as Trafalgar Square, is there any point in trying to draw attention to it in relation to less exalted parts of London?

Part of the problem may be that blacks and Asians tend to be used in contemporary discourse as metaphors for newness. Op-ed columnists and state-of-the-nation chroniclers invoke them to show how, along with deindustrialization, devolution and globalization, Englishness has changed since the end of the war. That they had already been serving in the armed forces, stirring up controversy in Parliament, or, as The Times suggested, through their mere bedroom arrangements helping to change the way that national identity is conceptualized, often goes unacknowledged. In contrast, New York defines itself through such symbols of newness and ethnic multiplicity as Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

Popular culture encourages the conflation between London, ethnicity and newness. The very category ‘urban’, signifying a range of musical styles from garage and drum‘n’bass to glossy r‘n’b, is used as shorthand for black, or at least a certain version of it, one that is associated with a kind of in-yer-face, street-real nowness that is highly valued by advertisers and media planners who have always been eager to tap into – and exploit – youth culture’s desire for the next ‘next thing’.

Certainly, walking through the streets of London today, it’s hard not to be struck by the omnipresence of ‘colour’, and its importance in giving tang and immediacy to the city. Strange aromas flume out of North African side-caffs and foodstalls; puffaclad man-bwoys slouch along with barrio-hustler gaits and practise throwing shapes; Nike billboards enjoin us to buy boots endorsed by the latest soccer sensation who, according to that morning’s tabloids, is as lethal a striker in the bedroom as he is on the pitch; a riot of badly-xeroxed fly-posters plastered on to a defunct internet café big up Nation of Islam rallies and lecture series in Highgate to be delivered by ludicrously-monikered Indian holy men; a would-be It Girl sports a ludicrous bindi on her forehead as she flicks through the cheap sari fabrics on display outside ‘Qasim Cloathes’; a Bangladeshi cornershop offers cheap calls to Dakar and Accra; telephone kiosks are plastered with cards announcing the dominating charms of a 48DD Brand Nubian Beauty; a straggle of interestingly-coiffured clubbers queue to see if there are any returns for tonight’s soundclash between two Dalston-based dark-side glitch-fiends; a sleek young courier poised at the traffic lights sings to himself, ‘We’re loving it loving it loving it’; flush with his first salary cheque from a German multinational, an expensively-suited young Asian leads his broken-backed mother into an upscale salon for the first beauty treatment she has ever had.

None of this is heinous, but neither, except in terms of scale, is it especially new. Black people, whether as horn players, percussionist-beggars, touring gospel singers from the American South, or cash-in-hand jazz musicians at illegal basement clubs, have long introduced new and eerie sounds to the metropolis. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they bonded with the white underclasses at wharf taverns where they glugged down ale and sang sea shanties, and at bawdy mixed-race hops where people of all colours roared and danced together. As retailers, too, they have hawked anything they had to hand – bits of cloth, hankies, toys, foodstuffs. Sometimes they hawked themselves. The Georgian version of telephone cards were the directories of ‘Covent Garden ladies’ which listed prostitutes available for hire. Mrs Lowes, of 68 Upper Charlotte Street in Soho, was a West Indian who charged clients three guineas for a whole night and one guinea for a short visit. She was described, in the tersely reductive terms that were also a feature of slave advertisements during the eighteenth century, as having ‘a sweet cheerful disposition, fine dark hair, and eyes of the same friendly hue; fine teeth’.7

My central concern in this book is not just to highlight the presence of dark-skinned people in bygone London, but to tell the story of the black and Asian people who have told stories about black and Asian London from the eighteenth century to the present day. I want to show how they have depicted the city rather than how they have been depicted; Olaudah Equiano, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushdie, Frederick Douglass, Claude McKay, Wole Soyinka, Mary Seacole, Hanif Kureishi, Sam Selvon and Wilson Harris are just some of the authors who have written about the English metropolis. They have employed a wide variety of genres – short story, TV poem, journal, travelogue, radio drama, cinema screenplay. They have also had utterly conflicting responses to the capital. Some have sought to reverse European literary classics by depicting the metropolis as a heart of darkness or composing volumes entitled A Passage To London. They have drawn on – and crucially diverged from – the visions of London painted by Jonson, Blake, Dickens, H.G. Wells and T.S. Eliot.

Contemporary novelists increasingly understand and prize the fact that their metropolitan chronicles are part of a longer, deeply sedimented tradition of black London writing. Some – Mike Phillips and David Dabydeen, for instance – have themselves contributed to the upsurge in black English historiography over the last two decades. S.I. Martin has even been sponsored by the London Arts Board to organize literary walks pointing out the sites and landscapes that informed many of the eighteenth-century authors whose lives he wittily dramatized in his 1996 novel, Incomparable World. Other writers, such as Salman Rushdie and Bernardine Evaristo, have been inspired to put on their walking boots by reading history books which recount the intimate relationship between London and Empire: at a pivotal stage of The Satanic Verses, the anglophiliac and horn-sprouting Saladin Chamcha visits Club Hot Wax where he is confronted by a black literary London hall of fame – Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Ignatius Sancho, Mary Seacole. This attempt at historical connection signals a living, felt tradition of black metrography – one that infuses the imagination of today’s writers. They are engaged in constructing a heritage, one that makes the city more navigable. They are also doing something that all immigrants from time immemorial have sought to do – to give shape and meaning to a metropolis that at first terrifies them in its noisy chaos and formlessness. Writing about the Sylheti natives who settled in the East End during the 1920s, the historian Caroline Adams observes:

It was not easy to find their way around in the big city and various ingenious systems were devised. For example, a man would arrange bricks along the pavement to mark his route to work through the confusing streets around Brick Lane … and get hopelessly lost if they were moved. Then there were the codes for identifying the buses to the West End: the number 8 was ‘two eggs’, the number 22 ‘two hooks’.8

That this is the first book to be written which looks at black and Asian accounts of London is rather surprising. After all, many historians and anthologists have commented on London’s accretive and polyglottal nature.9 They point out that it has flourished through invasion and immigration. From the Romans and the Saxons, to the Huguenots, Russian Jews, Italians, Cypriots and the Irish, the capital’s energy, wealth and aura of infinite possibility have been fuelled most ardently by successive waves of outsiders. And yet these newcomers – especially those from the colonies – are rarely themselves heard. Their stories are considered ancillary, of minority interest. A.N. Wilson’s Faber Book of London (1993) excerpts Lord Scarman’s Report into the Brixton Riots of 1981, but not a single passage from a black writer.

Even in the academic sphere, where questioning the traditional canon is the rage, there has been little interest in the relationship between colonial writers and the metropolis. Certain areas such as eighteenth-century slave memoirs and Anglo-Caribbean writing of the 1950s have been covered relatively well. No one, however, has attempted to pull together this disparate scholarship, and identify some of the tropes and motifs that have recurred down the centuries. It’s been left to creative writers to take up the challenge. Fred D’Aguiar and S.I. Martin have drawn parallels between late Georgian and 1990s black London; Caryl Phillips and Gbenga Agbenugba both hark back to the post-war period. Braiding past and present, reaching out for personal and social linkages, what Grace Nichols calls ‘webs of kin’, these authors’ books resonate with, and are underscored by, histories all too often absent from black literary criticism.10

What becomes clear from reading Nichols’s work, and that of her forebears, is how slippery the term ‘metropolis’ is. It encompasses millions, arrivants from a thousand different places, aliens to one another, who, even if they live in the same streets and districts, often barely see – yet alone know – one another. This book will illustrate how the Petticoat Lane loft where Gronniosaw first spotted his future wife held none of the social cachet of Charles Street, the small Westminster side-road in which Sancho – also black, also an ex-slave – opened his grocery in 1773. Those lascars who froze to death in nineteenth-century Limehouse glueboiling factories had nothing in common with the Indian travellers who, fifty years later, stayed in expensive West End hotels and consorted with leading politicians and royalty.

Not only have colonial authors lived and worked in a variety of different boroughs, but they have also imagined, perceived and described the city in very different ways. London is variously portrayed as epicurean banquet, luminescent centre of the imperial world, mazy labyrinth in which self and sanity are lost track of, moral abattoir, ontological catwalk, redemptive culmination of life’s travails, inferno. Class, race, gender, historical context and personal psychology have all inflected their descriptions of the capital in large and unpredictable ways. There is no single black or Asian London. Like the city itself, the way in which it is imagined and depicted changes over time. And a good thing too. It’s not even obvious that the relationship between colonial writers and London has to be vexed or agonistic. The ‘metropolis’, contrary to critical cliché, does not always feel imperilled by, or hostile to, ‘marginal’ culture. On the contrary, as this book shows, individuals (such as Laurence Sterne) and institutions (such as the BBC) have traditionally been very keen to encourage marginal voices.

The role of ‘imagination’ is central to this book. For too long black literature has been considered in extra-literary terms. It is treated primarily as a species of journalism, one that furnishes eyewitness accounts of sectors of British society to which mainstream newspapers and broadcasters have little access. Given that interest in black and Asian people tends to be at its highest when they are attacked, rioting, or the subject of official reports documenting prejudice in some tranche of daily life, it is hardly surprising if black writing comes to be viewed as a kind of emergency literature, one that is tough, angry, ‘real’. It was ever thus: in 1787, two years before the first African-English autobiography was published, a trader-turned-Abolitionist called John Newton described in cold print what he had seen when he first poked his head below the deck of a slave ship:

the Slaves lie in two rows, one above the other, on each side of the ship, close to each other, like books upon a shelf. I have known them so close, that the shelf would not, easily, contain one more.11

It is an astonishing metaphor – domesticating the inferno of the Middle Passage, week after week of shitting, starving, shrieking hell, to the status of an over-stocked personal library. And it was against this context that ex-slaves kick-started the history of black writing about London. Yet, even then, as we can see from reading the letters of Ignatius Sancho, imagination and idiosyncrasy kept spilling out of every page. The metaphors and allusions pile up. The tone of his correspondence, far from being strait-laced, is comic and highly stylized. Not only does Sancho elicit a good deal of pleasure from writing about London, he imparts it to his readers. So, I believe, does the work of many of the authors I discuss in this book.

My goal, then, is partly archaeological: to uncover and expose the sheer variety of works about London that have been written since Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s slave autobiography in 1772. Indeed, almost every author whose roots lie in the former colonies has produced work, fictional or non-fictional, focusing on life in the English metropolis. To embark upon a study of this vast corpus of writing is, in effect, a decision to write a history of black British literature. At the risk of conflating the word with the world, the textual with the social, it’s also a history of black and Asian London itself. Read properly, the printed page is actually a very good place to turn to for an insight into coloured immigrants’ relationship to the capital. Cities have always been imaginative as well as physical places. We mythologize and fantasize about them. We create mental maps. Sometimes they’re created for us. This is particularly true for colonial writers, many of whom were taught about London and its ‘correct meaning’ in tiny village schools thousands of miles away from the actual city whose reality proved to be rather different.