The Race Riots of 1919 in Liverpool and Cardiff

Introduction

The so-called ‘race riots’[1] which broke out between January and August 1919 in seven ports[2], were some of the most serious and sustained instances of public disorder in twentieth century Britain. During these riots, white working – class crowds targeted black seamen, their families and black-owned businesses and property in these ports. Other black people, including military personnel and skilled workers also came under attack from white crowds. The 1919 ‘race’ riots came to national prominence through the newspapers of the day, and the coverage was often hostile and racist in tone. Press reports made many people aware, for the first time, of the presence of black and minority ethnic people living in Britain, although many of them had lived and worked in the country for years. Britain’s expanded black population due to WW1 demands in factories and ports, was disproportionately male. Colonial soldiers and sailors of African descent from the Caribbean and from West Africa were the most visible of the new immigrants. The colour of their skin made them an easy target for resentment and ultimately violence. In 1919, both the more recent arrivals and the settled black communities, especially in Liverpool and Cardiff, discovered that they were all viewed by the same suspicion and considered, by some, as ‘aliens’.[3]

The 1919 rioting in the ports was primarily caused by severe post-WW1 competition for jobs, especially in the merchant navy. Shipping companies chose to sign on white foreign seamen rather than black British seamen. The major unions representing seamen were opposed to the employment of black seamen when white crews were available. Black seamen were cheated out of out-of-work donations that many of them were eligible for when the Ministry of Labour’s Employment Department sent secret instructions to labour exchange managers that ‘unemployed black seamen of British nationality should be left in ignorance of their rights.’[4] The lack of work was aggravated by an acute housing shortage. For the British working class, war service was part of a ‘contract’ struck with the state. When the promised post-war benefits ie job opportunities, and better housing, did not materialise, there was widespread public protest. Rioting was an extreme form of direct action and racist behaviour and motivations were particularly evident in the actions of the white rioters in 1919.

Liverpool

In 1919, demobilization had increased Liverpool’s black population to about 5,000. They were mostly working class and out of work. Black Liverpudlians had their employment terminated at local oil mills and sugar refineries because white people refused to work alongside them. In May 1919, white rioters began to attack black citizens in the streets, as well as their businesses and homes. The violence in Liverpool was orchestrated by well-organised gangs, hundreds and thousands strong, who hunted black men on the streets.’[5] The Elder Dempster Shipping Line’s hostel for West African sailors and the Davis Lewis Hostel for black sailors were attacked and many houses were targeted and set alight. On 13 May 1919, a delegation of black men visited the office of the Liverpool Echo and handed over a statement. It said:

‘The majority of Negroes […] are discharged soldiers and sailors without employment; in fact some of them are practically starving, work having been refused them on account of their colour […] Some of us have been wounded and lost limbs and eyes fighting for the Empire in which we had the honour to belong [..] We ask for British justice, to be treated as true and loyal sons of Great Britain.’[6]

The determination of the British authorities to write the role of black soldiers and sailors out of the official memory and memorialization of WW1 was noticed by black people living in Britain.

On 9 and 10 June mobs of youths and young men in ‘well organised’ gangs, their total strength varying between 2,00 and 10,000, roamed the streets, ’savagely attacking, beating, and stabbing every negro they could find.’[9] The Times newspaper reported that ‘every coloured man seen was followed by large hostile crowds.’[7] Ray Costello wrote:

‘The scenes might have prefigured the infamous Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938, when Jewish premises had their windows broken, and many were set on fire. In a climate of widespread unemployment, feelings ran high against black people, who, wrongly in the case of the majority of Liverpool blacks, were considered newcomers to these shores.’[8]

The hatred of the white rioters for Liverpool’s black community was reported in several local newspapers. Liverpool’s Evening Express described what happened on 9 and 10 June:

‘Wrecked houses, despoiled of their furniture, gaping holes in plate glass windows, shops which been broken open by hooligans and emptied of their contents by thieves, and charred patches in the roads denote the bonfire made by some innocent person’s furniture are visible evidence of the result of rioting in the negro colony of Liverpool last night.’[10]

‘There is a feeling of terror among the coloured people of the city’ reported another local newspaper. Ernest Marke was just a 16 year old ex- merchant seaman (born in Sierra Leone) when he found himself caught up in the Liverpool riots. His eyewitness account[11] of his terrifying ordeals at the hands of white mobs provides first-hand insight into what it must have been like for a black citizen at that time. Recalling the Liverpool riots for BBC television’s Forbidden Britain in 1994, Marke said that he was rescued twice by white women when he ran away from white mobs.[12] He also said that the police refused to help black victims because some of them were very prejudiced.

However, many black people sought sanctuary from white gangs in local bridewells (petty offenders’ prisons) and fire stations. The Liverpool Evening Express reported ‘Four hundred were marched through the streets by the police.’[13] The police undertook interviews with the black people who had been sheltered in the Liverpool bridewells. They and other members of the black community were registered, their details recorded, to produce a relatively detailed picture of the black population of the city, with the origins, trades and family backgrounds of hundreds of people. This was used after the riots to develop a system of observation and monitoring in Liverpool. Black seamen were issued with registration cards that contained photos and fingerprints that had to be produced to sign on for ships, a system copied and adopted by other ports. The Aliens Order of 1920 and Special Restrictions (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order of 1925 further required all black seamen living in Britain, including British subjects, to register with the police and then prove their nationality.[14] The 1925 Order was, in effect, the enforcement of the earlier Alien Restriction Act of 1914, designed to keep aliens resident in Britain under supervision. This legislation has been described as ‘the first instance of state-sanctioned race discrimination inside Britain to come to widespread notice.’[15]

Whilst the rioting was still taking place, the main government response was to set up an interdepartmental committee, to pursue an active repatriation programme. The aim was to clear black Britons from Britain itself and disperse them around the British Empire. On 23^rd June, Lord Milner, Colonial Secretary, issued a memo regarding repatriation saying:

‘I am convinced that if we wish to get rid of the coloured population whose presence here is causing so much trouble we must pay the expense of doing so ourselves. It will not be great.’[16]

As Ernest Marke commented, “A free passage with £6 cash was offered to anyone who would like to ‘jump at this great opportunity’.”[17]

The National Archives contains letters between the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, together with the Chief Constable and officials from the Ministry of Labour and the Home Office and Colonial Office, that demonstrate the start of plans for the evacuation of the entire black population of the city to abandoned army camps outside the city. Black people would be interned there while a scheme for their repatriation to their homelands in Africa and the Caribbean could be worked out and put into action. The fact that many of the black people driven from their homes were black Britons with no other homeland to which they might be repatriated was just one of the flaws in the scheme. Another was that a proportion of those who might feasibly be returned to their countries of origin were married with British white wives, and in many cases, mixed-race children. Repatriation under those circumstances would have resulted in the break-up of British families and the impoverishment of wives and children. Sadly, some families did get broken up as black fathers were amongst about 2,000 black men returned to their countries of origin, some under duress. However, ultimately the repatriation scheme was not fully implemented.

Some newspaper editorials fanned the flames of racial tensions by describing black people in terms of racist stereotypes. A major focus was on black men’s relationships with white women. Official responses to the riots in Liverpool were often blatantly racist. A police officer commented, “The negroes would not have been touched but for their relations with white women. This has caused the entire trouble.’[18] The eugenics movement in Britain was alive and well during this period with its emphasis on racial purity, and combating degeneration and miscegenation in the British ‘race’. Questions of British identity were also raised. Olusoga commented, ‘There was also a view among the mobs that patrolled the streets of Liverpool that blackness and Britishness were mutually exclusive.’[19]

The greatest tragedy of the 1919 riots in Liverpool was the murder of a black seaman called Charles Wotten, on 5 June 1919.[20] He had served as a ship’s fireman in WW1 and was discharged from the Royal Navy in March 1919. He lodged at 18, Pitt Street, a boarding house for black seamen in Liverpool’s dockland area, when the police raided it. They were responding to a disturbance that had taken place at another address. At the boarding house, a police constable saw Wotten, who had escaped from the boarding house, being chased by a large crowd of about 200-300 rioters. The police ran after him, but the crowd chased him to Queen’s Dock which was located in the Toxteth area. By the time police reached him, a crowd of about 2,000 were throwing all kinds of missiles at Wotten. At one point, Wotten was seized by a policeman, but was ripped out of the officer’s grasp by the mob. The crowd forced him into the water where he drowned. Although a number of police officers were at the scene on the night of the murder of Charles Wotten, no arrests were made. At the subsequent inquest the coroner concluded that the cause of the victim’s death was drowning but added there was insufficient evidence to determine how Wotten had got into the water. This was the verdict, in spite of the fact that the report carried statements from a number of witnesses and a police officer who had all been present that evening.[21] The situation was aggravated in August, in the latter stages of Liverpool’s summer of riots, when the police tasked with defending the city in general and black people in particular, went on strike.

The local police were often biased in their arrest policy, In November 1919, 15 black men found themselves on trial for their alleged involvement in the Liverpool riots. They were charged with ‘riotous assembly and assault’. The defence counsel was Edward Nelson. His fees were paid for by the African Progress Union (APU), a London-based black civil rights group led by John Archer. (The APU had also funded the forty black men who were arrested and charged in June 1919). The Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury reported that ‘The case against the men was based mainly on identification by police and bystanders, much of which was unreliable and at times contradictory, and five of the fifteen accused were acquitted. The other ten, however, received prison sentences of between eight and twenty-two months.’[22] Jenkinson remarked about arrests and trials:

’But there is no doubt, given the numbers of Blacks arrested compared to their actual number in Liverpool, the proportion of Blacks to be brought to court was higher than Whites This fact gains significance when it is remembered that… the Black community of Liverpool was overwhelmingly the victim of the rioting.’[23]

Although black people were blamed for the riots, a local magistrate said that it was the white mob which was ‘making the name of Liverpool an abomination and disgrace to the rest of the country.’[24]

Cardiff

Cardiff experienced one of the most vicious outbreaks of racial violence that had yet occurred in Britain. During the week of racist rioting, three men were killed and dozens injured, and the damage caused to property cost Cardiff council more than £3,000 to repair.[25] Cardiff’s black population increased from about 700 in August 1914 to about 3,000 in April 1919. About 1,200 of them were unemployed seamen. There were at least as many demobilized white soldiers in the city, most of whom were unskilled. On 11^th June, a large hostile crowd of white people attacked a group of black men and their white wives on Canal Parade bridge. The white crowd attempted to reach Bute Town where a large number of Cardiff’s black citizens had their homes, but police managed to stop them. Some attackers did get into Bute Street and attacked Arab (men mostly from Yemen and Somalia) owned lodging houses. More determined and organized attacks on Cardiff’s black community ensued over the subsequent few days. Two thousand people attacked black people in their houses and shops.

The whole of the city’s police force was concentrated in a cordoned-off area of black settlement in Tiger Bay. Military force was also used as both mounted police and infantry blocked the way to streets where black people lived. Contemporary reports were clear that ‘Colonial soldiers’ (i.e. Australians, Canadians and South Africans) armed with rifles placed themselves at the head of lynch mobs.[26] The newspaper accounts reported ‘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!’ Mobs included many white women and girls who carried sticks and stones. The Western Mail reported, ‘the efforts of the police were confined to keeping the white men from damaging property.’[27] Property being deemed more important than people, black communities under siege had two choices – flight or fight. A few did leave but most chose to stay and, if need be, to fight.

The fighting in Cardiff was probably the fiercest of the whole of the race rioting in 1919. Ibrahim Ishmaa’il, a young Somali seaman, who was living in Cardiff at this time witnessed some of the clashes and recorded them in his autobiography:

‘The fight started at about 7.30pm and lasted for a fairly long time. Seven or eight of us defended the house (Abdi Langara’s boarding house in Millicent Street) and most of them were badly wounded. 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.’[28]

Ernest Marke in his autobiography also reported:

‘The mobsters didn’t get things all their own way. Some of them were badly cut up; negroes started carrying guns and razors to defend themselves. More mobsters got hurt in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay than any other part of Britain, for Tiger Bay had the toughest negroes there were in Britain.’[29]

Just as in Liverpool, a local repatriation scheme was established but not everyone involved, wanted to be in it, and part of Cardiff’s black population indignantly rejected the offer. They insisted on claiming their rights as British subjects to get fair treatment and remain in the city. The Colonial Office was keen that married couples where the husband was black and the wife white, should not be repatriated together. The British authorities feared that by doing so, it would upset the existing social order in the colonies. It is not known how many black seamen took up the offer. The Bristol Times and Mirror noted that 600 ‘blackmen have been sent from Bristol Channel ports to their homes overseas.’[30] However, in Cardiff in the 1920s, black men were forced by the police to register as aliens, even though they had passports, discharge papers from war service in the armed forces, and birth certificates, all demonstrating their status as British subjects.

During the hot summer of 1919, black people in Britain were not only being attacked physically, in their homes and in the streets but also psychologically in the press. Reporters excused the white aggressors by blaming their black victims for daring to defend themselves. However, Britain’s black communities had to fend for themselves as police protection was limited and there were no large numbers of white allies out on the streets to support them against racist attacks. In 1919, the divisive role of racism in Liverpool and Cardiff was overt. White workers in bitter economic competition with black workers were mobilized into lynch mobs led by armed groups.[31]

To understand the anti-black riots in Britain and the black community’s response, we have to see them in the context of social unrest both in Britain and in Britain’s Caribbean and African colonies after WW1.  A black perspective of the race riots was limited in 1919. The two black journals of the time, African Telegraph and African Times & Orient Review reported the incidents as they were taking place. Felix Hercules in an African Telegraph editorial commented:

’The supineness of the Imperial Government during the race riots drives home the fact they approve of them, that they are in line with Imperial policy.’[32]

Dr. Rufus E. Fennell acted as a spokesman for the black community in Cardiff. He organised two joint protest meetings of Cardiff’s black and Arab communities on 13 and 16 June 1919. He said it was the responsibility of the British government to support those who found themselves on the receiving end of racist attacks.[33] He told one of the protest meetings 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.’[34]

The 1919 riots shaped the identity of Cardiff’s black community in an important way. Dr Glenn Jordan, the Director of the Butetown History and Arts Centre commented:

‘I think that one of the things it did was say:” We are tough people. Don’t mess with us, don’t step on our turf: we will protect it, we will defend it.” I think that’s an important part of the self-concept of Tiger Bay.’[35]

There was similar black self-reliance in the Liverpool riots. Ernest Marke compared the 1919 riots with the race riots in Notting Hill and Nottingham in 1958 and concluded, ‘The 1958 race riot was caused through sheer ignorance and hooliganism, which was partly instigated by a certain fascist element and it was only a speck in the pan in comparison with 1919. The authorities, the press and public sentiment in 1958 soon put a stop to it then, but in 1919 there were fewer of us and less people who cared.’[36]

Bibliography

Primary sources

Archives.

The British Newspaper Archive

The National Archives Home Office and Colonial Office records.

Newspapers and Periodicals

African Standard

African Times and Orient Review

Bristol Times and Mirror

Liverpool Courier

Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury

Liverpool Evening Express

South Wales News

The Times

Western Mail

Secondary sources

Bourne, S. ‘Liverpool and the Murder of Charles Wotten’ in Black Poppies : Britain’s Black Community and The Great War (Stroud: The History Press, 2014). pp147-152

Costello, R. Black Tommies: British Soldiers of African Descent in the First World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015.).

Fryer, P. Staying Power: The history of black people in Britain (London: Pluto Press,1984).

Ishmaa’il, I. An early Somali Autobiography completed in 1928 and published by Richard Pankhurst in 1977.

Jenkinson, J. The 1919: A Survey’ Race Riots in Britain in Rainer,L. & I. Pegg (eds) Under the Imperial Carpet: Essays in Black History 1780-1950 (Crawley: Rabbit Press 1986)

Llwyd, A. Black Wales: A History of Black Welsh People (Hughes/Butetown History and Arts Centre, 2005).

Marke, E. In Troubled Waters: Memoirs of Seventy Years in England (London: Karia Press,1986).

Olusoga, D. Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Pan, 2016).

Ramdin, R. The Making of The Black Working Class in Britain (Aldershot: Wildwood House Limited, 1987).

Rainer, L. & I. Pegg (eds) Under the Imperial Carpet: Essays in Black History 1780-1950 (Crawley: Rabbit Press 1986)

Tabili, L. The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth – Century Britain: The Special  Restriction  (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925 (Journal of British Studies 33, January 1994), pp.54-98.

Notes

[1] The article uses Jacqueline Jenkinson’s definition of ‘race riot’. She states, ‘By riot I refer to a dispute between large numbers of people involving the use of sticks, knives and often revolvers; when the dispute is between Whites and non-Whites the result is described as a ‘race riot’. J. Jenkinson ‘The 1919 Race Riots in Britain: A Survey’ in L. Rainer, L. & I. Pegg (eds). Under the Imperial Carpet: Essays in Black History, 1780-1950. (Crawley: Rabbit Press, 1986.), pp.182-207.

[2] The seven ports were Glasgow, South Shields, Salford, Hull, London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Newport and Barry.

[3] Note on terminology used in the article. The use of words such as ‘alien’ ‘coloured’ and ‘Negro’ are strictly linked to the historical context and are not deemed appropriate for use today.

[4] P. Fryer Staying Power: The history of black people in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p.299.

[5] D. Olusoga Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Pan, 2017) p.457.

[6] Liverpool Echo, 13 May 1919.

[7] Black and White at Liverpool – Police Protection for Negroes’, The Times, 11 June 1919.

[8] R. Costello, ‘Liverpool’ in The Oxford Companion to Black British History. (eds) by D. Dabydeen, J. Gilmore & C. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) pp.267-269.

[9] Inspector Hugh Burgess, ‘Racial riots’, 18 June 1919, copy in TNA CO318/352.

[10] Evening Express (Liverpool), 11 June 1919.

[11] E. Marke In Troubled Waters: Memoirs of Seventy Years in England (London: Karia Press, 1986).

[12] S. Humphries and P. Gordon Forbidden Britain: Our Secret Past 1900-1960 (BBC Books, 1994), pp.103-104.

[13] Liverpool Evening Express 11 June 1919.

[14] D. Olusoga Black & British, p.466.

[15] L. Tabili The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth – Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925 (Journal of British Studies 33, January 1994), pp.54-98.

[16] Lord Milner, ‘Repatriation of Coloured Men’ distributed 24 June 1919, TNA CO 323/814/282-283.

[17] E. Marke In Troubled Waters p.34.

[18] Liverpool Courier 11 June, 1919 p.4.

[19] D. Olusoga Black & British p.461.

[20] S. Bourne Black Poppies pp.147-152.

[21] Liverpool Evening Press 10 June, 1919 p.5.

[22] Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury, 10 November, 1919.

[23] J. Jenkinson ‘The 1919 Race Riots’ p.197.

[24] Liverpool Weekly Press, 14 June, 1919, p.5.

[25] This sum is equivalent to £958,000 in 2023 using the ‘GDP per capita’ calculation from measuringworth.com https://www.measuringworth.com/index.php.

[26] P. Fryer Staying Power, p.305.

[27] Western Daily Mail, 13 June, 1919

[28] I. Ishmaa’il An early Somali autobiography, completed in 1928 (published by R. Pankhurst 1977) p.374.

[29] E. Marke In Troubled Waters p.31.

[30] Bristol Times and Mirror, 13 September 1919.

[31] P. Fryer. Staying Power p.312.

[32] F. Hercules ‘Discrimination and Disintegration’, editorial African Telegraph, 1/13 (July-August 1919), p.253.

[33] S. Bourne Black Poppies p.144.

[34] South Wales News, 23 July 1919, p7. Western Mail, 19 July 1919, p.7 (with picture of Fennell).

[35] Glenn Jordan in Alan Llwyd, Black Wales: A History of Black Welsh People (Hughes/Butetown History and Arts Centre, 2005), p.102

[36] Marke, E. In Troubled Waters, p.32.