Description:Many migrants met partners and married once in Britain. Although not uncommon in post-war Britain, relationships between men and women from different ethnic backgrounds were far from widely accepted. The fear of 'miscegnation' (inter-'racial' sexual relationships) had been deeply embedded in British thought since the days of slavery and colonialism. In Nazi Germany, the United States and South Africa anti-miscegnation laws, forbidding inter-racial relationships and marriage, prevailed well into the late twentieth century. Whilst no such laws had ever existed in Britain, prejudice and hostility acted as significant barriers to such relationships.
Aside from the looks and comments from passers-by in the street, the strongest reactions often came from the people who were closest to them. Jacob Prince, who came to Birmingham from Trinidad in the 1940s, remembers the reaction of his future father-in-law to his proposed marriage:
" One day somebody said to her dad, “do you know your daughter is going out with one of these black guys?” and he went….when she went home, she got a good hiding, etc etc and from there it escalated. I met him, we had a nice chat, and we got….eventually we got….we wasn’t married then. We got on pretty well but the time came to get married and he said no, he said, “you’ll have to wait until you’re 18” she waited until she was 18 and eventually he said, “right, if you go you don’t come back.”" (MS2255/2/096 p.9.)
However, objections to inter-racial marriage often came from both sides and, if they refused to give up their partner, couples risked being cut off by their families and friends. They could thus lose an important source of their support networks.
"…my Dad was entirely against it due to the British Colonialism, he said that, he’s always speaking about the British, what they did in different parts of the world and so on, and he resented, and he did say that if I married a European, that he would have no further association with me, and he would cut my allowance off, which he did when he discovered that I had got married." (MS2255/2/003 p.4.)
Although both partners often suffered as a result of attitudes towards their relationship, it was women who experienced more hardened attitudes as a result of perceptions about what was deemed 'appropriate behaviour' for a woman. Women who were involved in relationships with black men faced hostility and were portrayed as sexually promiscuous, lacking in morals and misguided. The Picture Post thus assumed a patronising tone towards these women:
"British women who prefer them are probably driven either by their own curious appetite, by their own loneliness, or by their sympathy for his. Often the Negro in Britain is a lonely man. This can lead to love." (Picture Post 30/10/1954.)
Whilst serving in the RAF Granville Lodge found that white colleagues disapproved of white women who socialised with black men:
" All right, when they were not flying, we would like to go to dances. They resented black people, black soldiers or air men, dancing with white girls, but there weren’t any black girls over here and a nasty thing was that there were all kind of vicious rumours, I think there was from colonial days that if a girl went with a black man she was no good and I found that on the contrary, a girl, a white girl who had the courage of her condition (sic), go with a black man, was hundred times better than the girl who submitted to other people’s opinions and regard her own opinions and feelings. "(MS2255/2/085 p.5.)
In spite of the social barriers mounted against them including the pressure from family, friends and institutional figures to abandon their love, many relationships flourished. In many cases, as a family gradually got to know their son or daughter's partner, the barriers fell away.
The Charles Parker Archive provides additional material on the subject including interviews for a documentary on inter-racial marriages which was broadcast on the BBC during the 1960s called 'Under and Apple Tree' (MS4000/6/1/60.)
Author: Sarah Dar