In the decennial 2011 Census , 1.2 million people—2.2 per cent of the population—were enumerated in the ‘Mixed’ group in England and Wales. One year later, the heptathlete Jessica Ennis-Hill, a gold medallist winner in the 2012 Olympic Games and the daughter of a Jamaican father and an English mother, was heralded in the media as not only ‘the face of the census’ but ‘the face of the Olympics’.1 That same media carried advertisements for everyday goods and services depicting ‘mixed race’ couples, people and families, indicating that racial ‘mixing’ and ‘mixedness’ had become both quotidian and an integral part of popular culture. Indeed, commentators spoke of the contemporary mixed race cohort as a new phenomenon or special generation—for example, ‘Brown Britain’, ‘Beige Britain’, the ‘Melting Pot’ or ‘Ethnically Ambiguous’ generation2—that, as in America, was putting the country on a path to a post-racial future in which race itself was becoming increasingly irrelevant. Yet a century earlier, people in racially mixed unions and their children were generally denigrated by the wider society as degenerate, feckless outsiders, and frequently cast as unworthy of social citizenship. How did this radical transformation come about? What were the moments, events and movements in the history of the nation that brought about such massive change? In this book, we set out to illuminate the longstanding but often hidden or ignored history of racial mixing and mixedness in twentieth century Britain, drawing on both more familiar episodes of Britain’s racial past as well as events and experiences which are less recounted or known.
The history is, in fact, an entanglement of many stories, of different and often competing discourses not only over the course of the twentieth century but of many preceding centuries. From the outset of Britain’s imperial expansion, racial mixing was rife. Often horrendously forced, at other times freely entered into, interracial contact, liaisons and unions were at the heart of the colonial and colonised experience. In Britain too, with a minority ethnic presence dating back to Roman times, interracial relationships were not unfamiliar: in 1578, Captain George Best commented that he had ‘seen an Ethiopian as black as coal brought to England, who taking a fair English woman to wife, begat a son in all respects as black as the father’,3 while such relationships featured prominently in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594) and Othello (1604). Indeed, as Kaufmann’s (2012, 2017) work on black Tudors illustrates, there is substantial evidence of black people marrying and raising families with white English men and women across the country’s cities, towns and hamlets throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Gylman Ivie, an ‘Ethiop’ whose daughter with Anna Spencer of Dyrham, Gloucestershire, was baptised in 1578, and ‘Joane Marya a Black Moore’ who became ‘the wyffe of Thomas Smythe Byllysmaker’ in Bristol in 1600. By the eighteenth century, a diverse black presence was clearly settled in the country, with intermarriage between the predominantly black male population and white British women a common occurrence: in 1778, Captain Philip Thicknesse (1778: 108) commented of Britain that ‘in every country town, nay, in almost every village are to be seen a little race of mulattoes, mischievous as monkeys, and infinitely more dangerous.’ Similarly, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of relationships between newly settled Chinese and Lascar4 men—often sailors, who had settled in areas of London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow and other port cities—and white women, who were sometimes dubbed with monikers such as ‘Calcutta Louise’, ‘Lascar Sally’ or ‘China-Faced Nell’ due to their interracial relationships (Stadtler and Visram, n.p.).5 In addition to the presence of children produced by such relationships, Britain also frequently became home to the racially mixed sons and daughters of wealthy colonists—such as Dido Belle, Jane Harry and James Tailyour—who, as revealed in Daniel Livesay’s (2018) fascinating research, were regularly sent to the metropole to be educated or integrated into British society, an occurrence also depicted by contemporary novelists including Austen (Sanditon, 1817) and Thackeray (Vanity Fair, 1848). Certainly, interraciality was not the preserve of the working classes: in 1794, for example, The Times reported that the wife of a gentleman in Sheerness had eloped with a black servant and refused to return to her husband,6 while David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre, a wealthy, racially mixed Indian man and the first person of Asian descent to be elected to the British Parliament, married the Honourable Mary Anne Jervis, the daughter of a Viscount in 1840 (Fisher 2010).
While such relationships were certainly viewed unfavourably in certain quarters—at the turn of the nineteenth century the journalist William Cobbett raged at the ‘shocking’ number of English women who were prepared to accept not only black lovers, but much worse, black husbands (Fryer 1984: 234–235)—they did not provoke universal condemnation. Unlike in America, for example, at no point were laws banning interracial marriage ever legislated,7 and clearly many white Britons, particularly women, were not adverse to setting up home with those of a different race nor cared if others did: Cobbett remarked that the ‘disregard of decency’ amongst white women was ‘with sorrow and with shame, peculiar to the English’, while contemporary sources noted that a black man could walk down London’s Oxford Street ‘arm in arm with a well-dressed white woman, unmolested and largely unremarked’ (Fryer 1984: 235). Similarly, the ideas of ‘hybrid vigour’ and ‘hybrid degeneration’ continued to jostle against each other in scientific and popular thought as a means of explaining not only the characteristics but also the advantages or undesirability of racially mixed people. Originating from experiments in plant and animal husbandry examining whether cross mixing was considered to improve on or destroy existing biological qualities, ideas about the benefits or disadvantages of ‘human hybrids’ were also fiercely argued over by European and North American scientists, as well as being reflected in public debate and literary circles: in his escapist fantasy, the protagonist of Tennyson’s Locksley Hall (1842), for example, lauds the physical prowess of his imaginary mixed race offspring before subsequently reviling the cultural degeneracy he envisions race crossing to bring. Thus, debate around both the visibility and acceptability of interraciality ebbed and flowed, depending on the social, political and scientific climate. Indeed, as white British attitudes towards other races—bolstered by science—became more openly and unashamedly aggressive during the imperial expansion of the nineteenth century, earlier somewhat nonchalant attitudes towards racial mixing hardened and there were increasing attempts by authorities to clamp down on those aspects of interraciality which threatened the social and racial order, particularly overseas where in India, for example, white traders and colonists had frequently ‘gone native’, essentially becoming ‘white Mughals’ through marrying into Indian families and adopting many facets of Indian life (Dalrymple 2002).
While back at home the end of the nineteenth century saw less visible racial mixing due to the gradual decline in the minority ethnic population, the issue of interraciality did not disappear from the public view. In fact, discussion of the demerits of ‘Eurasians’8 and ‘half-castes’ around the Empire were familiar topics in British newspapers while the longstanding literary interest in what was popularly labelled ‘miscegenation’—interracial marriage or procreation—exploded even further in popular literature, particularly romance novels aimed at a metropolitan female target audience with messages that sought both to warn and titillate readers about the crossing of racial boundaries (Teo 2004). As our own presentation of this history shows, such globalised understandings would come to heavily influence perceptions of the occurrence of racial mixing and mixedness that would increasingly ebb and flow in Britain from 1900 onwards.
The twentieth century history of racial mixing and mixedness in Britain is thus founded on a long history of conceptualising and representing interracial people, couples and families in shifting but particular ways. Yet the twentieth century also not only built on but crystallised many of these concepts and representations in ways that continue to shape the perceptions and experiences of those mixing and of mixed race today. Early assumptions about the dynamics and patterns of mixed race families—such as those by Edward Long, the British colonial administrator and historian, who complained in 1772 about the ‘venomous and dangerous ulcer’ England was facing due to the fondness of the ‘lower class’ women in England for having relationships and children with black men (in Fryer 1984: 157–158)—were given scientific ‘credibility’ in the 1920s and 1930s when the Eugenics movement was most active: mixed racial families, studied, peered at and prodded by researchers, officials and the media, were described in pejorative terms and morally condemned in government and press reports. Such understandings were heavily influenced by emergent influential US theories, such as Everett Stonequist’s The Marginal Man (1937), which extended Robert Park’s (1928) theory of the in-between ‘marginal man’ racial outsider specifically to ‘racially hybridized people’. Legitimising the stereotype of the ‘tragic mulatto’—a product of nineteenth century American fiction that portrayed mixed black/white individuals as social and psychological misfits doomed to a tragic end9—these works and approaches reverberated through twentieth century Britain with often detrimental outcomes. For example, in addition to the official widespread castigation of interracial families in the interwar period, the Second World War saw relationships between black American GIs and white British women monitored and intentionally thwarted, and their ‘half-caste’ children—like others of mixed racial backgrounds throughout the century—deemed as confused misfits, with many ending up in care. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the war, many families of Chinese seamen and white British women were broken up due to the fathers being forcibly repatriated, whilst for decades after the first large-scale immigration in the late 1940s, those who formed interracial unions were routinely subjected to racism in the neighbourhoods where they lived. Such ...