A People's History of Race and Racism 01

Can you predict what ordinary people living in Britain during the last century thought about race and racism? Are you ready to proceed with this installment of A People's History, in which your job is work out how the general public experienced living in postwar Britain?

• Yes
• No

In this quiz, you'll be asked to guess how ordinary people answered questions in opinion polls and surveys conducted from the 1950s to the 1990s by organisations like Gallup and NOP. This isn't the usual kind of quiz which tests what you already know - it's designed to leave you knowing more at the end than you knew at the beginning. Don't worry if you find it difficult to predict the answers at the start. After all, they say that 'the past is a foreign country' in which people thought and acted then in surprising, sometimes disturbing, ways from our perspective. Before we begin, how much background knowledge do you have of public attitudes to race and racism in postwar Britain prior to taking this quiz?

• None
• Not much
• Some
• Plenty
• Masses

Let's start with some population statistics. Approximately what percentage of the British population do you think was Black or Asian in 1901?

• 0.0003
• 0.003
• 0.03
• 0.3

So Britain was a very white place at the start of the twentieth century. Things changed somewhat in WWI, tens of thousands of Indian soldiers were stationed in Britain on their way to or from the Western Front. Upon their departure, Britain's Black and Asian population returned to consisting primarily of students, sailors, dockers and their families living in London, Liverpool, Cardiff and Tyneside. What do you think was the main reason why the non-white population in Britain remained so small before WWII?

• Immigration restrictions
• Limited job opportunities
• Expensive boat fares

Hundreds of thousands of non-white people served in Britain as part of the war effort during World War Two. Where did the vast majority of them come from?

• The Caribbean
• India
• The United States
• West Africa

Answer explanation

Approximately a quarter of a million Black US servicemen were stationed in Britain during WWII. There were also several thousand West Indian volunteers in Britain, mainly recruited by the RAF, plus a few thousand Indian troops. Millions of Indians and hundreds of thousands of West Africans joined the Allied war effort, but they were primarily stationed in Asia and Africa.

In 1948, something unexpected happened when over a hundred ex-servicemen joined other West Indians aboard the SS Empire Windrush to seek their fortune in Britain. They were followed by over 100000 migrants from the Caribbean to Britain in the 1950s. What was the primary reason for this mass migration?

• The British Nationality Act 1948
• British employers advertising jobs in the West Indies
• Immigration controls in the United States

Answer explanation

When the United States government introduced new immigration quotas in 1952, it effectively prevented West Indians from seeking work there. They were permitted to live and work in Britain as Commonwealth citizens, but this right had existed prior to the British Nationality Act 1948. Only small numbers of migrants were directly recruited by British employers such as London Transport.

There were few large-scale attempts to find out about the racial attitudes of white British people in the first half of the twentieth century. Most research on the issue focused on port communities or student populations. An exception was a survey carried out by the American sociologist Richard LaPiere shortly after WWI. He struck up conversations with people in public places and asked them whether they would ‘let children associate with those of good coloured people.’ His conclusion - that most British people were racially prejudiced - was widely dismissed by British researchers. Why do you think they rejected his findings?

• He did not ask identical questions to every person he interviewed
• He did not interview a random sample of people
• He was considered to overestimate the level of racial prejudice in Britain
• All of these reasons

More reliable polls and surveys about migration began to appear in the 1950s. The first of these was conducted by the Colonial Office in 1951 and asked a nationwide sample of adults whether they had every encountered a 'coloured' person. What proportion of people said that they had done so?

• A tenth
• A quarter
• A half
• Three-quarters

The 1951 Colonial Office poll found that people divided evenly over whether 'more coloured people should be encouraged to come and work over here' if there was work aplenty for them to do. There was more of a consensus about what might prevent them from finding it 'easy to settle down in this country'. What do you think was the most common response?

• Different customs
• Difficulty in making friends and finding jobs
• Racial prejudice; the colour bar
• The weather

Answer explanation

70% saw prejudice and discrimination as the main challenges facing non-white migrants. 20% mentioned the weather, 9% mentioned different customs and 4% mentioned difficulties in finding jobs or making friends.

Britain officially had no 'colour bar' of the kind that existed in apartheid South Africa or the segregationist US South. There were no laws which prohibited people from any activity based on their skin colour. At the same time, there were no laws which prevented individuals and organisations from discriminating on grounds of race.

• a
• b
• c
• d