Before the Windrush ─ Race Relations in Twentieth-Century Liverpool

Long before the arrival of the Empire Windrush after the Second World War, Liverpool was widely known for its polyglot population, its boisterous sailortown and cosmopolitan profile of transients, sojourners and settlers. Regarding Britain as the mother country, coloured colonials arrived in Liverpool for what they thought to be internal migration into a common British world. What they encountered, however, was very different. Their legal status as British subjects notwithstanding, coloured colonials in Liverpool were the first to discover: There Aint No Black in the Union Jack.Despite the absence of significant new immigration, despite the high levels of mixed dating, marriages and parentage, and despite pioneer initiatives in race and community relations, black Liverpudlians encountered racial discrimination, were left marginalized and disadvantaged and, in the aftermath of the Toxteth riots of 1981, the once proud cosmopolitan Liverpool stood condemned for its uniquely horrific racism. Before the

John Belchem is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Liverpool, author of Irish, Catholic and Scouse: The History of the Liverpool-Irish, 1800-1940 (LUP, 2007) and editor of Liverpool 800: Character, Culture, History (LUP, 2006).