Dark days in the Dale

One of the great books to have come out of the British-West Indian encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the Jamaican journalist (and former London bus conductor) Donald Hinds. Published in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Jamaicans and other West Indians resident in Britain. Throughout, Hinds is haunted by the ‘race disturbances’ that swept Britain in 1958. Tensions erupted first in Nottingham then, more grievously, in west London. White youths (‘Teddy Boys’ to the tabloid press) beat up blacks and Asians in Shepherd’s Bush and the area then known as Notting Dale between the factories of Wood Lane and the newly claimed middle-class streets of Notting Hill Gate. Sir Oswald Mosley’s Union Party rallied support for the ‘Keep Britain White’ cause. So began four days of the worst rioting the United Kingdom had ever seen.

The following year, on the night of 17 May 1959, a young black carpenter from Antigua, Kelso Cochrane, was fatally stabbed in a street off Portobello Road. With Machiavellian adroitness, Mosley held a meeting at the murder scene (today marked by The Grove gastro pub on Southam Street). To cries of ‘So say all of us!’ Mosley declared that the time had now come to admit that there was indeed a ‘coloured problem’ in the British midst. Kelso’s funeral in Kensal Green cemetery was attended by over 1,000 mourners, black and white. The show of white support did little to prevent the notion, fast growing among West Indians, that Britain was no longer so welcoming to Commonwealth subjects. As Hinds put it: ‘After Cochrane’s death we had to rethink everything — we had to revise our faith in the Union Jack.’ To this day, Cochrane’s killer has not been found.