Foreigners (23 page)

The thousands of Irish immigrants to Leeds, who arrived
in the wake of the great famine of the 1840s, lived in
conditions at least as intolerable as those of the Jews. They
congregated in the east end of Leeds in slums of unimaginable
depravity where crime and prostitution were rife,
and these Irish Catholics often embarrassed their English
co-religionists with their supposed debauchery. However,
what was beyond dispute was the fact that conditions for
the poor in Leeds were among the worst in Britain. The
water supply was putrid and contaminated with effluence
from the sewers, and hundreds of people were often forced
to share one privy. Disease was rife, and these overcrowded
places were devoid of either daylight or fresh air.
Understandably, life on the street was, for some, a much
more palatable option. With the introduction of horsedrawn,
and then electric, tramways, by the end of the nineteenth
century some workers were able to move out of the
centre of Leeds and they began to commute to work from
the suburbs. However, the vast majority of the poor were
trapped in squalor and therefore unable to enjoy civic
improvements in education, transport, and the opening up
of public spaces for parkland.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Leeds formally
became a city and it boasted a population of nearly half
a million. However, despite the city's affluence, problems
of pollution and overcrowding continued to blight the lives
of the working population. Fears of contagious diseases
such as tuberculosis were real, as were Jewish concerns
about anti-Semitism. Despite the fact that over 2,000 Jews
volunteered for service during the First World War, Jews
continued to be regarded as 'foreigners'. In 1917 fighting
between Christian and Jewish men in the city escalated
into a full-scale riot which resulted in many Jewish properties
in the Leylands area being destroyed. The city's resistance
to perceived 'outsiders', no matter how long they have
been resident in the city, has always bedevilled Leeds. This
antipathy easily crossed over into the twentieth century,
and its virulence was fuelled by the well-known capacity
of the people of Leeds for drinking and gambling.

The economic depression of the early twentieth century
meant that there was no shortage of people to fill the
poorhouses and workhouses of the city. Although new
council-owned houses were being built to house the working
classes, those who lived below a certain economic level had
little choice but to live in slums that remained mired in a
depravity reminiscent of the early Victorian years. During
the great depression of the twenties and thirties it was
once again the clothing industry that saved Leeds. Firms
such as Burtons, Hepworths, John Collier, and Jackson's
began to corner not only the national, but the international
market in ready-made 'smart' clothes. Employment
opportunities began to grow, and eventually slums began
to be cleared. By the Second World War, Leeds was
becoming surprisingly progressive in her civic attitude
towards ongoing difficulties in housing and education, but
the city's often hostile attitude towards 'outsiders' continued
to be a deeper and more impenetrable problem.

In 1933 the Leeds Jewish Refugee Committee began to
help German Jews escape from the brutal anti-Semitism
of their own country, and by 1939 some 700 German Jews
had found refuge in Leeds. However, upon arrival they
soon discovered that local golf clubs banned Jews, and
that the tea rooms and dance halls openly advertised their
'English only' policy. Jews were treated as pariahs and often
subjected to physical attack, or swastikas being painted on
their shop windows. But this was now their home; modern
Leeds. A city of half a million people with one of the
most robust economies in Britain; a city made up of
migrants who had all come to settle on the banks of the
River Aire. Like the Irish before them, the Jewish population
of Leeds refused to move on. They were going
nowhere. This was their home. And then others arrived.

In fact, these 'others' had been appearing in Leeds for
some time. In 1791, the famous African writer Olaudah
Equiano visited Leeds while promoting sales of his influential
autobiography, and he later wrote a letter to the
Leeds
Mercury
under his adopted name, Gustavas Vassa. In
December 1859, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech in
Leeds Town Hall at a meeting of the Leeds Anti-Slavery
Society, and the third edition of his autobiography was
actually printed in Leeds. And later still, in 1901, the black
composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor composed a choral
cantata for the Leeds Triennial Music Festival. However,
aside from these visitors, there is precious little evidence
of a significant black presence prior to the Second World
War. The occasional individual does turn up in the records,
such as Abraham Johnson, who was born in Zanzibar in
1848 and who, during the second half of the nineteenth
century, worked for a while at John Marshall's Flax Mill
in Leeds. Or Pablo Fanque, a black man who owned and
operated a circus in late Victorian England, and who is
buried in Leeds. The small pre-Second World War black
population in Leeds consisted almost entirely of domestic
servants, theatrical performers, or industrial workers, and
they existed as isolated individuals in an otherwise homogeneous
white society.

After the Second World War many 'demobbed' colonial
soldiers, aircrew, and seaman from Africa and the
Caribbean 'stayed on' in some English cities. In 1945 the
black population of Leeds largely consisted of such persons
but, in common with the rest of the country, the numbers
were negligible. However, by the mid-fifties the nation had
begun a programme of massive recruitment of Caribbean
labour in order that the post-Second World War infrastructure
of Britain might be maintained, particularly in
health and transport. As a result, dark strangers began to
appear in far greater numbers on the streets of Leeds.
According to the 1951 census, there were 107 West Indians
and 45 Africans living in the city. Ten years later, in 1961,
there were 2,186 West Indians and Africans, which included
carpenters, masons, tailors, mechanics, painters, and electricians.
These newcomers of African origin were visible
and vulnerable on the streets of Leeds, but they no longer
needed to think of themselves as being isolated. A community
was being formed.

Chapeltown's history is written into its architecture.
Its huge semi-detached and terraced houses, built for
the prosperous, Christian new middle classes in the
early 1900s, its two parks and its wide, tree-lined streets
are now interspersed with buildings which were once
synagogues, and Asian-owned mini-markets selling
the produce of the world. Halfway up Chapeltown
Road there's a wall which, throughout the seventies,
bore the inscription REMEMBER OLUWALE in huge
white letters. Near that wall there's an ugly vacant lot
which, until recently, was the site of the elegant
country club built in the twenties for those prosperous
Christians. The club became Chapeltown's
most notorious pub. White Leeds imagined that inside
the Hayfield every type of black sinner was making
mischief. A curious corollary of this fantasy was that
the Hayfield became a kind of 'black space', where
whites only entered if they accepted the rules laid
down by the black men who played dominoes, drank,
sold a little weed and checked the ladies. Since these
rules were easy to accept – mutual respect and toleration,
whatever status the outside world conferred
upon you – lots of adventurous whites found themselves
at home there. It's said that David Oluwale
frequented a similar place in Chapeltown, a nightclub
called, in his day, the Glass Bucket, but I'm pretty
certain the early evening would have found him in
the Hayfield. The Hayfield was erased from the map
around 2004 – yet another sign of the city's inability
to deal properly with its black citizens.

Dr Max Farrar, Leeds Metropolitan University, 2006
The Chapeltown Enterprise Centre stands at the bottom
of Button Hill. The centre features the Best Fade Unisex
Salon. Across the road is the Silver Tree Club which, these
days, is a bricked-up, burned-out building. Chapeltown has
changed. Chapeltown no longer boasts good manners. It
is becoming derelict and infested with drug dealers. Garbage
lies piled up in the streets, and there is a paucity of civic
pride. Modern Chapeltown is home to a lost generation.
A young woman shouts at me. 'Hey you, black man.' Her
voice is raw and flat. A broad Yorkshire voice. As she
crosses the street and walks toward me I can see that she
is swathed in a big black coat. 'Hey you, black man.' Her
eyes are wet with drugs, and she promises me that she will
do anything. 'Black man.' I quicken my steps
.
I glance back
at the Best Fade Unisex Salon. I want to tell the people
in the enterprise centre that they are right to try, but they
should look around themselves. There is no real enterprise.
No real business, beyond survival, in this faded
Chapeltown. And across the street, where the Hayfield pub
would have stood, there is now nothing. Nothing at all.
It is gone.
(Like you, David. Gone.)
The bottom of Button
Hill is empty.

The dark 'others' began to arrive in Leeds in the fifties.
But what kind of a city was this that expected these
newcomers to live like animals in abandoned bombed-out
slums? The emigrants had heard rumours that the English
often set fires in their houses, but until they reached England
and felt the sharp bite of their first winter they did not
fully understand. But they soon learned. However, what
they never learned to understand, or accept, was the racism
which confined them to filthy rooms. Landlords, including
Leeds City Council, seemed intent upon extracting money
from them in exchange for rooms in which it was barely
possible to turn around; rooms which one had to share
with mice and fleas and rats, where water ran down the
walls when it rained, and thereafter snails crawled up them;
rooms where the nearest bathroom was your handbasin,
and your one toilet bowl was in the next street and had
to be shared with 200 others. The mother country was
welcoming her citizens at the front door, and then quickly
ushering them out through the back door crying, 'No
Blacks', crying, 'No Coloureds', crying, 'Go back to where
you come from'. And David heard these shouts, but he
wanted an education in order that he might make something
of himself in England, and so he redoubled his
polite efforts to learn. He worked harder, and studied
harder, but still they took him to Armley jail, and then
on to the asylum where they changed his personality. And
when they released him back into the world, David soon
discovered that he had lost his damp, cold room at 209
Belle Vue Road. Even this dismal place had slipped through
his fingers, but he still possessed his city of Leeds on the
banks of the River Aire. David still had his city.

I have to say that by the later stages I believe some fatalism
had begun to creep into David's spirit. He expected to be
arrested, so he didn't bother to try and hide. He just kept
going back to the heart of the city centre and staying there
where he knew that he would be very visible. It was as
though he was challenging them to remove him from the
city. They would beat him and arrest him, but his attitude
was clear: 'I'll just do what I want to do and I won't disappear.
I won't be invisible.' It was all very rational to him.
He knew the consequences, but he continued to defy
people. As I said, he could have slept every night in the
back of his Ghanaian friend's warehouse if he'd have wanted
to. He could have had a flat, or he could have been safe
and invisible in different parts of the city, but he didn't
want to disappear. He wanted to be seen, and Leeds was
his battleground – his home – and he wasn't going to leave
his home. In the later stages he sometimes gave the outward
signs of being a shambling, slow-witted, slow-walking man,
but he always knew where he was going. He knew
Meanwood, Hyde Park, and Chapeltown; he understood
the streets. He knew the safe areas, but he also knew that
if he took Step A then Step B would follow. He made a
rational decision to take Step A, which was to go back
into Leeds city centre and claim his right to be in the city.
Step B was to be beaten, arrested and then carted off to
Armley jail. First Step A and then Step B, but he wouldn't
give up. During this time there was, to my memory, no
other black person from Africa or the Caribbean who was
homeless and on the street. In the sixties, David was the
only black man sleeping rough on the streets of Leeds.

My father was a military-minded man. Being an army
sergeant, he was dominant in the family and he was difficult.
My joining the police force was his idea and he said
it would make a man of me. My mother was silent on
the matter, as she was on most things. She was ten years
younger than my father, and she didn't get a look in when
it came to decisions. At the age of nineteen I thought I'd
give it a crack and join the Leeds police force and see if
I could get my father on my side. Initially I liked Leeds,
and I liked the life on The Headrow. I was stationed in
the centre of Leeds. Millgarth Station covered a nonresidential
area. Issues at Millgarth were mainly to do with
crime, vagrancy, revellers in the pubs, drug users, and there
was supposed to be a 'problem' with students. I was very
friendly with the tradesmen on my patch, but what I didn't
do was make friends with anybody in the force. Not one
single person. This caused me problems because the police
service in Leeds was like a closed club. I remember being
told to choose my friends from within the force, and not
from outside it, and this was a sticking point for me. I
had been seen by someone in a pub in Wetherby with my
old school pals and I was on the carpet for that. I was
up in front of an inspector and he said, 'Who are you
mixing with outside duty hours?' I remember thinking
this wasn't actually going to work for me. On duty or off
duty, you had to stay within the group of officers, but I
didn't really have any friends in the force. But, at least to
begin with, I did enjoy working in the centre of Leeds.
There
were
some black people that would turn up in the
centre, and they didn't have an easy time. You might find
somebody who'd been out drinking and hadn't caught the
bus home, or somebody who was trying to get into a
hotel, or somebody who was separated from their group
of friends. But generally speaking, black people and
mixed-race people were rare sights in Leeds city centre at
that time in the sixties. I patrolled mainly around the area
of Vicar Lane, The Headrow, and then going down
towards the river area and around the open market. The
business people – café owners, restaurant owners, shop
owners – they all regarded the police as people who could
do no wrong. And the police were fiercely proud of this
and so there was a very strong feeling that the police were
there to serve the incumbent business people. I befriended
quite a few café owners, you know, people that you could
go and chat to, and who made you feel that you were part
of the community. Now in the daytime, that was all very
nice and it was all very cosy. In the night it was a different
place. The streets were deserted, people had gone home,
and the police, what were they to do? What was their job
then? Well, it was to check property. To scour about and
make sure that they didn't find broken windows around
entrances at the rear of properties. At night the city centre,
instead of being the business people's place, became very
much the Leeds of the authorities and of the policemen.
And that's really an important thing – the change of the
city from day to night. On my patch I befriended quite
a few dossers and I used to go and chat to them. There
was a tea stall in the open market which may or may not
still be operating, and it used to open at about five in the
morning, and I would always drop in. And you'd get a
mixed bunch of people and they accepted me. I used to
take my hat off and chat with them. In fact one officer
said that I had the attitude of a social worker to the job,
which was not thought to be a good thing. But I did, I
used to take my hat off. I was in a very difficult position.
Life with my father was greatly improved, but I soon
realised that I didn't like some of what was going on in
Leeds. I was very concerned because it was becoming
obvious that there were some difficulties for a certain
individual. I was in a terrible state of moral dilemma. If
anybody was still about in Leeds city centre after the late
night taxi queue it was very rare. A couple of times I did
find a drunk, but it was very rare. In the two years I
worked the patch, I can't remember finding a person at
say four o'clock in the morning. I never did. Only David.
I never found another dosser sleeping out anywhere. The
other dossers might have had somewhere they knew they
could go; to the crypt or whatever. I can't remember exactly
when
I first saw David, but I know I saw him on my foot
patrol in the Millgarth area. He would go into the deep
shops. I know the Bridal House was one that he went
into. Yeah. He'd be in there. But he'd be in other ones on
Vicar Lane as well. He tried to get into the deep shops.
The ones which have got two entrances. He was always
alone. I never saw him with anybody, and he wouldn't be
at the café in the morning. Some of the other dossers
would be at the café, but not him. I used to wonder where
he got his food from. I saw him quite a lot, but he never
ran away from me. He wouldn't enter into a conversation
with a policeman, he just wouldn't talk. But he didn't run
away. Whereas, if he saw Inspector Ellerker or Sergeant
Kitching he would run, and he would shout. But he
wouldn't run from me.