London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. Sukhdev Sandhu

       Introduction

      Lo, lovely London, rich and fortunate,

      Famed through the world for peace and happiness¹

      THESE FLORID SENTIMENTS were ascribed to a ‘stranger from the parching zone’ by the playwright George Peele in 1585. They divert and confound: did an African really speak these lines? It seems scarcely credible for black people to have been living and working in London as far back as the sixteenth century. Yet they curiously anticipate the lyrics of ‘London Is The Place For Me’ which the calypsonian Lord Kitchener freestyled upon disembarking from the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in 1948, the year commonly thought to mark the arrival of dark-skinned foreigners to England.

      The words were actually delivered by a white actor. Peele was writing for the Lord Mayor’s Pageant, a festival of London’s merchant capitalists held annually throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to mark the investiture of the incoming Mayor. Many merchants, as brash and exhibitionist as City traders and early dot-com entrepreneurs, used the occasion to show off. In particular, they liked to flaunt their success by draping negroes in fabulously expensive silks, pearls and jewels. At one pageant a pair of elaborately dressed Moors were mounted on leopards, waving the banners of the Skinners’ Company and the City of London. At another, a black youth was transported through the capital on top of a life-size model of the Grocers’ Company crest – an elaborately carved camel – while he hurled raisins, almonds and prunes at the thousands of cheering spectators. On his head he wore a feathered wreath. At his sides stood two goddesses representing Plenty and Concord.²

      This cavalcade – extravagant, absurd, oddly affecting – is by no means an isolated example of how black people have been enlivening the life of the capital over the centuries. For the African presence in London spans the millennium. Writing with that strange mixture of churlishness and chiliasm, relish and repugnance, to which critics of the metropolis have often resorted, Richard of Devizes claimed in his twelfth-century Chronicle that the city was a hive of perversity and attracted ‘Stage players, buffoons, those that have no hair on their bodies, Garamantes [i.e. Moors], pickthanks, catamites, effemoinate sodomites, lewd musical girls, druggists, lustful persons, fortune-tellers, extortioners, nightly strollers, magicians, mimics, common beggars, tatterdemalions’.³

      During the sixteenth century more and more black faces could be seen in the capital. A trumpeter from Africa, known as John Blanke (i.e. John White), played for both Henry VII and Henry VIII. A painted roll belonging to the College of Arms shows him blowing his horn at the 1511 Westminster Tournament held to celebrate the birth of a son, the short-lived Prince Henry, to Catherine of Aragon. In

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