Slaves lie in two rows, one above the other, on each side of the ship, close to each other, like books upon a shelf. I have known them so close, that the shelf would not, easily, contain one more.11
It is an astonishing metaphor – domesticating the inferno of the Middle Passage, week after week of shitting, starving, shrieking hell, to the status of an over-stocked personal library. And it was against this context that ex-slaves kick-started the history of black writing about London. Yet, even then, as we can see from reading the letters of Ignatius Sancho, imagination and idiosyncrasy kept spilling out of every page. The metaphors and allusions pile up. The tone of his correspondence, far from being strait-laced, is comic and highly stylized. Not only does Sancho elicit a good deal of pleasure from writing about London, he imparts it to his readers. So, I believe, does the work of many of the authors I discuss in this book.
My goal, then, is partly archaeological: to uncover and expose the sheer variety of works about London that have been written since Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s slave autobiography in 1772. Indeed, almost every author whose roots lie in the former colonies has produced work, fictional or non-fictional, focusing on life in the English metropolis. To embark upon a study of this vast corpus of writing is, in effect, a decision to write a history of black British literature. At the risk of conflating the word with the world, the textual with the social, it’s also a history of black and Asian London itself. Read properly, the printed page is actually a very good place to turn to for an insight into coloured immigrants’ relationship to the capital. Cities have always been imaginative as well as physical places. We mythologize and fantasize about them. We create mental maps. Sometimes they’re created for us. This is particularly true for colonial writers, many of whom were taught about London and its ‘correct meaning’ in tiny village schools thousands of miles away from the actual city whose reality proved to be rather different.
It could be argued, of course, that the literary history I am about to narrate could also be told about other ethnic groups who arrived in London during the past few centuries. There would be a good deal of truth in this, and the likes of Children of the Ghetto (1892) by Israel Zangwill or Emanuel Litvinoff’s Journey Through A Small Planet (1972) certainly do have a lot in common with many of the books looked at in London Calling. Not only do they cover the same benighted urban locales and totter-down social milieux, but they share with black and Asian accounts what the critic Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’. This includes a keen interest in labour (both its dignity and indignities); an uneasy relationship with what is perceived as ‘mainstream’ culture – and an attendant refusal to neglect marginal sectors of society; and, most of all, a hunger to find a literary voice capable of evoking the hopes and fears, the din and chatter, of people who speak in tongues dissonant to the ears of longer-resident Londoners.12
Yet the simple fact of not being white in London matters a great deal. It means black and Asian accounts of the capital cannot be conflated with those of writers from other immigrant groups. Three centuries of imperial history also make a difference: authors in this book often bridle at the social roles they feel Londoners, victims of shoddy education, are asking them to inhabit.
I have, as will become apparent, a soft spot for rhapsodical writers, those who are not embarrassed to talk about having fun in the city. Black and Asian writing is often seen as worthy, rather than enjoyable. Reading histories of immigrants in London one is often left with the impression that if they weren’t being bruised and harried by hostile whites, then they spent all their spare time agitating and organizing. Many immigrants were harried. And a not-insubstantial minority did agitate. But feel-good (or should that be feel-angry?) narratives which impute to their subjects ceaseless radicalism tend to overlook the fact that, throughout the centuries, the primary struggles for most black and Asian Londoners have been domestic, not political. They wanted to have a bed to sleep in, food on the table, friends with whom to banter, someone to cuddle up to at night, their kids to be safe and happy. The pursuit of pleasure and comfort overrode the pursuit of political equity.
Not that the two are mutually opposite goals. Nor would I want to downplay how challenging life in the capital has been for black and Asian Londoners. The numerous racially-motivated killings in recent years, of young men like Stephen Lawrence and Ricky Reel, attest to that fact. And yet I would still argue that London has been good to people coming from the old Empire, just as they have been good for London. That’s why so many of them live here rather than, say, in Taunton or the north-west of England. They have never had to reside in segregated ghettos as in the United States. Riots have been few. Inter-racial contact has been common. Year after year, decade after decade, from one century to the next, they have come here, from abroad as well as from other parts of England, by various means – from slave ship to the freezing undercarriage of a jet plane – in order to flee poverty, apartheid, ordinariness. They found in this old, old city a chance to become new, to slough off their pasts. London gave them the necessary liberty. It asked for very little in return. Certainly not for loyalty: newcomers were able to rail against slavery, dictatorship, imperialism, London itself. They had free congress. They were emotionally and intellectually unshackled. And so, for all the bleakness and hard times recounted in it, this book is, as are many of the books it discusses, a love letter to London.
CHAPTER ONE ‘In Our Grand Metropolis’
Sale of a Negro Boy. – In the account of the trial of John Rice, who was hanged for forgery at Tyburn, May 4, 1763, it is said, ‘A commission of bankruptcy having been taken out against Rice, his effects were sold by auction, and among the rest his negro boy.’ I could not have believed such a thing could have taken place so lately; there is little doubt it was the last of the kind.
Poet’s Corner A.A.
(Letter to Notes and Queries, 1858)1
it is wrong for 20th-century multi-culturalists to invent a spurious history for black settlement in Britain before the Fifties and Sixties.
(Geoffrey Littlejohns, letter to The Independent, 1995)2
A.A. WAS WRONG. In the years following his letter of baffled disgust, many of the antiquarians, genealogists and men of letters who made up the readership of Notes and Queries wrote in to provide subsequent examples of African men and women being parcelled off to the highest bidder at public auctions held in the centre of the English capital. A.A.’s question, the ensuing lost-and-found advertisements, and the details of slave auctions which were reprinted in the journal, are evidence of the speed and ease with which London’s malodorous past had been forgotten in some of the most learned quarters of English society. Although slavery had only been fully abolished as recently as 1838, it required archivists and antiquarians to fill in the large chinks that were already emerging in the public memory.
The most cursory glance at the paintings, the prints and the literature will prove how myopic it is to insist on a culturally homogeneous conception of the eighteenth century. Empire not only underpinned the swelling British economy during this period, but was crucial to the capital’s well-being. The Thames allowed London to become one of the world’s leading trading centres. Tea, sugar, cotton, cloth, spices, coffee, rum, fruit, wine, tobacco, rice, corn, oil were just some of the products ferried into London from India, Africa and the Americas. Nearly all of these goods depended on slave labour. Not for nothing did a coin – the guinea – derive its etymology from the West African region of that name, the area from which hundreds of thousands of natives were seized in order to work on plantations across the Atlantic. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the African became
