2 Metropolitan legacies: rethinking Britishness

Decolonisation led to the movement of people from the former empire into Britain. This resulted in legal and cultural changes to the way that national identity was codified and understood.

In 1948 Clement Atlee’s (1883–1967) Labour government passed the British Nationality Act. This law linked the colonies and Commonwealth countries to the metropole through shared citizenship by creating a single form of legal status ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’. It decreed that ‘the expression “British subject” and the expression “Commonwealth citizen” shall have the same meaning’ (British Nationality Act, 1948). This meant that ‘After 1948, a non-white person born in colonial Kenya or Jamaica had enjoyed identical citizenship, on equal terms, to Winston Churchill’ (Patel, 2021, p. 22).

The Act defined nationhood not by blood ties to, or habitation within Britain’s geographic borders but through the shared history of empire. It gave millions of people worldwide the right to live and work in Britain. It led to around 500,000 people from the Commonwealth and British colonies moving to Britain between 1948 and 1962.

After the Second World War, Britain needed workers to help rebuild. People were invited by the government from across the empire. We are going to look in more depth at the Caribbean. Men were offered jobs in Britain in transport, coal mining, textiles, agriculture and construction. Women were offered opportunities in the newly established National Health Service.

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Figure 3 ‘London is our home now!’, Caribbean Challenge Feature. Photographs by Maurice Ambler depict scenes from Brixton which was known as London’s ‘Caribbean Quarter’.

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Photograph montage of nine images arranged around a central text that reads "London is our home now! It is Saturday afternoon, and grey old London is relaxing after a week of toil. Through her crowded districts move the sons and daughters of the West Indies, as they are doing in many other parts of Britain, discovering a new way of living. What do they really think of it? These pictures taken for CARIBBEAN CHALLENGE, in Brixton, by Maurice Ambler, lift the lid on life in London's 'Caribbean Quarter'." Image 1 (top left) A group of Black men standing in the street next to traffic lights are waiting to cross the road. Caption reads "What you doing this evening? Let's go some place and enjoy ourselves." Image 2 (top central) Two Black men dressed in bus driver's uniforms stand on the edge of the street. Behind them men and women walk along the street. Caption reads "This bus system is a hell of an improvement - here buses really run on time." Image 3 (top right) A portrait image of a smartly dressed Black man. He wears a trilby hat which is placed to the side of his head, a suit jacket with a pocket handkerchief, and a white shirt with a bow tie. Caption reads "I feel like I want to go home... want some sun and a sea bath. But maybe I'll stay a little longer and save some more money." Image 4 (bottom right) Two Black men wearing suits walking down the street. Caption reads "You have to hurry to keep warm here... And man, what a heap of clothes!" Image 5 (bottom centre) A young Black boy wearing a cap stares into the camera. Behind him is a pram containing a Black baby wearing a bonnet. A Black man wearing a suit stands next to the pram with his back to the camera on the edge of the street. The street has a car driving past and white woman crosses the road. Caption reads "Baby minding? Not really my line!" Image 6 (bottom centre) A Black woman with a handkerchief tied around her head is being served at a market stall by a white man. He holds a bag open in front of a counter laden with eggs and meat. There is a weighing scale in the background. Caption reads "Sorry madam, we don't sell saltfish. Try some nice bacon and eggs? She learns to shop the Brixton way..." Image 7 (bottom left) A street lined each side with impressive terraced homes. In the foreground are steps leading up the front door of a house, a child stands in the small front garden leaning on a low wall staring into the street. A woman walks on the path and there are cars parked in the road. Caption reads "London makes a person feel so small. It's a good thing there are so many of us in this street." Mr Turner's daughter looks at Somerleyton, Road Brixton. Image 8 (centre left) A Black woman attends to the stove and a Black man stands up reading a newspaper in a cramped domestic interior. A Black child sits at the dining table at the front of the image and a large wardrobe is against the wall. Caption reads "We're glad to have a place to live, though it's a lot of rent. And we're even learning to do our cooking indoors!" say Mr and Mrs Turner. Image 9 (centre) A Black man walks down a street wearing a trilby hat, jacket, trousers and smart shoes. He is carrying shopping in a bag.

Figure 3 ‘London is our home now!’, Caribbean Challenge Feature. Photographs by Maurice Ambler depict scenes from Brixton which was known...

For men like Arthur Curling who served in the RAF during the war, he was not an immigrant in a foreign country, he was returning home. He articulated a sense of British national identity that was cultivated in the colonies through cultural practices and the education system.

‘We were always British. In Jamaica I can remember, when it was the Queen’s birthday or the King’s birthday or the Coronation, everything was done the way Britain wanted us to. We hadn’t our own identity… England was the ‘mother country’ as they used to say and anything the English did… was always right’ (Curling quoted in Hammond Perry, 2015, p. 60).

This sense was echoed in the newspaper reporting of the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, with the Evening Standard running the headline ‘Welcome Home! Evening Standard plane greets the 400 sons of Empire’. Not all the media were as welcoming. The Derby Daily Telegraph of 10 June 1948 ran the headline ‘Jamaicans Want British Jobs’ and the Shield Daily News of 22 June 1948 wrote ‘200 Jobless Jamaicans Come to Britain’.

Despite taking on largely unskilled jobs in Britain, 1 in 4 men and almost half of women were non-manual workers (Fryer, 1984). They faced racism and ‘colour bar’ issues including in employment, housing, and leisure activities. Campaign groups resisted these forms of discrimination arguing that equal citizenship should mean equal treatment. For example, the Bristol Bus Boycott in 1963 was a protest aimed at the Bristol Omnibus Company for discrimination against Black and Asian employees.

Eventually the British Nationality Act was replaced with legislation which made it increasingly difficult for people to claim citizenship and migrate to Britain from its former empire. Nonetheless, the experience of empire transformed the metropole creating a diverse multicultural society.