Black Britain's darkest hour

In 1968, in one of the most controversial speeches of Britain's political history, Tory MP Enoch Powell warned the nation against opening the 'floodgates' to black immigrants. It caused a storm of protest. Sarfraz Manzoor recalls the impact on his family and, 40 years on, returns to Powell's constituency to meet those Powell wanted to 'send home'

It is a bright, blowy Saturday afternoon in Birmingham city centre and I am standing outside the Burlington Hotel, trying to turn back time. Hooded teenagers huddle in groups, shoppers weighed down with bags hurry past the busking saxophonist mournfully playing 'What a Wonderful World'. How must it all have looked 40 years ago when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, Louis Armstrong had just had a No 1 single and the Burlington was called the Midland Hotel? It was here on another Saturday afternoon, 20 April 1968, 16 days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, that local Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered a lecture to an audience of 85 Conservatives in a second-floor meeting room.

Powell was 55 and shadow defence spokesman under Edward Heath. As Health Minister eight years earlier, he had been encouraging immigrants from the Commonwealth to work in the understaffed NHS. Now, he was about to make a speech warning in the most apocalyptic terms of the consequences of rising immigration. The speech remains the most controversial in British political history. In its most notorious passage, Powell, classicist as well as politician, quoted the Roman poet Virgil, warning: 'As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood".'

The 'Rivers of Blood' speech destroyed Powell's political ambitions, but 40 years later, it remains a toxic cloud floating above all political debate on race relations. The teenagers and shoppers on New Street may not recognise the significance of what happened in Birmingham, but in Wolverhampton, which Powell represented in Parliament for 24 years, there are many for whom the past is not so easily forgotten. In Wolverhampton I meet Lance Bunkley, one of the first black immigrants to arrive. He is 70, a tall man with a rich, musical voice who now lives in a four-bedroom home with three cars in the driveway. We walk through the living room where paintings of African women hang. He points out a framed photograph of himself with Muhammad Ali.

'If Britain's present boom is to be maintained,' declared Wolverhampton's local newspaper in 1956, 'more workers must be found. Where? The new recruits to British industry must come, it would seem, from abroad, from the colonies.'

Lance had arrived in Britain a year earlier as a 17-year-old after a three-week journey by ship from Jamaica. 'I came to Wolverhampton because they called it the Black Country,' he explained. 'I thought there would be black people living there.'

In the spring of 1968, he lived on the same road as Enoch Powell. 'I remember his military moustache and his brigadier walk,' he recalls. 'He had to walk past my house to get to town - but he always walked on his side of the road, never on my side.' What did he make of Powell? 'He was a psychotic escapist with megalomaniac tendencies,' he replies. 'Nobody knew who he was, he was just an MP - until he made that speech.'

The day before the speech, Powell confided to a friend that it would go up 'like a rocket and stay up'. It was not the first time he had talked about immigration. He had given a similar speech only two months earlier in Walsall, but it failed to make an impact. This time, he sent out advance copies to ensure that the media would be present and chose to illustrate his opinions with the raw views of his Wolverhampton constituents.

Dressed in a dark, pinstripe suit, Powell, grim-faced and thin-lipped, recounted how one man had told him: 'In this country in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.' To prevent future calamity, Britain had to encourage voluntary repatriation and end new immigration. 'We must be mad, literally mad,' Powell declared, voice rising and eyes glowering, 'as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.'

The significance of Powell's words was not instantly obvious to those in the audience. John Mellor, a superintendent in the West Midlands constabulary at the time, recalls: 'It wasn't his finest moment. There were lots of press men gathered, but I didn't find the speech electrifying.' When news of the speech reached London, it was condemned by the press and Powell's colleagues. 'An evil speech,' declared the Times, claiming: 'This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history.'

Three members of the shadow cabinet threatened to resign unless Powell was sacked. Heath dismissed him, but even as Powell was being cast into political exile, his supporters were taking to the streets. 'There were public demonstrations in Wolverhampton and London,' says Robert Shepherd, Powell's biographer and producer of a forthcoming BBC Radio 4 documentary on the 'Rivers of Blood' speech. 'One thousand dockers went on strike to protest at his dismissal, marching to Westminster carrying placards saying "Back Britain, not Black Britain".' On the Tuesday after the speech, 23,000 letters arrived at Powell's home and the Post Office had to provide a van solely for Powell's mail. During the next 10 days, there were 700 telegrams and 100,000 letters. Only 800 were in disagreement.

Although Powell claimed he was speaking out on behalf of concerned constituents, there was little evidence of racial tension in the city. As far back as 1955, the managing director of a rubber firm that employed black workers had told the Wolverhampton newspaper: 'There is not antipathy of any kind between white employees and the coloured men.' As a policeman in 1968, Mellor recalls little tension between the communities. Lance remembers: 'Before the speech, a lone black man could walk home at night, but after that there was fear. I remember trying to help an elderly person on the bus and being told, "Take your black hands off me." If you were a black man dating a white woman, the police would track you, then they'd beat you.'

Gulam Haider Ellam was working as a machine-tool fitter in the spring of 1968. 'In the afternoon after work, I would be cycling home and I would see a gang of skinheads waiting for me. I would have to pedal so fast to try and get away from them.' The police were not trusted to offer protection, so Gulam would carry a metal chain for defence, while Asian bus drivers would keep hockey sticks with them on their routes.

The speech radicalised those who opposed Powell. Blacks, whites and Asians met in church halls and planned protests against the damage being done to their town's reputation. (The Rock Against Racism movement also owed its creation to Powell after a drunken comment from Eric Clapton during a concert in Birmingham in 1976, when the musician told an audience to vote for Powell to stop Britain becoming 'a black colony' inspired the founding of the anti-racism movement.)

The speech also implied that ethnic minorities would never be truly British. In 1968, my father had been in Britain for five years and Powell occupies a surprisingly significant place in my teenage psyche. My mental image of him was of a glacial man, always dressed in pinstripe suits, with unsmiling eyes, a face in a fixed scowl, shivering with racial fury. When I learnt that he was a poet and a brilliant scholar, double-starred first in Latin and Greek from Cambridge, it served as a reminder that bigotry was not the sole dominion of the ignorant. Powell's name was regularly cited whenever my father wanted to remind me how easily Britain could turn against us. It sometimes seemed that he and my father were bound together in a conspiracy to force me to accept that I was not and never would be British.

More than Norman Tebbit, Powell frightened me. Tebbit wanted me to support England, but Powell wanted me to support England while living in Pakistan. Repatriation was a most terrifying word for a young boy who knew nothing but Britain and who feared what might happen should Powell and his supporters ever gain power. He taught my family the importance of always having a suitcase packed and a Pakistani passport.

For Powell, immigration was a threat to social cohesion. He believed the native population was in danger of being swamped by an alien culture. It was this fear, encapsulated in the potent image of a white woman living in fear of her black neighbours, which made the 'Rivers of Blood' speech so powerful.

Powell told his Birmingham audience of a letter he had received about a widowed pensioner who had seen all her white neighbours moving out of her street. She had lost her husband and both sons in the war and was now, it was claimed, being woken every morning by West Indian neighbours demanding to use her telephone. 'She is becoming afraid to go out,' Powell said. 'Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming wide-eyed piccaninnies.'

Powell refused to name the woman, but last year a BBC Radio 4 documentary claimed to have identified her as Druscilla Cotterill, who died 30 years ago. She lived in Brighton Place, minutes from Powell's Wolverhampton home on Merridale Road. Today, the house where Enoch lived is immaculately maintained, white-painted with neatly trimmed hedges. Powell, the man who had complained of living 'within the proverbial stone's throw of streets which went black', had later sold his home to a West Indian couple.

On my way to Brighton Place, I pass a young Asian man washing his car. Has he heard of Enoch Powell? 'Tory MP? BNP views?' he says.

Brighton Place was torn down 20 years ago. Now it has been renovated and renamed Brighton Mews. Forty years ago, Mrs Cotterill lived there on her own and she rented out rooms to West Indian lodgers. Those who knew her are divided on whether she was the woman referred to in the speech. John Mellor tells me he was shown a specimen box kept in a storeroom in the police station that contained the excrement pushed through her letterbox. 'The idea that she was invented is absolute rubbish,' he says. Lance Bunkley retorts: 'That letter [the anonymous letter read out by Powell] is a total invention. Not only was Druscilla not racist, she had a black male friend who lived next door.'

The parents of Colleen Moore, now 71, lived in Brighton Place. She remembers Druscilla as a tiny woman who liked a drink. 'She was the sort of woman who young children might mistake for a witch,' she tells me. 'She eventually had to be sectioned.' Moore does not believe Druscilla is the woman Powell was referring to. 'The letter says the woman had two children, but Druscilla didn't have any children so it couldn't have been her.'

Even if such incidents were true, they were the exception rather than the rule: in the main, it was black and Asian people who were being abused. In his excellent biography of Powell, the late Paul Foot described how he spent 1964-65 travelling and talking to people who held anti-immigrant views. 'In Southall, Birmingham and Bradford, I was told that "an old lady of 68" had been accosted by a coloured man,' he writes. 'Other familiar themes were the carefree scattering of excrement... the same stories and the same language before 20 April 1968 had been used almost exclusively by extremists and racialists... those who sought scapegoats had found a champion.' In a sense, whether the letter was authentic is immaterial; the very fact it attracted such a response demonstrates that Powell had struck a chord.

In the Quarterhouse pub, only minutes from Powell's old constituency home, Geoff Bangham, a friend of Powell's and Wolverhampton's longest serving landlord, is preparing to open. Outside, the flag of St George flutters in the beer garden. Inside, photographs of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher jostle for space with Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper and Norman Wisdom. 'Do you recognise this chap?' says Bangham, pointing to a framed photograph of Powell given to him by the politician.

In 1968, Geoff managed the Alexander pub. Was there a colour bar? He says that no official bar existed but: 'I suppose if you're in a pub and all of a sudden 20 Muslims come in, some people might wonder what was going on.' How does he feel about Britain today? 'It has come true, what Powell said,' Bangham Geoff me sadly. 'This is not the country I thought I would grow old in. I feel society is changing just by the sheer numbers coming in and it does seem we are reaching a boiling point. I have an Indian doctor and he's good as gold, but over the last few years there are too many people coming from Europe.'

Arten Llazari, 35, came to Wolverhampton from Albania as a refugee nine years ago. He is co-founder of the city's refugee and migrant centre. 'I am fully aware that I am living in Powell's former constituency,' he says when we meet in his office in a bland building in the city's Waterloo Road. 'I know about his speech. In meetings, whenever we talk about community cohesion, his name crops up.'

In the waiting room outside sit young men with anxious eyes. 'There is no doubt that refugees are the latest targets,' Llazari tells me. 'The established immigrant communities can fight back, and they have votes, but people see refugees as the lowest of the low.'

Among those who work in the centre are two young Asian women. Tanveer Khuja, a hijab-wearing, British-Pakistani woman, describes how friends reacted when she revealed she was helping asylum seekers: 'My Asian friends would say, "Why are you helping refugees when they are coming into this country and taking our jobs?" Her co-worker Parminder Gill says: 'It's almost like they think they are more British than the British and the refugees remind them of what they used to be like.'

Maybe abusing the next wave of immigrants is how earlier waves believe they earn their citizenship. Perhaps they think that by criticising Poles, Romanians and Albanians, they will be spared. I want to know whether these two Asian women feel British. 'I love my fish and chips,' laughs Parminder. 'That's as British as you can get.' 'Define British,' says Khuja. Define it yourself, I say. 'To me, being British is being able to speak your mind,' she suggests, 'and to have a system that won't let you down.' Does she mean a system of government? 'Yeah.' And what about those who might see her hijab and think she poses a challenge to the British way of doing things? 'I live by Islam but it doesn't contradict being in this country. My faith says: wherever you live, treat your neighbours with respect and that includes the country you are living in. '

I leave the refugee centre with her words still turning around in my mind. Being a good neighbour was something my parents instilled in their children. On Eid, my mother would give my sisters and me plates of pilau rice covered in silver foil which we would offer to neighbours and friends. We didn't do it to be ambassadors for our religion, but in a way I suppose we were. I had arranged to meet Mirza Baig, a community worker with memories of Enoch Powell. I arrive at his door only to learn from his wife that I am a whole day early. 'Just come in and wait and I will pick up my husband and bring him home,' his wife tells me in Urdu. I explain that I have a photographer with me. 'Is he a Muslim?' No, she's white and she's a woman. 'That's not a problem, ask her in.' Within minutes, Karen and I are in the living room and being offered tea, cakes and savouries. 'You are being extraordinarily kind,' I tell her. 'Not at all, son, this is a Muslim house,' she says.

And so we sit, in the house of strangers I have only spoken to once on the phone, in a room where the television is set to a channel broadcasting a young boy reciting the Koran from memory, and we wait for Mr Baig. Forty-five minutes later, they return and I explain to the surprised Baig what I want to talk to him about. In the event, what he has to say about Powell is not especially illuminating; far more interesting is when he starts discussing poetry. He pulls out an old folder bulging with looseleaf paper containing his poems, some dating back to the early Fifties.

'I came to Wolverhampton in 1967 and I remember sitting with English friends reciting my favourite lines from Tennyson and Longfellow,' he tells me, 'and they would be stunned. You know, they would say, "We are English and we don't know these poems." And I would think: you silly people - you have no taste for poetry?'

And then he is off again, reciting fragments of poetry learnt in his youth.

When Mirza Baig walks down the street, his white neighbours probably see a squat, bulky old Asian man, shuffling along unsteadily. They are unlikely to see a man more aware of poetry than most British people. When I ask him about Enoch Powell, Baig says he thought he was a madman. But I did wonder what could have occurred if Powell, himself a published poet, had met Baig and seen not an Asian man who represented a threat to British culture, but a fellow poetry lover who enriched the country he had chosen to make his home.

In Bloody Foreigners, Robert Winder's superlative study of British immigration, he suggests: '"Englishness" is by definition a foreign idea - a silhouette visible only from afar... national identity is often a statement of opposition to outside forces; a form of protest.' Powell's speech was a definitive statement of opposition, an anguished howl of protest.

Watch the scratchy black-and-white archive footage today and 20 April 1968 seems a world away. For someone like me, born three years after, it barely needs to be stated that today's Britain is a more tolerant nation than 40 years ago. Racist language that was considered permissible even 20 years ago is now not tolerated. Today's second- and third-generation children of immigrants can contemplate opportunities unthinkable when I was a teenager.

So when I ask Lance Bunkley whether he would rather have been a young black man in 1968 or 2008, his answer surprises me. '1968,' he says instantly. 'In those days, we were a community. We looked after one another; we paid each other's debts; blacks and Asians worked together. Today, there is no sense of community and everyone is an individual.'

'I don't think Britain is very different from 40 years ago,' says Gulam Haider Ellam. 'Some white people are still against blacks and Asians because we have become successful. They don't like that, so they say things like, "They're taking over." At the end of the day, we work hard for our lives. I don't want to say most white people are lazy, but they don't want to work. They depend on government handouts, we don't. We want to work.'

Just as Lance and Gulam remain sceptical of the progress achieved, so these days Britain seems both comfortable with, and weary of, its established and emerging immigrant communities. Powell lived to see Brixton, Toxteth and Handsworth riot in the early Eighties, which for some amounted to proof that his prophesied rivers of blood had come to pass. But he died, in 1998, just as European refugees began to arrive in Wolverhampton and across the country; he also did not live to witness the rise of Muslim radicalisation in the aftermath of 11 September 2001.

The anxieties that Powell articulated 40 years ago of 'homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition' are anxieties which have only escalated over time. The concern Powell expressed about Sikhs demanding special treatment is today a widespread apprehension that everyone is accorded special treatment - Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Afro-Caribbeans and asylum seekers - everyone except the native white population. It is that apprehension which has led to the onslaught against multiculturalism and this is why, after all these years, some continue to venerate Enoch Powell as a prophet. John Mellor calls him 'the best Prime Minister we never had': 'If he had been elected, he would have run this country like he was planning an attack in the desert.'

The words 'Enoch was right' can still spell political suicide, as prospective Conservative candidate Nigel Hastilow learnt to his cost last year when he said as much in a Wolverhampton newspaper column. And yet whether it is Gordon Brown speaking about 'British jobs for British workers', Hazel Blears saying that learning English must be 'an absolute top priority' or the uproar sparked by the Archbishop of Canterbury's comments on sharia law, some of Powell's ideas are now in the mainstream of political debate. Next month, BBC2 will broadcast a television documentary that is broadly sympathetic to Powell. Once, this would have been unthinkable; today, it is inevitable. These days, it is not only white people who feel able to voice concern at rising levels of immigration. 'I think we need to control immigration better,' Parminder Gill tells me. 'After all, there are only so many houses...'

'If you come here, then you should become a citizen,' says Celeste Amina, who left Portugal to study in Britain in the early Sixties and has been married to Gulam Haider Ellam for 45 years. 'But there are many people who are living here but they don't want to become citizens. They let too many people in and they are still doing that today - not from India, but from Europe.'

Enoch Powell was right, it seems to me, to highlight the danger of communities failing to integrate and right to say that the sheer number of immigrants coming into a country can have a serious impact on its culture. But having met those who suffered as a consequence of his Birmingham speech, and as someone whose childhood yearning to belong was haunted by his toxic legacy, it is hard to forgive him. This was a man who spoke fluent Urdu and would ask his Asian constituents if they preferred to talk to him in English or their mother tongue, a politician who did not speak out against immigration throughout the years that West Indians and Asians were arriving in this country and his constituency, who in October 1964 said: 'I have set and always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origin.'

In trying to explain why he decided to raise the subject of immigration when he did, it's hard to escape the conclusion that it was politically motivated. The explicit purpose of the speech was to attack the Labour government's plans to pass a Race Relations Act which would have outlawed racial discrimination in employment and housing. But there was also, some suggest, an intention to destabilise the position of Conservative leader Edward Heath. In July 1965, Powell came a distant third in the Conservative party leadership contest. After the speech, Powell was transformed into a national public figure with a realistic prospect of leading the party. For that prize, Enoch Powell was prepared to pay in blood.

'I could not understand why people looked at me as if I should not be here,' Gulam Haider Ellam tells me, recalling the aftermath of the Birmingham speech. 'It made me angry because I was a British citizen, born in the British Raj.'

For an imperialist such as Powell, whose greatest ambition had been to be viceroy of India, being a British citizen was only useful so long as it served the empire. When those same citizens began to arrive in Britain, their claims to citizenship were less appealing. Powell concluded his speech at the Midland Hotel by declaring: 'To see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.'

But it was not his white constituents whom Powell was betraying. He was betraying men like Lance Bunkley, who tells me that the speech 'made me feel like I was a stranger in a strange land'. He was betraying Tanveer Khuja's father, who worked at the Goodyear tyre factory, and Parminder Gill's father, who toiled in a metal factory. He was betraying the Commonwealth doctors and nurses whom he had invited to come to Britain. He was betraying my father and every immigrant who suffered and saved doing work the whites thought was beneath them. And he was betraying everyone, of every colour, who believed that diversity could enrich as well as threaten a nation.

Powell's beloved empire and precious England had relied on the efforts of these immigrants, the very men and women he was happy to castigate for political gain.

Leaving Wolverhampton, I felt humbled to have met some of those who lived through 20 April 1968. It is they, and all those who supported them, who are the true Great British heroes. The men and women who, unheard and unheralded, proved their devotion to this country through hard labour. Enoch Powell might have been predicting rivers of blood, but today's Britain was built because of their rivers of sweat.

Observer