Race relations research as social science

As Jordanna Bailkin has argued, a lot of the early postwar research in this area, predating the work coordinated by the IRR, was carried out by or under the influence of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, under the leadership of Kenneth Little.¹² Little wrote his PhD thesis at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Raymond Firth. Little’s thesis examined the African, Arab and Caribbean population of Cardiff’s Bute Town.¹³ As head of department at Edinburgh from 1950, Little hired a number of junior scholars who would also produce studies of ‘coloured quarters’ in port districts. Banton’s study of Stepney was the outcome of a postdoctoral fellowship at Edinburgh; Patterson wrote Dark Strangers as a research fellow at Edinburgh supervised by Little.¹⁴ Little and Banton did fieldwork in West Africa, Patterson had research experience in South Africa, and some of Little’s other hires were from Africa. ‘The indigene in Africa haunted the creation of the migrant in Britain’, Bailkin observes, ‘much as anthropology haunted the emergent discipline of sociology’. She adds: ‘Anthropology was one of the key disciplines deployed in making sense of migration. But it was also the first to be written out’.¹⁵

The relationship between sociology and social anthropology in the study of migrants in Britain was not a clear-cut matter of succession, however. From the beginning, students of immigration in postwar Britain were heavily influenced by the University of Chicago tradition of urban sociology. Following Robert E. Park, many British researchers studying immigration from the Commonwealth and from eastern Europe were attentive to competition for resources such as housing as a site of interaction between new arrivals and established residents. They used the terms of Park’s ‘race relations cycle’, such as ‘accommodation’, ‘integration’, and ‘assimilation’, though they sometimes treated them as different kinds of ‘host’–‘immigrant’ relation rather than stages to be cycled through. (This was the approach Jerzy Zubrzycki took in his research on Poles in Britain, undertaken at the LSE under the informal supervision of Chicago sociology’s ambassador to Cold War Britain, Edward Shils.¹⁶) Other Chicago school concepts, such as ‘zones of transition’, ‘marginal men’, and ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’, recur in the work of British-based researchers in the 1950s.¹⁷ These concepts proved compatible with the ‘participant observation’ tradition of social anthropology. Mark Clapson takes Little’s Cardiff study as his first example of ‘the early influence of the Chicago School in Britain’, but, as Freddy Foks observes, a ‘more proximate, and likely decisive, influence on Little’s work was the anthropological training he had done at the LSE’.¹⁸ Little’s protégés Banton and Patterson drew on sociological concepts, but their methods remained indebted to their social anthropology background. Arguing against another succession narrative – Mike Savage’s argument that sociology became modern ‘by escaping the “gentlemanly” methods of social anthropology’ – Foks makes the broader point that multiple domains of ‘1950s social science’ that are ‘often subsumed wholly into the history of sociology, like the community studies of Michael Young or race relations research’, in fact ‘emerged out of the productive application of anthropological methods in urban Britain’.¹⁹

Insofar as sociology replaced social anthropology in race relations research, it did so in a way that Bailkin and other historians of the Edinburgh school or the IRR do not really address: as a consequence of the turn toward more sophisticated statistical analyses. Although Chris Waters emphasised race relations researchers’ claims to scientific authority, he and the historians who have followed him have taken surprisingly little notice of the more assertively scientific, quantitative research on migrant communities undertaken in the 1960s. When Anthony Richmond appears in the historiography of race relations research it is usually as the author of another study of a Black community in a port city, in this case Liverpool, that paid significant attention to contemporary history and policy.²⁰ The later quantitative study Migration and Race Relations in an English City (1973) is seldom cited by historians interrogating race relations research.²¹ From the early 1960s, race relations research turned to quantitative methods, which of course was where a lot of the action was in British sociology at this time. One of the goals of its practitioners was to achieve a rigour (for instance in sampling and case study selection) that they believed was unattainable by social anthropology or the approach of the Institute of Community Studies.²²

In Migration and Race Relations, Richmond and his collaborators used data from Bristol to challenge other researchers’ claims that migrants’ fortunes in the housing market were best explained by factors other than race and racism – that people of colour became concentrated in areas of substandard housing for the same reasons as other groups with similar demographic profiles and similar positions in the labour market (such as single Irish men).²³ The Bristol project used the computing facilities of Richmond’s employer, Bristol College of Science and Technology (which became Bath University of Technology early in the life of the project) to process interview schedules.²⁴ Richmond and his collaborators compared different indicators of housing quality (for instance, number of dwellings per building, number of households per dwelling, persons per room, availability of bath, toilet and hot water supply) for West Indian and Pakistani households and those of white residents who had moved to Bristol from other parts of England and from Wales. Heads of household were sorted into two main categories, ‘white’ and ‘coloured’, and further coded by age and occupational classification. ‘A process of random selection was then used to create pairs of white and coloured respondents who were identical on each of the above variables’. The researchers compared each pair using different statistical tests (‘t’ test, chi-square, and McNemar’s test) for the several housing-quality variables.²⁵ Richmond’s team concluded, ‘with confidence’, that ‘the poorer living conditions experienced by coloured immigrants in the Bristol survey area are not due to demographic or ethnographic factors, but were almost certainly due to discrimination against them because of their race or national origin’.²⁶ This quantitative research does not fit the ‘pacification’ argument. It does not reconstruct Bristol’s West Indian and Pakistani communities, but rather analyses a structure of relationships between white people and people of colour.

Geographers were less likely to publish with the IRR or use the phrase ‘race relations’ to describe their research, but a good deal of the research responding to the ‘urban crisis’ of the late 1960s and 1970s, and examining the impact of slum clearance on Black and Asian communities, was carried out by geographers. Some of this research, too, involved quantitative methods. The standard measure of residential segregation from the 1960s through the 1980s was the index of dissimilarity. Expressed as a percentage, the ID indicates what proportion of an ethnic group in a census enumeration district would need to move their residence to match the distribution pattern of the total population. A value under thirty was regarded as low; forty through forty-nine as moderate, fifty through fifty-nine as moderately high, sixty through sixty-nine as high, and over seventy as very high. In the United States, the laboratory for the social-scientific study of segregation, the African-American population’s ID averaged 87.8 in over 200 cities in 1960; in studies of British cities in the 1960s and 1970s, the Black and Asian populations had IDs in the forties and fifties.²⁷ Establishing minority populations’ indices of dissimilarity could help researchers (and civil servants) understand the effects of changes in housing policy in the 1960s and 1970s, as people of colour were allocated council housing in substantial numbers for the first time. It is odd that the work of geographers gets so little attention in the historiography of race relations research, as they fit the profile of the ‘applied’ social-science expert better than most of the ‘anthropologists-cum-sociologists’.²⁸

In the late 1970s, the Oxford geographer Ceri Peach and his doctoral student Samir Shah (who became a television executive) undertook a study of the contribution of council housing allocation to ‘West Indian desegregation’ in London.²⁹ Civil servants in the Department of the Environment read it closely, producing three separate commentaries. They concluded it added little to other research they had seen, by the think tank Political and Economic Planning, and by the Greater London Council. They judged its broader conclusions (only changes across boroughs, not within areas of Caribbean concentration, would lead to ‘desegregation’) ‘Fairly obvious … but now we shall be able to point to statistical evidence!’³⁰ The department proved much more receptive to a project by Valerie Karn, perhaps in part because Karn was sensitive to local practice and her work was not overwhelmingly quantitative. ‘By examining Birmingham City Housing department’s records, interviewing black and white families and working closely with Housing Department officers involved in the allocation process, it is intended to carry out an action and empirical research project on the opportunities available to, and choices made by, black families within the public sector’. In preliminary discussions, the Birmingham Housing Department indicated a willingness ‘to co-operate in any proposed research on the movement of ethnic minorities from their existing concentrations. This is due to their recognition that there is a need for such research in Birmingham and that any results can be used by the Department in reviewing its policies and practices’.³¹ Civil servants in the Department of the Environment were eager to fund Karn’s project as it ‘would … provide important insights into several issues of central concern to DOE’s interests in race and housing’.³²

The corporation of Birmingham also made some of its housing files available to another researcher, Hazel Flett, in the years after the West Midlands conciliation board found Birmingham’s housing allocation policy contravened the Race Relations Act 1968.³³ Flett published a co-authored study of Birmingham’s ‘dispersal’ initiative in the Journal of Social Policy and a narrative account of it in a series of working papers published by the Research Unit on Ethnic Relations established at the University of Aston with Social Science Research Council support in 1970. Flett characterises the latter as ‘a chronological account’, in contrast with the ‘critical analysis’ in the Journal of Social Policy article. Throughout the chronological account ‘runs the theme of the governmental management of race relations in a racially unequal society’.³⁴ The ‘working paper’ was a narrative that quoted council documents, interviews with councillors and council staff, and press coverage. Despite its provenance and its unmistakably social-scientific form – a fifty-four-page typed and cyclostyled report – in its genre, register and evidence base Flett’s chronological account had strong affinities with investigative journalism. The next section explores the connections between race relations research and journalism.

Race relations research as journalism

The journalistic aspects of a lot of ‘race relations research’ sit uneasily with the historiography’s emphasis on science and expertise. It is not simply that some of its practitioners (such as Elizabeth Burney and Lionel Morrison) were journalists by profession, or that its most prominent exponents in the early postwar decades wrote in a ‘crossover’ style. Banton wrote for the Listener and Patterson’s Dark Strangers was serialised in the People. It was later paperbacked by Penguin Books, as one of Richmond’s books was.³⁵ Many race relations studies overlapped with journalism in their methods as well as their manner.

Race relations studies often combined participant observation with inquiries to local councils and voluntary organisations. Sometimes they extended the privilege of anonymity to informants employed by councils. They reported public meetings and controversies, and they combed through local newspapers. Many chapters of ‘race relations’ books, with their footnotes to council documents and local newspapers, could easily be mistaken for exercises in contemporary history. The point may be illustrated by two studies by political scientists (a number of the academics who wrote studies for the IRR were political scientists rather than sociologists or anthropologists). L.J. Sharpe, a lecturer in government at the LSE, contributed the chapter on Brixton to the IRR volume that Nicholas Deakin edited on the 1964 election. Sharpe made inquiries of local officials as a reporter would, and seized on revealing details in stories he heard. He reported, for instance, that white customers of Brixton’s launderettes complained that black people put dirty underwear into washing machines.³⁶ David Beetham – another politics lecturer – wrote a book for the IRR about the disputes in Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Manchester over Sikh bus drivers campaigning to wear turbans rather than the caps that were (notionally) part of their uniform.³⁷ Beetham’s Transport and Turbans, too, incorporated information from local newspapers, quotations from councillors and council staff, and aperçus about persons and situations. Though there could be no doubt about the authors’ social-scientific credentials, the studies by Beetham, Sharpe and, as we will see, Patterson, rely for much of their information on the same kinds of direct inquiry as journalists writing topical books, such as (to take an example on a closely related subject) Paul Foot’s book about the racially charged election campaign in Smethwick in 1964. Like the studies by these race relations researchers, Foot’s book tracks issues and actors through the pages of the local newspaper, and quotes extensively from extended interviews and vox pops.³⁸

Race relations researchers also made investigative moves characteristic of newspaper reporting. Throughout the 1950s it was routine for advertisements for rented accommodation to stipulate ‘No coloured’, ‘White people only’, or ‘English only’ (‘English only’ was often used to mean ‘no Jews’ as well as ‘no Poles’).³⁹ Landlords and letting agents who made no mention of race or nationality in their advertisements nevertheless proved unwilling to let to people of colour when asked: they evidently recognised that racism was embarrassing in the postwar world, but they still saw racial difference as a fact of life.⁴⁰ On more than one occasion newspaper reporters confirmed this when they called landlords and accommodation agencies to probe for unstated unwillingness to let to people of colour.⁴¹ In one of her studies of Notting Hill and its environs, Ruth Glass used the same tactic. She spoke to landlords whose ads made no mention of race and asked them whether they would accept a Black or Asian tenant. Glass received answers like this:

I’m only the housekeeper here, and I work for an agent. It’s really against the conditions but I have taken one or two Indian people. You know, they’re not so dark. I mean, well I could get away with it if they were not too obvious – well, if they are coffee-coloured, for example, or lighter.

Objections that a prospective tenant was not sufficiently ‘light-skinned’ often went together with a belief in insuperable cultural difference (‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ racism were never straightforward alternatives):

Well, we have our way of life, and they have theirs, don’t we. But how dark is he? I mean, some are jet black and some are coffee-coloured. But if he’s dark we couldn’t consider it.

Rex and Moore’s Race, Community, and Conflict had an impact outside social-scientific circles because of a finding that the authors reached by ‘journalistic’ rather than ‘sociological’ means. Rex and Moore noted that ‘the application form of the Housing Department contains no reference to the colour or country of origin of the inhabitant’ (nearby Wolverhampton explicitly discriminated by country of origin).⁴² ‘[I]n our talks with Council officials and Councillors we found a certain sense of pride in the formal justice of the scheme’. All the same, Rex and Moore observed, ‘the scheme as it stands uses formal criteria to exclude the vast body of immigrants’.⁴³ Rex and Moore’s revelation that Birmingham was effectively operating a segregated housing system attracted widespread media coverage that put pressure on the corporation.⁴⁴ The controversy prompted Birmingham to increase Black and Asian people’s access to council housing (which in turn led to the introduction of quotas and, in time, more adverse press). So Race, Community, and Conflict had an impact similar to a journalistic exposé as well as sharing some of the methods of investigative reporting.

Dark Strangers revisited

Sheila Patterson’s 1963 book about Brixton is Exhibit A in the case against ‘race relations research’. Dark Strangers is institutionally representative. The book is the product of fieldwork carried out under Kenneth Little’s supervision between late 1955 and the beginning of 1958 while Patterson worked in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Patterson went on to work for the new Institute of Race Relations and revised the text substantially in the light of what she learned there and in response to the debates leading up to the passage of the immigration restriction legislation of 1962.⁴⁵ Other workers for what would later be derided as the ‘race relations industry’, such as Ruth Glass, had anti-racist credentials. Patterson did not, and the methods she shared with Glass were combined, in Dark Strangers, with openly racist judgments. Patterson normalised the racist assumptions of white Brixton residents (the pages about fostering and adoption, with their uninhibited comments about cute babies and unattractive babies, make especially distressing reading). In the process, though, Patterson documented those assumptions conscientiously.

In “Dark Strangers” in Our Midst’, Chris Waters writes:

Patterson, in her account of the social and cultural differences between ‘hosts’ and ‘strangers’, began with a sentimental and sanitised account of traditional working-class life in Brixton. The ‘respectable residents’, she wrote, ‘expect a tolerable and at least superficial conformity to “our ways”, a conformity to certain standards of order, cleanliness, quietness, privacy, and propriety. Clean lace curtains are hung at clean windows, dustbins are kept tidy and out of sight … and house fronts are kept neat. Houses do not give the impression of being packed to the brim with temporary and noisy strangers of both sexes.… Except for the children, people … “keep themselves to themselves” and life is lived quietly.… Marriage is the norm for decent girls’. In concluding her remarks … she wrote, ‘No immigrant group has in the mass so signally failed to conform to these expectations and patterns as have the West Indians’.… In statements like these, the racial other was marked by the absence of qualities assumed to be central to the character of white Britons.⁴⁶

In the passage Waters is critiquing, Patterson makes some of the same rhetorical moves as contemporary opponents of immigration. Peter Griffiths’s allies in Smethwick as he campaigned on immigration restriction spoke of respectable and orderly white people being displaced by chaotic and dissolute Black people.⁴⁷ Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, with its tableau of a widow living in ‘a respectable street in Wolverhampton’, worked with the same opposition between the cleanliness, order and propriety of an established white community and the squalor, chaos and implied immorality of ‘dark strangers’.

Waters is thus right to read Patterson’s treatment of working-class culture in terms of a postwar discourse of race and nation. But the terms of his critique block out the possibility of learning anything from Patterson about everyday discourses of race and the practices they shaped in Brixton. What information does Dark Strangers supply that is, in Mandler’s words, ‘not easily accessible by other means’? What does Patterson add to the extensive coverage of Black–white interactions in the South London Press (which she cited extensively) or the complaints by white people about their Black neighbours and landlords that were documented by the council’s housing department and now available in the Lambeth Archives?

One answer involves Patterson’s ability to play the investigative journalist. Aldermen and council staff briefed her anonymously, providing details and perspectives that are not duplicated in the archives or the newspapers but which can be triangulated with those other sources. One of her informants was a woman who had worked in the Town Hall and ‘lived in a middle-class street into which a few coloured families had recently moved’. Her job involved fielding complaints from residents. She sketched for Patterson ‘the main categories of objectors and objections’. The first category were established tenants of cheap leasehold houses that had been bought by people from the Caribbean or Nigeria. The second were residents of areas with a large Black population. (This second category overlapped with the first.) The third group were people like the informant herself, residents of ‘better-class areas’ that people of colour were starting to move into. The latter group were ‘house-proud and object to the tone of the area going down. Most coloured people don’t wash their windows, and they put their dustbins in the front garden. Some of them carry knives too’. Dustbins exposed to view, dirty windows: breaches of the community expectations Patterson listed in the passage Waters critiques. Tenants of Black landlords complained about life inside the building rather than outward appearances: ‘dirty toilets, noise, and food smells’. ‘Sharing a house usually works only when the toilet isn’t shared’, Patterson’s informant remarked.⁴⁸ The Lambeth housing committee minute books bear this out. White tenants of Black landlords seeking a transfer into council housing routinely pointed out that they now had to ‘share toilet and bathing facilities with the Jamaicans whose habits are different to theirs’.⁴⁹ For others it went without saying that sharing a toilet with people of colour was oppressive: ‘This house has been purchased by coloured folk and the lavatory is shared by all persons in the house’.⁵⁰

Patterson followed up her informant’s observations with ‘a series of direct quotations’ sampling white people’s judgments about Brixton’s Black residents. The sample reflects Patterson’s interest in the variety of racist tropes. ‘Don’t be frightened’, she reports a middle-aged white woman as saying on her doorstep. ‘The dog won’t go for anyone white’. What makes these racist vignettes more than just general confirmation of what can be found in other sources is Patterson’s commitment to placing her informants, both geographically and socially (‘Cheerful, rather slatternly middle-aged woman in untidy requisitioned basement flat in Angell Town’).⁵¹ It makes a difference to know that an informant lived on or near Geneva and Somerleyton Roads, two streets of decaying houses where half the residents, and many of the owners, were Jamaicans (and which were municipalised in the late 1960s).⁵² One ‘Old, rather difficult woman living alone on one half of small working-class house behind Geneva and Somerleyton Roads’ used the N word to complain about the neighbours who ‘made life hell for me’ when she lived in a house on Somerleyton Road divided into flats.⁵³ A man still living on Somerleyton Road had a very different take. He was living in a caravan on a bomb site and worked as a variety performer. (Brixton had a reputation as the home of theatrical performers, and in the 1950s The Stage was still carrying classified ads for bedsits and lodgings in Brixton.)⁵⁴ ‘We find the coloured people O.K.’, he told Patterson. ‘They mind their own business and are kind neighbours. They don’t worry my wife or little girl either, but then we are show people, used to getting on with all colours and races’.⁵⁵

The attentiveness to place and social position is characteristic of Patterson’s treatment of white Brixtonians’ thinking about Black people. Patterson’s account of working-class culture in Brixton is not, as Chris Waters assumes, ‘universal’, but one mindful of differences in urban communities in postwar Britain. Indeed, Patterson thought that the contours of working-class culture in Brixton helped explain the differences between ‘race relations’ there and in other parts of Britain. In an address to a conference of social workers in October 1958, when she had finished her Brixton fieldwork but had yet to write the book, Patterson suggested that the strength of ‘respectability’ in Brixton made it unlikely that rioting like that in Notting Hill or St Ann’s in Nottingham two months earlier would take place in Brixton. In Brixton, Patterson told the conference, there were ‘certain informal but generally-observed rules of behaviour, and perhaps even sanctions … It is felt that Brixton is, or should be, a respectable place, a place where people keep their front-steps scrubbed, dress respectably and do not brawl or behave noisily in public. Naturally, things don’t always work out like that, but it is felt that they should’. It was not that Brixton was a less racist place than Notting Hill, but that disorderly expressions of racism, or anything else, were more likely to be suppressed in Brixton.⁵⁶

Other researchers agreed. The sociologist Pearl Jephcott made a comparable judgment in her study of Ladbroke Grove, published around the same time as Patterson’s book but based on fieldwork undertaken later, four years after the Notting Hill riots. Jephcott thought that the large number of transient residents meant that households in Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill did not ‘acquire that respect for “what the neighbours say” which, on the whole, probably supports the decent code’. Wives and mothers were not connected to networks of gossip, those sources of pleasure and discipline, that characterised more sedentary populations.⁵⁷ In the mid-1950s, a meeting on the ‘welfare of coloured people in London’ was told: ‘There is less tension [between people of different races] in boroughs having a civic sense, e.g. Bethnal Green, and more tension in areas like Kilburn which lack a civic sense’.⁵⁸ Bethnal Green in the East End was the archetype of a close-knit ‘traditional working-class community’; Kilburn in north London was home to large numbers of people from Ireland, mostly younger male workers. These observations by social workers and social scientists suggest that assumptions about good neighbourly behaviour were not simply a vector of racism, a cultural marker of difference between white working-class people and Black (or Irish) ‘strangers’, but also a cultural structure that inhibited the disruptive expression of racism.

In a study that Jon Lawrence has used to brilliant effect in showing working-class culture’s premium on privacy and autonomy rather than mutualism, Raymond Firth identified a complex of ‘fierce assertive separateness’ in the ‘ordinary mundane affairs’ of the people of Bermondsey. Firth observed that the need to share space and facilities ‘tends to divide and individualise households as much as bring them together’.⁵⁹ Working-class communities enforced expectations in multiple ways – force, gossip, ostracism, the withholding of credit and services – but the culture of ‘assertive separateness’ also created zones of relative impunity.⁶⁰ Patterson, in a sentence Chris Waters omits when sampling her list of the expectations of ‘respectable’ households in Brixton, remarked: ‘Moral nonconformity is tolerated so long as it is discreet and causes no inconvenience to others’.⁶¹ This was of a piece with the injunction, also cited by Patterson, to ‘keep yourself to yourself’. Firth’s informants frequently declared: ‘we keep ourselves to ourselves, and then we can’t get into trouble’.⁶² Keeping yourself to yourself was a way of carving out some autonomy in cramped conditions – not just by keeping your own affairs private, but also by avoiding getting dragged into other people’s business. James Vernon has argued that Britain became modern through abstracting technologies of power that supported a mobile and transactional ‘society of strangers’.⁶³ I would add that the working class had to evolve its own strategies of distancing to manage living in tense proximity in modern cities.

Some of the clichés Patterson reports – about the West Indians who minded their own business or the obligingly quiet Nigerian couple (‘you wouldn’t know they were there’) – suggest that it was possible that ‘assertive separateness’ translated into an unenthusiastic toleration of immigrants, provided they too kept themselves to themselves.⁶⁴ This was a conclusion that members of Britain’s community of Polish ex-servicemen and their families came to quickly, according to Jerzy Zubrzycki.⁶⁵ It may be that what was really expected of migrants was not ‘integration’ or ‘assimilation’, but making sure that their difference did not obtrude onto others. Patterson does not make this argument, but the testimony she gathered, and the things she noticed, provide a starting point for thinking about how popular expectations of neighbourly behaviour underwrote tolerance and intolerance in multicultural Britain. At the beginning of this chapter I suggested that race relations research should be seen as part of the public culture of democracy in postwar Britain. If I am right about the implied social contract of ‘keep ourselves to ourselves’ guiding white people’s responses to ethnic diversity, then race relations research can also help us understand the ‘vernacular liberalism’ of this moment.⁶⁶

Notes

1. 1.  M. Hilton, J. McKay, N. Crowson and J.-F. Mouhot, The Politics of Expertise: How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. pp. 64–5; M. Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chs. 3–4; J. Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), esp. pp. 7–11.

2. 2.  M. Clapson, ‘The American Contribution to the Urban Sociology of Race Relations in Britain from the 1940s to the Early 1970s’, Urban History, 33.2 (2006), pp. 263–4.

3. 3.  E. Linstrum, Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), ch. 5; H. Flett, The Politics of Dispersal in Birmingham (Birmingham: SSRC Research Unit on Ethnic Relations, University of Aston, 1981), p. 1.

4. 4.  C. Waters, ‘ “Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963’, Journal of British Studies, 36 (April 1997), pp. 209, 210.

5. 5.  Bailkin, Afterlife of Empire, pp. 2, 8.

6. 6.  M. Matera, ‘The African Grounds of Race Relations in Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 34.3 (2023), pp. 415–39.

7. 7.  R. Waters, ‘Race, Citizenship and “Race Relations” Research in Late-Twentieth-Century Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 34.3 (2023), pp. 493–6.

8. 8.  Waters, ‘ “Race Relations” Research’, pp. 497–8.

9. 9.  Waters, ‘ “Race Relations” Research’, p. 498.

10. 10.  P. Mandler, ‘Being His Own Rabbit: Geoffrey Gorer and English Culture’, in C.V.J. Griffiths, J.J. Nott, and W. Whyte (eds.), Classes, Cultures, and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 208.

11. 11.  M. Savage, ‘Revisiting Classic Qualitative Studies’, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 30.1 (2005), pp. 118–39; J. Lawrence, Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-War England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); J. Goldthorpe et al., ‘Historians’ Uses of Archived Material from Sociological Research: Some Observations with Reference to the Affluent Worker Study’, Twentieth Century British History, 33.3 (2022), pp. 392–459; L. Carter, ‘The Hairdresser Blues: British Women and the Secondary Modern School, 1946–72’, Twentieth Century British History, 34.4 (2023), pp. 726–53; J.D. Carpentieri, L. Carter and C. Jeppesen, ‘Between Life Course Research and Social History: New Approaches to Qualitative Data in the British Birth Cohort Studies’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 27.5 (2023), pp. 517–44; R. Goldsmith, ‘Towards the Vernacular, Away from Politics? Political History after the “New Political History”’, Political Quarterly, 94.2 (2023), pp. 272–8; A. Hill, ‘Brains, Breeding, and Knowingness: The Politics of Meritocracy in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain’, Modern British History, 35.3 (2024), pp. 316–34.

12. 12.  Bailkin, Afterlife of Empire, pp. 26–33.

13. 13.  K.L. Little, Negroes in Britain: A Study of Racial Relations in English Society (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1947).

14. 14.  M. Banton, The Coloured Quarter: Negro Immigrants in an English City (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955); S. Patterson, Dark Strangers: A Sociological Study of the Absorption of a Recent West Indian Migrant Group in Brixton, South London (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963).

15. 15.  Bailkin, Afterlife of Empire, pp. 29, 30.

16. 16.  J. Zubrzycki, Polish Immigrants in Britain: A Study of Adjustment (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956).

17. 17.  Clapson, ‘American Contribution to the Urban Sociology’, pp. 256–60.

18. 18.  Clapson, ‘American Contribution to the Urban Sociology’, pp. 256–8; F. Foks, Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), pp. 117–18.

19. 19.  Foks, Participant Observers, pp. 122, 128.

20. 20.  A.H. Richmond, Colour Prejudice in Britain: A Study of West Indian Workers in Liverpool, 1941–1951 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954); Waters, ‘Dark Strangers’, pp. 228, 231–2; Bailkin, Afterlife of Empire, p. 31.

21. 21.  Bailkin’s comment, quoted earlier, that anthropology was ‘the first [discipline] to be written out’ of migration studies in Britain has a footnote to this book, citing it as an example of ‘the excision of anthropological research’. Bailkin, Afterlife of Empire, pp. 30, 255 n. 48.

22. 22.  Goldthorpe et al., ‘Historians’ Uses of Archived Material from Sociological Research’, pp. 399–400.

23. 23.  J. Rex and R. Moore, Race, Community, and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1967), pp. 12, 83.

24. 24.  A.H. Richmond, assisted by M. Lyon, S. Hale and R. King, Migration and Race Relations in an English City: A Study in Bristol (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1973), pp. v, vi.

25. 25.  Richmond, assisted by Lyon, Hale and King, Migration and Race Relations, appendix 2 (quotation from p. 279).

26. 26.  Richmond, assisted by Lyon, Hale and King, Migration and Race Relations, pp. 123–6 (quotation from p. 126).

27. 27.  C. Peach, ‘Slippery Segregation: Discovering or Manufacturing Ghettos?’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 35.9 (2009), pp. 1382–3.

28. 28.  Foks, Participant Observers, p. 117.

29. 29.  C. Peach and S. Shah, ‘The Contribution of Council House Allocation to West Indian Desegregation in London, 1961–1971’, unpublished typescript, 1979, copy in The National Archives [TNA], HLG 118/3191.

30. 30.  TNA, HLG 118/3191, D. J. Clark to Mr Nicol, July 1979, day not specified; Arthur Fliess to Hilary Neal, 5 October 1979.

31. 31.  TNA, HLG 118/3191, Valerie Karn, ‘Housing Opportunities in the Public Sector: Research Proposal’ (1976).

32. 32.  TNA, HLG 118/3191, Arthur Fleiss to Ms Meek, 16 November 1976.

33. 33.  H. Flett, J. Henderson and B. Brown, ‘The Practice of Racial Dispersal in Birmingham, 1969–1975’, Journal of Social Policy, 8.3 (1979), pp. 289–309; Flett, Politics of Dispersal.

34. 34.  Flett, Politics of Dispersal, p. 1.

35. 35.  Waters, ‘Dark Strangers’, pp. 218–19; Waters, ‘Race, Citizenship and “Race Relations” Research’, pp. 505–6.

36. 36.  L.J. Sharpe, ‘Brixton’, in Deakin, N. (ed.), Colour and the British Electorate 1964: Six Case Studies (London: Pall Mall Press, 1965), p. 16.

37. 37.  D. Beetham, Transport and Turbans: A Comparative Study in Local Politics (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1970).

38. 38.  For instance, P. Foot, Immigration and Race in British Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 36.

39. 39.  R. Glass with H. Pollins, London’s Newcomers: The West Indian Migrants (1960; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 59.

40. 40.  Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London, Cmd. 2605 (London: HMSO, 1965), p. 246; E. Burney, Housing on Trial: A Study of Immigrants and Local Government (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1967), p. 11.

41. 41.  Glass, with Pollins, London’s Newcomers, p. 62.

42. 42.  Rex and Moore, Race, Community, and Conflict, p. 24; Burney, Housing on Trial, p. 191.

43. 43.  Rex and Moore, Race, Community, and Conflict, p. 24.

44. 44.  Flett, Henderson, and Brown, ‘Practice of Racial Dispersal’, p. 289.

45. 45.  Patterson, Dark Strangers, p. xiii.

46. 46.  Waters, ‘Dark Strangers’, p. 224; Patterson, Dark Strangers, pp. 198–9.

47. 47.  M. Hartley-Brewer, ‘Smethwick’, in N. Deakin (ed.), Colour and the British Electorate 1964: Six Case Studies (London: Pall Mall Press, 1965), pp. 77–105.

48. 48.  Patterson, Dark Strangers, p. 200.

49. 49.  Lambeth Archives, MBL/22/18, Housing Committee minutes, 20 May 1954.

50. 50.  Lambeth Archives, MBL/22/22, Housing Committee minutes, 17 November 1955; MBL/22/20, Housing Committee minutes, 17 March 1955.

51. 51.  Patterson, Dark Strangers, pp. 200–201.

52. 52.  Burney, Housing on Trial, pp. 139–45.

53. 53.  Patterson, Dark Strangers, p. 201.

54. 54.  Sharpe, ‘Brixton’, p. 21; The Stage, 18 June 1953.

55. 55.  Patterson, Dark Strangers, p. 202.

56. 56.  London Archives, London Council of Social Service (LCSS) papers, Acc. 1888/120, ‘Sheila Patterson. L.C.S.S. Oct. 1958’, typescript stamped 15 October 1958; ‘The new West Indian migration in South London – some problems of adaptation and acceptance. Mrs. Sheila Patterson. M.A’., n.d. (a summary of the same talk).

57. 57.  P. Jephcott, A Troubled Area: Notes on Notting Hill (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 56; see also pp. 33–4.

58. 58.  London Archives, LCSS papers, Acc. 1888/120, ‘Note of the Meeting, Welfare of Coloured People in London’, 26 October 1955.

59. 59.  R. Firth and J. Djamour, ‘Kinship in South Borough’, in R. Firth (ed.), Two Studies of Kinship in London (London: Athlone Press, 1956), p. 34; Lawrence, Me Me Me?, ch. 2.

60. 60.  M. Tebbutt, Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 86. For examples of such impunity see J. Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 71–4.

61. 61.  Patterson, Dark Strangers, pp. 198–9.

62. 62.  Firth and Djamour, ‘Kinship in South Borough’, p. 34.

63. 63.  J. Vernon, Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

64. 64.  Patterson, Dark Strangers, p. 229.

65. 65.  Zubrzycki, Polish Immigrants in Britain, pp. 168–9.

66. 66.  On this ‘vernacular liberalism’ or ‘popular Wolfendenism’, see C. Hilliard, A Matter of Obscenity: The Politics of Censorship in Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), pp. 201–7.

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