Interview with Chris Mullard

Born in Hampshire in 1946, Chris Mullard arrived in Newcastle in the mid-1960s after a brief spell in London. He studied, worked on the buses and became in 1968 the first full-time worker for the Community Relations Commission (CRC) in Newcastle. In 1973, he published Black Britain,[i] which described itself as one of the first books to have been written by a Black writer, born and raised in the UK. Shortly afterwards, he was forced to resign from the CRC. Mullard later taught at Durham University, and published several books, including Racism in Society and Schools (1980) and Race, Power and Resistance (1985).[ii] He now heads Focus Consultancy, an organisation that promotes diversity in the workplace. It is one of the largest organisations of its kind in Europe. This interview covers the period from 1968 to 1973, when Mullard worked as a community activist in the North East.  

Who did you work with in your campaigns?

My natural base was quite narrow. Caribbean people saw me as Caribbean, but I wasn't. I had been born here. I was outside the immigrant communities. The number of African Caribbeans anyway was just in the low hundreds, in the whole North East. One friend, Rocky Byron, I knew him through Carnival. He was an entertainer, a dancer, worked in factories and odd jobs. He's still going, 75, active in the community, forming groups. In the 1970s, he worked as a security officer for Deloittes, and then for Richard Harbottle. There were other individuals, independents, and people from the Sikh community, like Dashin Singh. He was the Secretary of the Gurudwara, off Elswick Road. He was always behind us. Dr. Pindi Naru also brought in several Hindu individuals.[iii]

            More of the religious organisations were upset. They were politically opposed to anything that smacked of radicalism. Their instinct was to merge and to assimilate. They saw my concerns as being separatist, opposite to their interests. I was too militant and radical. They were conservative in that sense. My strategy for dealing with the radicals was to win individuals, to turn theirs into a quite opposition. The two key individuals in the Islamic community were Zafir Khan and Mohammed Haq. They oscillated between fierce opposition and some support. They saw that what I was doing was in their interests, but as a group they were withdrawn.

John Rafferty started as a traditional labour man, a Clause IV socialist. He became the Labour agent for Gordon Bagier MP.[iv] Then he was Secretary of the Newcastle Council of Social Services. That was a voluntary association, distinguished both from the Christian movements, and the local authority, more structured, bureaucratic ways of working. The Chair of the Council of Social Services was Richard Harbottle. He was very different, more of a Liberal Tory in the Heath tradition. He became a Chartered Accountant, I don't know why, after reading History at University. Richard was at Trinity Hall, where his best friend was a Trinidadian, Reggie Duma. He spent time with this sort of crowd. He was very much influenced by the old school of historians, he had an extraordinary sense of injustice.

Asian people wanted an Asian person involved in leading the organisation. But the politics of ethnicity worked against that. There were large Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities, if any one had been appointed from any of these groups, the other two would have complained. I had no allegiance to any of the groups. That helped to neutralise opposition. And who else would they appoint? That was important.

They were opposed to me because they saw me as radical. Their strategy was to keep their heads down. My own strategy was to expose racism, to be deliberate about exposing racism. I knew all the black authors and all the black figures. My critique emanated from an understanding of the Community Relations Councils. I knew they worked as a buffer organisation, a sort of quasi-state.

So why did you apply to work for one?

The CRC was a massive effort on the part of the state to undermine the mass movement. The British reacted to that anger and organisation, to buy off the leadership. They offered status and salaries. But I was a bit smarter than most of my colleagues who worked in the CRC business. I believed we could use the structures to deliver radical objectives. Sometimes you have to use the discourses in order to effect the change. I did feel one could do that. My own kind of activism required a different kind of knowledge. How did you get involved from the bureaucracy? We could not deliver from on the street. We lacked knowledge of bureaucratic organisation. How do they deliver management and control? How do they place limits on the struggle? We needed to get closer to that. Also, I needed a job! I was writing a bit, but it hardly paid for the bedsit. I did need work. That's why I knew the power of buying off a radical. It's quite a powerful thing.

Were there any protests against your appointment?

Councillor Gray disliked me. He was a Conservative and head of Newcastle Council at this time. I was a Black Marxist, like [Cedric] Robinson.[v] My theoretical concepts tended to see everything in terms of the class struggle, with black issues as a large part of it. The world was – and is still – divided into white and black, the haves and the have-nots. The media was opposed, even the BBC. Councillor Bennie Abrahams disliked me. He was in the Labour Party. Abrahams was a local businessman and a Jew. He was in control of race relations in the North East. But his deep Zionism pushed him towards Conservative positions on race. Plus I was just twenty-four, which was far too young for the post. So my appointment produced side issues, towards the idea of profession. In life, you have to climb up ladders, but here was some Young Turk, suddenly in charge of Community Relations. I was challenging relationships of age and authority, ties that go deep in the North East. Luckily, coming out of the streets, I didn't have to learn any cynicism about liberalism.

            I became very friendly with Mike Neville, the anchorman for BBC News in the North East.[vi] Michael Partington played a similar role at Tyne Tees. I set up a supporters' club, for people who wanted to contribute to the work of the CRC. Geoff Ridden was the deputy editor of the Newcastle Chronicle. I invited him to edit the CRC newspaper, Gambit. Soon, we had a professionally produced newspaper. The Chronicle even agreed to print it for us off their presses, for free. I had to allow opposition to emerge. Once it did, I went in to neutralise their ability to act.

            Both Gray and Abrahams worked to reduce our funding from the council. They tried to exercise their will, but we had a countervailing power. We received private donations from businesses and foundations. I was able to secure a salary of £900 a year. Our supporters' group at its height provided more than £200 a month, more then enough to pay for my salary. Brian Roycroft was the head of Newcastle Social Services. He began to deliver support from within the council.[vii] Gordon Squires was the Head of Education. We delivered in Education. Then the Director of Housing, all the problems of housing in the West End, they all came to us.

What did you achieve in your time at the CRC?

We set a lot of templates. We can claim ownership of a politicised model of community development. We were moving away from casework to a politicised notion about power. We took seriously the entrepreneur model, before anyone had coined the phrase. Social partnerships? We didn't have any choice. We had to raise money. We organised sponsored walks. We contributed to social legitimation. Lawyers and professionals wanted to identify with us. We were the first Community Relations Council to identify the problems correctly and not to hide behind labels. The issue was race, not friendship. It was about the superiority of one group and the inferiority of another. We pioneered what people later called Race Equality, hence the name the Race Equality Councils. The CRC's were something less, 'give them a cucumber sandwich'. We used the media as part of our strategy. We were raising consciousness of the issues, taking smugness off the body of the North East.

            We wanted to break down the models that South Shields was the answer. There was a lot of smugness about that. But the people who settled in the town experienced discrimination. Local shipowners would hire the crews, they'd hire people for 9 months and then dump them, not pay them, deny them halal meat. Through working with the community, we could impact on the consciousness of people. We deconstructed notions of Geordyism and North Eastism, repackaging them in terms of anti-racism. That was the beginning of it.

            Jeremy Beecham was my age then, he had just become a Labour councillor. He stood out against Abrahams. Late he became leader of Newcastle council. His consciousness became infected by what we were doing. A lot of our thinking has informed the later discussion around ideas like institutional racism. Long before Macpherson, we were grappling with the same idea in practice and called it that.

I went home exhausted but thinking tomorrow is another chance against the onslaught of today. I believed in what I was doing, in new ways, new relationships.

Black Britain says very little about the roots of your ideas.

At that time, I just couldn't talk about my background. My father was a US airman born in Jamaica. He lived in the US and then came over to Greenham Common. He met my mother, a white Hampshire lady. She was a peasant girl, really, the daughter of a farm labourer. She didn’t know what to do with a black child, born out of wedlock. Her parents told her to gout and find the father and come back without me. The community officer told her that my father had flown off, and was probably dead. So she abandoned me at Newbury rail station. I was left with the name Christopher Paul written on me. I was brought up in an orphanage, surrounded by a number of black kids. We were all gathered together, all in the same predicament. All our consciousness fused together. So I grew up with a very strong sense of difference.

            The whole experience of being black, an orphan, I felt I had been marked out as inferior. But I learned ways of coping with it. At school, there was cricket, rugby, and athletics. Certain masters would protect me, provided I excelled. Others were keen to see me excel at sport, provided I kept out of the classroom. But still each year I came top, and that gave me something. I came to London in 1960, when I was 16. I lived in Notting Hill and became a legal clerk. The firm was motivated by a sort of Christian benevolence. I took my A-levels here, was given an offer to Cambridge, but knew I'd have all the same problems all over. I chose campaigning instead.

            Black Britain was an attempt to come to terms with all that history. Some of the pain and hurt that you do see in the book was an attempt to connect back to that part of my childhood. These were things that it took me years to confront. They're not in the public domain. In the book, beneath the facts, there is an emotional underpinning. I guess it's one reason why I found it hard to connect to some of the people in the North East. I wasn't talking their story. My experiences were outside their experiences. I guess that's been part of the story of race.

Why does race matter so much? We don't amount to more than 10 percent of the population. Why are we so significant? I think part of the answer is that we mirror the horribleness and inhumanity of white society. We remind white society of the horrible things that were done in the name of whiteness. They see in us the devil in themselves. That goes deep down in popular consciousness.