9 October 2008: Newcastle; city of migration

Over the past 160 years Newcastle has been a great city of immigration. Other cities such as New York or London are better known for the part played in their history by migrants. But the extent of migration-based population growth has been no less striking in Newcastle than anywhere else. Of course, I am not going to suggest that migration has been a simple process, with new people arriving in the same proportion in each decade. To use the familiar metaphor there have been "waves" of immigration. There have inevitably been lulls in between, although these have usually been short. To draw a comparison with London, there were more recent immigrants in London in 1960 than there were in Newcastle in 1960. But there were many more recent immigrants in Newcastle in 1860 than there were in London in the same year. To see the total picture is to be struck by the volume and the continuity of immigration to this city.

Let me start at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As you would expect, the impact of migration was shaped by the structure of existing society. As late as 1801, the North East was a semi-developed, rural area, with a population of less than 250,000. The wealth of the region was held in production, in the extraction of coal and other goods. Newcastle, with a population of 33,000, was smaller than Bath or Portsmouth. Within the city, wealth was concentrated. We can see this from the subscription lists for the Literary and Philosophical Society, which was founded in 1793. The Duke of Northumberland donated £400. The next subscriber gave just £25. Between the rural rich at one extreme, and the urban or agricultural labourers at the other, there was a narrow middling layer. In 1778, for example, the largest groups of tradesmen in Newcastle were 175 innkeepers, 55 butchers, 50 tailors, 36 grocers, 32 attorneys at law and similar numbers of cabinetmakers. These numbers are modest, even by the standards of the age. The large numbers of lawyers and publicans meanwhile remind us that Newcastle was a port and an important hub on the commercial route north to Scotland. The largest occupations in the city were seamen and keelmen, of which there were as many as 9,000 and 1,500 respectively by 1802. Campaigns of international solidarity already had wide support. Newcastle's anti-slavery campaigners printed copies of their pamphlets in batches of 2,000 at a time.

Already by 1800, there were groups of people living in Newcastle who had recently from Scotland, from Ireland or from further away. A traveller's guide to Newcastle, published in 1807, mentioned various churches suggesting an external influence. 'There are six congregations of Presbyterians, properly so called, united in doctrine, discipline and communion with the church of Scotland.' Other churches to be found in the city included 'one of Burghers, and two of Antiburghers seceding from that church, a respectable body of Unitarians, a congregation of Independents, another of Calvinist Baptists, two called Killianite, two Romish chapels. All these live together', the guide noted, 'very peaceably...'

Between 1801 and 1851, the population of Newcastle more than doubled from 33,000 to 87,784. This increased population had to come from somewhere, from better health-care and reduced mortality rates, from increased rural-urban in-migration and from long-distance travel. In 1838, the Journal boasted that Newcastle was 'making more strides in wealth, population and importance than perhaps any other [city] in the Empire.' People moved to the region looking for work especially in coal, metal-working rail and shipbuilding.

The most important new arrivals were large numbers of Irish people looking for work. Under the impact of the great famine, the population of Ireland fell by one million between 1840 and 1850 alone. Many emigrants settled in this city. The Irish-born population of Newcastle in 1851 was 7,124 or 8.1 per cent of the total. Newcastle was not the closest port home after Dublin, but it was one of the most secure. Many years later, T. P. O'Connor, the Irish Home Rule MP, was fulsome in his praise of the welcome that the Irish received in Newcastle, 'Of the many asylums to which the Irish fled after the great exodus of the forties, there was none in which, owing to many circumstances, they were able ultimately to find more favourable circumstances than on Tyneside.' Several historians have agreed, including Roger Cooter. 'The Irish population centred around Newcastle', he writes, 'enjoyed a climate of opinion that when combined with their economic position allowed them to thrive and prosper like nowhere else in England.'

By 1871, the four British counties with the highest foreign-born population were Durham, Northumberland, Lancashire and Cumbria, in that order. Early marriage and high family sizes must have played a part in population growth, as did better medicine, but the key factor was migration. The geographer E. G. Ravenstein described the North East as the most diverse of all the English regions. Another contemporary estimated that there were 400 Irish businessmen in Newcastle by 1872 and 4,000 skilled workers. By 1874, only three other cities in England had more Irish-born citizens than Newcastle.

What Roger Cooter had in mind when praising the positive 'climate of opinion' in Newcastle was the influence exerted over this city by the activities of Joseph Cowen the local newspaper magnate and MP. A former Chartist, he was a consistent advocate of welcome to new arrivals. In 1852, twelve Hungarian soldiers arrived in Newcastle. They had been fighting as volunteers in the 1848 war of independence. Cowen engaged the support of the Christian Socialist Working Tailors' Association to clothe them. He also donated some £40 to a Hungarian Relief Committee. The presence of these foreigners soon drew criticism, and Cowen had to defend the soldiers in print against the charge that they had come here dishonestly (or, in more recent parlance: that they were bogus asylum-seekers). He drew attention to the desire of the men themselves to work, and to the good reports of the various bodies that had employed similar soldiers elsewhere in Britain. Cowen told his audience that these Hungarians had fought for their country's freedom from Austria and appealed to Radical precedent. 'It has been falsely argued' he wrote, 'that they [the soldiers] would rather remain in a state of pauperism, than by manly industry and self-reliance support themselves. To this unfounded and malicious statement we give the most unequivocal and unqualified contradiction. The only complaint of the men is that they are the forced recipients of charity; and they are willing to accept any kind of labour by which they may earn a livelihood ... Remember, these men were not engaged in a servile war, in a war of aggression. They were merely doing for their country what our own Cromwell and his colleagues did for England.

In 1855, Joseph Cowen and his allies also helped to block a proposed anti-refugee Bill in Parliament aimed at excluding foreign troublemakers, including the prominent Hungarian nationalist Louis Kossuth. One former Chartist George Julian Harney warned in the radical press that any such plans would be met with 'a national delegation' to bring what he called 'pressure from without' to bear on the legislature. He named Newcastle along with London and Glasgow as one of three likely centres of the planned pro-refugee campaign.

Other groups of people arrived in the same decades. There were many Scottish immigrants working in the mines and in ship-building. In addition, he records held at St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church in Newcastle shows that as many as 462 individuals with Italian names living in Newcastle between 1795 and 1915. They included toy merchants, jewellers, makers of barometers and thermometers, shipping agents and wood carvers.

'The 1860s', as Nigel Todd has written, 'conveyed a constant procession of black music hall performers, sailors, religious ministers, politicians and even cricketers through Newcastle and South Shields.' An Original African Opera Troup raised money for the Newcastle Infirmary in 1861, and was praised in contrast to the various 'spurious blackamoors', blacked-up white entertainers. 'A local journalist', Todd continues, 'was particularly interested in the part played by black sailors in a seamen's strike on the Tyne in June 1866. For several days, hundreds of seamen struck for higher wages in ports along the Tyne, organising mass pickets of ships, open-air meetings and flamboyant processions. The black sailors were heavily involved in the strike, with the journalist observing: 'Whatever may be the feeling of the people of America or elsewhere against colour, it is not participated in by our tars, who walk arm in arm with the coloured men.'

By 1900, the Jewish presence in Newcastle amounted to nearly 2000 people. The population was originally based in the working-class west of the city. New migrants often started as peddlers before "making it" as salesmen or shopkeepers. Jews later began to settle in the middle-class suburb of Jesmond. There were already around one hundred Jewish homes in the borough by 1914. Subsequent generations of Jews then migrated to Gosforth or Kenton.

Jack Common's novels describe Newcastle in the years immediately before 1914. Common's parents were 'people who worked for a living and got just that, who had a home so long as they paid the weekly rent, and who could pay for offspring by the simple method of doing without themselves.' Common's mother lit candles for a Jewish family on the Sabbath, 'When I hear how the poor Indians live I'm sorry for them', he records her saying, "cos I know what it is".' One local resident Fang Lee was forced to endure the taunts of kids, 'Ching, Ching, Chinaman, choppy, choppy, chop.' Another outsider, a black man called Joe, was a suitor for Peggy, the sister of Common's own darling Mabel.

T. Dan Smith was born in 1915. Dan Smith's early biography gives a sense of the influences to which people could be open in the Newcastle of the 1920s and 1930s. His father was a Durham man who moved to Newcastle, a strong supporter of the Russian Bolsheviks, and an admirer of Italian opera. Smith's mother was a Cumbrian fell-farmer, who later worked on the telephone exchanges in Wallsend. As a young man, Smith attended the meetings of the Workers Education Association, and came into contact with the Newcastle branches of the International Friendship League. There, he met Basque children and Czech refugees. He rrad socialist publications from around Europe including the Spanish POUM. Smith was also a regular at the Socialist Society in Newcastle's Old Royal Arcade. Its meetings were attended by Krishnan Menon, later a minister in the Indian government. Speakers included Jomo Kenyatta and Cheddi Jagan, later leading figures in the struggle for national liberation in Africa and Latin America. It was evidently an internationalist milieu.

Much of my book is devoted to the history of postwar migration to the region. The chronological structure I adopt is based on a model proposed by another historian of migration Göran Rystad, who suggests that there have been four 'stages' of postwar migration to Europe. The first moment he described as the 'Beginnings of the Labour Migration to North Western Europe'. This stage lasted only from 1945 to 1955. It was typified by the movement of large numbers of migrant workers, many of them expecting to find only temporary work. New settlers in Newcastle included European Volunteer workers, more Scots and Irish and some Commonwealth migrants. The distinctiveness of Newcastle in this decade lies admittedly in the relatively small numbers of new arrivals.

The second stage for Rystad was 'Labour Migration ... in step with the industrial expansion of Northern and North Western Europe', which continued from around 1955 to the oil slump of 1973. It was in this period that significant numbers of people migrated to London, Birmingham and other cities from the West Indies, India and Pakistan. These were the years when white England first experienced significant black migration. Newcastle did too, but with relatively low numbers of new migrants. Such black populations as were established tended to be smaller than their counterparts elsewhere.

A further process was the 'Halting of Labour Migration Following the Oil Crisis. The Number of Immigrants Continues to Increase due to the Reuniting of Families', from 1973 to 1985. This pattern fits the region neatly. As changes to migration closed the door to direct migration from the Commonwealth, new people tested the limits of the restrictions. Some groups continued to arrive, such as the Newcastle Chinese, many of whom came to the region on work permits, or on the private recommendation of family or friends. From the mid-1980s, new laws prevented dependents from travelling.

The theme of recent years, Rystad writes, has been 'the Search for Asylum'. As Britain and other European governments have taken steps to prevent economic migration, so other forms of movement have taken greater prominence. Through the 1990s, the number of new arrivals claiming refugee status tended to rise, in Britain anyway, reaching a peak in 2002. By and large, refugees did not move voluntarily to the region, at least not at first, but had to be forcibly dispersed to the region, having first arrived in London or on the south coast. Having failed to diversify at quite the same pace as other English regions during the 1950s and 1960s, Newcastle suddenly found itself catching up fast.

Let me choose a couple of lives to put some flesh on the bones of this story. One doctor Robert Cole arrived in Britain from Sierra Leone and opened a medical practice in Newcastle in 1934. 'Indian colleagues suggested some village practice in the mining areas of County Durham, and howled at my proposal. "You'll never get on in Newcastle, it's full of colour prejudice".' Despite the fears of his friends, the surgery flourished. He became a sort of community 'leader', helping to open British Council lodgings in Newcastle for African students, and establishing schemes to bring Sierra Leonese women to be trained in the UK as nurses.

Ali Mohammad was one of the first people born in Pakistani to have settled in Newcastle. As a young man he worked for Billy Smart's Circus and as an extra in films. Later on he joined a travelling theatre group where was billed as singing Qawwalis (songs in praise of Allah). The songs were not in fact devotional at all, but a kind of call-and-response with Mohammad's friend Taj. Mohammad was a larger-than-life character, quick-witted, energetic, full of stories. According to his daughter Nargis Haq: 'We did not believe half the stories he used to tell us, but we dug out some old photographs and saw that a lot of what he said made sense. Everything was going nicely. Then one day, Taj sent home some of his photographs to Pakistan and the women of the family were so horrified to see him with English women that they immediately summoned [Taj] back home. My dad never saw him again, but until the day he died they were writing.'

One Tyneside sociologist J. H. Taylor conducted a detailed survey of young Asians living in Newcastle in 1968. Three quarters of his sample came from Eastern Punjab; many others were Mirpuri from Pakistani Kashmir. Forty per cent described their parents as farmers. In England, these older men were employed as credit drapers (24 out of 67 sampled), skilled workers (14 of 67), self-employed shopkeepers (11 of 67) and unskilled labourers (8 of 67).

The drapers worked as travelling salesmen, buying clothes or furnishings at a discount from wholesalers, then selling them at retail prices. They traded almost exclusively with whites. One market for their goods was to be found in the pit villages, where there was relatively little prejudice, as one of Taylor's interviewees recalled: 'Twelve to fifteen years ago pitmen were good workers getting regular money and did not mind spending a few bob. If you go to the bungalows they won't entertain you. Some don't like coloured people. In the collieries they live and let live. These big-shot people they wave you though the windows to go away and have signs on the doors saying "No hawkers".'

Part of the story of migration inevitably concerns conflicts over resources. In 1967 the Education Committee of Newcastle Council conducted a survey of the needs of 'immigrant pupils'. The survey was motivated by specific, paternalist concerns. It was assumed that immigrant children had greater learning needs, and that these would prove detrimental to the education of local children. The survey found the greatest concentrations of such pupils in Westgate Hill Junior and Infants Schools, whose 607 pupils included some 121 immigrants, one fifth of the total. An attempt was made to learn which schools were taking students who required help with English. The Education Committee of Newcastle City Council was asked whether 'it wishes to regard 20 percent as a maximum percentage of immigrants in any one school, in which case no more immigrant children could be admitted to Westgate Hill'? Fortunately, the idea of an absolute cap on immigrant students were rapidly dropped – how on earth could it have worked?

The following year the Journal ran a piece, 'When you go to school in a strange land'. The headmaster of Slatyford Comprehensive described conditions at his school, '"The only instances of discrimination have been caused by a small undesirable element among English children," Mr. Hackett said. He is upset that the only incident in which two sides came to blows, white against coloured, was given race riot publicity.' Students did not mix. 'Like the bus crews at the Corporation depot where British, Indian, Sikh, Pakistani and Jamaican employees take their tea breaks in five separate groups, most of the children at Slatyford prefer to make friends among their own nationality.' The children had adopted Western life styles and spoke English at home. Their choices were commended. Yet a doubt was raised, for the successful integration of this British-born generation into wider society might only result in a new set of problems. 'When they leave schools with their "O" and "A" levels and the same hopes and ambitions as their white school friends, they will not settle for the second class citizenship that their parents have gratefully accepted. It is then that the North East (and Britain's) proclaimed beliefs in racial equality will be put to the test.'

A 'Commonwealth Immigrants Working Group' of Newcastle council met between September 1966 and May 1968. The Chair was Councillor Abrahart, a lecturer at Newcastle University who was generally associated with the Labour Left. Various other locals were invited onto the group, Dr. B. Basu ('Nationality: Indian'), Mr. Neville Pierre ('West Indian'), and Mr. Khwaja ('Pakistani'). The main work of the group included funding translations and English classes. Its members hoped to secure the funds for a research worker ('Mrs. Telang, a coloured person'), and ultimately a community centre. In November 1967, 'The Chief Constable's representative (one Superintendent Bensely) reported on an incident at a school in the City involving coloured and white children.' Press reports had been overblown, 'It was noted that the incident had been exaggerated, and was without significance.' At another meeting, in March 1968, Mr. Rafferty asked about a newspaper report of 'an incident at a City school involving coloured and white children. Mr. Chadderton (for the Director of Education) replied; it being noted that the incident was without significance.' The event was said to be unimportant, yet it was the second in five months.

The very last recorded meeting of this working group took place on 6 May 1968. The members passed a motion calling for the appointment of a part-time Liaison Officer. A report was given on the 1965 Race Relations Bill. Mr. Rafferty made reference to a march against racial discrimination that had been organised by local branches of CARD, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination. The march was planned for Saturday 11 May. 'Following a lengthy discussion', the minutes record, 'it was agreed that while members of the Working Group present had some sympathy with the aims of the organisers of the protest march, it must, as a sub-committee of the Council, dissociate itself from the march.'

The demonstration took place in the context of Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech. In London on 1 May, fighting took place between pro-Powell dockers and anti-racist students. At Warwick, two days later, a Conservative MP was heckled, after addressing students on the need to remove sanctions against white-dominated Rhodesia. In the North East, members of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination called the demonstration to highlight the danger of Powellism and to oppose any possibility of it spreading north.

Newcastle papers took an attitude of hostility to the march, warning of the certainty of violence, and instructing their readers not to attend. Hints of rumours were reported as if they were facts, and little attempt was made to compare hostile comment against any favourable view. On 7 May, for example, the Evening Chronicle reported that the organisers of a Black Power campaign in Leeds were planning to send 200 followers to join the march. On the same day, the Newcastle Journal claimed that the event lacked any backing from the various local communities. Reference was made to the Council's Immigrants Working Group, whose members had been asked to disassociate themselves from the expected trouble. 'The Sikh representative, Dr. Naru, said that his community did not support the march, for many of them felt it would cause prejudice among members of the white community. Similar sentiments were expressed by Mrs. Saeeda on behalf of the Pakistani community.'

On 11 May, the day of the planned demonstration, the Journal reported the warnings of the police that the march should not be allowed to happen. 'Marchers, fans told to "cool it".' The Northumbria police had checked in the calendars and learned that this Saturday procession was due to take place on a match day. Twenty thousand Manchester City fans were expected in the city. 'A meeting of the two may lead to rowdyism'. 'Last minute attempts by prominent Newcastle moderates to halt the demonstration failed.'

The march led from Elswick Road to Town Moor. No demonstrators arrived from Leeds. Nor were there any clashes with football fans from Manchester, and why, anyway, was it assumed that the fans would be minded to disrupt an anti-racist protest? The event was entirely peaceful. Jimmy Murray, the union convenor from Vickers Armstrong, spoke from the platform. He attacked Powell for encouraging a vile atmosphere of racism. He even joked at Powell's expense, 'And he looks like a South Shields White Arab himself.' Around 200 people took part. 'Little support for race march', the Journal patronisingly maintained.

In my book, I discuss in some detail the changing nature of immigration to Newcastle after 1970, the important anti-racist campaigns of groups such as the Anti-Nazi League, and the re-emergence of racist political parties in the last ten years (not especially in Newcastle, but in the region), I also attempted to explore whether there was a distinctive pattern of emigration from the North East. With regards to emigration, the general picture appears to be that migrants prosper compared to the people who remain in the homes which the migrants have left. Especially in an epoch of cheap travel, those who travel and find life is for the worse, tend to return briskly. What is true of people entering the UK is equally true of people leaving this country. In America, Australia, Canada, the incomes of UK immigrants are on average higher than the incomes of those born in that country. Against a general picture in which people who leave the UK tend to prosper, I have noted some counter-examples, including groups of people from this city who settled in parts of industrial South Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, only to be there the victims of the very same processes of deindustrialisation and deskilling, which had caused them to leave the UK in the first place.

I will end with some general remarks: forty years ago, in the Newcastle press, an argument was put that the city was different. It was more welcoming than other English cities - such as London, which had seen the recent Notting Hill riots.

Some of this distinction I think was earned. The local papers were for many years more supportive than the counterparts in the South. There has been a local mood of welcome, in the city and in the region, rooted in the positive experiences of Irish migration to the mining areas and Arab settlement on the Tyneside coast. Yet there have also been signs of a different and more hostile spirit. Although they could be seen mainly in a few distinct areas, they have grown in recent years, as the North East has become integrated into a general, national or European pattern of hostility and distrust towards migrants.

Looking at Britain as whole, the picture is contradictory. There is evidence of peaceful co-habitation alongside signs of increased tension. More children of migransts have risen to prominence in recent years; yet the roles they have been allowed have remained narrow. Black culture has never been more fashionable with young white men and women; never has the press been so consistently hostile to migrants. The first black woman has joined the cabinet. The first refugee was murdered in Sunderland. Optimistically, one observes that the figures for inter-racial marriages have risen each year. But so have racist crimes.

Through the post-war years, immigration controls have consistently tightened. As the cost of long-distance travel has fallen, the possibility has been raised of new waves of mass migration. In periods of labour shortage, the trend towards greater control has weakened, yet the general direction has been towards ever greater policing of racial boundaries. In a world divided by sharp economic inequalities not just between classes, but between national societies as well, race has become again the best marker of who should be allowed the benefits of national citizenship, and who should be denied. In terms of laws, the future is undoubtedly one of attempts towards greater restriction.

The rights of all migrants have diminished. The ease with which people were able to settle in the post-war period was the product of specific factors, including labour shortages and a strong sentiment that society should never be allowed to go back to the 1930s. The postwar consensus saw a rejection of both mass unemployment and racism. In a different historical moment, the legal rights of all migrants have been sharply reduced. There has been a greater tendency to define citizenship in terms of blood and ancestry. Such redefinitions allow greater scope for retrospective discrimination. We have already seen, in some parts of the US, the idea that benefits should be restricted from both illegal immigrants and their descendants. British law draws no such legal distinction against second-generation children, but society does still distinguish. Meanwhile, the press campaign against refugees has left a permanent mark, in legitimising aggressive, hostile responses that would previously not have been tolerated. In recent years, the most confident of political forces have been those who would see not merely new migration ended, but the adoption of a state policy of removal and the creation of an 'all white Britain'. Unless movements for welcome can challenge both popular and institutional racism, the future could be bleak indeed. The task then lies with all of us, to demonstrate that hope can win out after all.