Investigating the Investigators: Moral Panic, Mixed-Race Families and Their Vilification in Interwar Britain

Abstract

This paper investigates the investigators behind the distinct ‘moral panic’ that targeted mixed-race families residing in Britain’s multiracial port communities during the interwar period. This period witnessed heightened social anxieties following the First World War, exacerbated by the economic downturn and the visible presence of multiracial populations, a consequence of wartime labour demands. The 1919–1920 ‘race riots’, erupting in various British port cities, served as a critical catalyst in the exposure of underlying racial prejudices and anxieties surrounding interracial relationships and mixed-race children. In our paper we explore how the ensuing ‘moral panic’ was not simply a spontaneous societal reaction fuelled by sensationalist and prejudiced reporting in the press, but was actively constructed and sustained through a confluence of official investigations and the actions of key individuals within government and society. These forces collectively contributed to a pathological legacy that profoundly impacted the treatment and perception of mixed-race families in Britain well beyond the interwar years. Our paper builds upon our collaborative work with Peter Aspinall, to whom this paper is dedicated as one of his last scholarly endeavours.

1. Introduction

‘Though relatively small in their dimensions the nature of this sordid evil is so appalling and its consequences so alarming and even tragic that the government cannot continue to ignore it … Certain philanthropic organisations in this country might assist in liquidating the remaining problem of half-caste children and that of the parents who for various reasons cannot leave the British Isles.’ (Harris n.d. [Dec 1931]).

We open our paper with this disturbing commentary by John Harris, general secretary of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, not simply as illustration of how some establishment figures viewed mixed-race couples and their children in Britain during the interwar period, but also because it reveals a quieter truth: that the moral panic around interraciality at this time was not the product of isolated local anxieties, but rather a coordinated and evolving process sustained by a network of investigators, officials, civil servants, local dignitaries and social and religious reformers. In their exchange of information and calls to action, this network not only reinforced racialised narratives that existed at the time but were directly responsible for shaping how mixed-race couples, families and people would be thought about for years to come.

Building on our collaborative work with Peter Aspinall, to whom this paper is dedicated, we engage with his commitment to tracing the administrative and classificatory dimensions of race by ‘investigating the investigators’ who, in the wake of the 1919 and 1920 ‘race riots’ across nine of Britain’s multiracial port cities, fuelled a ‘moral panic’ around what they defined as a pressing social problem: the growth of working-class mixed-race families and, in particular, their children.

The race riots and the moral panic around these ports and their multiracial working-class communities have been well-covered, from the national picture (Jenkinson 2009; Rich 1990) to localised accounts (Christian 2008; Evans 1980; Lawless 1995; Tabili 1994b). Much of the existing literature has focused—rightly—on the economic context and the pressure from labour unions, the role of social scientists and the eugenics movement or on sensationalist press reporting. Less attention, however, has been given to the distributed network of concern that intensified after the riots, as an overlapping group of officials and investigators exchanged correspondence and planned inquiries into additional port cities well into the late 1930s. These connections suggest something more systematic than the localised moral panics often largely attributed by the press—and at times scholarly accounts—to widespread public resentment in the wake of economic hardship and housing shortages (Jenkinson 2009).

Instead, what emerges is a smaller, more tightly knit infrastructure of racialised knowledge production and bureaucratic surveillance. While localised white working-class hostility to their Black and mixed-race neighbours and communities undoubtedly existed, we argue that the idea of ‘mass outrage’ needs to be revisited. Rather, we propose that the interwar moral panic around mixed-race families was not simply an eruption of popular feeling but was shaped, fuelled, and sustained by a relatively narrow network of officials, investigators, and institutions, whose prejudices and administrative authority gave the panic both form and longevity.

Paul B. Rich’s influential work on the interwar Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children (LAWHCC) has amply documented the role of philanthropic organisations and institutional actors in framing mixed-race families as a social problem in the interwar period (Rich 1990). Expanding Rich’s institutional account, this paper turns to the everyday mechanisms through which ideas of racial mixing and mixedness as a problem circulated and were sustained. Tracing correspondence, minutes, and memoranda between figures such as John Harris, Cardiff’s Chief Constable James Wilson, local Cardiff businessman Frederick de Courcy Hamilton, and Harold King of the LAWHCC, we highlight the connections through which official anxieties were exchanged, reinforced, and translated into action. Rather than analysing the content of published reports alone, we focus on their making—on how administrative exchanges and iterative practices produced a shared focus and language of concern that translated local anxieties into national agendas.

This paper does not offer a comprehensive mapping of interwar networks, but takes an exploratory step towards understanding the relational and bureaucratic processes that linked these investigations together. By ‘investigating the investigators’, we argue that local concerns in various port cities, particularly Cardiff, Liverpool, London, and Hull, were not isolated episodes but part of a connected bureaucratic as well as moral project. The paper and its approach reflect one of the final outputs of Peter Aspinall’s scholarly work and his broader interest in the bureaucratic life of racial classification: how state and voluntary actors generate, circulate, and normalise racialised knowledge through routine paperwork. What emerges is less a picture of mass public outrage than of a small but influential group of investigators, officials, and philanthropists whose correspondence and committees gave bureaucratic form to prejudice. In examining their connections, we extend Hall et al.’s (1978) conception of moral panic, showing that its reproduction in the case of interwar mixed-race families and people was not limited to the press or public discourse but was sustained within the everyday operations of administration and governance. Our aim is not only to recover forgotten bureaucratic exchanges, but to reconstruct the everyday workings of how racial logics circulate—and become entrenched—through routine practices of governance, inter-agency dialogue, and administrative mirroring.

2. The ‘Race Riots’

Prior to the twentieth century, mixed-race families had existed in Britain for centuries, but only in small numbers and generally integrated into working-class communities (Bressey 2013; Balachandran 2014; Caballero and Aspinall 2018). This longstanding multiracial population had periodically attracted public commentary, including at the turn of the twentieth century, when Anglo-Chinese mixing in particular attracted scrutiny and investigation (Aspinall and Caballero 2013). However it was the interwar decades that really saw a sustained focus, what Caballero and Aspinall have called ‘the era of moral condemnation’ (Caballero and Aspinall 2018). In order to understand this hostility, it is useful to discuss the violence that unfolded in Britain’s port communities at the end of the first two decades of the twentieth century.

During the First World War, the greatly increased demand for labour had led to a huge rise in seamen from Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian sub-continent and China. As cheap labour, largely from British colonies, men of these nationalities had been present since the nineteenth century in Britain’s main ports, but their numbers had always been small (Tabili 1994b). Then, numbers rose: in Cardiff, the Black population increased from about 700 on the eve of the war, to over 3000 in April 1919, while in Liverpool numbers grew to around 5000. Nationally there may have been in the region of 20,000, with approximately 2000 Chinese (Fryer 1984). Given that their presence was almost entirely due to shipping and soldiery, this population of colour was predominantly male. Violent, racially-motivated attacks by white men on these men of colour—predominantly Black, Arab and Chinese—ran from January to August 1919 in nine of Britain’s main ports (London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Barry, Newport, Salford, Hull, South Shields and Glasgow) and re-occurred in certain ports in 1920. In a number of the ports, discontent was whipped up by seamen’s unions, keen to exclude men of colour from competing for work. The fierce violence resulted in five deaths and numerous injuries, over 250 arrests and extensive damage to property, especially to houses where men of colour were lodging, often with their white partners. Despite the fighting being very largely instigated by white men, Black men were disproportionately arrested (Jenkinson 2009). The press and officials, including the police, all saw the riots as due to men of colour and white men competing for the same jobs, women and housing. While unemployment was acknowledged as a key factor (many white men recently having returned demobbed to find no work available), repeatedly the press and the authorities cited white men’s fury at interracial relationships as an equal, even the main, instigator of the riots. Some white women with Black, Arab and Chinese men were attacked too for their ’treacherous’ agency in choosing such partners (Caballero and Aspinall 2018).

The local police and local immigration officers in particular campaigned for ‘coloured’ seamen to be deported, supportive of the Coloured Alien Seamen Order (CASO) of 1925.1 This Order was an attempt to get non-British subjects to register on arrival at British ports; they could be denied entry or subsequently expelled. The reasons for the Order were that certain authorities (Home Office and Board of Trade especially) did not want men of colour to compete for work with white British seamen, nor become dependents on state relief. Additionally, there was anxiety about a repeat of unrest at their presence. Those who were British subjects, and that was the vast majority, were told that they had to provide proof of their British identity in the form of a passport or its equivalence. Virtually no one had passports at the time (the British passport office only came into existence in 1921) and passports were hard to obtain. When disembarking, seamen had relied on their seaman’s discharge book, with their photograph. There is not the space to discuss this Order here (see Tabili 1994a), but there was much opposition from the men and their lawyers, with evocations of their sacrifices in the Great War (Balachandran 2014; Tabili 1994b). The India Office and Colonial Office were also worried about the Order. Up until this point they had been indifferent to the plight of men of colour but now realised that this restriction could lead to unrest in the British colonies. Some men were deported, but it is hard to ascertain actual figures. Some men with passports had them confiscated. (There are obvious parallels to the Windrush scandal of 2018–2020 in which many of those who had come to the UK from the Caribbean 1947–1973 were wrongly classified as illegal immigrants (Gentleman 2019)). What was certain was that the CASO permanently codified ‘a hierarchical definition of British nationality, dependent on race, class and occupation’ (Tabili 1994b, p. 122).

3. The External Gaze: Eugenicists and Social Scientists

In addition to a focus on seamen of colour, the riots led to certain organisations, academics and authority figures local to portside communities increasingly taking a voyeuristic interest in interracial relationships and their mixed-race offspring. One influential organisation was the Eugenics Education Society. In 1924 it set up a ‘race crossing’ project (studying mixed-race children) employing two physical anthropologists from South Wales, Professor Herbert J. Fleure and Rachel Fleming. In their study they deployed anthropometry—one key form of calculating ‘difference’ which had grown increasingly popular in the nineteenth century, particularly the measuring of head shape and size. It was, in essence, a comparative methodology, which in the nineteenth century had involved the comparison of white to Black people, and men to women, contributing to the justification for the rule of indigenous peoples in the colonies, and for women’s lack of political rights at home.

Fleming was instructed to examine the different ‘mixes’ of children in Liverpool, Cardiff and East London, comparing children with white mothers and Black fathers to those with Chinese fathers. By her final report in 1939 she had measured over 100 of each category. While she argued that some of the children displayed physical ‘disharmonies’, she did not claim this as particularly consequential. In fact, in 1932, she presented a paper at the British Commonwealth League in which she stated ‘there was nothing in anthropology or biology to indicate that racial mixture was bad.’ The Daily Express reported that ‘a white woman, warmly defending marriages between negroes and whites was loudly applauded’ (Fleming 1939; Bland 2007; Aspinall 2018; Caballero and Aspinall 2018).

However, this finding of Fleming’s was not the one that gained traction. Fleming wrote up the first stage of the research in an article for Eugenics Review in 1927 (Fleming 1927). Today eugenics—the theory of improving the human race by selected breeding—is considered a pseudo-science, one discredited heavily in the wake of Nazi Germany’s ‘final solution’ plans. In the interwar years though, it was widely accepted in Britain (and elsewhere) as scientific ‘fact’. Eugenical language bled into newspaper reports, organisational and policy statements and actions, and wider society more generally, thereby impacting the lives of those in interracial relationships and their mixed-race children. The take-up of Fleming’s research is a case in point. Before publication of Fleming’s findings in her 1927 article, she gave a public talk organised by the Liverpool University Settlement. Present were various Liverpool dignitaries, police and welfare organisations. The talk led to the immediate establishment of the ‘Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children’ which saw ‘mixed parentage’ as ‘a handicap comparable to physical deformity’ (King and King 1938). (Harold King, who ran the LAWHCC, will be returned to later as a key player in the attempt to address the ‘problem’ of mixed-race children.) While earlier in the decade the chief concern had been men of colour in relations with white women, by this time the focus had widened to include the children of those relationships.

In 1930, under the authorship of social scientist Muriel Fletcher, the Association produced the notorious Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and other Ports which demonised mixed-race children and their parents (Christian 2008). Picking up on a remark by Fleming on mixed-race girls’ difficulty in finding work (it was not explicit, but it was clear that Fleming—and Fletcher—were referring mainly to girls with Black fathers), Fletcher turned the blame away from the labour market and onto the girls themselves and their inheritance:

All the circumstances of their lives tend to give undue prominence to sex …From her mother the half-caste girl is liable to inherit a certain slackness, and from her father, a happy-go-lucky attitude towards life. She has not therefore much incentive to work.

Fletcher accused both parents of immorality—that the mothers were often prostitutes and/or ‘mentally weak’, and the fathers ‘promiscuous in his relations with white women’, and twice as likely to have venereal disease than white men. None of these claims about immorality were made by Fleming, incidentally. In addition to Liverpool, Fletcher looked at other ports, including Hull and Cardiff, noting: ‘it is imperative to consider some way of checking the growth of the problem and also of minimising the evils already in existence’ (Fletcher 1930). The ‘problem’ of mixed-race families was seen in terms of their pathology rather than their experience of high unemployment, poverty and racism. Fletcher called for immigration control of men of colour, although the vast majority of Black men in Liverpool were from the Caribbean and West Africa and were thus British subjects and supposedly not deportable under the 1925 CASO.

The report was picked up by elements of the press, who had been feverishly reporting on the ‘problem’ of interracial relationships in dockside communities since the ‘race riots’ (see Caballero and Aspinall 2018). Now, the focus began to turn to the children of these relationships, particularly the threat they were seen to present to Britain, in terms of destabilising notions of race, nation and Empire. Fletcher’s statistics and interpretations on mixed-race families in Liverpool and other of Britain’s ports were repeated in the press as fact (see, for example, The Sunday Sun, 15 June 1930), and prompted local press investigations into what was frequently termed an ‘evil’ growing in the docks. The voices of those investigated remained largely unheard though many local Liverpudlians were appalled by Fletcher’s report. For example, Rev Adkin of the Liverpool African and West Indian Mission felt it would take ‘months even years to repair the damage’ (Adkin to Harris 1931) while Christian (2008) reports that Fletcher was stabbed and run out of the city, such was the strength of local feeling against her.

4. John Harris, Anti-Slavery Campaigner

One dignitary who was highly impressed by the Fletcher Report was John Harris (1874–1940). Harris had been involved in issues of race and Empire for many years. In 1898, he and his wife travelled to the Belgian Congo as Baptist missionaries, where they were horrified by the extreme cruelty they witnessed under King Leopold’s rule: amputations, rape, torture and killings of Congolese workers on the rubber plantations. Harris worked with Roger Casement, H.R. Fox Bourne, and E.D. Morel in exposing these atrocities (Hochschild 1998). With his wife, who had taken many photographs, he toured Britain, the United States and Europe, speaking at over 600 public meetings. In 1910, he became the general secretary of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, and after the war, also served as general secretary of the Welfare of Africans in Europe Committee—an organisation set up to support Africans who had fought for Britain, offering recreation separate from Europeans and assisting in their repatriation. Both organisations, along with Harris himself, were based in Vauxhall Bridge Road, London. He was briefly a Liberal MP (1923–1924) and was knighted in 1933 for his services to anti-slavery campaigning.

With such credentials, one might assume that Harris would be active in—or at least sympathetic to—British anti-racism. But as historian Paul Rich points out, Harris followed the teachings of the British ethnographer and explorer Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) and espoused a liberal yet paternalistic and polygenist racial segregationism. He increasingly believed that Africans were ill-suited to life in an industrialised Western society and were better off in their own countries (Rich 1990). If Black people were in Britain, he felt they should be here only temporarily and should be helped to return to their land of origin—their ‘natural’ environment. Rather than supporting imperial domination, Harris promoted a model of British colonial trusteeship, where Britain would ‘protect’ African interests and prepare them for self-governance. This included facilitating education for an African elite in Britain, especially the sons of prominent families, who would return home with ‘civilised’ ideas. Harris played an active role in arranging such schooling. Much of his correspondence for the period 1930–1939 (including his replies, which he often kept as carbon copies) are housed in Weston Library, Oxford, although in crammed ring-files and thereby sometimes difficult to read.

Harris’s polygenist and segregationist views help explain his distaste for racial mixing. As a young man, Harris had performed evangelical social work under missionary Rev Dr F.B. Meyer. Harris was very probably influenced by Meyer, who told the Daily Herald in 1919 that he was against ‘a mixture of races’, for ‘mongrels were always despised and found it hard to hold their own’ (Daily Herald 1919). Through the 1930s, Harris was central to developing a network of authoritative men—philanthropists, non-conformist churchmen, Members of Parliament, chief constables, local dignitaries—who sought to elevate the issue of racial mixing in British ports from a local concern to a national problem. One of Harris’s contacts in this network was James Wilson, the Chief Constable of Cardiff.

5. The Cardiff Intervention: Policing Race and Respectability in Bute Town, 1927–1929

By the late 1920s, concerns over interracial relationships and Black settlement in Cardiff—long simmering since the violence of 1919—were becoming increasingly formalised within police, municipal, and parliamentary circles. At the centre of this escalation was Chief Constable James Arthur Wilson, whose racialised framing of the ‘colour problem’ in Cardiff would catalyse a series of official and political responses.

In September 1927, Wilson wrote directly to Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks, urging the closure of Maltese cafés under the 1920 Aliens Order to prevent ‘illicit carnal intercourse between the white and coloured races’ (Wilson to Joynson-Hicks 1927, and see Jenkins (2014)). The following year, in November 1928, a formal letter of complaint was sent by Alderman Frederick de Courcy Hamilton to the Lord Mayor of Cardiff, fellow Alderman W.R. Williams. De Courcy Hamilton’s concerns, focusing on employment, interracial cohabitation, and alcohol in the Bute Town area, were read before the Watch Committee in December. (Watch Committees were local government bodies that oversaw local policing.) In response, Wilson produced an extensive report in January 1929, titled Problems Peculiar to the Bute Town Area or Shipping Quarter of the City and Port of Cardiff.

The report described the local Black and mixed-race population in strikingly pathologising terms. While acknowledging that Black seamen generally observed the law, Wilson claimed they lacked British moral standards and assimilated values. Although written the year before the publication of Fletcher’s report, Wilson’s was similar in its central anxiety: interracial sex and the production of deeply flawed mixed-race children. He asserted:

‘They [Black seamen] come into intimate contact with the female sex of the white Race, principally those, unfortunately, who are prostitutes or women of loose moral character, with the result that children are born whose lineaments unmistakably indicate the origin of the male parent. In other words their progeny are half-caste with the vicious hereditary taint of their parents. The Legislature has not taken steps to prevent or penalise sexual relations between the white and coloured races and this is the crux of the whole question.’ (James Wilson to Watch Committee 1929, and see Tabili (1996)).

Wilson presented Cardiff’s port communities as morally and racially contaminated. He called for a series of interventions: a segregated lodging house for Black seamen, employment schemes for ‘half-caste women and girls’, moral welfare initiatives, and the closure of most public houses in Bute Street. He also proposed a classification system for the Black population—British-born, colonial-born, naturalised, and foreign—which sought to bureaucratically contain a mobile and multiracial community he labelled a threat to the social order. National newspaper the Daily Herald presented Wilson’s claims as fact, opening their article ‘Black Men and White Girls’ with the assertion that ‘Hundreds of half-caste children with vicious tendencies are growing up in Cardiff as the result of black men mating with white women’. In the same paper, Rev J.H.G. Bates of St Michael’s Church in Butetown, Cardiff, likewise declared that ‘the Anglo-Negroid mixture is vicious and a menace to the community’ and proposed the prohibition of marriage between Blacks and whites (Daily Herald 1929b).

Wilson wrote a follow-on report (also entitled Problems Peculiar to the Bute Town Area or Shipping Quarter of the City and Port of Cardiff, dated 10 April 1929) which amplified his call for comprehensive action from the government, demanding they address the problem of ‘coloured men with white women and their half-caste progeny’ which remained ‘untouched’ despite earlier efforts. In Wilson’s view, ‘its partial or complete elimination’ could not be affected without the aid of Parliament. In other parts of the Empire, Wilson noted, social ostracism was enough to prevent the problem, but ‘that feeling does not dominate a certain class of woman in the British Isles.’ Similarly, he remarked, that while ‘some of the inhabitants of the Motherland are more tolerant on this subject’ they may in time ‘awake to the fact that our race has become leavened with colour strain to such an extent that it calls for action’; ‘serious-thinking people’ needed to intervene in the meantime. The answer, Wilson proposed in the report, was anti-miscegenation legislation as enacted in South Africa under the South African Immorality Act of 1927, to prohibit ‘illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives and other acts in relation thereto.’ Wilson then outlined the punitive measure under this law, which included up to five years in prison for white Europeans found guilty.

Wilson’s report was followed by an unnamed report presented and authored by Cliff G. D. Hawkes, the Deputy Juvenile Employment Officer, at a conference at the Cardiff Employment Bureau in June 1929. This event and the report, discussed in the Western Mail (1929b), were aimed at those interested in the ‘problem’ of employment for Cardiff’s mixed-race youth. Hawkes noted that Wilson had focused public attention on the ‘public matter of mixed marriages’. The children’s schools had been surveyed and while the numbers of those who would be seeking employment was relatively small, the employment barrier, particularly for girls, was considered ‘most distressing.’ Several of those present, however, agreed that employment opportunities for any youth from the Cardiff dock area were low. Hawkes remarked that while he was not suggesting that ‘coloured’ seamen made bad fathers or husbands and their home conditions were not any worse than many English [sic] families, efforts should be made to reduce mixed marriages. It was decided to form a sub-committee to investigate the employment issue of mixed-race youth further. In addition to Wilson, de Courcy Hamilton and other local figures, Wilson’s report was bolstered by political support from Arthur Evans, Sir Lewis Lougher and Sir Clement Kinloch-Cooke, MPs for Cardiff South, Central and East respectively. The three were noted in the report for actively pressing the Home Secretary on the issue, though it is unclear if they also supported the anti-miscegenation legislation proposal. However, the campaign’s scope extended beyond Cardiff. Reynolds’s Newspaper (27 January 1929) stated that Wilson’s report was to be circulated to ‘all seaports in the kingdom, with the object of securing their co-operation in bringing in new legislation.’ In the April 1929 report, Wilson stated the response from other port police authorities experiencing similar problems ‘peculiar to the presence of coloured communities in this country’ was supportive.

Yet, while Wilson’s reporting was met with formal support from Cardiff Watch Committee, it is unclear just how supportive other port authorities were in relation to lobbying for a parliamentary bill to address the ‘social evils’ of racial mixing, including anti-miscegenation legislation. Existing documentation suggests that support was uneven. When the Daily Herald had questioned Glasgow’s Chief Constable about the ‘half-caste’ issue in January 1929, he had replied: ‘association of coloured men and white women in Glasgow has raised no acute problem there and has not been under official review.’ (Daily Herald 1929a). On the other hand, Swansea’s Watch Committee, led by Chief Constable, Thomas Rawson, decided to support Wilson and Cardiff, even though Rawson noted that the dozen ‘coloured’ men, their white wives and children in Swansea were both few and law-abiding (Western Mail 1929a). Meanwhile in Hull, the new Chief Constable, Thomas Howden, appointed in November 1928, brought Wilson’s letter before the Hull Watch Committee. He remarked that coloured men in Hull ‘gave very little trouble’ and ‘were well under the control of the police’, although problems were gradually increasing, though not to the same extent as in Cardiff. Nevertheless, several Watch Committee members, including Alderman Raine, suggested they help Cardiff, even if Hull did not need legislative action (Yorkshire Post 1929; Western Mail 1929a).

Notwithstanding, the Cardiff network vigorously pressed on. Evans had raised parliamentary questions in January and again in April 1929, asking the Home Secretary to appoint a committee to examine ‘the problem of coloured men and white women’ (Hansard 1929). A few days later, Sir Robert Thomas, MP for Anglesey, also took up the issue in the Commons. At a conference in May 1929, organised by the Joint Committee of the British Council for the Welfare of the Mercantile Marines and the British Social Hygiene Council (BSHC),2 retired Captain F.A. Richardson presented similar concerns, prompting resolutions that called on the government to investigate the increasing number of ‘half-caste children’ in seaport towns and their future employability. The conference was told by John Sandeman Allen, MP for Liverpool West Derby, ‘one of the greatest problems … was that of the half-caste child in ports, a problem that must be tackled promptly’ (Liverpool Echo 1929). (Sandeman Allen would go on to raise this issue as a Parliamentary question in November 1936). Wilson was also at this conference. In his report back to the Watch Committee, he stated that he had shared the feeling of the Committee on the problem and that the conference had unanimously agreed, among several items, to draw the government’s attention to ‘mitigating the evil’ of the increase in mixed-race children in Cardiff (Cardiff Watch Committee Minutes 1929). By early June, the issue had spread further into local policy infrastructure. Councillor James Griffiths convened a conference of care committee workers on the ‘welfare of the half-caste child’, influenced directly by Wilson’s work. As mentioned above, a report was presented by Cliff G.D. Hawkes, deputy juvenile employment officer, and a sub-committee was established to explore the matter further (Western Mail 1929b).3

Harris visited Cardiff several times to inspect the conditions of ‘coloured’ men. In November 1931 de Courcy Hamilton, with whom Harris was in regular correspondence, met him at Cardiff station and took him to meet Wilson (De Courcy Hamilton to Harris, 1931). De Courcy Hamilton had continued to press Wilson and the government on the issue of interracial mixing; in 1930, he had contacted both regarding the ‘Buteluna’ fair held in the dockside area of Loudon Square, which he argued ‘conduces to the mixture of Races and their contact under most unfavourable conditions.’ Wilson cited de Courcy Hamilton’s arguments in his own report to the Watch Committee on the fair, adding that the police and local religious organisations felt that, As well as the fair being held on a Sunday, its additional ‘evils’ were that it was a ‘breeding ground for immorality’ and that ‘a large number of white girls and coloured men meet there.’ (Fair Ground, Loudon Square 1930). On his next visit, a couple of weeks later, Harris tried to get the Colonial Office to take an interest in what he termed ‘a most distressing state of affairs’ and suggested they facilitate repatriation, but they argued that it was a ‘local issue’ (Robert Hamilton to Harris, 1932). De Courcy Hamilton told Harris that the men did not want repatriation: ‘Many have white wives and families who would not be allowed to go back with them’. He suggested that we ‘educate some of the better type of men to go out to Africa as missionaries.’ (De Courcy Hamilton to Harris, 1932).

The May 1929 national conference appointed Captain Richardson to produce an investigation of the ‘colour problem’ in the ports of Cardiff, Liverpool and London. He reported in 1935, and like Fletcher, Harris and Wilson, was very concerned about the growth of ‘half-castes’: the result of mating between men who could not ‘be expected to understand’ British civilising standards with women of ‘loose moral character’. There were enough mixed couples in the dock areas ‘to produce hundreds more of this unfortunate half-caste population as each year passes’ (Richardson 1935). The Richardson report, like Wilson’s and Fletcher’s, entered the wider world. It was discussed in Parliament that year and the next, with several MPs asking about the employment problems of ‘half-castes’. Evans requested a small Royal Commission and newspapers took up the report too. For example, one local paper declared: ‘We can no longer tolerate the … burden on our doorstep’, advocating repatriation of colonial immigrants in order to cease ‘the ethnological experiment of crossbreeding’ (Western Mail 1935). National newspapers were also interested: journalist F.G.H. Salusbury who was studying various British ports for the Daily Express, quoted Richardson’s assertion that ‘half-caste’ girls in Cardiff, ‘have very little chance but to sink to an even lower level’ (Salusbury 1936).

There were counter narratives to this demonisation of mixed-race families. Some are evidenced in the handful of letters published in newspapers from the general public, including women in interracial relationships who wrote furiously to the press to challenge depictions of mixed-race families. For example, when Hull’s Daily Mail mentioned Hull Watch Committee’s condemnation of the ‘type’ of women found in mixed marriages, one woman angrily replied: ‘I see in to-night’s “Mail” about the Arabs, also about the girls being of very low moral type. I think it is wrong about them…I, myself, am married to an Arab and I could not find a better husband.’ She signed the letter ‘ARAB MAN’S WIFE’ (Hull Daily Mail 1929). Counter narratives also came from anti-racist organisations who conducted their own investigations. One was undertaken by Nancie Sharpe (later Hare), who wrote Report on the Negro Population in London and Cardiff in 1933 for the Methodist Mission. ‘It is noteworthy that the children of coloured men almost always appear well fed and are warmly dressed, in spite of poverty.…The general testimony of teachers and people who have had contact with coloured children is that they are as bright and intelligent as any’. In Cardiff: ‘NO [sic] half-caste girl has been convicted as a prostitute, and only one or two are known to have married because of pregnancy’ (Sharpe 1933). However she was negative about the men, claiming that ‘negroes make undue sexual demands on their wives’ and that the women were or had been ‘semi-prostitutes’ (Jenkins 2014).4 Sharpe/Hare was a member of the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP), a civil rights organisation set up in 1931 by Jamaican Dr Harold Moody, and her findings were republished in 1934 and 1937 in The Keys, the LCP’s paper. Sharpe had written to Harris in November 1931 asking for help with her investigation and was told that he was currently in Cardiff but would reply once he had returned. Whether he did is unknown. He was very negative about Moody and the LCP, accusing them of being ‘extraordinarily careless about their conduct of public business’ (Harris to A Wilson, 1935).

In 1935 The Keys also published a report by another LCP member, George W Brown: Investigation of Coloured Colonial Seamen in Cardiff. This opened with exposing ‘the wilful misapplication’ of the Alien Registration Act to thirty-five coloured British subjects resident in Cardiff. They were all registered as aliens and refused work on ships, resulting in much poverty, including for their children, for whom ‘secondary education and industrial employment are practically closed’. A Cardiff public official (presumably Wilson) had called for legislation to put a stop to ‘the breeding of such children’. The report concluded that the League was ‘looking to the creation of some institution or institutions for the development of the children into productive and useful citizens, and the permanent relief of the Cardiff Coloured Community’ (Brown 1935). Both Sharpe’s and Brown’s reports were powerful and authoritative, but The Keys did not have a wide circulation, and neither report was taken up by the press. However, some press reports did grudgingly admit that locally, interracial mixing wasn’t always a problem. The same Daily Herald article that reported on ‘half-castes with vicious tendencies’ in Cardiff, went on to note that in relation to Liverpool, ‘Inquiries showed that many of the mixed unions turn out happily’, and that a local detective stated that for many of the local white girls, ‘a coloured man was no different to a white man’ and that he knew cases where ‘Chinese were said to make the best husbands.’ (Daily Herald 1929b).

Nevertheless, such counter-narratives were given short shrift by the Harris network. Harris read Brown’s report and he sent a copy to Alexander Wilson, a member of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society and an active Quaker (Wilson 1974) along with the comment: ‘a letter from a very responsible person in Cardiff’ (De Courcy Hamilton?), who ‘works very hard for the coloured people there’, had told Harris that ‘there is absolutely no truth whatsoever in the allegations of conditions in Cardiff made in this “report”.’ Harris had read that the Quakers were co-operating with the LCP and thought ‘it a great pity that the Society [of Friends] should be publicly linked to Moody’s organisation in this way. Of course I recognise that the statement is mendacious’ (Harris to A Wilson 1935). Unfortunately, we have no reply from Alexander Wilson.

6. Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children and the Exclusion of People of Colour from Their Conferences

While Harris was looking with interest at what was happening in Cardiff, he was also in frequent correspondence with Harold King, founder of the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children. In the 1930s, King organised three conferences on the ‘problem’ of ‘half-caste’ children. The first conference was held in December 1936. Apart from contacts in Liverpool, Cardiff and London, King also invited people from Hull, Glasgow and Newcastle to attend. Hull’s Rev. S.A. Cowthorn revealed at the conference that a number of ‘Arabs and lascars’ had been deported in 1929, ‘after a disturbance on the employment question’. In 1935 Harris, in his attempt to build up a wider picture of the various ports’ demographics, had written to Hull’s Chief Constable Howden to ask about the number of coloured people in Hull and ‘some of the difficulties with which police are confronted.’ Howden had replied very precisely that there were 132 men of colour of which 60 were ‘Arab’ and 24 West African and repeated that ‘they cause little or no trouble’ (Howden to Harris 1935).5 He had not mentioned deportations. According to Cowthorn in 1936, the Arabs were still a problem: ‘the black spot as far as moral questions were concerned and in particular Arab cafes’. He also made the strange claim that ‘there were very few illegitimate [mixed-race] children as the women who associated with the men were mostly prostitutes’. Did he assume that prostitutes always used birth control? Or that they were infertile? Either way, the ‘half-caste’ was not seen as a serious problem in Hull (Report of Half-Caste Conference, 1936). Despite this, Cowthorn was invited to the next ‘half-caste’ conference in June 1937 (King to Harris, 14 May 1937).

We know that King also invited delegates from Newcastle and Glasgow to the December 1936 Conference because he read out letters from both cities (the authors unnamed in the Report), which apologised for their absence (Report of Half-Caste Conference, 1936). Though South Shields had experienced race riots, Newcastle had not, but it was a port with many colonial seamen and was experiencing racial tension. That King had invited anyone from Glasgow in the first place is perhaps surprising given the Chief Constable’s statement in January 1929 that there was no serious review of the issue in the area.

Trinidadian Charles Collet, who became General Secretary of the LCP in December 1936, heard about the first conference and wrote politely to Harris: ‘The League and myself are most interested in this matter and it would be a pleasure for me to receive a copy of the report as soon as possible. I hope it will be possible in the future to find a common basis for sincere co-operation between the 2 organisations.’ (Collet to Harris 17 December 1936). After all, Brown of the LCP had proposed in his 1935 report that the League create ‘some institution or institutions for the development of the children into productive and useful citizens’. And in 1937, a resolution at an LCP conference suggested setting up a National Committee, including organisations such as Women’s Co-operative Guild, the Co-operative Union, the TUC, Save the Children Fund and others, to ‘influence public opinion’ and work with local juvenile employment committees to help ‘children of African descent’ (Keys 1937). They did not mention King’s Association.

Harris replied to Collet that ‘the minutes would be regarded as confidential. However … I am quite sure that co-operation would be welcomed but I rather think there is something to be said both on your side and on other’s in running an organisation independent of what may be regarded as an “interested” organisation’ (Harris to Collet 18 December 1936). He and King were keen to exclude from the conferences what they referred to as ‘interested parties’. By this they meant people of colour who were likely to have a stake in any discussion of mixed-race children; they saw their presence as undermining the paternalistic disinterest of white philanthropists. In March 1937 Collet wrote to King saying he ‘understands from John Harris that a 2nd conference to study certain questions relating to children of mixed descent is to be held shortly. Please give details so our representatives can attend’. King replied disingenuously that he had no knowledge of such a conference. In June that year Collet informed Harris that he had only just found out about the conference being held at the Friends’ House the next day. He had not been invited, nor heard from King. Harris reiterated his point about ‘interested’ parties: ‘not a good idea to have on one’s committee those representatives for whom one is working as one can put more pressure if disinterested’ (Harris to Collet 4 June 1937).

7. Deputation to the Home Office, 1936

The year of the first ‘half-caste’ conference, namely 1936, Harris attempted to co-ordinate a deputation to the Home Office. Harris worked with Harold King and James Watson to draw up what became a eleven-page report about ‘people of colour in this country, to convince you of the importance of setting up some kind of government enquiry…Not merely is this a substantial evil in our midst but is one which we fear must grow unless steps are taken to cope with the existing situation.’ It represented ‘a festering political, moral and industrial sore…. the problem of the half-castes is one of increasing difficulty: nobody wants them! They are welcomed neither by whites nor by coloured people, and very few employers will provide them with positions.’ The report asked if they would ‘receive a small deputation of those who know about the subject’, with the aim of urging some form of government enquiry ‘into the really tragic condition of these unfortunate people’ (Report to Home Office 20 February 1936).

On 28th July 1936 a delegation of about twelve people met at the Home Office. Included were Harris, a couple of others from Welfare Committee of Africans in Europe and the Anti-Slavery Society, King, Evans MP and various religious figures from the Methodist Mission and the Salvation Army in Cardiff and Liverpool, including Rev Bates and also Rev G.F. Dempster, who worked at the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society, that housed out-of-work seamen in East London. Sir John Simon, unable to be present, was replaced by Geoffrey Lloyd, Home Office Under-Secretary of State. (Harris must have been disappointed as he had told King that he had a ‘rather well-known personal relationship with Sir John Simon’ (Harris to King, 20 December 1935)). The delegation raised the issue of passports, ‘co-habitation between white women and coloured men.’, ‘the problem and distress of the half-caste’, and ‘difficulties with union officials’. They urged that ‘some form of government enquiry should be held to report on the effects of, and to make recommendations for, reducing the notorious evils and disabilities that admittedly obtain today’ (Note on Deputation to HO, 1936). They had also handed over fifty case studies (drawn from Fletcher’s work) about the ‘half-castes’ and the terribleness of mixed relationships. Bates and King asserted that mixed-race children were increasing in number with King speaking darkly of ‘an organised influx of women’ into Liverpool to meet coloured men’s demands (Note on Deputation to HO, 1936). Lloyd deflected their demands, suggesting that the separate voluntary organisations work together across the ports, which is of course what they had been trying to do.

In early January 1937, over five months since the Home Office meeting, Harris wrote to Lloyd about how at Harris’s December conference he was tasked to inquire of Lloyd whether they could see the terms of reference and interim report of the Inter-departmental Committee ‘which has been examining the question’. Conference members felt that ‘until they knew a little more about what the Government proposed doing, it would be inexpedient to make definite suggestions’ (Harris to Lloyd 7 January 1937). Lloyd replied two weeks later: ‘there must be some misunderstanding as I cannot find that any inter-departmental committee has ever been appointed … Enquiries however are being made’ (Lloyd to Harris, 20 January 1937). Lloyd worked fast and two days later was able to reassure Harris that ‘an inter-departmental conference of representatives from seven departments and a representative of the office of the High Commissioner of India has met… and an enquiry has been instituted’ (Lloyd to Harris 22 February 1937).

In July 1937, Harris wrote plaintively to Lloyd that he had been hoping to hear from him as he had had a meeting the other day with officials of the different bodies in Liverpool, Hull, London and Cardiff, and they ‘are showing some uneasiness at the fact that it is almost a year ago that we had the privilege of discussing the situation with you’ (Harris to Lloyd 11 June 1937). Lloyd replied that ‘the special enquiry was concluded at the end of last month, but the results will not reach us for a few weeks more, as local officials are working in co-operation’ (Lloyd to Harris, 21 June 1937). At the beginning of the next month King wrote despairingly to Harris that he was sure the committee ‘hasn’t looked at half-castes. The Superintendent of the Juvenile Employment Bureau has heard nothing from them, although it is well known in Liverpool that he is closely in touch with the particular problem.’ It confirmed to King that they were only looking at coloured seamen and not the families ‘who are surely one of the vital questions’. He worried that ‘the question of half-castes will be shelved or postponed indefinitely’ (King to Harris I July 1937). He was right: the government conference concluded that welfare work with mixed families and their children be decentralised and addressed at port level.

8. Harris’s Third Conference and the People Article of October 1937

Harris’s anxiety about the government not considering ‘half-castes’ no doubt galvanised him to organise a third conference. This time Harris did inform Collet: he told him there was to be a public meeting in Liverpool on 25 November at 8 pm, preceded by an informal committee meeting at 4pm, to which representatives from Cardiff and Hull had been invited. ‘Why not write to Mr King and ask if you can attend?’ Collet did indeed write to King straight away, not referring to Harris but mentioning that a Sunday paper of 17 October had mentioned a public meeting in Liverpool on 25 November, preceded by a committee meeting. (We have been unable to locate this newspaper article).6 He asked King several questions: whether a representative from his group could come to the committee; whether the public meeting was open to coloured people; and whether at the public meeting a representative from his organisation could speak? (Collet to King, 25 October 1937). King immediately wrote to Harris: ‘Collet’s letter gave me considerable surprise’. He did not know how ‘they’ (LCP) kept so well informed of their plans (not realising that Harris was the informer). King wrote rudely and again disingenuously to Collet: ‘Our committee considered the question of opening our meeting, which you wrongly describe as a public meeting, to coloured people and it was decided it would not be desirable. On the question of the Committee meeting preceding the meeting you are better informed than I am myself’ (King to Collet, 27 October 1937).

Collet was understandably furious at being brushed off yet again and clearly lied to. He replied at once:

‘I notice you are the Honorary Secretary of the “Association of the Welfare of Half-caste Children”. I need scarcely say that the word “Welfare” seems strange side by side with that most objectionable word “Half-Caste”, but this title may have been given through ignorance, and I should be very pleased to have some information regarding this association and its work. I hope it is not a “private” association …. I note that it will not be possible for me or any delegate of the League of Coloured Peoples to be present either at the ‘prelim informal committee” or at the “semi-public” meeting … on 25th of Nov. This, together with information that I have gathered previously, leads me to suspect very strongly that your work has for its aim “the reduction of the half-caste children of coloured people in the ports, if necessary, by deportation”. These people are British subjects and it is both our work and our intention to fight any discrimination against British subjects in this country on account of race or colour.’ He also pointed out ‘the danger of very strong feeling which might result if such an action were considered’ (Collet to King 25 October 1937)). King forwarded the letter to Harris with the comment: ‘some of the things in Collet’s letter are getting near to unpardonable’ (King to Harris 27 October 1937).

Just prior to this heated exchange, an article appeared in the popular paper People 1937 (not the article that Collet refers to as mentioning the forthcoming conference). To quote the piece in full:

‘PARLIAMENT TO PURGE THE SEAPORTS

“SPECIAL TO “THE PEOPLE”

STEPS TO DEAL WITH THE GROWING NUMBER OF HALF-CASTE CHILDREN IN THE PORT TOWNS AND WITH THE INCREASING ASSOCIATION OF WHITE WOMEN WITH NEGRO SEAMEN ARE TO BE TAKEN BY PARLIAMENT IN THE NEAR FUTURE.

MPs representing Cardiff, Liverpool and Newcastle are to be invited to meet to see if they can decide on some common programme.

Numbers of children have to be cared for by local authorities at the expense of the ratepayers, while many of the seamen, on making the acquaintance of women in the docks, neglect to find work on outgoing ships in the towns and are also kept at public expense.

Steps are being taken in Liverpool to train as many as possible of the half-caste children for trades and then to transfer them to Africa, the native country of their fathers, so that they can become useful citizens there.

Public Assistance Authorities are also fixing a lower rate of relief for negroes than for white people in the hope that this will compel them to seek work again. In addition, the police are keeping under much closer supervision than hitherto the women who consort with these coloured visitors.

We have presented this article in its entirety, capital letters included, as it dramatically illustrates some of the attitudes and intentions of the time, here reproduced in a leading Sunday paper. It enumerated the moral, economic and social ‘problems’ being discussed: (1) the undesirable association of white women with seamen of colour, with reference to such women being under police surveillance, (2) the fact that the seamen were unemployed and living off the rates, and (3) that the children were also costing the ratepayers, with a plan to deport them to Africa. Was Collet right in thinking that it was King who intended to deport mixed-race children to Africa? For all the racist remarks of King, Fletcher, Richardson and Harris about mixed-race children (and Harris did write sinisterly about liquidation, and Fletcher of minimising the evils), we have not come across their suggesting the children’s deportation. They may well have desired such an outcome but realised its illegality. The children, by virtue of being born in Britain, were British subjects. (Attempting to repatriate their fathers was something that they did see as a possibility however. And in 1932 De Courcy Hamilton had suggested to Harris that we ‘educate some of the better type of men to go out to Africa as missionaries’). So who was suggesting that the children be trained in trades and sent to Africa?

Among Harris’s letters there is one dated 22 December 1937 from L Redfearn, Assistant Secretary of Liverpool Council of Social Services, to Mr Astbury, general secretary of Charity Organisation Society, London, about Daniels Ekarte and the African Churches Mission. (This letter was presumably forwarded to Harris). The African Churches Mission, based in Liverpool, was run by Nigerian Pastor Daniels Ekarte. He helped Black people with their legal rights, ran a café near the docks providing free or very cheap meals for the poor (white and Black) and preached fiery, political sermons (Bland 2019; Sherwood 2023). Many authorities however, and certain ‘philanthropic’ bodies, saw him as a ‘trouble-maker’. For example, King told Harris: ‘Strictly between you and I both I and one or two other people in Liverpool who know Ekarte well, think him an extremely dangerous person’ (King to Harris 29 October 1937). Redfearn told Astbury that ‘there is no-one who thinks there is anything sufficient to justify police action [against Ekarte]. [Harold] King did suggest that “in the present appeal being made, which has as its object the repatriation of half-caste children, it would be difficult for him to show any definite scheme to which the money is going”’ (emphasis added) (Redfearn to Astbury December 1937). Therefore it appears that Ekarte was asking for funds for a repatriation scheme; he had very little money and often appealed for help (King described Ekarte to the Colonial Office as a ‘vigorous beggar’ (quoted in Bland (2019))). This aim of sending mixed-race children to Africa remained an objective of Ekarte, for after the war, and in relation to the mixed-race children born to Black GIs, Ekarte, according to African-American anthropologist St John Drake, expressed a desire to ‘gather together all the babies, train them in industrial education and then send them forth at adolescence to help redeem his beloved Africa’ (St. Clair Drake n.d., c1948). Ekarte was a follower of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association which advocated a ‘back to Africa’ movement: those of African descent to recover Africa from the white man (Bland 2019).

By late 1937, the network’s energy was beginning to fragment. King continued to correspond with Harris but appears to have withdrawn from public activity soon after. In 1939 he left Liverpool; we do not know where he went, though by 1949 a man of the same name was serving as clerk to Somerset County Council, which was then overseeing the care of mixed-race children born to Black GIs during the Second World War (Bland 2019). Around this time, the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children was renamed the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Coloured People, widening its remit beyond children but retaining many of its earlier concerns (Rich 1990). The change in name reflected a modest institutional evolution rather than a clear ideological shift: official correspondence continued to speak of mixed-race families in the language of difficulty and social problem.

9. Government Responses

As evidenced by the Home Office’s reactions to Harris’s efforts, it appears that those within national government were generally much less animated about the issues brought forward by the network than those in it. During the initial pressure from Cardiff in 1929, the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, had replied that while they had deported ‘several alien coloured seamen who are part of the trouble … a large number of the men of whom the Chief Constable complains are British subjects’ (A. Evans 1935). This response seems to have triggered Wilson’s diatribe that anti-miscegenation laws akin to South Africa could be enacted; however, despite Joynston-Hicks’ reputation as a moral reactionary, the Home Office did not pursue this avenue.

In July 1935, Evans, MP, continued to press the government on what he termed ‘the problem of the coloured and half-caste population’ in dock areas. In Parliament, Evans called first on the Minister of Health and then the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin for formal action, in response to the findings of Captain F.A. Richardson’s 1935 report, including the establishment of a Royal Commission, (A. Evans, 1935). Yet, though Evans framed the matter as a national moral emergency, internal government correspondence reveals a more sceptical tone. Replying to Dr. Wade, a senior medical officer, in a minute dated 17 September 1935, his colleague from the Ministry of Health, M.J. Chatters, wrote:

‘On the whole I feel that the report exaggerates somewhat the conditions in Cardiff. With the exception of the native colonies I hardly think that any of the points raised call for special enquiry, but it would be useful if we could keep in touch with the Port Welfare Committee and hold a watching brief on future developments for a while.’

Wade then commissioned a brief to be conducted by Dr. R.J. Matthews. Dated 17 September 1935. Matthews’ report—titled Observations on the Survey Report by Captain F.A. Richardson—struck a different note to Richardson’s. Rather than endorsing claims of moral or racial degeneracy, Matthews observed that European sailors were responsible for far more venereal disease in Cardiff than ‘coloured’ seamen, and that the latter were also ‘less promiscuous in their habits’ than other groups. While Matthews briefly acknowledged local concerns about the presence of ‘coloured’ seamen and mixed-race children, he emphasised that housing conditions and economic pressures were the central issues affecting all residents. He noted, too, that the city authorities had already made improvements, signalling a pragmatic municipal response was needed, rather than classing the situation as a moral emergency (Matthews 1935).

The matter then appears to have been sidelined by the Ministry of Health until August 1938 when, following two parliamentary questions tabled by Evans, the Ministry of Labour and Ministry of Health began a new set of investigations into the conditions and welfare of seamen in British ports. The Ministry of Health, however, made it very clear that they were only concerned with port work in relation to venereal disease and TB, and recirculated Matthews’ report (not Richardson’s). The Ministry of Labour and Board of Trade then began to set in motion plans to conduct new enquiries into conditions for seamen in London, Southampton, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle, and Hull. The enquiries were conducted by R. B. Hunter from the Ministry of Labour (Ministry of Health correspondence, 1935).

Although the correspondence between the Ministries makes no mention of ‘coloured seamen’ as a specific focus, most of the selected ports were either sites of the 1919–20 race riots or had previously attracted official attention in connection with mixed-race families and youth.7 While the sites chosen were obviously among Britain’s largest commercial ports, the recurrence of these same locations suggests a degree of bureaucratic continuity. The omission of other significant ports, such as Plymouth and Dover, hints that older perceptions of racialised port communities may still have shaped the selection of sites for inquiry.

Indeed, the issue of racial mixing as problematic lingers in a confidential draft interim report on Cardiff by Hunter for the Ministry of Health dated 2–10 February 1939, entitled Enquiry into Seamen’s Welfare in Ports: International Labour Recommendation No. 40 (Hunter 1939). Though race was not the stated focus of his investigation, occasional references to ‘coloured seamen’ and ‘half-caste children’ reveal the persistence of earlier assumptions. Hunter described the dock area as ‘a cosmopolitan community… who, with their British neighbours, appear to have drifted into a low standard of living,’ and observed that ‘by intermarriage and other racial difficulties, the [coloured seamen] have created a social problem which affects the dock area.’ Such phrasing echoes the moral and classificatory language of previous reports, even as the official emphasis shifted toward welfare and employment.

Subsequent reports appear to have adopted a similar tone. As Balachandran (2014) notes, a 1939 Port Welfare Enquiry flagged up the issue of interracial relationships between Indian men and ‘the worst type of white women’ beyond the dock districts. Though noting it was beyond the report’s remit, it urged ‘drastic action’ to prevent colonial seamen from settling in Britain without special permission. Taken together, these documents suggest that despite the supposed administrative focus on the welfare of seamen generally, racialised understandings of port life—and the impulse to monitor and contain it—remained embedded in official thinking on the eve of war.

In examining these reports—both those circulating within the network and those produced inside government—we have made every effort to identify their authors. Government reports are often treated as anonymous artefacts, but behind each inquiry, memorandum, and published account stood individuals with distinct perspectives, prejudices, and professional agendas. Recognising this restores human agency to bureaucratic knowledge-making. It is especially striking, for instance, how Dr. Matthews’s (1935) report on Cardiff downplayed the issue of interracial mixing compared with the more sensational and moralising tone of Richardson’s and Hunter’s, a reminder that even within officialdom, interpretation and emphasis were far from uniform.

10. Conclusions

In some ways the arrival of the second world war in the UK in September 1939 brought the overt and relentless academic, press and bureaucratic focus on Britain’s multiracial port communities to an end (Rich 1990). With attention and government efforts needed elsewhere, the port investigations seem to have petered out, as did their press counterparts. Moreover, many of the interwar British mixed-race children and young people who had been the focus of earlier 1930s’ enquiries had become adults by the outbreak of war, signing up to fight for Britain (though their service continues to remain largely unrecognised in mainstream accounts). Others were evacuated to the countryside, as fictionalised recently in Steve McQueen’s 2024 film Blitz (McQueen 2024) With the efforts of its colonies greatly needed, the British government promoted British mixed-race children and their families in recruitment and propaganda videos specifically produced for African and South Asian colonies, such as the short film Springtime in an English Village, which featured mixed-race evacuee Stephanie Antiah being crowned May Queen by her classmates in Stanion, Northamptonshire, or the photography series ‘Everyday Life in Butetown’, which featured several mixed British-Yemini families in Cardiff (for discussion on the real history behind Blitz, see The Mixed Museum: https://mixedmuseum.org.uk/news/the-real-history-behind-steve-mcqueens-blitz-mixed-race-families-in-wartime-london/ accessed 10 October 2025).

However, as Balachandran (2014) discusses, the war did not end bureaucratic surveillance of men of colour, their white wives and children; rather, it surfaced new anxieties. For example, when Americans arrived in Britain in 1942 as allied troops, the Army Bureau of Public Affairs produced an educational pamphlet The Colour Problem as the American Sees It which announced: ‘We need not go into a long discussion as to whether mixed marriages between white and coloured are good or bad. What is fairly obvious is that in our present society such unions are not considered desirable, since the children resulting from them are neither one thing nor another and are thus badly handicapped in the struggle for life’ (quoted in Rose (2003), p. 261). Harris’s delegation and the Army Bureau of Public Affairs both saw mixed-race children as unwanted, unclassifiable and deeply disadvantaged (Bland 2019).

We can see this in the treatment of some of the two thousand children born to Black GIs and white British women in the Second World War. They were all illegitimate as the US army would not permit Black soldiers to marry their white girls-friends, and nearly half of the children were put into care. The British government were clearly ambivalent about the presence of such children and did consider sending them to the US (and there were many African Americans keen to adopt them). Although US adoption was permitted for a short period in 1949–50, the Home Office reconsidered, worried about Britain being too beholden to its powerful ally and fearful of being seen as deporting this particular ‘problem’. It again became very difficult for the children to be adopted by Americans, not least their own fathers, for given this was long before DNA testing, they were deemed ‘putative’ relatives only (Bland 2019).

Similarly, concerns about Indian and Chinese workers settling in Britain during the war saw not only new committees and surveillance form (Balachandran 2014), but cruel policies enacted. Immediately after the war, thousands of Chinese seamen, including those who has served on British merchant ships, were suddenly deported with no warning from Liverpool, including hundreds who had married and had families with local women. Home Office files dismissively refer to the women as ‘belonging to the prostitute class.’ (Aspinall and Caballero 2013). Their wives and children were not only left destitute, but were not told what had happened to their husbands and fathers. To this date, their children are still looking for answers (Aspinall and Caballero (2013), see also https://dragonsandlions.co.uk/ accessed 15 October 2025).

These attitudes persisted into the postwar decades, reignited by the arrival of Caribbean, South Asian, and African migrants who answered Britain’s call to rebuild the nation (Balachandran 2014). Press warnings about the ‘perils’ of interracial marriage and the ‘problem’ of mixed-race children revived the language and anxieties of the interwar moral panic. Behind their outwardly liberal takes, the emerging postwar social scientists often upheld earlier older perceptions of interracial families, including some involved in the emerging field of ‘race relations’. For example, sociologist Michael Banton’s much-praised The Coloured Quarter (1955), which explored migration and settlement in the East London area of Stepney, repeated many of the same assumptions found in interwar investigations, describing white working-class women in interracial relationships as ‘nymphomaniacs’ or ‘mentally and educationally sub-normal’ (Banton 1955).

Moreover, state surveillance of interracial relationships and mixed-race families continued. As Caballero and Aspinall (2018) note, the Home Office began systematically monitoring immigrant and mixed-race communities from 1957 onward, circulating memoranda to all chief constables requesting data on immigrants’ living conditions, crime, illegitimacy and, by 1960, ‘intermixing, miscegenation and illegitimacy.’ A 1962 Manchester report compiled by local health visitors quantified mixed-race children and interracial families with the same classificatory zeal seen in the interwar years, distinguishing between children with ‘one coloured parent’ and ‘two coloured parents’, and correlating their legitimacy and housing status with moral worth. Although officials concluded that the figures were ‘not very startling’, the very act of measurement illustrates the endurance of an investigative gaze that treated mixed-race family life as a social pathology requiring surveillance and categorisation. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that a ‘new wave’ of research—led by researchers many themselves from mixed-race families—began to question both the gaze, language and authority of those earlier investigations (Caballero 2005). Their work marked the start of a shift, from being the objects of inquiry to becoming its authors.

In tracing the correspondence and reports of the 1920s and 1930s, this paper has sought to recover not only the origins of a moral panic but the administrative machinery that sustained it. What emerges is not a story of mass sentiment, but of how a relatively small body of officials, investigators, and commentators—driven by conviction, prejudice, or professional ambition—could greatly influence the ways in which a nation understood a group of people. The language and categories devised by figures such as Harris, Wilson, Fletcher, Richardson and others outlived them, shaping policy, pedagogy, and public discourse for decades. In continuing to challenge and unpick this legacy, we build on Peter Aspinall’s commitment to understanding how racial classification and bureaucratic practice intertwine. Part of that legacy is to continue to ‘investigate the investigators’, and to recognise how ‘official’ knowledge, once racialised, acquires a troubling durability, and how ideas seeded by the few can harden into supposed fact, long after their authors and their moment, have passed.