Writing in The Guardian (24th August 2002), Alan Travis reports that new evidence has come to light about the Notting Hill racial riots. Over five nights in August 1958, a great deal of violent crime was committed by both black and white people on the streets of Notting Hill and Notting Dale in London. Official reports from the Metropolitan Police at the time suggested that the attacks were simply the work of ‘ruffians and hooligans’ and were not directly related to racism. However, secret papers and private statistics have now been uncovered which tell a different story. The papers include eyewitness accounts from the police who were patrolling the streets, and these indicate that most of the violence was committed by white working-class men who were out ‘nigger-hunting’. 300-400 such men are alleged to have been spotted, armed with iron bars, butchers’ knives, and weighted leather belts, and out on a mission to ‘Keep Britain White’. Of the 108 people who were arrested and charged, 72 were white and 36 ‘colored’, many of whom had acted in retaliation against the white men’s attacks. Thus, it would seem that the riots did have a racial motive and were largely the work of white xenophobic, but the police and the government’s attempts to deny this have led to grave mistrust of the Met by London’s black residents. 

Questions:

1. Why do you think there was such a conflict between the black and white residents of London in the 1950s? 

2. Why would the police have been keen to deny that the riots were racially motivated? 

3. What do such ‘hate crimes’ reveal about race relations in a supposedly multicultural society like Britain? 

4. The Notting Hill Carnival began in 1959 as a response to these riots. What kind of ‘counter-discourse’ does this suggest? 

5. How reliable do you think these ‘secret’ police reports are as evidence of what happened on the streets of Notting Hill?