Hotting Hill Nights

Fortnight ago, when Britain suffered its first race riots (TiME, Sept. 8), most Britons were inclined to dismiss them as a shocking but temporary aberration. Last week, in shame and humiliation, Englishmen learned that racism had become part of the British way of life.

Every night last week--except twice when it rained--the mobs surged through London's seedy Netting Hill and Paddington districts. In Latimer Road, Soapboxer Jeffrey Hamm roared that Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley's Union Movement had warned five years ago that racial flare-ups would result from the government's "open-door" policy to Negroes from the colonies and Commonwealth. "Deport colored people found guilty of crime!" he shouted. From the crowd of 2,000 teenagers came a hissing, ecstatic "Yesss!" A carload of Negroes went slowly by, and 200 screaming Teddy boys peeled off from the crowd, chased after it.

On Ledbury Road, hoodlums worked systematically down the street hurling bricks and milk bottles at every house where Negroes lived. When they reached a Negro bar called the Calypso Club, three Molotov cocktails (bottles filled with gasoline ignited by a wick) were hurled out at the crowd. "Kill the bloody spades!" shrieked a 15-year-old Teddy boy. Others took up the cry--but it changed to "Kill the bloody coppers!" as truncheon-flailing police surged into the mob. Dozens were arrested and police stations stacked up piles of bicycle chains and tire irons, flick knives and nail-studded belts taken from the rioters. "It's become a teen-age sport," said the officer in charge of West London night operations.

The Lesson of Little Rock. Why were they doing it? "I reckon Little Rock learned us a lesson," snarled one Teddy boy. Ranted a black-bearded ex-serviceman: "I'm a nigger hater all right. I happen to love this country of mine . . . Before the war we were supreme beings--30,000 of us kept one-third of the earth's surface in order. We've got to keep the blacks down or they'll take over like Hitler did."* And a Times reporter noted that the hoodlums came from all over London, even from areas where there were no Negroes, "because these stunted, pallid thugs like the chance of violence without danger."

Rising Tide. As Commonwealth ministers from the West Indies and Africa flew hastily into London to express "grave concern" over the continuing riots, the British government seemed to be more than ever at a loss just what to do about it. Home Secretary R. A. Butler, speaking to a Conservative rally at Saffron Waiden, carefully avoided committing himself to anything. "It has always been the right of British citizenship to come in and out of the mother country at will, and it will need considerable force of argument to alter this policy," he said. On the other hand, Butler noted that even "before these incidents we have been reviewing the volume of colored immigration and what happens to those who come here from our Commonwealth countries."

In his hint at the possibility of some kind of restrictions on nonwhite immigration to Britain, Butler was in tune with an increasingly vocal segment of British opinion. The Trades Union Congress (see below) last week condemned any proposal to raise bars against Commonwealth non-whites and the Labor Party planned to insert an antidiscrimination plank in its next election program. Yet three of London's twelve leading newspapers--the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and Daily Telegraph--supported restrictions as did a growing number of Tory M.P.s and a few Laborites. And at week's end the Daily Express announced that it had surveyed Britons on the desirability of restriction. The results: 79.1% in favor of restrictions, only 14.2% opposed.

* In Great Britain there are 50 million whites, 200,000 coloreds.

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