04 December, 2011
Simpler times
I've just been listening to a CD of The China Story, a Goon Show episode originally recorded in 1956. Against a general background of high-pitched yabba-yabba supposedly characteristic of spoken Chinese,
I was an impressionable eight years old when this incendiary stuff was first broadcast. To be honest I don't remember actually hearing this specific episode at the time but I was an avid Goons fan and recall much in this general vein.
But me and my mates did not, incited by this sort of vile racism freely broadcast by the B-B-C, wander the streets of Moston looking for Darkies to whitewash or Chinamen to mock.
Would have been a waste of time anyway. As far as I recall there were no Blacks in Moston at that time. None at all. I'm not so sure about the Chinese; I don't think there were any but your Wily Oriental has over the centuries developed the devious skill of being simultaneously both ubiquitous and invisible; they might have been lurking furtively in laundry baskets and coming out at night to eat White children and stray dogs for all I know. Or some such dastardly native practice.
Actually, the first time I saw non-White people in the flesh was on my first visit to Moss Side in 1959. On the busy pavements of Moss Lane East in what was otherwise a typical slightly run-down Manchester inner suburb, perhaps 5% of the pedestrians were West Indians. And did the 11-year-old Edwin need to be sternly reprimanded by the bus guard for screaming foul abuse and coating the windows of the bus with angry spittle? Well not as such, Lord Copper. It was, to be fair, a new and memorable experience which I still recall clearly. But I'm sorry to disappoint any Righteous readers, for a fairly accurate verbalization of my reaction to this unfamiliar sight would be "Oh, those are Black people, are they? OK then."
If it helps any, I do remember feeling slightly hostile to a Black lady who got on the bus later that year and sat next to me. She was, like many women of recent West African heritage, of, shall we say, an extravagantly endomorphic somatotype and took up an awful lot of our shared seat, squashing my small frame up against the side of the bus. I would have minded less if the confined space hadn't made it difficult to hold my copy of Kennedy's Latin Primer comfortably; I was trying to revise my amo, amas, amat at the time.
Things have changed in the succeeding 50-odd years. Whether or not for the better I leave to the reader to judge.
Seagoon (replying to a taunt from Grytpype Thynne): Lies! I have my dark secrets.
Ellington (interjecting, in exaggerated "Darkie" accent): Man, so do I!
Seagoon: Silence, Ellington. Or I'll have the whitewash brush to you.
I was an impressionable eight years old when this incendiary stuff was first broadcast. To be honest I don't remember actually hearing this specific episode at the time but I was an avid Goons fan and recall much in this general vein.
But me and my mates did not, incited by this sort of vile racism freely broadcast by the B-B-C, wander the streets of Moston looking for Darkies to whitewash or Chinamen to mock.
Would have been a waste of time anyway. As far as I recall there were no Blacks in Moston at that time. None at all. I'm not so sure about the Chinese; I don't think there were any but your Wily Oriental has over the centuries developed the devious skill of being simultaneously both ubiquitous and invisible; they might have been lurking furtively in laundry baskets and coming out at night to eat White children and stray dogs for all I know. Or some such dastardly native practice.
Actually, the first time I saw non-White people in the flesh was on my first visit to Moss Side in 1959. On the busy pavements of Moss Lane East in what was otherwise a typical slightly run-down Manchester inner suburb, perhaps 5% of the pedestrians were West Indians. And did the 11-year-old Edwin need to be sternly reprimanded by the bus guard for screaming foul abuse and coating the windows of the bus with angry spittle? Well not as such, Lord Copper. It was, to be fair, a new and memorable experience which I still recall clearly. But I'm sorry to disappoint any Righteous readers, for a fairly accurate verbalization of my reaction to this unfamiliar sight would be "Oh, those are Black people, are they? OK then."
If it helps any, I do remember feeling slightly hostile to a Black lady who got on the bus later that year and sat next to me. She was, like many women of recent West African heritage, of, shall we say, an extravagantly endomorphic somatotype and took up an awful lot of our shared seat, squashing my small frame up against the side of the bus. I would have minded less if the confined space hadn't made it difficult to hold my copy of Kennedy's Latin Primer comfortably; I was trying to revise my amo, amas, amat at the time.
Things have changed in the succeeding 50-odd years. Whether or not for the better I leave to the reader to judge.
# posted by Edwin Greenwood @ 13:48 
Comments:
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Surely you had the delightful Little Black Sambo books at junior school ?
I certainly did in those far off days of the mid sixties when all my classmates were white working class kids, everyone's parents were married and only our Dads had jobs - and for sure no one had ever heard of Islam.
The past is a foreign country called England.
I certainly did in those far off days of the mid sixties when all my classmates were white working class kids, everyone's parents were married and only our Dads had jobs - and for sure no one had ever heard of Islam.
The past is a foreign country called England.
# posted by 
: 05 December, 2011 00:51
: 05 December, 2011 00:51
Do you know what I hate the most about the whole multi ethnic shit soup that exists in England today?
Its this,I have met some foreign folks who have been the nicest most decent people you could meet and I hate to have to lump them in with the trash of their respective races,but we must if our country,our England is going to stay OUR ENGLAND and not just some country where the English are just another ethnic group and not even the majority in that,their own land.
Its time to stop this nonsense about black or Asian "English" people,screw Bonnie Greer and her fellow travellors,being English DOES mean having ancestors that go back to our original Anglo-Saxon ancestors or if not that then having a sufficiently Northern European ancestry as to be able to "pass" as English.
The only people qualified to say who is or isnt English are the English themselves.
Its this,I have met some foreign folks who have been the nicest most decent people you could meet and I hate to have to lump them in with the trash of their respective races,but we must if our country,our England is going to stay OUR ENGLAND and not just some country where the English are just another ethnic group and not even the majority in that,their own land.
Its time to stop this nonsense about black or Asian "English" people,screw Bonnie Greer and her fellow travellors,being English DOES mean having ancestors that go back to our original Anglo-Saxon ancestors or if not that then having a sufficiently Northern European ancestry as to be able to "pass" as English.
The only people qualified to say who is or isnt English are the English themselves.
"... being English DOES mean having ancestors that go back to our original Anglo-Saxon ancestors or if not that then having a sufficiently Northern European ancestry as to be able to "pass" as English."
The John Smith test.
"The only people qualified to say who is or isnt English are the English themselves."
Indeed.
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The John Smith test.
"The only people qualified to say who is or isnt English are the English themselves."
Indeed.
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