The Commonwealth Comes to London
YVEL, T.R.F
Changing Britain-2 The Commonwealth Comes to London By T R. Fyvel London IT is fairly well established how small a part of the British nation took part in the management of the greatest empire...
...Lawrence Harvey, who made a dashing hero in the international Romeo and Juliet film, is a South African...
...The Commonwealth is markedly represented on London's stage, ballet, opera and film...
...Yet one feels that the question of these eagerly accepted West Indian intellectuals is one thing, and that of "integrating" an evergrowing number of West Indians into the British working class quite another...
...But there is also a movement in reverse: It is said that up to 10,000 Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans are coming to this country each year to settle either for good or for a long period...
...The West Indians in Britain fall into two streams: a minority who drift into the fringe jobs of London's West End life and its vice and a majority who have gone into industry proper, and it is oddly enough the latter who have aroused more resentment...
...Such guests were few...
...Another, rather different immigration has also come from the Commonwealth...
...The motive is probably less color prejudice than fear that the inflated trade-union bargaining power of the present day may be affected...
...As for the teeming 500 millions of the colored races, they seemed adequately represented by a small number of distinguished students at the universities, some of them rich or intellectual or even both —like Mohandas Gandhi at the Inns of Court, Jawaharlal Nehru at Harrow, John Kotelawala of Ceylon at Christ's College, Cambridge, Solomon Bandaranaike of Ceylon at Christchurch, Oxford, or, more modestly and recently, Kwame Nkrumah at London University...
...Of course, not all West Indians are immigrant workers...
...But what can already be noticed is how British life itself has been affected by the new Commonwealth relations...
...Notable examples were William Plomer and Roy Campbell, the two most versatile South African poets...
...A generation ago, the stereotype picture of the "colonial" visiting the mother country was still that of the man from the wide, open spaces, sunburned, direct in manner, socially gauche but a rough diamond...
...All this shows how Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have been transformed from "colonies" into countries with limited population but high standards of education and large and flourishing universities...
...and so it goes 011...
...The startling official figures for 1951-56 are: 16,000 Cypriot emigrants to the Commonwealth, mainly to Britain, against 900 to the U.S...
...They range from easygoing Canadians and Australians to ambitious young Indians grooming themselves for their niche in the Five-Year Plan bureaucracy and Africans, in Europe for the first time, trying to take in modernity in one stride...
...Since the war, about 100-200,000 British emigrants have left annually for the "White Dominions...
...O'Cascy), so today it is being quickened by this invigorating influx from tho Commonwealth...
...The Cypriots are clearly here to slay...
...The vigorous influx into the British professions and universities is today taken for granted...
...Lack of employment in their sunblest holiday islands has in the last half-dozen years sent close to 100,000 West Indians to London and other cities of Britain...
...Peter Finch, who has established himself as one of London's most forceful stage and film actors, is another Australian...
...Robert Helpmann, for long the leading dancer and choreographer of the Royal Ballet, Covent Garden (the former Sadler's Wells), is an Australian...
...In return for all their kindness I insisted that my landlady leave all the dirty dishes for me to wash...
...Recently the influx has quickened...
...As British citizens they can enter freely, and they have brought some acute social problems with them...
...The nature of the varied Commonwealth bonds, their strength, the extent to which the British cultural heritage will endure—all this cannot today be foretold...
...For a young writer from Melbourne, Johannesburg or Bombay, a spell in London has for some time been obligatory and some of the most talented have stayed...
...others again, as in public transport, have agreed to accept only so many West Indians in each bus garage or railway gang...
...it was assumed that in one way or other their stay in Britain would be all right, and Nkrumah in his autobiography has revealed how things arranged themselves: "The family proved extremely kind and took a great interest in my well-being...
...and only 82 to Greece...
...But, as a whole, the Cypriots in Britain are busy people —hard-working, enterprising and obviously prospering within the welfare state...
...Finally, it is worth noting an immigration which throws neat light on the differences between nationalism and real life: that from Cyprus...
...The common sight of Negroes walking in the West End with white girls is one of the first things American tourists talk about, but behind this lies a sorry tale of West Indians having the doors of lodging houses slammed in their faces, being forced into squalid overcrowding and excluded from trade-union membership...
...The close-knit Cypriot community in Britain, now 40,000 strong, has its political association, the "Cypriot Brotherhood" (the Turkish Cypriots have their own separate body), and its Greek-language weekly, J'ema, which cheerfully attacks British policy in the island...
...All three have therefore for some time been exporters of brainpower, and it is only natural that many of their graduates should come to Britain to make their names in professions like medicine or at British universities and scientific research institutes...
...Many British citizens have been shaken by the revelation of ugly color prejudice in their midst...
...Students from the Commonwealth, graduate and postgraduate, number one in eight of the student body...
...The British imperial military-administrative caste, whose mores George Orwell so well described, was numbered even at the height of the Empire in no more than tens of thousands...
...Of the ballerinas, Elaine Fifield comes from Australia and Rowena Jackson from New Zealand...
...They are certainly no longer the old stage characters from "the wide, open spaces...
...In British mass communications, Commonwealth participation is even stronger...
...Today the head of BBC sound radio is a Canadian...
...The leading elder statesman of British journalism is still without question Lord Beaverbrook, once a Canadian...
...The obvious answer is, very few...
...They have already taken over quite a slice of the London restaurant trade and built up several of the smartest West End restaurants...
...What is less well known is the reverse side: how little one was aware of the Empire in London...
...The chances arc that the Commonwealth immigration which has already brought new strains and colors into British life will continue...
...How far will this influence extend...
...They have already made a contribution to British life and will no doubt make more...
...There is also a more permanent Commonwealth influx...
...When the delicate Katherine Mansfield left her native New Zealand forty years ago to become a figure in the London literary world, she stood almost alone as representative of the Antipodes...
...This went even for the "White Dominions"—Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa...
...One need only mention Professor Arthur Lewis, the outstanding economist now appointed economic adviser to Ghana...
...the head of Independent Television News a New Zealander...
...Far from it: There is a long-resident West Indian intelligentsia in Britain...
...Their presence at the universities, the hospitals and the law-courts is unmistakable evidence that Africa is on the move...
...others have obstinately banned them, never mind socialism and all that...
...Today, London has become the artistic center of a worldwide English-speaking culture (and one must here include the 30 million Indians who have some knowledge of English...
...I was rarely in before midnight, as I used to work until all hours...
...the most popular political analyst on television another Canadian, Robert Mackenzie...
...But whatever time I came in I always knew that I would find something to eat left for me in the oven...
...Changing Britain-2 The Commonwealth Comes to London By T R. Fyvel London IT is fairly well established how small a part of the British nation took part in the management of the greatest empire on which the sun has ever set...
...And the Observer's drama prize for an original play recently went to a young West Indian, Errol John, in hot competition against 2,000 other entries...
...During the years of bitterness over Enosis, Cypriots have been emigrating, and coming steadily to London and not Athens...
...This is less so in the case of the Canadians, who have the United States at their doorstep, but most pronounced in the case of New Zealand, the furthest, most isolated, most British and best educated of all the Commonwealth states...
...If Enosis were granted, if Cyprus were joined with Greece, and Cypriots therefore lost that Commonwealth citizenship which today enables them to come freely to British territories, how many Cypriots in Britain would want to return to their former homes...
...People in general do not emigrate for political motives—not from London to small islands, at any rate...
...For example, a glance at the main university centers reveals that British student life has become strikingly international...
...Alan Moorehead, an Australian, was the most widely read British correspondent of the last war...
...The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a vigorous drama about Australian sugar-cane cutters, written by a young Australian playwright, Ray Lawler, is the success of the current London theater season...
...In the end, most West Indians do attain reasonably paid jobs and better housing and they are sending home several million pounds a year in remittances...
...And they will not be the only ones...
...Indeed, a large number are professional men—administrators, lawyers, doctors, architects, university scholars—many at the top of their professions...
...Yet there is no system about this British working-class reaction...
...Alexander Grant, who dances Petroushka, is a New Zealander...
...Psychologically, it is a long way from these London lodgings to Nkru-mah's premiership in Ghana, from the Thirties to the present day, from rigid Empire to an intangible Commonwealth of free nations in which the colored member states, some of them republics, form the majority...
...What is new is a rather impressive Commonwealth invasion into the British arts...
...In fact, students and student nurses from West Africa, between two and three thousand of them, form the biggest single unit...
...This I did regularly before I went to bed...
...So far, one can only say that, just as the intellectual and artistic life of London was for many decades enriched from Ireland (one thinks of Swift, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Shaw, Wilde, Yeats...
...Some trade-union branches— probably the majority—have accepted West Indians without question...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 44
