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Behind Channel 4’s pot-stirring lies an interesting documentary about how black American soldiers were treated in the Second World War
3/5
As clickbait headlines go, Channel 4 has outdone itself with Churchill: Britain’s Secret Apartheid. The story has almost nothing to do with Winston Churchill. The title, one presumes, is cashing in on the fact that debate continues over whether he was a racist or not.
It is frustrating, because this documentary covers an interesting topic pretty well. It is the story of black American GIs stationed in Britain during the Second World War. The Jim Crow policies of racial segregation effectively came with them. Black and white were kept apart; British pubs were ordered not to serve black soldiers.
Churchill had quite a lot to be getting on with at the time. Nor did he want to start a row with the Americans, who were lending their support at a critical moment. So, the programme tells us, he decided that the British authorities “wouldn’t enforce the US’s extreme race policy, but wouldn’t ask any awkward questions about it either – a typical British compromise”.
The programme explores several incidents in which black GIs were the victims of US military police. In the best known, at Bamber Bridge in Lancashire, a young man named Private William Crossland was shot and a battle raged at the base, leading to 32 African-American soldiers being convicted of mutiny and other crimes. Another black GI was shot in the back in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, after his group of friends went to get sandwiches at the city’s Colonial Club after a night out. In Leicester, there was a mass brawl between black and white soldiers who had been drinking in rival establishments.
Presenter Nadifa Mohamed is a novelist, although she does consult historians as she goes. She admits to approaching the subject with prejudice: she thought that the Americans’ racist attitudes would be shared by the British. “British imperial racism is not so far from American racism,” she explained. And in the archives, she found a note to Churchill from Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, expressing opposition to the arrival of black GIs: “The last war had shown that our climate was badly suited to negroes.” Yet Mohamed’s other discoveries made her question her assumptions.
She found reams of evidence that the British public opposed US segregation being played out in their country. Entries in the Mass Observation Archive called the attitudes “revolting” and shameful. In the present day, a woman recalled her publican grandmother serving a black GI against the orders of military police: “She said, ‘If he was my son away from home, I would want people to treat them well. Why be against someone who was here to help us?’”
In Bamber Bridge, locals stood with the African-Americans and still commemorate the events today. In a moving finale, Private Crossland’s niece came to visit, and was welcomed into the village pub with warm applause. A charge of mutiny remains on his record, and she is campaigning for him to receive an official pardon.
5/5
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English