Notting Hill Race Riots (1958): Racist Violence in West London

The Notting Hill race riots were a series of violent attacks by white crowds on West Indian residents of Notting Hill and neighbouring Notting Dale, in west London, in the late summer of 1958. For about a week from 30 August, mobs of up to several hundred people roamed the streets with bricks, iron bars and petrol bombs. The riots shattered the comfortable belief that Britain had no “colour problem” and became a turning point in Black British history.

Background

After the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948, tens of thousands of people from the Caribbean settled in Britain, recruited or encouraged to fill labour shortages. Many found that landlords refused to rent to them, and they were pushed into the cheapest, most overcrowded housing. North Kensington, with its decaying Victorian terraces, was one such area. Some landlords, notably Peter Rachman, exploited tenants of all backgrounds.

The district was poor, and resentment over housing and jobs was stirred up by far-right organisations. Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and the White Defence League held meetings and distributed leaflets calling for the deportation of Black immigrants. Gangs of young white men, the fashionable “Teddy boys”, were involved in increasingly frequent attacks. Newspapers often blamed the immigrants themselves for overcrowding, and some local politicians, including the area’s Labour MP George Rogers, called for curbs on immigration.

What happened

On 23 August 1958 fighting broke out in the St Ann’s district of Nottingham, and the news was widely reported. In the early hours of 24 August, a group of nine white youths drove around west London armed with iron bars and other weapons, attacking Black men they found on the streets and leaving several seriously injured.

On the evening of 29 August, a white Swedish woman, Majbritt Morrison, was seen arguing with her Jamaican husband outside Latimer Road Underground station; a crowd gathered and turned on him. She was abused and attacked again the following night. From 30 August the violence escalated. Crowds estimated at 300 to 400 people attacked houses occupied by West Indians in streets such as Bramley Road and Blenheim Crescent, smashing windows and throwing petrol bombs.

Black residents organised to defend themselves, barricading houses and in some cases fighting back. The police were later criticised for being slow to protect them and for treating the disorder as hooliganism rather than racist violence. Rain and heavy policing helped bring the worst of the rioting to an end in early September.

Arrests and trials

Police made around 140 arrests during the disturbances, the majority of them white, though Black residents who defended themselves were also charged. In September 1958 the nine youths responsible for the attacks of 24 August appeared at the Old Bailey. Justice Cyril Salmon sentenced each to four years in prison, telling them that everyone, irrespective of skin colour, was entitled to walk the streets in peace. The sentences were seen as deliberately exemplary.

Norman Manley, Chief Minister of Jamaica, flew to London to visit the affected areas and meet community leaders. Police files released decades later suggested that senior officers had played down the racial motive for the violence in their reports.

Aftermath and community response

The riots pushed West Indian residents to organise. Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born activist and editor of the West Indian Gazette, argued that Caribbean people needed to celebrate their culture in the face of hostility. She helped organise a Caribbean carnival held indoors at St Pancras Town Hall on 30 January 1959, part of which was televised by the BBC. The later outdoor festival that became the Notting Hill Carnival drew on this tradition.

Racist violence did not end. On 17 May 1959 Kelso Cochrane, a carpenter from Antigua, was stabbed to death in North Kensington; no one was ever convicted. Oswald Mosley stood for Parliament in Kensington North at the 1959 general election but won only about 8 per cent of the vote. The riots also fed demands for immigration control, which led to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962.

Timeline

• 1958, 23 August: Violence breaks out in St Ann’s, Nottingham.
• 1958, 24 August: Nine white youths attack Black men in west London.
• 1958, 29 August: Crowd turns on a Jamaican man and his Swedish wife near Latimer Road station.
• 1958, 30 August – early September: Mobs attack West Indian homes in Notting Hill and Notting Dale.
• 1958, mid-September: At the Old Bailey, the nine youths are sentenced to four years each.
• 1959, 30 January: Claudia Jones’s Caribbean carnival is held at St Pancras Town Hall.
• 1959, 17 May: Kelso Cochrane is murdered in North Kensington.

Why it matters

The Notting Hill riots were the first large-scale racist violence against Caribbean migrants in post-war Britain. They exposed discrimination that many in authority preferred to ignore, prompted the first organised Black community campaigns in London and helped give rise to one of Europe’s largest street festivals.