The Booma Boys
The Nigerian warriors came home from the Burma war filled by the same impatience with the past that flung their English comrades into Clement Attlee's grim embrace. Among them was a residue of restless souls whose misconduct in Lagos won them the name of 'Burma Boys'. When the late forties raced into Nigeria (as they never did to war-sodden, static, 'welfare' England), this name became 'Booma,' and the 'Boys' really boys: for a new generation of goodbad lads sprung out of the Lagos pavements, who were too young to have fought overseas but old enough to demand that the future happen quickly now. Many of these vivid scamps, innocent as rogues under twenty-three can be, were suddenly gripped by a deep urge to know the world; and as swallows do, they took off from Africa for England with nothing but a compelling instinct as their baggage, stowing away, signing on and deserting, sometimes cajoling minimal fares from rightly reluctant families. Their landfall was in the big English dock cities, and they loped ashore blithely confident that the world loved them and owed them a treasure.
Colin MacInnes, 1960
My second memory of meeting David was at a dance at the Jubilee Hall in Chapeltown. Today the place is some kind of a media centre, but it was originally built in the thirties as a Jewish social centre back when the Chapeltown area was rather grand and somewhat Jewish. The Jubilee Hall would allow us to rent rooms for dances and here, as in the pubs, the African students mixed with the African workers. With the West Indians there were actually more workers than students, but it was the other way around with the Africans. However, I do seem to remember that quite a few of the Trinidadians were doing medicine, dentistry, law, and accounting and so on. The second time I saw David was at the Jubilee Hall dance and I noticed him because he was smarter than most in his dress sense. David always wore cool suits, always a collar and tie, and when he began to dance he danced as though he had music in his soul. In fact, when David walked he did so as though he was walking to music. There was a great rhythm to his steps. The kind of music they played at Jubilee Hall dances was Hi Life and Steel Pan, and David was in his element. I noticed him that first time because he turned the wrong way. I noticed him the second time because he was such a great dancer.
I never saw David standing alone by himself either in the pub or at a dance. Aside from his living arrangements, which meant that he lived a little way off from all the others, he appeared to me to be fully integrated into the African group. In fact, sometimes the university held dances and I saw him there, and again I noticed his skill at dancing. This would have been around 1951. He was very bouncy, and very young and slim. David wasn't really a political type and he never joined in with any of that. I tried to talk to him about the racial situation, especially as I had just formed the Chapeltown Commonwealth Citizens Committee. This was a difficult time for a white woman to be seen with a group of coloured men. I would be at risk, but the greater risk would be to them. People would often say things to me — nasty things — and naturally the men would want to defend me, although I'd try to encourage them to say nothing. But it wasn't easy. The Labour Party wouldn't officially support us in our work with the coloured immigrants; some individuals within the Labour Party, yes, but not the Labour Party as a whole. We — the members of the Chapeltown Commonwealth Citizens Committee — leafleted places and tried to make them take down their discriminating signs. We postered offices and pubs, and we also went to estate agents and tried to convince them that property prices actually went up when coloureds moved in. We told them that initially some whites might want to move out, but we reminded them that the housing demand from coloureds was such that the prices would inevitably rise back up. We also tried hard to get coloureds registered to vote, and we were forever dealing with the nuisance of the police. David was interested in what we were doing, but he didn't take part. He would always ask how we thought we were going to change things, and I would try to convince him that it was worth collecting evidence of systematic racism and challenge it head-on. However, David preferred to talk about what he was doing then, which was working in engineering across at a foundry in Hunslet.
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It was called West Yorkshire Foundries, not because of the county of West Yorkshire (which actually didn't exist back then), but because the owner was a certain Mr Wallace West. The company began in the Second World War making castings for aircraft, then it eventually got involved in car manufacture. I was the personnel officer and I remember David as a short man who smiled all the time even though he didn't seem to have much to smile about. People in the factory used to call him 'Alliwalli' and he was known for reading educated newspapers. He spoke with a thick West African accent, I remember that, and it was sometimes difficult to understand what he was on about. But I was the one who led him from his formal interview to his department in the foundry itself. We put him in Department 87, which was then run by Percy Chainey, whose employees were required to help out with any department that had a labour shortfall. If no shortfall existed, Department 87 members were expected to sweep and clean the factory in general. Oluwale would have been among the first of hundreds of immigrant workers who eventually passed through the foundry's doors. They used to queue outside the interview room, three or four deep, and the line would often stretch right down the street. We attracted immigrants because the pay was competitive, but the conditions were terrible and safety was non-existent. We always had Lithuanians, Hungarians, and Poles, then Asians and West Indians, but Oluwale was the only West African I remember. In fact, in those days we had multilingual signs in the factory, but I'm not sure it helped anybody. The day used to begin at 7:30 a.m. In fact, the hooter sounded three minutes before work was to start, and that's when the men would assemble in the streets and begin to clock in. They had an hour for lunch and worked right through until 5:30 p.m., but it wasn't easy. In fact, to many it was worse than being down the pit. Mr West liked his employees to wear 'whites', like he'd seen workers wear in India. Well, they might look nice, but they were useless as protective gear. And there were no safety shoes or anything. In the aluminium and iron foundries you'd walk in and it would be completely black except for the light of the molten metal, a white light which was dazzling. Things were pretty bad back then, and even the area around the factory was rough with no grass in sight. The river was black, like oil. You sometimes see fish in it now, but back then the only living things in it were leeches. No, it wasn't a great job with all the heat and the sheer physical graft involved. But when overtime was available hours could easy double from the forty-four-hour basic.
And so there you were, David, working in the white-hot heat of the foundry, without protective clothing, vulnerable to spills and accident, hard grown men's work that only the strong and the skilled could survive and then, at the end of the day, out again, away from the filthy black river, out on to the windswept streets lined with redbrick factories. 'Hey you, nigger boy. Did you come out of your mam's arse?' A slow journey back in the direction of Belle Vue Road and a room called 'home', and the next morning back to work where the company doctor gave you your lightning-fast check-up. After he tapped your chest and looked quickly into your mouth, he had a suggestion. 'Cheer up, sunshine. Perhaps you should try going to the cinema. That'll make you feel better. Everybody's the same colour in there.'