Richard Oastler, Letter to Leeds Mercury, 29 September, 1830
During the nineteenth century, cloth continued to occupy a special place in the Leeds economy, and with the onset of Jewish immigration it achieved something of a revival. The first Jew arrived in Leeds in the 1820s and was listed as a voter in 1832. By the late 1840s a small community of middle-class German Jews had established themselves in Leeds, but the Jewry that followed in their wake was largely comprised of poor Jews from Eastern Europe, often Polish or Russian in origin, who were fleeing pogroms, particularly those that followed the murder of Tsar Alexander II. They would arrive at Hull and make their way west to Leeds in the hope of finding some kind of occupation in the clothing industry, for many were skilled tailors. As their numbers increased they settled in their own ghetto near North Street in conditions familiar to most workingclass residents of Leeds. But this was now their city — their new home — and they had no intention of going anywhere else, despite the well-displayed signs that let them know that Jews were not welcome. By the end of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of the 8,000 Jews in Leeds were employed in one of the 98 Jewish tailoring sweatshops where the conditions were often indescribable.
The thousands of Irish immigrants to Leeds, who arrived in the wake of the great famine of the 1840s, lived in conditions at least as intolerable as those of the Jews. They congregated in the east end of Leeds in slums of unimaginable depravity where crime and prostitution were rife, and these Irish Catholics often embarrassed their English co-religionists with their supposed debauchery. However, what was beyond dispute was the fact that conditions for the poor in Leeds were among the worst in Britain. The water supply was putrid and contaminated with effluence from the sewers, and hundreds of people were often forced to share one privy. Disease was rife, and these overcrowded places were devoid of either daylight or fresh air. Understandably, life on the street was, for some, a much more palatable option. With the introduction of horsedrawn, and then electric, tramways, by the end of the nineteenth century some workers were able to move out of the centre of Leeds and they began to commute to work from the suburbs. However, the vast majority of the poor were trapped in squalor and therefore unable to enjoy civic improvements in education, transport, and the opening up of public spaces for parkland.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Leeds formally became a city and it boasted a population of nearly half a million. However, despite the city's affluence, problems of pollution and overcrowding continued to blight the lives of the working population. Fears of contagious diseases such as tuberculosis were real, as were Jewish concerns about anti-Semitism. Despite the fact that over 2,000 Jews volunteered for service during the First World War, Jews continued to be regarded as 'foreigners'. In 1917 fighting between Christian and Jewish men in the city escalated into a full-scale riot which resulted in many Jewish properties in the Leylands area being destroyed. The city's resistance to perceived 'outsiders', no matter how long they have been resident in the city, has always bedevilled Leeds. This antipathy easily crossed over into the twentieth century, and its virulence was fuelled by the well-known capacity of the people of Leeds for drinking and gambling.
The economic depression of the early twentieth century meant that there was no shortage of people to fill the poorhouses and workhouses of the city. Although new council-owned houses were being built to house the working classes, those who lived below a certain economic level had little choice but to live in slums that remained mired in a depravity reminiscent of the early Victorian years. During the great depression of the twenties and thirties it was once again the clothing industry that saved Leeds. Firms such as Burtons, Hepworths, John Collier, and Jackson's began to corner not only the national, but the international market in ready-made 'smart' clothes. Employment opportunities began to grow, and eventually slums began to be cleared. By the Second World War, Leeds was becoming surprisingly progressive in her civic attitude towards ongoing difficulties in housing and education, but the city's often hostile attitude towards 'outsiders' continued to be a deeper and more impenetrable problem.
In 1933 the Leeds Jewish Refugee Committee began to help German Jews escape from the brutal anti-Semitism of their own country, and by 1939 some 700 German Jews had found refuge in Leeds. However, upon arrival they soon discovered that local golf clubs banned Jews, and that the tea rooms and dance halls openly advertised their 'English only' policy. Jews were treated as pariahs and often subjected to physical attack, or swastikas being painted on their shop windows. But this was now their home; modern Leeds. A city of half a million people with one of the most robust economies in Britain; a city made up of migrants who had all come to settle on the banks of the River Aire. Like the Irish before them, the Jewish population of Leeds refused to move on. They were going nowhere. This was their home. And then others arrived.
In fact, these 'others' had been appearing in Leeds for some time. In 1791, the famous African writer Olaudah Equiano visited Leeds while promoting sales of his influential autobiography, and he later wrote a letter to the Leeds Mercury under his adopted name, Gustavas Vassa. In December 1859, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech in Leeds Town Hall at a meeting of the Leeds Anti-Slavery Society, and the third edition of his autobiography was actually printed in Leeds. And later still, in 1901, the black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor composed a choral cantata for the Leeds Triennial Music Festival. However, aside from these visitors, there is precious little evidence of a significant black presence prior to the Second World War. The occasional individual does turn up in the records, such as Abraham Johnson, who was born in Zanzibar in 1848 and who, during the second half of the nineteenth century, worked for a while at John Marshall's Flax Mill in Leeds. Or Pablo Fanque, a black man who owned and operated a circus in late Victorian England, and who is buried in Leeds. The small pre-Second World War black population in Leeds consisted almost entirely of domestic servants, theatrical performers, or industrial workers, and they existed as isolated individuals in an otherwise homogeneous white society.
After the Second World War many 'demobbed' colonial soldiers, aircrew, and seaman from Africa and the Caribbean 'stayed on' in some English cities. In 1945 the black population of Leeds largely consisted of such persons but, in common with the rest of the country, the numbers were negligible. However, by the mid-fifties the nation had begun a programme of massive recruitment of Caribbean labour in order that the post-Second World War infrastructure of Britain might be maintained, particularly in health and transport. As a result, dark strangers began to appear in far greater numbers on the streets of Leeds. According to the 1951 census, there were 107 West Indians and 45 Africans living in the city. Ten years later, in 1961, there were 2,186 West Indians and Africans, which included carpenters, masons, tailors, mechanics, painters, and electricians. These newcomers of African origin were visible and vulnerable on the streets of Leeds, but they no longer needed to think of themselves as being isolated. A community was being formed.