Chapeltown's history is written into its architecture. Its huge semi-detached and terraced houses, built for the prosperous, Christian new middle classes in the early 1900s, its two parks and its wide, tree-lined streets are now interspersed with buildings which were once synagogues, and Asian-owned mini-markets selling the produce of the world. Halfway up Chapeltown Road there's a wall which, throughout the seventies, bore the inscription REMEMBER OLUWALE in huge white letters. Near that wall there's an ugly vacant lot which, until recently, was the site of the elegant country club built in the twenties for those prosperous Christians. The club became Chapeltown's most notorious pub. White Leeds imagined that inside the Hayfield every type of black sinner was making mischief. A curious corollary of this fantasy was that the Hayfield became a kind of 'black space', where whites only entered if they accepted the rules laid down by the black men who played dominoes, drank, sold a little weed and checked the ladies. Since these rules were easy to accept — mutual respect and toleration, whatever status the outside world conferred upon you — lots of adventurous whites found themselves at home there. It's said that David Oluwale frequented a similar place in Chapeltown, a nightclub called, in his day, the Glass Bucket, but I'm pretty certain the early evening would have found him in the Hayfield. The Hayfield was erased from the map around 2004 — yet another sign of the city's inability to deal properly with its black citizens.
Dr Max Farrar, Leeds Metropolitan University, 2006 The Chapeltown Enterprise Centre stands at the bottom of Button Hill. The centre features the Best Fade Unisex Salon. Across the road is the Silver Tree Club which, these days, is a bricked-up, burned-out building. Chapeltown has changed. Chapeltown no longer boasts good manners. It is becoming derelict and infested with drug dealers. Garbage lies piled up in the streets, and there is a paucity of civic pride. Modern Chapeltown is home to a lost generation. A young woman shouts at me. 'Hey you, black man.' Her voice is raw and flat. A broad Yorkshire voice. As she crosses the street and walks toward me I can see that she is swathed in a big black coat. 'Hey you, black man.' Her eyes are wet with drugs, and she promises me that she will do anything. 'Black man.' I quicken my steps. I glance back at the Best Fade Unisex Salon. I want to tell the people in the enterprise centre that they are right to try, but they should look around themselves. There is no real enterprise. No real business, beyond survival, in this faded Chapeltown. And across the street, where the Hayfield pub would have stood, there is now nothing. Nothing at all. It is gone. (Like you, David. Gone.) The bottom of Button Hill is empty.
The dark 'others' began to arrive in Leeds in the fifties. But what kind of a city was this that expected these newcomers to live like animals in abandoned bombed-out slums? The emigrants had heard rumours that the English often set fires in their houses, but until they reached England and felt the sharp bite of their first winter they did not fully understand. But they soon learned. However, what they never learned to understand, or accept, was the racism which confined them to filthy rooms. Landlords, including Leeds City Council, seemed intent upon extracting money from them in exchange for rooms in which it was barely possible to turn around; rooms which one had to share with mice and fleas and rats, where water ran down the walls when it rained, and thereafter snails crawled up them; rooms where the nearest bathroom was your handbasin, and your one toilet bowl was in the next street and had to be shared with 200 others. The mother country was welcoming her citizens at the front door, and then quickly ushering them out through the back door crying, 'No Blacks', crying, 'No Coloureds', crying, 'Go back to where you come from'. And David heard these shouts, but he wanted an education in order that he might make something of himself in England, and so he redoubled his polite efforts to learn. He worked harder, and studied harder, but still they took him to Armley jail, and then on to the asylum where they changed his personality. And when they released him back into the world, David soon discovered that he had lost his damp, cold room at 209 Belle Vue Road. Even this dismal place had slipped through his fingers, but he still possessed his city of Leeds on the banks of the River Aire. David still had his city.
I have to say that by the later stages I believe some fatalism had begun to creep into David's spirit. He expected to be arrested, so he didn't bother to try and hide. He just kept going back to the heart of the city centre and staying there where he knew that he would be very visible. It was as though he was challenging them to remove him from the city. They would beat him and arrest him, but his attitude was clear: 'I'll just do what I want to do and I won't disappear. I won't be invisible.' It was all very rational to him. He knew the consequences, but he continued to defy people. As I said, he could have slept every night in the back of his Ghanaian friend's warehouse if he'd have wanted to. He could have had a flat, or he could have been safe and invisible in different parts of the city, but he didn't want to disappear. He wanted to be seen, and Leeds was his battleground — his home — and he wasn't going to leave his home. In the later stages he sometimes gave the outward signs of being a shambling, slow-witted, slow-walking man, but he always knew where he was going. He knew Meanwood, Hyde Park, and Chapeltown; he understood the streets. He knew the safe areas, but he also knew that if he took Step A then Step B would follow. He made a rational decision to take Step A, which was to go back into Leeds city centre and claim his right to be in the city. Step B was to be beaten, arrested and then carted off to Armley jail. First Step A and then Step B, but he wouldn't give up. During this time there was, to my memory, no other black person from Africa or the Caribbean who was homeless and on the street. In the sixties, David was the only black man sleeping rough on the streets of Leeds.
My father was a military-minded man. Being an army sergeant, he was dominant in the family and he was difficult. My joining the police force was his idea and he said it would make a man of me. My mother was silent on the matter, as she was on most things. She was ten years younger than my father, and she didn't get a look in when it came to decisions. At the age of nineteen I thought I'd give it a crack and join the Leeds police force and see if I could get my father on my side. Initially I liked Leeds, and I liked the life on The Headrow. I was stationed in the centre of Leeds. Millgarth Station covered a nonresidential area. Issues at Millgarth were mainly to do with crime, vagrancy, revellers in the pubs, drug users, and there was supposed to be a 'problem' with students. I was very friendly with the tradesmen on my patch, but what I didn't do was make friends with anybody in the force. Not one single person. This caused me problems because the police service in Leeds was like a closed club. I remember being told to choose my friends from within the force, and not from outside it, and this was a sticking point for me. I had been seen by someone in a pub in Wetherby with my old school pals and I was on the carpet for that. I was up in front of an inspector and he said, 'Who are you mixing with outside duty hours?' I remember thinking this wasn't actually going to work for me. On duty or off duty, you had to stay within the group of officers, but I didn't really have any friends in the force. But, at least to begin with, I did enjoy working in the centre of Leeds. There were some black people that would turn up in the centre, and they didn't have an easy time. You might find somebody who'd been out drinking and hadn't caught the bus home, or somebody who was trying to get into a hotel, or somebody who was separated from their group of friends. But generally speaking, black people and mixed-race people were rare sights in Leeds city centre at that time in the sixties. I patrolled mainly around the area of Vicar Lane, The Headrow, and then going down towards the river area and around the open market. The business people — café owners, restaurant owners, shop owners — they all regarded the police as people who could do no wrong. And the police were fiercely proud of this and so there was a very strong feeling that the police were there to serve the incumbent business people. I befriended quite a few café owners, you know, people that you could go and chat to, and who made you feel that you were part of the community. Now in the daytime, that was all very nice and it was all very cosy. In the night it was a different place. The streets were deserted, people had gone home, and the police, what were they to do? What was their job then? Well, it was to check property. To scour about and make sure that they didn't find broken windows around entrances at the rear of properties. At night the city centre, instead of being the business people's place, became very much the Leeds of the authorities and of the policemen. And that's really an important thing — the change of the city from day to night. On my patch I befriended quite a few dossers and I used to go and chat to them. There was a tea stall in the open market which may or may not still be operating, and it used to open at about five in the morning, and I would always drop in. And you'd get a mixed bunch of people and they accepted me. I used to take my hat off and chat with them. In fact one officer said that I had the attitude of a social worker to the job, which was not thought to be a good thing. But I did, I used to take my hat off. I was in a very difficult position. Life with my father was greatly improved, but I soon realised that I didn't like some of what was going on in Leeds. I was very concerned because it was becoming obvious that there were some difficulties for a certain individual. I was in a terrible state of moral dilemma. If anybody was still about in Leeds city centre after the late night taxi queue it was very rare. A couple of times I did find a drunk, but it was very rare. In the two years I worked the patch, I can't remember finding a person at say four o'clock in the morning. I never did. Only David. I never found another dosser sleeping out anywhere. The other dossers might have had somewhere they knew they could go; to the crypt or whatever. I can't remember exactly when I first saw David, but I know I saw him on my foot patrol in the Millgarth area. He would go into the deep shops. I know the Bridal House was one that he went into. Yeah. He'd be in there. But he'd be in other ones on Vicar Lane as well. He tried to get into the deep shops. The ones which have got two entrances. He was always alone. I never saw him with anybody, and he wouldn't be at the café in the morning. Some of the other dossers would be at the café, but not him. I used to wonder where he got his food from. I saw him quite a lot, but he never ran away from me. He wouldn't enter into a conversation with a policeman, he just wouldn't talk. But he didn't run away. Whereas, if he saw Inspector Ellerker or Sergeant Kitching he would run, and he would shout. But he wouldn't run from me.