http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p8qqw/Who_Do_You_Think_You_Are_Series_9_John_Bishop/
Interesting feature on Minstrel Shows of 1870s and onwards touring the UK
Friday, December 7, 2012
Monday, November 19, 2012
‘More Looking Back’ by the Leamington Literary Society (1980)
I'm enjoying the 1980 publication: ‘More Looking Back’ by the Leamington Literary Society. It is a sequel to 'The Leamington We Used To Know’ by the Leamington Literary Society. The book features the memories of Leamingtonians such a Hilda Hay-Coghlan Willes, Dolly Brearley Lawson, Cecily Haynes, Elise de Normanville Davey, Kit Sheepey Judd, Millicent Milne and Alfred & Gladys Holloway. It is well organised into the following chapters:
1. Some of Leamington's Veterens
2. A Bit Churchy
3. Spanning the Wars
4. Interlude
5. Civilian Services
6. Shops
7. Undertakings Old & New
8. Coming & Going
9. Pastimes & Pleasures
As a Leamingtonian, born and bred, the book is a revelation. My Jamaican father lived in Leam from 1957 till his death in 2003. My Jamaican mother lived in Leam from October 1962 until her death in March 2010,
Much of the Leamington my parents would have experienced was gone by the time I started to take notice of my surrounding so this book is giving an insight into the Leamington they wold have known.
Not many reference to black and Asian populations beyond the 1972 arrival of Ugandan Asian.
p134 makes ref to the arrival of Indian workers at Lockheeds: "They were put on to labouring at first, and then to other jobs later. They were educated men, most of them, and there were one or two among them who had been to University. There are Indian women as well working at Lockheeds now."
1. Some of Leamington's Veterens
2. A Bit Churchy
3. Spanning the Wars
4. Interlude
5. Civilian Services
6. Shops
7. Undertakings Old & New
8. Coming & Going
9. Pastimes & Pleasures
As a Leamingtonian, born and bred, the book is a revelation. My Jamaican father lived in Leam from 1957 till his death in 2003. My Jamaican mother lived in Leam from October 1962 until her death in March 2010,
Much of the Leamington my parents would have experienced was gone by the time I started to take notice of my surrounding so this book is giving an insight into the Leamington they wold have known.
Not many reference to black and Asian populations beyond the 1972 arrival of Ugandan Asian.
p134 makes ref to the arrival of Indian workers at Lockheeds: "They were put on to labouring at first, and then to other jobs later. They were educated men, most of them, and there were one or two among them who had been to University. There are Indian women as well working at Lockheeds now."
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Amelia King & racism in the WWII Land Army (1943)
In September 2012 black historian Caroline Bressey appeared in a 5 mins sequence in the last 18 mins of episode 2 of the BBC TV documentary series ‘Wartime Farm’ outlining the case of Amelia King (d. 1995?), a black London-born woman who was refused employment by the WWII Land Army on the grounds that no white farmer would want a black person on the farm. Her father was a merchent seaman and her brother was in the navy. Rather than taking this dismissal quietly King took her case to her local MP and the matter was raised in parliament in 1943. When the story hit the national newspapers farmer Alfred Roberts offered her work but she insisted it be arranged through the Land Army – which subsequently became the case.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Dido Elizabeth Belle (1771-1804)
Amma Asante wrote & directed the film ‘Belle’ to tell the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle – her 2nd feature film. Dido Elizabeth Belle (1771-1804) the illegitimate daughter of Sir John Lindsay (1737–1788), naval officer with the Royal Navy. Her mother was a black slave of African origin, possibly called Belle, who had been captured from a Spanish slave ship in the West Indies and brought to England.
Monday, September 10, 2012
BBC Radio 4 - Stir It Up - 50 Years of Writing Jamaica
BBC Radio 4 - Stir It Up - 50 Years of Writing Jamaica
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mhxml -
Poet Salena Godden considers the impact of her Jamaican heritage on her
literary identity.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mhxml -
Poet Salena Godden considers the impact of her Jamaican heritage on her
literary identity.
BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor ...
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mkc0z
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mkc0z
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Helen Grant: first black female Tory MP
Helen Grant: first black female Tory MP (for Maidstone & The Weald, Kent since 2010)
Born: 28 September 1961
Place of birth: London raised in Carlisle
Family Background: born to an English mother & Nigerian father, but grew up in a single parent family after her parents separated & her father emigrated to the United States. She lived on Carlisle’s Raffles council estate with her mother, maternal grandmother & maternal great-grandmother.
Education: as the only black resident of the Carlisleestate she was the victim of racist bullying. At school she was captain of the school tennis & hockey teams, & represented Cumbria in hockey, tennis, athletics, & cross-country. She was also an under-16 judo champion for the north of England & southern Scotland. She studied law at the University of Hull, after which she planned to take specialist legal qualifications. When it appeared unlikely that her local education authority would fund a place at her preferred college, her local MP Willie Whitelaw championed her cause, & she took a place at the College of Law in Guildford where she qualified as a solicitor in 1988. She returned to Carlisle to do her articles of clerkship at Cartmell, Mawson & Main solicitors
Key details: Helen Grant met her husband, Simon, in 1990, & the couple are married with two sons. She divides her time between homes in Marden, Kent, & Kingswood, Surrey.
She joined a legal practice in Wimbledon specialising in family law. She established her own practice, Grants Solicitors, in 1996, which also specialises in family law. Grant was a non-executive director of the Croydon NHS Primary Care Trust from January 2005 to March 2007 before stepping down to concentrate on her political career.
Grant joined the Labour Party in 2004 & was asked by a senior local party figure to consider becoming a local councilor but she rejected the idea. She became disillusioned with Labour & joined the Conservatives in 2006. In 2006 Grant worked with Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice in the formation of Conservative policy to deal with family breakdown. Grant was one of the authors of the Social Justice Policy Group Report 'State of the Nation - Fractured Families' published in December 2006, & the follow-up solutions report 'Breakthrough Britain' published in July 2007.
Grant applied to become a parliamentary candidate, & was approved as a candidate in May 2006. She was selected by the Conservative Party as the prospective candidate for Maidstone & The Weald in January 2008, replacing longstanding MP Ann Widdecombe who had announced that she would be stepping down at the next general election. The seat, at the time, had a majority of 15,000. Grant was selected as an A-List candidate and, although she was publicly supported by the sitting MP, Widdecombe criticised David Cameron's policy of ensuring 50% of the Conservatives' A-list candidates were women—a policy thought to have helped Grant win the nomination. This was quickly followed by revelations from a Sunday newspaper regarding her previous membership of Labour.
She was elected at the 2010 general election on 6 May 2010, achieving a reduced majority of 5,889.
In June 2010 she was elected to the Justice Select Committee, a House of Commons select committee which oversees the policy, administration, & spending of the UK's Ministry of Justice.
Grant received her first government appointment on 4th September 2012, following a government reshuffle, when she received the dual roles of Under-Secretary of State for Justice & Under-Secretary for Women & Equalities.
Adapted by Ms A.J Allison from information found at: http://en.wikipedia.org
Born: 28 September 1961
Place of birth: London raised in Carlisle
Family Background: born to an English mother & Nigerian father, but grew up in a single parent family after her parents separated & her father emigrated to the United States. She lived on Carlisle’s Raffles council estate with her mother, maternal grandmother & maternal great-grandmother.
Education: as the only black resident of the Carlisleestate she was the victim of racist bullying. At school she was captain of the school tennis & hockey teams, & represented Cumbria in hockey, tennis, athletics, & cross-country. She was also an under-16 judo champion for the north of England & southern Scotland. She studied law at the University of Hull, after which she planned to take specialist legal qualifications. When it appeared unlikely that her local education authority would fund a place at her preferred college, her local MP Willie Whitelaw championed her cause, & she took a place at the College of Law in Guildford where she qualified as a solicitor in 1988. She returned to Carlisle to do her articles of clerkship at Cartmell, Mawson & Main solicitors
Key details: Helen Grant met her husband, Simon, in 1990, & the couple are married with two sons. She divides her time between homes in Marden, Kent, & Kingswood, Surrey.
She joined a legal practice in Wimbledon specialising in family law. She established her own practice, Grants Solicitors, in 1996, which also specialises in family law. Grant was a non-executive director of the Croydon NHS Primary Care Trust from January 2005 to March 2007 before stepping down to concentrate on her political career.
Grant joined the Labour Party in 2004 & was asked by a senior local party figure to consider becoming a local councilor but she rejected the idea. She became disillusioned with Labour & joined the Conservatives in 2006. In 2006 Grant worked with Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice in the formation of Conservative policy to deal with family breakdown. Grant was one of the authors of the Social Justice Policy Group Report 'State of the Nation - Fractured Families' published in December 2006, & the follow-up solutions report 'Breakthrough Britain' published in July 2007.
Grant applied to become a parliamentary candidate, & was approved as a candidate in May 2006. She was selected by the Conservative Party as the prospective candidate for Maidstone & The Weald in January 2008, replacing longstanding MP Ann Widdecombe who had announced that she would be stepping down at the next general election. The seat, at the time, had a majority of 15,000. Grant was selected as an A-List candidate and, although she was publicly supported by the sitting MP, Widdecombe criticised David Cameron's policy of ensuring 50% of the Conservatives' A-list candidates were women—a policy thought to have helped Grant win the nomination. This was quickly followed by revelations from a Sunday newspaper regarding her previous membership of Labour.
She was elected at the 2010 general election on 6 May 2010, achieving a reduced majority of 5,889.
In June 2010 she was elected to the Justice Select Committee, a House of Commons select committee which oversees the policy, administration, & spending of the UK's Ministry of Justice.
Grant received her first government appointment on 4th September 2012, following a government reshuffle, when she received the dual roles of Under-Secretary of State for Justice & Under-Secretary for Women & Equalities.
Adapted by Ms A.J Allison from information found at: http://en.wikipedia.org
Swanson's stop and search blackberry app 2012
Swanson's stop and search blackberry app 2012 - featured on Eddie Nestor's UK Black Podcasts 5th Sept 2012
Interesting to see if anything comes of this.
Interesting to see if anything comes of this.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
New scholarly volume on the iconography of slavery in European art
A New scholarly volume has been published on the iconography of slavery in European art, exploring imagery both old and new. The volume has been published by the Warburg Institute, edited by Jean Michel Massing (Cambridge) and Elizabeth McGrath (Warburg) and includes scholarship on the imagery of slaves and slavery in European art between the Renaissance and the period of Abolitionism. It resulted from a conference held at the Warburg at the end of 2007. You will find a short account of the book and list of contents on the Institute's website, linked here:
http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/publications/colloquia/the-slave-in-european-art/
http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/publications/colloquia/the-slave-in-european-art/
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Notting Hill Race Riots of 1958: Documents unsealed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/aug/24/artsandhumanities.nottinghillcarnival2002
Monday, August 27, 2012
Lucy Negro, prostitute: The Dark-Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets
Some black women worked alongside their white counterparts as prostitutes, especially in Southwark, & in the brothel area of Turnmill Street in Clerkenwell. Here Lucy Negro, a former dancer in the Queen's service, ran an establishment patronised by noblemen & lawyers. Her area of London was notorious. "Pray enquire after & secure my negress: she is certainly at The Swan, a Dane's beershop in Turnmil Street," wrote one Denis Edwards in 1602. Shakespeare's acquaintance, the poet John Weaver, wrote of a woman whose face was "pure black as Ebonie, jet blacke".
Dark Lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets was a London prostitute called Lucy Negro, a dark-skinned madam who ran a licentious house (brothel) in Clerkenwell, north-east London. aka Black Luce, she was 'an arrant whore & a bawde’, catering for everyone from ‘ingraunts’ (immigrants) to ‘welthyemen’ & the aristocracy.' Yet she Inspired many of Bard's sonnets 127 to 152. The sonnets give few details describing her, apart from her dark eyes, hair & complexion, with hints that she was married. The Bard imagines an unidentified woman - known as the 'Dark Lady' but not actually named by him in that way - in an adulterous sexual relationship. She is the inspiration for many of the sonnets 127 to 152. She is 'my female evil' & 'my bad angel' in sonnet 144.
This identity was tentatively suggested in the 1930s. in August 2012 Dr Salkeld revealed public records that convinced him. Dr Salkeld discovered part of the evidence in the diary of Philip Henslowe.
The diary of Philip Henslowe, who built Rose Theatre, makes reference to Lucy Negro & her associate Gilbert East, another Clerkenwell brothel owner. They were both tenants of Henslowe, who had a rival acting company
Henslowe, who staged at least one of Shakespeare’s plays - Titus Andronicus - recorded 30 occasions when he dined with a Gilbert East who was also Henslowe’s bailiff for properties that he owned.
Apart from a midnight raid on her premises, Luce is not recorded as being arrested, though her girls were, & court documents include references to her successful brothel.
'Black Luce’s bad name was so well-known that anyone reading Shakespeare’s… sonnets… in the 1590s & early 1600s is likely to have brought her to mind, & Shakespeare must have known this.'
Lucy Negro also appears in a list of bawdy entertainments - the Gray's Inn Christmas entertainments of 1594 - & in a few plays & literary texts of the period.
'The stews were closed down by Henry VIII in 1546 & that drastically inhibited prostitution activity in the area. 'The majority of cases were north of The Thames, including Clerkenwell.'
Adapted from information found at: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2194176/Dark-Lady-Shakespeares-sonnets-finally-revealed-London-prostitute-called-Lucy-Negro.html
Dark Lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets was a London prostitute called Lucy Negro, a dark-skinned madam who ran a licentious house (brothel) in Clerkenwell, north-east London. aka Black Luce, she was 'an arrant whore & a bawde’, catering for everyone from ‘ingraunts’ (immigrants) to ‘welthyemen’ & the aristocracy.' Yet she Inspired many of Bard's sonnets 127 to 152. The sonnets give few details describing her, apart from her dark eyes, hair & complexion, with hints that she was married. The Bard imagines an unidentified woman - known as the 'Dark Lady' but not actually named by him in that way - in an adulterous sexual relationship. She is the inspiration for many of the sonnets 127 to 152. She is 'my female evil' & 'my bad angel' in sonnet 144.
This identity was tentatively suggested in the 1930s. in August 2012 Dr Salkeld revealed public records that convinced him. Dr Salkeld discovered part of the evidence in the diary of Philip Henslowe.
The diary of Philip Henslowe, who built Rose Theatre, makes reference to Lucy Negro & her associate Gilbert East, another Clerkenwell brothel owner. They were both tenants of Henslowe, who had a rival acting company
Henslowe, who staged at least one of Shakespeare’s plays - Titus Andronicus - recorded 30 occasions when he dined with a Gilbert East who was also Henslowe’s bailiff for properties that he owned.
Apart from a midnight raid on her premises, Luce is not recorded as being arrested, though her girls were, & court documents include references to her successful brothel.
'Black Luce’s bad name was so well-known that anyone reading Shakespeare’s… sonnets… in the 1590s & early 1600s is likely to have brought her to mind, & Shakespeare must have known this.'
Lucy Negro also appears in a list of bawdy entertainments - the Gray's Inn Christmas entertainments of 1594 - & in a few plays & literary texts of the period.
'The stews were closed down by Henry VIII in 1546 & that drastically inhibited prostitution activity in the area. 'The majority of cases were north of The Thames, including Clerkenwell.'
Adapted from information found at: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2194176/Dark-Lady-Shakespeares-sonnets-finally-revealed-London-prostitute-called-Lucy-Negro.html
Conspiracy Theories & the death of African Leaders
It's rare for the leader of a country to die in office. Since 2008, it's happened 13 times worldwide - but 10 of those leaders have been African. Why is it so much more common in this one continent?
see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19356410
see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19356410
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Yvonne Moore: black Mayor of Leamington Spa, Warks 2012
Yvonne Moore: former nurse turned Leamington councillor (from 2007) & Mayor from 2012
Born c. 1950, Moore was a school governor and a key member of the local neighbourhood watch scheme. She also worked closely with police officers as part of an Independent Advisory Group and has combined these roles with being a magistrate and a youth magistrate.
She stated: “Leamington is very much a town of two halves. There’s a top half, and a bottom half. Like everywhere else, we’ve got the rich bits and the poorer bits. I know I can’t do it on my own but I very much want to get Leamington to be a united place. One of the things I’m most keen to do is meet all the community groups, finding out what’s happening in the town and seeing how I can help these groups. I just want to be there for people in the town.”
She first arrived in the UK back in 1958. After starting work as a nurse, she moved to the area in 1962 where she has lived ever since and raised her family.
She was working as a nurse in the 1970s & was active in the Royal College of Nurses union, attending RCN conferences all over the country.
Later she agreed to help out the local Liberal Democrats, delivering their papers and attending their meetings. Eventually she stood as a candidate.
Adapted from information found at: www.voice-online.co.uk/article/leamingtons-new-mayor-proves-popular-choice
Born c. 1950, Moore was a school governor and a key member of the local neighbourhood watch scheme. She also worked closely with police officers as part of an Independent Advisory Group and has combined these roles with being a magistrate and a youth magistrate.
She stated: “Leamington is very much a town of two halves. There’s a top half, and a bottom half. Like everywhere else, we’ve got the rich bits and the poorer bits. I know I can’t do it on my own but I very much want to get Leamington to be a united place. One of the things I’m most keen to do is meet all the community groups, finding out what’s happening in the town and seeing how I can help these groups. I just want to be there for people in the town.”
She first arrived in the UK back in 1958. After starting work as a nurse, she moved to the area in 1962 where she has lived ever since and raised her family.
She was working as a nurse in the 1970s & was active in the Royal College of Nurses union, attending RCN conferences all over the country.
Later she agreed to help out the local Liberal Democrats, delivering their papers and attending their meetings. Eventually she stood as a candidate.
Adapted from information found at: www.voice-online.co.uk/article/leamingtons-new-mayor-proves-popular-choice
Black presence in Scandinavia
Country blues singer-guitarist Eric Bibb, who learned his craft in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village but has spent much of his career in Sweden and Finland, explains how jazz and blues players such as trumpeter Don Cherry - step-father of R&B star Neneh Cherry - built new lives in exile. Dexter Gordon - the star of '"Round Midnight" was one of the pioneers, settling in Copenhagen in the early 1960s.
see http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0184rg8
see http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0184rg8
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Facebook & Twitter
Didn't realise I was so neglectful of this site.
I blame Facebook & Twitter.
However this is a lot of Black British History on there. I'm following up new leads every day.
Social networking at its best!
I blame Facebook & Twitter.
However this is a lot of Black British History on there. I'm following up new leads every day.
Social networking at its best!
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