Britain, 1919: Racial Violence and the Communities That Stayed

Peace without security

The attacks of 1919 took place in communities that already had histories. Liverpool, Cardiff and other ports contained seafarers, workers and families connected through Britain's overseas trade. Demobilisation and the contraction of wartime shipping intensified competition for employment and accommodation. Violence spread through a number of towns and cities, including Glasgow, South Shields, Hull, Liverpool, Cardiff, Newport and Barry. The National Archives' account places these attacks within a wider postwar crisis, but also identifies their specifically racial character. Black and other minority residents were blamed for conditions they had not created. Explaining the shortage of jobs is therefore not the same as explaining away the decision to attack particular neighbours. ¹

The familiar description 'race riots' needs care. It can suggest two equivalent groups meeting in a spontaneous fight, obscuring attacks on homes and people selected because of their appearance. At the same time, the events were not identical everywhere. A dispute around a hiring yard, an assault on a boarding house and an official proposal to remove residents involved different actors and decisions. Following those decisions allows responsibility to remain visible. The evidence is often disturbing, but it is more revealing than an account in which an entire city suddenly becomes a single, anonymous mob.

Glasgow and the struggle over employment

Jacqueline Jenkinson's research places the Glasgow harbour violence of January 1919 at the beginning of that year's wave of attacks in British ports. Her study examines the role of seamen's unions in protecting white workers' access to jobs by promoting a colour bar. Many sailors placed outside that protection were themselves British colonial subjects from Africa and the Caribbean. They resisted both physical attacks and the denial of their claim to employment. The contradiction is important: labour organisations could demand security for workers while deciding that some workers were less entitled to it. The argument was not simply about the number of available berths. It was also about who could count as British when jobs were scarce. ²

That distinction changes how we read unemployment as a cause. A lost wage creates material hardship; it does not dictate whose door must be attacked. Employers, union officials, politicians and newspapers could describe the same shortage in different ways. Treating racial division as an unavoidable reaction to economic pressure removes those choices from the story. It also hides the claims made by Black workers themselves. They were not merely a population on which policy acted. They argued about their status and attempted to defend their livelihoods.

Liverpool and the death of Charles Wootton

In Liverpool, the Bermudian sailor Charles Wootton, whose surname also appears as Wotton and Wotten, died after a pursuit into the dock area in June 1919. Research associated with Writing on the Wall's Liverpool walking tour describes the uncertainty over precisely how he entered Queen's Dock: accounts differ over whether he fell, was pushed or was thrown. They describe a crowd throwing stones while he was in the water. Preserving that uncertainty about the immediate sequence does not diminish the racist violence surrounding his death. It distinguishes what the evidence establishes from details that should not be made more definite through repetition. His story belongs to the city's streets and waterfront, rather than to an abstract argument about disorder. ³

Assistant Head Constable L. Everett's letter of 10 June is a stark record of official thinking. He reported a Black man drowned, damage to lodging houses and more than 200 people held by police for their safety. Yet his proposed response included asking whether Black residents could be interned in a ship or military camp and removed through compulsory repatriation. His description separated 'citizens' from the Black population and blamed relationships with white women and competition for work. These were the writer's explanations, not neutral facts about the victims. The letter shows how protection and coercion could become entangled: people endangered by a crowd were then discussed as a population to be cleared away. ⁴

Cardiff: belonging contested in the street

The Cardiff Chief Constable's report of 13 June acknowledged that white people had been the aggressors. It recorded serious injuries, arrests and extensive damage, while describing the concentration of police in Butetown. The same report preserved the arguments made by Black men: they considered themselves British subjects, pointed to their wartime service and work on food ships, and demanded equal treatment. It also reported hostility towards mixed relationships and resentment about houses bought or rented by Black residents. We do not have to accept every generalisation in the report to see the significance of those claims. Men who had helped maintain wartime shipping were asking why service and subjecthood failed to protect their lives and homes in peace. ⁵

An address under attack was more than a symbol of demographic change. It might be a place of business, a source of rental income or the centre of a household. Property destruction could therefore continue to affect people after the crowd dispersed. Questions about safety led directly into questions about paying for repairs, finding a bed and going back to work. Following those consequences reveals how street violence entered household finances and working lives, with effects that could persist after the most visible confrontation was over.

The production of an outsider

A Liverpool immigration-office letter of 11 June described a damaging circle. Employers would not, or feared to, hire Black and Chinese workers because of hostility, while the men were then described as unemployable and candidates for repatriation. The letter also noted exclusion of Irish workers in the Ormskirk district. Its author recognised that the attacks were mainly directed against Black British people and that prejudice would obstruct both work and justice. The document is valuable because the mechanism is visible within it. A refusal to hire did not reveal an inherent inability to work. It helped produce unemployment, which could then be cited as a reason for removal. ⁶

Newspaper argument could make exclusion appear protective. An Australian correspondent writing in the Morning Post on 13 June defended the White Australia policy and argued against racial equality in Britain. The writer invoked horrific American lynchings as a reason to prevent mixed settlement, shifting responsibility from perpetrators to the presence of Black people. Sexual relationships were made central to the supposed impossibility of living together. The article should be read as an intervention in a political argument, not as a reliable description of what all British people thought. Its importance lies in the effort to turn violence into justification for the very inequality that helped sustain it. ⁷

Families under scrutiny

Hostility to mixed families also appeared in organisations claiming scientific authority. In January 1919, the Eugenics Education Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute approached the Colonial Office about investigating racial mixture. Their letter framed children and relationships as a problem requiring official assistance, using dehumanising language about physical fitness, reproduction and supposed suitability for civilisation. It admitted a lack of evidence while assuming that racial categories supplied the right way to understand human lives. The letter predates the summer violence. It shows that intrusive thinking about families was not simply a reaction to disturbances in the streets; it also circulated through institutions seeking government cooperation. ⁸

A very different voice survives in Claudius Smart's letter from Bootle, dated 3 January 1921. He wanted assistance to travel to Jamaica because he could not find work. He explained that his wife agreed to the plan and that her aunt would support her until he earned enough to send money. A police inspector nevertheless demanded a guarantee that Smart said he could not provide. He asked the Colonial Office to reply directly rather than through that official. His account combines desperation with a proposed arrangement for family support. It should not be reduced to evidence that everyone wished either to leave or to stay. Smart was attempting to make a workable choice under conditions that severely limited his options. ⁹

The emergency outlasted the riots

Cardiff's housing crisis remained visible in 1921. A letter from Town Clerk Cecil G. Brown described boarding houses and night shelters accommodating unemployed seamen, with keepers unable to continue providing beds without payment. The requested response included repatriating people who were not British subjects or placing them in a camp. The practical problem was food and shelter; the proposed solutions again turned towards removing or containing the people who needed them. The document also records the network of missions and lodgings that had been supporting maritime workers. Those institutions were part of port life, but they could not absorb unemployment indefinitely without resources. ¹⁰

The Cardiff Seamen's Boarding Housekeepers Association made that pressure explicit in a telegram of 13 June 1921. It threatened to stop supplying food and beds and refer the men to the Lord Mayor. At the same time, it insisted that men who had served the country required immediate assistance. The telegram is not a simple expression of either generosity or hostility. It records an attempt to force government action by withdrawing services on which vulnerable people depended. Its appeal to wartime service also shows how the argument for fair treatment continued after the immediate violence of 1919. ¹¹

Historian Laura Tabili's study of the 1925 Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order traces a further development: administrative rules helped make racial difference consequential in employment and residence. Her research challenges the idea that hostility simply lay dormant until a crisis awakened it. The order's implementation required Black seamen to establish a status that their appearance made officials suspect, and British subjects could be caught within procedures supposedly directed at foreigners. The longer aftermath of 1919 therefore involved paperwork as well as street attacks. It concerned the authority to define someone as an outsider and the documents they could produce to contest that classification. ¹²

Remembering communities, not only attacks

The National Archives later worked with local archive services and schools to explore the history of 1919. Its education project brought records into discussion with young people in places connected to the violence. Such work opens a route between national government files and local memory. It also encourages questions beyond the date of an attack: which streets survive, what families remember, and how a city's public history represents people once described as a problem to be removed. Those questions make the archive an active resource rather than a closed record of suffering. ¹³

The communities did not vanish when the reports ended. Their survival should not be romanticised as proof that violence did little harm, nor should the violence become the only thing remembered about them. The strongest account places official correspondence beside workers' arguments and family decisions. It acknowledges deaths and destruction while retaining the larger history of people earning a living, maintaining relationships and claiming a future. In that history, remaining in Britain was not simply a passive outcome. For many residents, the idea of home had already been made through years of work and shared life, and could not be cancelled by someone else's demand that they leave.

Sources and further reading

1. The National Archives: 1919 race riots, historical introduction.

2. Jacqueline Jenkinson: Black Sailors on Red Clydeside, research abstract, University of Stirling.

3. Writing on the Wall / Culture Liverpool: 1919 Walking Tour, research on Charles Wotton.

4. L. Everett to the Home Office, 10 June 1919, HO 45/11017/377969/6.

5. Cardiff Chief Constable to Home Office, 13 June 1919, HO 45/11017/377969/5.

6. Superintending Aliens Officer correspondence, Liverpool, 11 June 1919, HO 45/11017/377969.

7. Morning Post, 13 June 1919, article preserved in HO 45/11017/377969.

8. Eugenics Education Society and Royal Anthropological Institute letter, 24 January 1919, FD 1/1734.

9. Claudius Smart to the Colonial Office, 3 January 1921, CO 137/744.

10. Cardiff Town Clerk to Home Office, 21 April 1921, HO 45/11897/332087.

11. Cardiff Seamen's Boarding Housekeepers Association telegram, 13 June 1921, CO 323/879.

12. Laura Tabili: The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain.

13. The National Archives: 1919 Race Riots Project.