Interracial dating in the 1920s

At the turn of the century, fears around the dissipation of Britain’s power throughout its colonies saw much of the discussion in the public sphere on racial mixing concerned less with racial mixing in Britain itself and more with the question of ‘the race problem’ (or ‘the native’ or ‘colour’ problem’) in the colonies of Empire and its dominions, that is, to what extent the legal and social status of ‘coloured’ colonised peoples should be equalised and what the consequences of doing so—or not doing so—should be. The subject of interraciality was often invoked as part of this discussion, with even supporters of racial equality often admitting the potential of its threat to the imperial order—how could this be safeguarded if the subjugated races developed intimate relationships and they and their children came to be accepted as equal? (Ansari 2009). Articles discussing ‘the sad and truly pathetic question of the half-caste’ or the dangers presented to white women by black men in South Africa, India and other colonised locales were familiar items in the pages of the press (little, however, was mentioned about the longstanding and persistent dangers to women of colour by white men).⁴ Whether arguing for equality or not, the language of interraciality tended overwhelmingly to suggest difference, whether exotic and titillating, bizarre and ridiculous or unfamiliar and threatening.

The arts, particularly literature, increasingly reflected this wider tension between the fear, fantasy and actuality of interracial mixing across Empire, including the social consequences of crossing racial boundaries. Of course, interracial affairs—and people—in colonial literature were nothing new: such themes had long featured in British fiction and were often at the heart of both potboiler ‘Mutiny novels’ as well as canonical imperial and colonial fiction of the nineteenth century as exemplified by Conrad, Kipling and Stevenson (Kuehn 2014). Twentieth century literature also continued this outward purview as few novels, short stories or plays touched on the subject of the racial mixing that was occurring in Britain itself; rather, a wide and receptive audience was exposed to the popular theme of interraciality in colonial settings across the globe, used primarily to highlight the predicaments, moral quandaries and consequences faced by white characters which in turn reinforced the hierarchies and boundaries of Empire. These hierarchies and boundaries, however, were neither static nor impermeable. As Phillips (2002: 341) adroitly notes, ‘the complex and multi-layered historical geography of imperial state formation meant that British imperial and colonial states did different things—with respect to the regulation of sexualities for example—in different times and places’. Attitudes to interraciality were therefore not unitary across the Empire but tempered by the multifaceted interweaving of imperial attitudes to race, class, gender, time and place.

Such attitudes were also reflected in the subtly varied representations of interraciality in early twentieth century popular literature. In daring African adventures, for example, the physical and moral downfall of otherwise ‘decent’ English men was shockingly shown through what Ida Vera Simonton’s hit novel Hell’s Playground (1912) called ‘mammy-palavering’, that is, an inability amongst many white male characters to resist what they saw as the repulsive yet alluring sexuality of black and mixed race women. In an entirely different vein, however, were the heady ‘Raj Romances’, mostly penned by white women with some experience of India,⁵ which flirted with notions of love and romance as well as desire in interracial relationships through their typical storylines featuring respectable English people falling in love with seductive Indians, usually from high-caste backgrounds. Meanwhile, in the body of exotic ‘South Seas fiction’, interracial relationships were unashamedly portrayed as an everyday part of Pacific Island life, depicting buccaneering British men falling for beautiful, uninhibited and sexually available ‘South Sea maidens’, while ‘treaty port fiction’ highlighted the transactional and commercial nature of interracial relationships between white men and Chinese women in Hong Kong.⁶

Across all locales, however, the love affair was typically cut short by the well-worn interracial trope of ‘killing, eliminating or putting aside the native partner’ (Prakash 1994: 121; see also Singh 1975), an outcome fuelled by colonial perceptions of physical interracial intimacy as ‘abnormal and absurd’; thus when such relationships were described, ‘they were intended to substantiate the native’s inferiority and the inherent incompatibility between the two people’ (Prakash 1994: 121) whose relationship, as Kuehn (2014) notes, tended to be conceptualised as emerging from ‘bad’ desire (i.e. lust or misplaced duty) as opposed to ‘good’ desire (i.e. true love). Certainly, while Indians, for example, tended to be given more voice, diversity and status in colonial period literature—and life—than black Africans, it was clear that theirs was still an inferior state of being, one ultimately unworthy of ‘good desire’ and its rewards of marriage and family.

Across every locale was also the lived embodiment of interraciality: the figure of ‘the half-caste’, often the central narrative pivot around which the predicaments, moral quandaries and consequences of racial crossing were hung. The ‘half-caste’, if able to survive into adulthood, appeared in the familiar literary guises of what Sollors (1997) calls ‘the tragic mulatto complex’, a narrow set of representations that portrayed people from mixed racial background as regretted by their parents from birth and bound by a physical and mental inheritance which inevitably triggers a series of predictable events and behaviours that tends to bring about their tragic end.⁷ Literature and theatre at the turn of the century churned out these endless repetitive tropes that became the staple representations of mixed race people, employing stock language that hammered home the ‘facts’ of the mixed race psyche: beautiful women who were ‘silly’, ‘foolish’, ‘fiery’, ‘wanton’, ‘jealous’, ‘lustful’ ‘temptresses’; handsome men who were ‘untrustworthy’, ‘delusional’, ‘temperamental’ and ‘weak’; and villains of both genders who were ‘diabolical’, ‘cunning’, ‘incurably treacherous’, ‘vengeful’, ‘rascally’, ‘scheming’. Overwhelmingly on the margins of the action and frequently lurking in various stages of unrequited, unhealthy love, their stories—like that of the racially mixed white and black African Akolé in Paul Trent’s A Wife By Purchase (1909) who dies of pneumonia after making her well-to-do white British half-sister promise to forgive their mutual white British lover—mostly ended in tragedy, or—as in the case of the wealthy half-caste (a ‘nasty, sticky, black toad’) who plots to marry a beautiful white girl in Fergus Hume’s short story ‘The Parrot’s Egg’ (1909)—in righteous failure.⁸

Although the vast majority of these depictions tended to follow the traditional literary narratives of interraciality - where crossing racial boundaries ended in separation, ostracism, tragedy or death - amongst the endless repetitive tropes, variations could nevertheless be found. As Forman (2013) reveals, the writer James Dalziel, for example, not only treats his Eurasian characters with complexity and sympathy, but also locates the failure of the mixed relationships in his Hong Kong treaty port fiction in external circumstances (e.g. disease, social ostracism, loss of a child) instead of the idea of inherent racial or cultural conflict; there is no, for example, regression to the savage self or fantastical invocations of mysticism as in the romances of Africa and India. Similarly, the work of the then wildly popular Louis Becke depicts a vast range of romantic, sexual and domestic interracial relationships between Western men and Polynesian women from the expedient, unhappy or violent to the loving, respectful and permanent, thus updating the tradition of romanticising and exoticising these relationships, showing them instead as ‘pragmatic and often unsentimental choices made by European men and island women striving to make a life often in the face of natural and human violence’ (Bhattacharya 2013: 92). Moreover, while Glaser’s (2010: 213) assertion that interracial relationships for female characters were ‘unthinkable’ may be the case within canonical colonial literature, it should be noted that outside of canon, a fair amount of thinking about such relationships took place.⁹ Often featuring a ‘New Woman’¹⁰ protagonist—that emerging late Victorian female figure of social, economic and sexual independence whose rejection of the norms of marriage and domesticity was considered by many to be a threat to the perpetuation of the British race, nation and, consequently, Empire itself—‘Raj Romance’ fiction was littered with white women having romantic and even passionate sexual relationships with Indian men and bearing mixed race offspring (e.g. Voices in the Night (1900), Anna Lombard (1901), A Marriage in Burmah (1905), Life of My Heart (1905), Babes in the Wood (1910), The Englishwoman (1912), The Daughter-in-Law (1913), Tony Bellew (1914)), while a number of Africa-based novels even dared to show white women engaged to black African men and, in the case of working-class female characters, entering into sexual and marital unions (e.g. ‘The Treatment of Brierly’ (1900), The Arm of the Leopard (1904), A Wife By Purchase (1909), The Hyena of Kallu (1910)). Even within the more formulaic works, intriguing glimpses of multilayered understandings and conceptualisations can be observed. While, as we discuss in a following section, the journalist and writer George Sims castigated black and white mixing, Forman (2013) highlights how in his 1905 anthology, Li Ting of London and Other Stories, Sims appears to condone the creation of Anglo-Chinese families in Britain, with a favourable portrait of his Chinese protagonist, his white East End wife and their refreshingly ordinary and integrated mixed race daughter who speaks ‘Cockney, not Chinese or pidgin’ (Forman 2013: 209). Even more extraordinary is Edith Duff-Fyfe’s The Nine Points (1908), a prime exemplar of the complex representational avenues of interraciality in early twentieth century fiction. With echoes of the real life Stamford case (see Chap. 3 and below), the story starts with the newly appointed Sir Alec Farraday, who lives in an Indian village with his adored but lowly native wife, passing his aristocratic identity and inheritance over to his friend, Carvill, to prevent their falling into the eventual hands of his half-caste children whose mixed ancestry, he believes, renders them unworthy and incapable of running the English estate. When Farraday’s son Bulbul grows up to learn of his true identity and arrives in England to claim his birthright, Carvill and his lawyer conspire against him—with the author’s complete blessing—to cheat him out of his inheritance as much as for the ‘good’ of the estate as for upholding Carvill’s promise to Farraday. Bulbul’s eventual capitulation to the Englishmen’s machinations shifts their views of him from a ‘weak, timid half-caste’ (236) to a ‘thorough little gentleman’ (295), while his attentions to Aggie, a white lady’s maid in Carvill’s employ, find a receptive home (‘his dark skin did not repel her in the least’ (248)). After marrying in England, Bulbul and Aggie move to India where, echoing the happy interracial marriage between his parents, they live very harmoniously with their two children—unlike Bulbul’s sister, Nettie, whose husband—a brutish white man—subjects her to constant racial abuse and violence, eventually murdering her and their unborn child. Apart from the governess’s comment on Aggie’s ‘race suicide’ (317), neither the villagers nor the ‘fake’ Farradays—the lord and lady of the manor—protest the union; in fact, the aristocrats give their blessing, attend the wedding and keep in contact with Aggie in India. Thus alongside the novel’s strong message of the perils and consequences of racial mixing, two happy and successful interracial relationships are also portrayed.

These types of representative turns frequently perplexed and confounded reviewers, who were often torn between enjoying the ‘fascinating’ stories, ‘exotic’ settings and ‘insights’ of the novels, and being unsettled by the racial boundaries being so openly crossed, particularly if conducted by white female characters. Where writers had their female characters blindly enter such relationships or remain chaste, eyebrows were scarcely raised: the Leeds Mercury notes that the story of Fanny Penny’s genteel A Mixed Marriage (1903), which depicts a relationship—born of unromantic pragmatism—between a white English gentlewoman and an Indian prince that fails before consummation can take place, ‘which might easily have been a disagreeable one, is actually a pleasant and wholesome chronicle’. Less tolerance was displayed, however, when such relationships were knowingly and willingly entered into. Margaret Peterson’s Tony Bellew (1914), in which the eponymous Tony takes to drink and shoots himself on learning that he is actually of mixed Indian and white parentage, provoked The Spectator to finally ‘speak [its] mind’ after finding the novelist’s third book focusing yet again on white women crossing racial boundaries—Tony has a white lover—‘a matter of grave regret’. ‘Now does Miss Peterson’, the magazine scolded, ‘honestly consider that the physical aspect of interracial marriage, and the problems of Eurasians in India, are suitable subjects for light fiction? In each of her books she would seem to rejoice in the use of innuendo, in the emphasizing of that vulgar, second-rate treatment of sexual problems which should be kept in the background--in fine, in an almost deliberate misuse of her exceptional talents’.¹¹

The importance and reach of these representations of interraciality should not be underestimated.¹² In addition to the audiences who themselves consumed these novels, short stories, plays and even films featuring interracial relationships and people, national and regional newspapers endlessly serialised stories and contained reviews of this fictional and dramatic portrayals. As Kapila (2010: foreword) notes, for all their ‘imaginative failures’, these representations allowed glimpses of an ‘interracial domesticity’ that, though a central facet of colonial life and sociality, was often scrubbed out of official accounts. Given that these representations were the first encounter for most white British people in their conceptualisations of those of a different race, such works were instrumental in acting as virtual ‘contact zones’ which shaped attitudes and perceptions of colonial subjects, as well as colonists and citizens of the metropole (see Chap. 5). The overriding fictional and dramatic impression given was that though interraciality could come to no good, its thrill and threat was contained by the suggestion that it was a fantastical, exotic practice. In reality, however, British domestic culture contained a commonplace mixed race reality in its very own streets (Malchow 1996).

Early Representations of Mixing in Britain

Even with the overseas focus and the relative small size of the minority ethnic population, Britain’s ‘coloured’ inhabitants did attract public attention nonetheless, with a small but steady stream of commentary trickling forward from the press. Despite the small size of the Chinese population, for instance (see Chap. 3), much interest was paid at the turn of the century to this community, not least ‘the Chinaman’s’ often remarked on propensity to seek relationships with white women and the women’s inclination to accept: in 1904, The Evening Telegraph noted that ‘There is nothing very rare nowadays in an English girl marrying an Oriental.’¹³ Though reporting on Anglo-Chinese interracial relationships tended to contain a bemused and facetious undercurrent, it was for the most part relatively mild in tone, particularly when discussing ‘respectable’ middle-class unions such as the Tomalin-Potts/Hsiao wedding.¹⁴ Even the somewhat smirking attitudes towards the interracial Anglo-Chinese relationships of Limehouse and other portside areas belied a level of nonchalance about the racial mixing occurring there. George Wade’s 1900 article ‘Cockney John Chinaman’ for the English Illustrated Magazine—greatly cited by the national and local press—contains no open hostility to such liaisons.¹⁵ Indeed, while ‘John Chinaman’ was perceived as a curious oddity, and the ‘ladies’ who married him were considered of dubious morality, Wade and other commentators often conceded that he was nevertheless renowned as making a good husband and father. The London newspaper, The Star, noted how the gender imbalance between Chinese men and women in Britain was only part of the explanation for Anglo-Chinese marriages, stating that ‘Chinese females are practically unknown in this country; but the ladies of [Limehouse] find the yellow man a most exceptional husband and father, being quite an example to the white men of the neighbourhood; he seldom drinks to excess, he works hard, never objects to bear a hand in the domestic economy of his household, and never strikes the woman of his choice’.¹⁶ The celebrated author and playwright George Sims echoed such sentiments in his 1905 feature on ‘Oriental London’, noting also the high quality of parenting and family life: ‘their children look healthy and are very comfortably dressed, and most of them are very nice looking. These dark-haired, black-eyed boys and girls, with the rosy cheeks and happy looks, are real little pictures’.¹⁷

Much less favourably noted, however, were the relationships between white women and black men in dockside communities. A lengthy article in the Leeds Mercury on poverty around Britain in 1901 was aghast at ‘miserable homes, where half-caste piccaninnies wallowed in rags on filthy floors, and if slatternly white women hiccoughed curses from the inner darkness, it was because their Kaffir mates—this is the Kaffir quarter—at the neighbouring public-houses swilled porter as dusky as their skins.’¹⁸ A similar ‘expose’ in the Weekly Mail in 1907 vilified the interracial families found in ‘Nigger Town’—the insulting local epithet for the black neighbourhood of Cardiff. Written as part of a series of articles on life in Wales by George Sims, who reported on the local relationships between white women and black men in a very different light to the interracial Anglo-Chinese unions he had praised in his writing a few years earlier, the article rails against the familiarity of these relationships in the neighbourhood which ‘makes not only for socially and morally, but physically for evil.’ The area, he fumes, is ‘one of the most repellent places in which a Briton, blest with pride of race can spend a morning, an afternoon or an evening’.¹⁹

The root cause of such unpleasantness, such objectors frequently held, was not the intense poverty blighting such communities but the moral laxity of certain types of white women found there. An article in The Cambrian minced no words in 1908 when it came to where the finger should be pointed regarding the interraciality occurring across portside communities:

A year earlier, the Leeds Mercury had also despaired over ‘white women fascinated by negroes’, though it pointed out that their ‘irresistible attraction’ to white women was not particular to the working classes: ‘almost every hour of the day in a walk through the West End,’ it spluttered, ‘one meets pretty English women walking with coal-black negroes.’²¹ Though the wantonness or foolishness of white women was deeply scolded, this is not to say that the ‘coloured men’ were considered blameless. A newspaper article of 1909 entitled ‘White Women and Coloured Men’ (in Lahiri 2000: 141) was in no doubt that white women needed to be protected from Indian men, specifically the many Indian students who at this time were resident in the country and were often entering into relationships with white women.²² Claiming to have lived among Indian students, the writer was horrified at the willingness of English women to associate with these ‘crafty heathens’; ‘it is,’ he raged, ‘positively nauseating to see them on the tops of buses, in the streets, at the theatres and almost everywhere one goes…These women have not the slightest idea of what grave risks they are running.’ Indian men’s ‘plausible tales of eastern life’ eventually ‘accomplish the ruining of these white women’. Police intervention was required, failing that ‘at the very least the ostracism of such couples….’ Action was required: ‘now,’ he urged ‘before the evil reaches any larger proportions is the time to insist on these Asiatics being placed in their proper positions.’ Similarly, despite the tolerance generally extended to the Chinese men, pockets of intense hostility—as in Liverpool in 1907—were apparent. In many intellectual quarters the Chinese were seen as part of a sinister ‘Yellow Peril’—a looming threat of swarming East Asian hordes gearing up to engulf and destroy the constitution and order of the ‘civilized’ West, militarily, economically, morally and socially (Forman 2013), a perception exacerbated by the Boxer Rebellion²³ at the turn of the century which greatly fuelled an anti-Chinese sentiment in Britain (and internationally). Their touted propensity for and appeal to white British women was occasionally viewed in these terms. Newspapers warned that while the Chinese of the metropolis ‘is not at all a troublesome member of society’, his brother was a ‘blood-thirsty miscreant running riot in the Orient’; as such, ‘the white civilisation cannot live beside the yellow. The Chinaman is too economical and too hardworking…. He can learn anything, and the white worker cannot compete with him…. Will he ever come along and make us open up our door to him? If he does our women will marry him. Incomprehensible as it appears to the white man, the Chinaman can get the women—the best of them—to mate with him.’²⁴ This discourse, as later sections in this chapter discuss, would increasingly be tapped into regarding Anglo-Chinese mixing as, similarly to other racial and ethnic populations, a focus on such groups tended to arise when economic and political tensions—local, national or imperial—aggressively reared their head. In such cases, outrage at these relationships was often as much the expression of wider concerns about ‘ownership’ of labour and national identity as it was ‘ownership’ of women. The disparaging of the Chinese and their white partners in the press and more widely in Liverpool in 1907, Glen (2012) argues, flared up for precisely such reasons, namely local concerns about the economic effect of Chinese-run laundries on neighbourhood businesses, as well as an attempt to incite interest in the 1906 General Election which was affected by the Chinese labour dispute in South Africa.

Yet for all their outrage and disgust, these objections were not part of a constant and high profile discourse in the press denigrating interracial relationships in Britain as was to appear in the following decades; rather, they ebbed and flowed as isolated rants, often found tucked away in short, miscellaneous news sections.²⁵ Indeed, the mood in the early Edwardian press towards interraciality in Britain appears to contain a significant degree of flexibility. The racial mixing and mixedness that was occurring at the heart of Empire might raise the eyebrows of middle opinion and sometimes stir it to comment, but it did not automatically and inevitably provoke the venomous outrage that later spewed forth. Indeed, the press often took great pride in proclaiming that, unlike the USA, South Africa or even within certain British colonies where racial mixing caused apoplexy among the white settler populations, Britain was much more forgiving. The Yorkshire Telegraph and Star’s statement that ‘it is fair to say that we have no race problem of our own, and cannot understand the situation of those who have’ was a sentiment regularly expressed in quarters of the press.²⁶ In light of clear evidence of institutional and social racism—including an unofficial ‘colour bar’ which led to people of colour frequently struggling with access to housing, employment and entertainment spaces—such claims were, of course, paper thin. Yet they do illustrate that hostility towards racial difference formed only a part of attitudes towards interraciality, rather than a whole.

We should be clear, however, that these accounts are not meant to counter the existence of very real and distinct prejudiced and racist attitudes. The very highlighting of some stories of interraciality was at times to draw attention to their perceived unusualness, underscored often with snarky comments to emphasise that message, such as the barbed comments regarding the fortuity that the 8th Earl of Stamford—who had married Martha Solomons, a low born South African woman of colour before inheriting his title—had had no male heir, otherwise a ‘woolly-headed’ ‘half-caste representative’ of the earldom would [have been] in the House of Peers’.³⁵ Other accounts meanwhile attracted particularly intense venomous coverage, such as the turn of the century turbulent relationship between ‘Prince’ Peter Lobengula, a black performer with the Savage South Africa show, and Kitty Jewel, the daughter of an Englishman who had emigrated to South Africa, which ‘veered between facetious amusement and righteous indignation’ (see Shepherd 1986: 100). Similarly, alongside the genre of myths pedalled by the propagandists (see Chap. 2), there was also circulating during the early decades of the century some odd folklore about the consequences of interracial intimacy and mixing: in a letter to The Times in 1907, a doctor stated that ‘if a white woman have a child by a black man, her subsequent children, even if the father be a white man, will be more or less black.’³⁶ While a current of racism in these accounts is almost always running, when read as a whole they nevertheless do show that interraciality in the early twentieth century was represented, discussed and portrayed in multifaceted and complex ways, and consequently, as we discuss further in Chap. 5, experienced so. With the onset of the First World War however, such complexity of representation would increasingly become more constrained.

In the lead up to the First World War, the visibly multiracial mixing of dockside communities began to garner attention beyond the odd, ranting journalist here and there. With economic strife and politics on the continent issues rising, working class interraciality threatened the idea of a strong, homogenous nation (Witchard 2004) and the press joined politicians, local commentators and trade unionists in vilifying those minorities who became the recipients of both projected fears about moral and racial degeneration and the requisitioning of white British men’s jobs and women. The 1911 seamen’s strike and related violence, for example, focused attention once again on the Chinese population who, as in Liverpool in 1907, were blamed for the economic woes of white working-class men (Auerbach 2009). The earlier nonchalant tolerance of the press towards ‘John Chinaman’ was replaced by a growing vilification and ‘Yellow Peril’ imagery was furiously invoked in the increasing warnings to the public of the dangers of the Oriental, particularly in relation to white women. The London Magazine published an excoriating ‘exposé’ in 1911 entitled ‘The Chinese in Britain: A Growing National Problem’ in which it was claimed that Oriental dominion of the West was being plotted in the Chinese ‘lairs’ of London, Liverpool and Cardiff, where young white women were tempted into unsavoury unions, the ‘exotic charm’ of the Chinese overcoming ‘their instinctive repugnance to a race of alien blood and colour’, and thus threatening ‘the purity of the Anglo-Saxon blood.’ (see Auerbach, 65–66).

In tandem, there began to emerge a feverish fascination in the arts with the Chinese population residing in London’s Limehouse, not least with its ‘sexual integration’ into the imperial metropolis (Forman 2013: 198). Of this literature, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu series, first introduced by the previously serialised novel The Mystery of Fu Manchu (1913), and Thomas Burke’s collection of short stories Limehouse Nights (1916)—one of which (‘The Chink and The Child’) inspired D.W. Griffith’s acclaimed silent film Broken Blossoms (1919) about the platonic and ultimately tragic love of a Chinese man for a white girl—remain the best-known examples, primarily due to their international success and subsequent influence.³⁷ However, as Witchard (2004) and others have noted, despite the tendency to bracket their work together as illustrative of the ‘Yellow Peril’ fiction of the time, their attitudes to their Chinese protagonists are in fact quite different. Rohmer’s work positioned the Chinese as ‘active agents of evil and criminality’, using the shelter of the vice-ridden, multiracial neighbourhood of Limehouse to incite the downfall of British society (Forman 2013: 217). Burke’s writings, meanwhile, had ‘no evil oriental geniuses, international conspiracies or clumsy pastiches of Sherlock Holmes’ (Seed 2006: 58). Instead, his Chinese characters were the immigrant neighbours, friends, lovers and enemies of the white working classes of Limehouse. As such, Burke depicts the Chinese men of his stories and the white women that they had relationships with in ways that are both matter-of-fact and morally ambiguous. This blunt yet layered exploration of the mixing and miscegenation willingly occurring amongst a multiracial working class at the centre of Empire led to instant notoriety on publication—in addition to the shocked reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, the work was banned for immorality by British circulating libraries and there was talk that Burke might be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act (Witchard 2004). Yet, by focusing on the private lives of the multiracial Limehouse residents—in contrast to Rohmer’s focus on the public effect of the Chinese presence there—Burke encourages his readers to empathise across colour boundaries with his protagonists, whose experiences are portrayed as being indelibly shaped by the structure, demands and consequences of Empire (Forman 2013). Griffith’s film also worked to elicit sympathy for the interracial relationship at the heart of its story, though it overplayed the tropes of Orient fantasy and pantomime and downplayed the explicit grittiness of Burke’s Limehouse to do so (Burrows 2009).

For all the encouragement of empathy however, Griffith’s film and Burke’s writing did little to dispel longstanding stereotypes about Chinese men that consistently bubbled over in times of economic strife. The old tropes of opium usage and peddling, attraction to young girls, effeminacy and threat of white slavery that appeared in their and other literary and dramatic portrayals of the Chinese, whether bluntly invoked or subtly examined, contributed to previous narratives of the Chinese as loving husbands and good fathers being overshadowed.

Moreover, ‘Yellow Peril’ fiction not only pointed to the threat presented by racialised others, but also to that presented by the working classes, who were also complicit in undermining the social structure and order through their perceived alcoholism, violence, drug abuse and willingness to mix racially. This body of literature reinforced the message ‘that the East could only creep into the West with the latter’s collusion’ (Forman 2013: 201), with some more guilty than others. Indeed, while Western men in this literature are often the naïve or unwitting dupes of the Chinese, Western women are actively and willingly engaging in ‘destabilising’ Englishness. In the East End of Limehouse Nights, not only do ‘teenaged Cockney girls eat Chow Mein and Chop Suey with chopsticks in the local caffs, blithely gamble their house-keeping money at Puck-a-pu and Fan Tan, burn joss-sticks in their bedrooms, and ritualistically prepare opium pipes in the corner pub’ (Witchard 2004: np), but they also sleep with, marry and bear the children of Chinese men. As throughout ‘Yellow Peril’ fiction generally, Burke’s relentless focus on the lurid brutality and moral degeneracy of the white working classes of London bolstered prevailing stereotypes about the types of white women who crossed racial boundaries as well as suggesting certain inadequacies inherent in those white men who were failing to keep these women in order. All in all, the fiction portrayed a violent, sinister underworld in the capital in which the increasing interactions between the Chinese and white British working classes were unravelling the social and cultural foundations of British life.

The widespread concerns—about sexual propriety, about racial degeneration and, above all, about the undermining of Empire—in the face of war were not confined to the Chinese. Though black colonial troops were frequently greeted warmly by local populations—at a parade of the troops at the Lord Mayor’s Show in 1915, a West Indian company ‘which included many coloured men, got a specially hearty cheer’³⁸—as the war progressed and the novelty of seeing black men parading off to war faded, press reaction to their presence in the country became increasingly hostile and a disproportionate and highly sensationalist amount of coverage began to focus on their social and economic threat. ‘Where we formerly saw one white woman married to a black, or living with him, we now see scores,’ protested the Empire News in 1917 (in Smith 2004: 114). The Empire News, the purveyor of casual racism at the best of times, was increasingly vehement in its opinion that black male workers presented a menace to the social fabric of British society, especially to white women who were ‘easily tempted by free-handed Negroes earning good money’ (Smith 2004: 114). Meanwhile, the Manchester-based newspaper, The Daily Dispatch, carried a series of articles decrying ‘The Black Peril’, particularly the ‘pronounced weakness’ of black men ‘for associating with white women’ (Smith 2004: 114).

While the arts continued to reflect deep-rooted social concerns about the dangers of racial mixing outside Britain, such as depicted in the popular doomed interracial romance and revenge play Mr Wu (1913)—whose scenes of a Chinese man sexually blackmailing a white Englishwoman, one reviewer noted, ‘makes your gorge rise’ (Auerbach 2009: 74)—these were increasingly joined by a focus on the crossing of racial boundaries at home. The 1914 novel A “Water-Fly’s” Wooing: A Drama in Black and White Marriages by a former Daily Mail correspondent, Annesley Kenealy, warns of the dangers of racial mixing between black and white, particularly when transposed from the colonies to metropole. The return to England from West Africa by a colonial official with his ‘Water-Fly’ son (‘a half-caste, a man of no country, who belongs to no race’ (18)) unleashes a spiralling chain of tragedy for all parties, including a white woman who finds herself drawn to the man the novel describes as ‘the unnatural’. As Graff (2009: 278) notes, though long out of print, the novel’s ‘importance as a text stems from its engagement with Kenealy’s dramatisation of contemporary threats: the New Woman, racial hybridity and the sexual legacy/moral legitimacy of the Empire’.

Those in different social strata managed to find more harmony as they continued to benefit from the humanising lens of class. Auerbach (2009), for example, notes that in the popular and critically acclaimed 1918 play The Chinese Puzzle: An Original Play in Four Acts, which focuses around a diplomatic scandal between a Chinese ambassador and his white wife, the Chinese protagonist and interracial relationship are treated respectfully; the Aberdeen Journal reports that on learning the authors were to write a play featuring a prominent Chinese character, Sir Robert Hart, the Inspector-General of Customs in China, counselled, ‘take care you draw a Chinaman and not a heathen Chinee’, advice that was, the newspaper noted, ‘duly followed’.⁴⁰ In real life social circles, the Chinese Countess Oei Hui-Lin and her son Lionel were feted by high society, with pictures of both littering the society pages of newspaper and magazines—including high profile features in Tatler—with the manners, beauty and fashion sense of the exceedingly wealthy ‘chic and charming’ Countess gushed over at length.⁴¹

While it may have been important to maintain the goodwill of the powerful Chinese elite, the masses were thrown under the bus of fear mongering. As Auerbach notes, there had been a ‘rapid evolution, in British public discourse, of Chinese residents and London’s “Chinatown” from an exotic curiosity at the turn of the century to a dire threat to society’ (Auerbach 2009: 2). With an increasingly ingrained link between race, gender and class featuring in public discourse, the picture of those who were willing to cross the line was becoming both more visible and more entrenched.

By the 1920s, press opinion on interracial relationships in Britain had moved from its patronising, occasionally disapproving and somewhat disinterested tone at the turn of the century to one much more aggressive and condemnatory in nature. The 1919 riots (see Chap. 3) had shone a spotlight on Britain’s multiracial communities unknown to many outside of ‘Yellow Peril’ fiction—the Hull Daily Mail stated that ‘the recent East-end street battle has focused public attention on what is admitted to be a growing evil in the cosmopolitan quarters of London’⁴²—and in doing so they began the process of crystallising and articulating attitudes to racially mixed couples in ways that would have pervasive and longstanding repercussions (Tabili 1994: 136). As Belcham (2008: 7) notes, ‘what was formerly exotic multicultural space now acquired more problematic meanings’ as interracial port town communities came to pose awkward questions about citizenship and belonging for the other within the heart of Empire.

Perceptions of interraciality in Britain were now dominated by increasingly essentialised conceptualisations of interracial port communities; moreover, press coverage increasingly combined ‘the three elements necessary to create a ‘moral panic’—exaggeration of events, prediction of similar events and symbolisation’ (Lahiri 2000: 141). The press began to step up a gear in its derisive portrayal of the men of colour and white women in these communities, as well as its message that relationships between the two warranted serious social concern. Articles detailing broken or violent marriages were common and little sympathy or credence was given to the woeful economic plight of black, Arab and Chinese men who had been made virtually unemployable in the post-war years by the relentless pursuit of the trade unions, shipping owners and local authorities to sideline them and the legislation enacted by government to support this; rather, they were seen as a threat to white men’s security and a burden on the state (Belcham 2008). The flaring up of racially motivated violence in seaports in 1920s,⁴³ where competition for seagoing employment once again saw white seamen and crowds attack black and Arab sailors and their lodging houses, was reported on in familiar terms, with local and national newspapers ignoring or underplaying the issue of unemployment and economic decline of the merchant shipping industry and instead focusing on interracial relationships as the cause of the problem; according to The Times, the outbreak in Hull was ‘a recrudescence of trouble which has been simmering for some time, and is due to local resentment at the relations between coloured men and women of the town’, while the Western Mail reported that it appeared the Newport troubles ‘began over a dispute between black men and sailors with reference to a white woman’ (Jenkinson 2009: 207–209).

The labour movement further savaged black men through its full embrace of Germany’s vitriolic racist ‘Black Shame’ propaganda, which railed against France’s decision to station black West African troops in the occupied Rhineland. In the spring of 1920, the leading left-wing daily newspaper, the Daily Herald, published a rancorous article by ED Morel—a journalist and later a Labour MP—entitled ‘Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine’. As in his pamphlet ‘The Horror on the Rhine’, which was distributed and enthusiastically received at the Trade Union Congress of 1920, Morel invoked longstanding ideas of the ‘Black Peril’, railing against the presence of ‘sexually…unrestrained and unrestrainable’ Africans in Europe ‘raping women and girls’. Appealing to the British working class, Morel warned that workers would be ‘ill-advised if they allow it to pass in silence because to-day the victims happen to be German’ (Reinders 1968; James 2003).

Given the climate post the 1919 riots, the arguments of Morel and the Daily Herald—which also published a damning editorial on the issue—fell on ripe ground. The continued presence of black, Arab and Chinese men after the war, despite the fact that many were British-born citizens or subjects, was seen as part of the ongoing ‘colour problem’ across the country’s cities, one that was both economic as well as social. ‘Many of these coloured men [in Glasgow]’, declared The Sunday Post in 1922, ‘have married white women, are drawing the unemployment dole, and are receiving relief from the parish’.⁴⁴ As before, women of colour continued to be almost completely erased from the public picture of these communities, despite their growing presence within them (see Chap. 5), and all focus was on the ever more vilified ‘coloured’ men and white women couples found there.

The contempt and despair of local officials across the country regarding the ‘scandal of black men and white girls’ was frequently reported on by the press: at a meeting of Cardiff’s Public Morals Committee in 1920, a clergyman had stated that ‘hundreds of couples of coloured men and white girls had come to his church to be married, but so strong were his feelings in regard to this danger that he had refused to officiate’.⁴⁵ In Poplar, East London, a fellow clergyman explained to the Lancashire Evening Post that, despite there being no civil or ecclesiastical law against them, he opposed mixed marriages as, in many cases, it was ‘fatal to happiness’: ‘sometimes a woman can live on very good terms with a Chinaman or a Hindu but I have never met a woman who was really happy with a nigger’.⁴⁶ Meanwhile, the press widely covered the views of officials such as the Metropolitan Magistrate at the Thames Police Court, Mr JAR Cairns, who habitually condemned the ‘greatest problem’ he had to face at the court: ‘girls of 17, 18, and 19, who, for some extraordinary reason, are infatuated with Limehouse, and the Chinese, Arabs, and other coloured men who inhabit the district’.⁴⁷ Indeed, though it was understood that the sheer presence of ‘coloured’ men in these communities was to be deplored in itself, the behaviour of white women was greatly as execrable, if not more so. The Chairman of Hull Police Court was quoted as stating that though ‘coloured men were responsible for a great deal of vice in the city…the Bench were convinced that white women were responsible for encouraging it’.⁴⁸ Young women were thus complicit in their own degradation, inexplicably willing to ‘commit moral and physical suicide’ as Cairns so saw it.⁴⁹ Qualifying his remarks, Cairns made it even more clear that (as if he had not already) it was white women whom he truly held responsible for the ‘lamentable state of things’ in East London: ‘I want to say frankly that my remarks had less reference to the coloured men than to the white women. The women can hardly expect coloured men to show more respect for them than they show themselves’.⁵⁰ As Tabili notes, the outpourings from this focus portrayed ‘both partners as unfit, in class-based and gendered terms as well as racial ones: idle, unproductive, unmanly men, and women of mean estate, easy virtue, and dubious maternal qualities’ (Tabili 1994: 156).

As the aftermath of the riots sank in and it became clear that the idea of mass repatriation was a dead end and Britain’s interracial communities were here to stay, the headlines and stories in the press on racial mixing became ever more lurid and incendiary. As Auerbach (2009: 152) notes, the commercial activities of Chinese (and black men) in London in particular were repeatedly linked to interracial liaisons, the alleged increase in gambling and narcotics among whites, and to the physical and moral decline of the metropolis as a whole. ‘A SOCIAL CANKER’ thundered the Western Daily Press in 1922 on Limehouse;⁵¹ the ‘PREY OF BLACK MEN’ screamed numerous papers in covering the bigamy case of a young woman who had been married to an Indian, a Malay and a Portuguese in 1923.⁵²

The increasingly vitriolic tone towards racial mixing in the press was further inflamed by the growing establishment concern around a perceived moral degeneracy amongst the young as a whole. Seeking to forget the hardships and pressures of wartime and the post-war period, young people were increasingly flocking to the burgeoning nightclub scene, much to the disgust of the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynston-Hicks, who denounced the clubs in the metropolis as ‘a blot on the life of London’ (Pugh 2008: 218). To the despair of the establishment, London’s West End was host to a ‘flamboyant flaunting of convention’ (Witchard 2004: np) with a mix of bohemian revellers from chorus girls and black musicians to nouveau riche millionaires and aristocrats rubbing shoulders and brazenly indulging in the triple vices of the flapper age: gambling, drugs and jazz (Kohn 1992; Witchard 2004). These fashionable multiracial spaces facilitated interracial relationships and liaisons within the ‘society’ crowd and it was considered ‘chic’ amongst the ‘fast set’—men as well as women—to have a black lover or engage in illicit sex, as satirised in Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928) and Holtby’s Mandoa, Mandoa (1933). As Bush (1999) notes, amongst the frivolity and fetishisation, authentic relationships also occurred—in her 1938 book Nigger Lover, Doris Garland Anderson, the wife of the African American playwright Garland Anderson, in repudiating racial prejudice as a whole, also expressed her disdain for the smart set whose behaviour she felt devalued genuine interracial relationships.

The newly independent young white women of the war age were in particular seen to be at the mercy of these hedonistic, cosmopolitan and dangerous influences that brought them into contact with the contaminating forces of ‘coloured’ men. The environs of central London’s Tottenham Court Road repeatedly attracted the attention of the press due to the dangers of its interracial night life scene. In the early 1920s, the Daily Express and Nottingham Evening Post printed particularly vitriolic articles about the ‘black peril to white girls’ in the heart of London. ‘HALF-CASTE BABIES’—‘SPREADING COLONY OF NEGROES’—‘NIGHTCLUBS-LIVING ON VICE’—spluttered the by-lines. The Express was incensed by this ‘black invasion’ of ‘nearly 200 coal black niggers’ who had settled in the area in the wake of ‘the craze for coloured jazz band musicians’. Now, shrieked the paper, ‘they have their own cafés…and a night club, where black men and white girls dance until the early hours of the morning…. These London negroes have too uncanny a fascination for white women.’⁵³ In its lengthy exposé of the neighbourhood, the Nottingham Post damned the area as ‘the worst plague spot in the whole of London’ and also bewailed the black man’s ‘irresistible fascination for a certain type of white girl. When he arrives in London to take up an appointment in one of the many jazz bands, there is keen competition to win his favour.’⁵⁴ Concerns about jazz and its supposed effect of an intoxicated state which reduced moral restraint and encouraged sexual permissiveness, including interracial mixing (Parsonage 2005; Mckay 2006), were further highlighted in the controversy around John Bulloch Souter’s 1926 painting The Breakdown, exhibited at the annual Royal Academy show. The painting, which depicts a black saxophonist sitting on a broken statue of Classical Art while a naked white woman dances in front of him, produced a wave of horror across both the art world and the press. After much outcry—and once again reflecting the ripples of unease that interracial mixing in Britain caused throughout the colonies—the Secretary for the Dominions intervened (on the basis that ‘the subject was considered obnoxious to British subjects living abroad in daily contact with a coloured population’) and the painting was quickly withdrawn (Mckay 2006).

The home establishment also felt the need to make a stand against the interraciality now occurring so blatantly in the very centre of the metropole and the press lasciviously reported on raids on such ‘black man’s cafés’: The Nottingham Evening Post commented that during one raid the police had found ‘30 black men dancing with white girls, in an atmosphere as vitiated as the human mind can imagine’,⁵⁵ while the case against a ‘coloured’ proprietor, Uriah Erskine, in 1925 was covered widely in the press, most of whom seemed not so much concerned with Erskine’s charge of running unlicensed premises than with the threat, as the Hull Daily Mail stated, that the club presented to ‘public order’, the police having observed that ‘black men and white girls, most of them under the influence of drink’ were engaged in dances together ‘with objectionable and suggestive movements’ and that ‘coloured men and white women [were] sitting around caressing each other’.⁵⁶

The picture painted by the establishment was that jazz was a corrupting, dangerous and un-British influence, one that could create a ‘Niggers’ Paradise’—as the Nottingham Evening Post dubbed Tottenham Court Road—to which ‘scores of white girls owe[d] their ruin’, their descent into prostitution and drugs the result of being seduced by jazz and dope, both proffered by black men. However, in relation to the traffic in drugs, thundered the Post, ‘the black men are closely associated with the Chinese, many of whom are their near neighbours’.⁵⁷

The Post’s reference to the Chinese and their association with drug trafficking was not an isolated accusation. On the one hand, the war years had deflected a great deal of negative coverage regarding racial mixing from Chinese to black men. However, the hedonism of the 1920s put this still small population back into the direct spotlight. From 1916 to the mid-1920s, a moral panic arose around London’s ‘drug scene’ with the press reporting hysterically on the dissipation found in the capital, particularly in the nightclub scene and amongst young women (Kohn 1992). As Auerbach (2009) notes, court trials, press reports and popular fiction all helped popularise the fear that the recreational use of cocaine and opium was part of a sinister ‘dope’ culture that crossed from East to West London, controlled and encouraged by Chinese men who were not only corrupting but co-opting white women into their nefarious scheme to undermine the British race.

Indeed, although the use of opium had long formed part of the depiction of the Chinese in London, the interwar period saw the theme resurface ‘with such a degree of prominence that it overshadowed earlier representations of the Chinese in which the substance was absent or…formed a subordinate element to larger themes of social injustice and transgressive affection’ (Forman 2013: 198). Moreover, such portrayals took on a new sense of threat as the Chinese were now seen as posing a threat to those outside their debauched Limehouse community, what the Western Daily Mail dubbed ‘an ulcerous plague-spot in the very heart of the Empire’.⁵⁸ Sensationalist and prolonged coverage was given to the ‘dope’-related deaths of young women—most notably the actress Billie Carlton in 1918 and the nightclub dancer Frieda Kempton in 1922—in particular the role of Chinese men and their white wives or female associates in the supply chain of opium and cocaine to the deceased. ‘The Evil Trade in Opium: English Girls as the Chinaman’s West End Agents’ declared the press⁵⁹ in the wake of the Carleton case as Ada Ping You, a Scottish woman living in Limehouse, was charged alongside her Chinese spouse and a white English man in connection with supplying drugs to Carleton. As has been noted, (Kohn 1992; Auerbach 2009), Ping You was heavily disparaged by the court for the transgression of racial and moral boundaries through her marriage to a Chinese man, with both defence and prosecution drawing on her interracial marriage to paint her as both victim and active agent of her opium-addict husband.⁶⁰ Fear of the corrupting influence of the Chinese on white women and the transmission of Chinese vice from the East End to the West End also underscored the Kempton case. The implication of the Chinese restaurateur and West End nightlife figure Billy ‘Brilliant’ Chang in supplying the drugs that led to Kempton’s overdose led to yet another media frenzy about the sinister influence of Chinese men on British society.⁶¹ Despite insufficient evidence to charge Chang in relation to Kempton’s death, the press yet sought to imply his guilt through tales of an unidentified ‘Chinese dope king’ in the vein of Fu Manchu controlling London’s drug traffic through an extensive network of mostly female workers ‘from manicurists in reputable parlours to attendants in clock rooms’.⁶² In relation to Chang himself, much was made of the hypnotic fascination he exerted over white women; when he was finally arrested in his new abode in Limehouse (having been driven out of the West End by the police) on the charge of possessing a single packet of cocaine, the press pruriently reported and expanded on the salacious details of police reports: sex in exchange for drugs, women seduced into becoming drug dealers, wild group orgies with ‘drug-frenzied women’ in his ‘intoxicatingly beautiful den of iniquity above the restaurant’.⁶³

The establishment endlessly pulled its hair out about these relationships and who was to blame. ‘What is the “Yellow Lure?”’ shrieked the Western Daily Press in a feverish article excoriating the moral decay caused by the Chinese quarters of Liverpool, Glasgow and Cardiff but most of all the ‘canker’ of Limehouse. The Press saw opium and gambling as only part of the explanation why young white girls were drawn to this East End neighbourhood; citing a female official, the article levelled accusations at both the Chinaman’s fascination for depraved natures and the vulnerability and foolishness of young white girls—‘devoid of shame’—who, having tasted financial independence and social freedom during the war, now ventured to Chinatown to seek excitement and money. Shuddering at the depravity into which these girls then fell, the Press feared that ‘the cheapening of white women amongst the Asiatics’ would have inevitable consequences for Empire, particularly for the wives and mothers of imperial outposts ‘whose honour and lives are being horribly threatened by the undermining of the respect that the Asiatic has hitherto had for the white woman.’⁶⁴ As Seed (2006: 71) notes, ‘dozens of newspaper and magazine articles in 1919, 1920 and 1921 reinforced these supposed connections between Chinese seamen, Limehouse shopkeepers, suborned white girls and the West End demi-monde.’ The drastic remedies urged by the paper to prevent Anglo-Chinese mixing in Britain—deportation, fines and imprisonment—could not be implemented directly due to British reluctance to introduce anti-miscegenation laws: interracial relationships and marriage between white women and coloured men were perfectly legal. Nevertheless, the police and magistrates increasingly managed to use the law to attempt to reinstate what they saw as the proper racial and gender order in the East End. Undercover investigations, clandestine observations, sudden raids and mass arrests provided evidence for the police to find charges to close down cafés and gambling houses by drawing on a range of laws, including the Disorderly Houses Act and the increasingly stringent anti-narcotics and gambling legislation (Auerbach 2009), and in numerous cases the Chinese men charged were deported.

With the press eagerly and persistently reporting on both the ‘vice’ of Limehouse and the police and court crackdown, the coverage constantly hammered home the message that men of colour had a fatal effect—morally, socially and physically—on white women. The arts also imported similar ideas through representations of Limehouse that steadily emphasised the link between vice, ‘coloured’ men and the downfall of white girls. The thinly veiled cinematic accounts of Carleton and Kempton’s deaths, The Case of a Doped Actress (1919) and Cocaine (1922), gratuitously highlighted the interracial contact/Limehouse threat beloved of the press. Both films were, however, refused certificates by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) due to concerns about glamorising drug usage and their ‘sordid content’; when the BBFC revised its code of conduct in 1926, it added injunctions not only against opium dens but also against ‘equivocal situations between white girls and men of other races’ (Burrows 2009: 288). Of those ‘Limehouse melodramas’ that passed the censors, the influence of Griffiths’ Broken Blossoms template was plain to see, with filmmakers churning out formulaic productions which set sensational tales against a sordid ‘London’ backdrop;⁶⁵ even when the setting was not directly identified as Limehouse, the invocation of the now recognisable tropes of drugs, gambling, moral degradation and interraciality signified both location and moral message to the audience (Burrows 2009). The measured tone of the Daily Telegraph’s 1920’s ‘Children of Chinatown’ article—which dismissed the lurid portrayals of Limehouse degeneracy and opium dens as stemming from ‘vivid imagination and kinema [sic] pictures’ rather than actual knowledge⁶⁶—was an isolated, ignored voice. Limehouse—and the racial mixing in Britain the area had come to represent—was becoming increasingly exoticised in the popular imagination.

The lure and dangers of racial mixing at home were further emphasised by the continuing popularity of novels, plays and films that depicted scintillatingly dangerous and lurid practices of racial mixing in the far flung reaches of Empire. The sensational and influential West End and Broadway hit White Cargo: A Play of the Primitive (1923), an adaptation of Simonton’s Hell’s Playground (1912), entertained audiences from Plymouth to Aberdeen by shining what critics called ‘a lurid light on the responsibilities of Empire-building’.⁶⁷ Set in West Africa, the story warns how the continent ‘plays entire havoc with men’s mental and moral fibre’ through showing the downfall of Langford, a fresh and idealistic young English colonist who is seduced into marriage by the ‘sinuous, alluring, semi-savage’ ‘half-breed’ Tondeleyo, barely surviving her attempt to murder him once she tires of the marriage.⁶⁸ Critics warned that the depiction of Langford’s moral degradation, particularly his increasing sexual desire for and eventual union with Tondeleyo, was not for the fainthearted. ‘It is strong fare’ gulped the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, ‘perhaps far too strong in places even for these “ultra-modern days”…there were times when the lines were so strong or so suggestive in their meaning that the audience literally gasped’. Nevertheless, despite objections in some quarters that the heralded ‘stark realism’ of the play was ‘a deliberate excursion into the undesirable’—the Lord Chamberlain, responding to public demands, banned the poster—audiences clamoured to see this ‘vivid play of the primitive unvarnished life in the tropics’—as it was subtitled—rewarding the actors’ performances with standing ovations.⁶⁹ ‘Nothing more gripping, more thrilling, more realistic has been seen on the British or American stage for many years,’ proclaimed the Dundee Courier. ‘It promises to become one of the plays of the century’.⁷⁰

Of course, as Newell (2002) points out, the supposed ‘stark realism’ of White Cargo was only concerned with the effect of colonialism in Africa on white male European colonists (the ‘white cargo’ of the title) and, consequently, the implications for the imperial project as a whole. Reflecting their position as the lowest of the hierarchy, black and ‘half-caste’ Africans—and women in particular—in both high and lowbrow fiction were stripped again and again of any real sympathy, individuality or humanity—‘rarely presented as if they were viable human beings…. It is required of black women not only that they be sexual, but above all that they be silent’ (Busia 1986: 365). By killing off or having their heroes resist temptation, these works ‘expunge the figure of the African or “mulatto” wife’ (Newell 2006