Mixed Museum colleagues awarded British Academy grant

We are pleased to announce that two of our founders, Drs Chamion Caballero and Peter Aspinall, have been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant Award.

The pair will be working with Professor Lucy Bland of Anglia Ruskin University. The award will fund their project ‘Investigating the Investigations’: a study of the official reports and commentaries on Britain’s interracial portside communities during the interwar years.

The research will take the team to archives across Britain, starting with The National Archives which holds the influential Richardson report. Conducted by Captain F.A. Richardson in 1935, this investigation into foreign seamen in Cardiff painted a harsh and derogatory portrait of interracial mixing in the city, linking Black and Asian men, their white partners and mixed race children with dirt, disease, immorality, degradation and marginalisation.

Like Richardson's report, most of the investigations - and the media reporting of them - would go on to cement a pathological legacy, affecting the ways in which mixed-race families were viewed and treated by the British state and society for decades to come. We will be showcasing the project's findings in a digital exhibition at The Mixed Museum next year.