The real history behind Steve McQueen’s Blitz: mixed-race families in wartime London
Inspired by a striking image from the Imperial War Museum, Steve McQueen’s new film Blitz tells the story of a mixed-race family during the heavy bombing of London in the Second World War. In this post, our Director, Dr. Chamion Caballero, and longstanding TMM partner Professor Lucy Bland draw on their body of research - including a recent project with TMM co-founder Peter Aspinall - to explore the real Black and mixed-race wartime histories behind the film. Read to find out more about experiences of evacuees to the overlooked diversity of London’s East End and the contributions of people of colour to Britain’s war effort.
Images: 1) A young boy on his way to evacuation in July 1940. Source: Imperial War Museum (HU 55936) 2) Elliott Heffernan in Blitz. Source: Apple TV+.
Forgotten Evacuees: People of Colour on Britain’s Home Front
Steve McQueen’s Blitz has captured the attention of filmgoers and historians alike, not least for its striking visual inspiration: a photograph from the Imperial War Museum archive. The image shows a young evacuee of Black heritage, suitcase in hand, ready to leave London for the countryside.
Like so many other young children during the second world war, the boy in the photo was sent away to live in with strangers in rural Britain to escape the heavy bombing of Britain’s cities - known popularly as the Blitz - by Nazi Germany. For on the 1 September 1939, two days before the official outbreak of war, about three million children were evacuated from urban areas across the country into parts of the countryside thought to be safe, part of ‘Operation Pied Piper’. Many of the children arrived with no change of clothes, just what they stood up in. While some had a wonderful time, looked after by kind people, there were many less positive stories.
Though stories of evacuation are well-known, whether in terms of firsthand narratives or fictional accounts, the photograph reflects a broader reality: the presence of people of colour in wartime Britain, including the mixed-race families whose children were evacuated. Despite their presence, resilience and contributions to the wartime effort, their stories have largely been obscured from Home Front narratives and understandings.
Stephanie and Constance Antia
Stephanie and Constance Antia, daughters of an African merchant seaman and his English wife, were evacuated from London to Stanion, Northamptonshire, in 1940. Stephanie was later crowned May Queen in 1944, an event captured in the Colonial Film Unit’s Springtime in an English Village. The film was used as propaganda to promote Britain to its African and Caribbean colonies.
Marie Kamara
Marie Kamara was a mixed-race eight-year-old who was evacuated from East London to Winchester. Children were ‘picked’ by locals who came to ‘choose’ their evacuees. Marie was the last one chosen from her group. As an adult, she became a dancer at Ballet Negres, the first Black ballet company in Britain. Watch interviews with her talking about her life at the London Evacuees Oral History website and Oxygen Arts' Facebook page.
McQueen’s Blitz challenges these omissions, not only through centring the story around George – the character inspired by the photograph - and his family, but also through the Black, Asian, mixed-race and other minority ethnic characters he encounters through the film. Below, we draw on our individual and collaborative research projects – including our Re:Port project with Peter Aspinall – to share insights into the very real multiracial history behind the film.
Britain’s Port Cities: Moral panics about mixed-race families and communities in the interwar period
While Britain has always been home to multiracial communities, the early twentieth century saw these increase substantially, particularly in some of Britain’s largest port cities. Many Black, Asian, Chinese and Arab men who fought for Britain during the First World War, including serving as merchant seamen, settled in Britain’s dockside neighbourhoods.
As fewer Black, Asian, Arab and Chinese women migrants resided in Britain at this time, most of the men married and started families with local white women - many of whom were of Irish heritage - as well as British mixed-race women. With the country economically suffering after the war, and on the arrival home of white demobbed men, hostility towards the men of colour grew, the press, trade unions and government blaming them for not only ‘taking’ white men’s jobs but also ‘their’ women.
The tensions exploded in 1919 and 1920 when racial violence towards the men and their communities – commonly referred to as the ‘race riots’ - flared in nine of Britain’s port cities. This social hostility continued throughout the 1920s, with white women in mixed racial relationships also attacked – physically and morally – for damaging the ‘superiority’ of the British ‘race’, nation and Empire by partnering and having children with men of colour.
The problem was seen to be widespread, not only confined to the docks. London’s nightclubs came under fire for facilitating racial mixing (in one scene in Blitz, George’s white English mother, Rita, is shown socialising at a nightclub with Marcus, his Black Grenadian father, and other mixed couples).
Tottenham Court Road in particular became a fixation for the press, with headlines railing it as London’s ‘worst plague spot’ for the so-called ‘black peril’ it presented to white women. Endless articles decried the ‘colony’ of ‘coal-black Negroes’ who were running cafés and nightclubs, seducing women through jazz and drugs. These men, the press claimed, were ably supported by Chinese men, who pedalled ‘dope’ and also held an ‘uncanny fascination’ for white women.
‘What is the “Yellow Lure?”’ shrieked the Western Daily Press on the supposed moral decay caused by the Chinese quarters of Liverpool, Glasgow and Cardiff but most of all the ‘canker’ of East London’s Limehouse. Interracial relationships, the articles argued, were not only depraved but the cause of social unrest, not least due to the growing number of what were derogatorily referred to as ‘half-caste’ babies.
This Daily Express article, published in 1930, is a prime example of the stigmatisation of mixed-race children in working-class port communities during the interwar period.
By the 1930s, a full blown moral panic had erupted about the danger presented to Britain due to what the press called the ‘menace’ and ‘social danger’ of mixed-race children. Across the port cities, a network of individuals – from chief constables to councillors and ‘concerned’ prominent citizens - set up groups and commissioned reports to tackle the ‘problem’, at times with Home Office involvement.
The onslaught of concern focused on the children lasted almost the entire decade. In 1938, Cardiff newspaper the Western Mail was still banging the drum for something to be done, advocating repatriation of colonial immigrants in order to cease ‘the ethnological experiment of cross-breeding’. Concerns about racial mixing were increasingly framed in terms of faux concern for the children. In 1938 the Liverpool University Settlement (a charity to help Liverpool’s poor) declared that ‘mixed parentage’ was ‘a handicap comparable to physical deformity’. The frenzy of reporting only dialled down when the onset of war diverted attention and resources elsewhere (though it would restart again in the post-Windrush era).
During the war: a mixed-race family in Stepney
Regardless of what the moral panickers thought, the fact of the matter is that mixed families were firmly a part of British life. As in Blitz, some of these called Stepney their home. Kenny Lynch was born in Stepney in 1938 to a white British mother and a Barbadian father, the youngest of 13 children, and part of a longstanding mixed family (Kenny’s great-great grandfather settled in Britain from the Caribbean in 1811). When war broke out, most of the children were evacuated to Wales, though as he told researcher Stephen Bourne, he stayed behind due to his young age. His sister, Gladys, took part in eisteddfods (Welsh music festivals) during her time in Wales; later, she would gain fame as jazz singer Maxine Daniels. And Kenny would become a well-known singer, song writer and actor.
Video: Kenny Lynch interviewed in 2018 for the 1000 Londoners project.
As appears to be the case with George, Lynch has remarked in interviews that during the war his family were only one of a handful of mixed families in Stepney. However, just a few miles further east was home to a significant mixed-race community, which Kenny’s family had initially been part of before they moved to Stepney.
Before the war: mixed-race families in Canning Town
The opening of the Victoria Dock in 1855 brought ships carrying goods from across the British Empire and beyond, attracting seamen from across Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Asia and the Caribbean. Some of these settled in the areas around the docks, finding jobs and building families with local women. By the 1930s, parts of the area had become so multiracial that Crown Street in Canning Town became known locally as ‘Draughtboard Alley’, due to the number of Black, mixed and white families who resided there.
The original photograph of the Crown Street children as appeared in the Daily Express, 1930. Note how the photo also contains white children, who were mostly cropped out of the Express article. ©Mary Evans Picture Library, reproduced under licence.
Levels of poverty throughout East London were extreme. For the mixed-race families in particular, work was often hard to find for the fathers due to racial discrimination. Noting how badly the seamen were treated, missionaries worked closely in East London with these families.
Interestingly, two of those who were most active in supporting the Black, mixed, Indian and Arab populations of Victoria Docks were middle-class converts to Christianity who had married white Englishwomen: Ebenezer Bholanath Bhose (born in Bengal) who was the chaplain of St Luke's parish in the late Victorian period, and then Kamal Chunchie (born in Sri Lanka - then known as Ceylon - to Muslim parents of Malay heritage) in the interwar years. Chunchie’s work in supporting the hundreds of mixed-race families of Newham – along with his work founding The Coloured Men’s Institute in 1926 - is wonderfully documented by Eastside Community Heritage.
Images: 1) Kamal Chunchie, 2) The exterior of the Coloured Men's Institute on Tidal Basin Road, 3) Kamal Chunchie with members of the local community at the Institute's Christmas Party, 1926. Source: Newham Archives.
Despite the poverty and damaging media portrayals, these neighbourhoods were often described by residents as close-knit and supportive. Anita Crozier, who grew up in East London in the 1930s, told Stephen Bourne that 'black men married white women and quite a lot of mixed marriages turned out alright because they were good to each other. Where we lived there was no feeling that mixed marriages were wrong. The white people we lived with accepted it. I feel there is more racism here now than we ever had before the war. We never had any racism when I was young.'
Memories from white residents also support the claim that there was a lack of racism within these communities, contrasting sharply with the press stereotypes. Doris, who grew up in the area recalled that ‘There were lots of black kids. We used to play together, no animosity between any of us. There were white women married black, you know, West Indians, they were working on the boats. Got on ever so well together […]. Sometimes when me and my sister’s talking, we say, “I wonder what happened to so and so,” you know. During the war a lot of them went.”’
The film The 'Strangers' Home tells the history of migration in the Royal Docks. It features an interview with Amanda Graham, whose family members appear in the photo used by the Daily Express. Like others with ties to the area, she recalls: ‘Sure there was racism, but there was also a lot of people kind of getting along with each other, playing with each other, regardless of background. None of them really had much money and they kind of got on with their lives.’
These tight knit multiracial neighbourhoods could be found across many of Britain’s port cities. Liverpool and Cardiff’s communities are the best known. The former Butetown Arts and Heritage Centre housed a wonderful video of a group of Black and mixed-race adults from Cardiff reminiscing about their time as evacuees in Aberystwyth along with some members of their host families. Maria Lin Wong and Yvonne Foley have documented Liverpool's Anglo-Chinese community, including the devastating break up of families immediately after the war, when Chinese men were forcibly deported without their wives and children being informed.
Other cities were also home to these communities. Scholars such as Richard Lawless and Sydney Collins, for example, have written about the tight knit mixed Arab communities of South Shields in the interwar and wartime periods.
Not just children: Black and mixed-race adults during the war
The history of mixed-race families in Britain has been greatly shaped by what Professor Minelle Mahtani calls ‘mixed-race amnesia’: the tendency to see mixed-race families as a new phenomenon, regardless of the generation. Conversations about the ‘rise’ in mixed-race children that we see now are also found in earlier generations when objections to mixed marriages were frequently framed under by the question: 'What about the children?' Those posing this in the 1950s post-Windrush era of migration seem to have forgotten about the children of the 1920s and 30s (as well as the children born in the war and afterwards to Black GIs, labelled by the African-American press ‘brown babies’).
Many of these – along with their parents - also served their country. Some, like Lilian Bader and Jack Leslie – who was born in Canning Town - are fairly well known. Others deserve greater recognition, such as Kenneth Roberts, who we have recently learnt about: a young mixed-race man from Staffordshire who was part of the elite parachute company who led the way at the Battle of Arnhem.
This racial diversity is often left out of Home Front narratives. McQueen however makes several references to this in Blitz, beyond George’s family. McQueen gives a significant role to Ife, a Black African air warden, based on the real life story of Ite Ekpenyon. He has long been thought to be Britain’s only Black air warden; however, we recently learnt the story of Kenneth Roberts father, John Mathania Roberts, who served as an air warden in Staffordshire.
McQueen also includes a number of characters played by actors with mixed racial heritage. Erin Kellyman's character Doris (pictured above) works alongside Rita in an armament factory (bringing to mind the Cardiff women immortalised in the 1936 photo 'Trouser Girls'. Celeste plays a nightclub singer in the vein of British artiste Evelyn Dove.
Steven Graham, Mica Ricketts, and Christopher Chung form part of a multiracial gang George runs into. Chung’s character hints at the longstanding Anglo-Chinese families of Limehouse. Meanwhile Graham, of mixed Black heritage, has spoken about the backstory to his character, Albert, being raised in a Victorian workhouse. Again, this story is rooted in real history; Professor Caroline Bressey’s superb scholarship has uncovered many stories of Black and mixed-race children who were raised in Dr Barnardo’s during the Victorian era.
The role of drama and fiction in sharing history
The history we’ve spotlighted in this post tells a story that upends the tidy, monochrome narratives we’ve too often been handed about the ‘Home Front.’ These are stories of resilience in the face of poverty and racism, of tight knit families and communities that defied stereotypes, and of lives lived in the shadows of mainstream history.
Steve McQueen’s Blitz thrusts these hidden histories into the spotlight, but the work of uncovering them is far from done. Archives are filled with accounts that challenge what we think we know about Britain’s past, ones that deserve to be more than footnotes. But it’s through storytelling, whether in film, writing, or oral histories, that these lives are brought vividly back to us. We hope that our research – some of which is shared at The Mixed Museum – will help inspire more storytelling that shines a light on Britain’s longstanding and complex multiracial history.
Sources and further reading
The information in this article is drawn from individual and collaborative research by Dr Chamion Caballero, Professor Lucy Bland and Dr Peter Aspinall. Click on the links in their names to view their academic publications.
Learn more
Watch Steve McQueen’s Blitz on Apple TV+
Explore The Mixed Museum to learn more about the histories behind Blitz
Support The Mixed Museum’s work, including our research to identify and share more Home Front histories
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