Mixed race Britain: charting the social history

While the race is one of mixed ethnic groups of the fastest growing in the UK, there is nothing new to people of different cultures meet

images: number of respondents photographs of family involvement albums

Oliva was only 15 when she met the man who would become her husband. Cardiff was 1930 and the nurse intern was lost on the way home from the cinema at the Royal Infirmary. "I stopped and asked the child the way to Queen Street. And we started talking and I fell in love instantly. "

The term "child" Olive met in the street that night was Ali Salaman, a working group of young Yemeni as a leader in his own restaurant, Café Cairo, a hang- out popular district of Tiger Bay. Despite the advice of her father that she married a non-Jew, the girl married Methodist Salaman Ali when he was 16 and continued to have 10 children.

with the Métis now measured in the national census and one of the fastest growing ethnic groups, it is often seen as a contemporary phenomenon. But Chamion Caballero, senior researcher at the center of London South Bank University of weeks, said: "There is a long history of miscegenation in the UK that people do not talk."

Knight co-wrote the research so far unreleased Peter Aspinall, a reader of Population Health at the University of Kent, which puts into perspective contemporary mix.

This shows that unions between white women and men from communities of British immigrants were common in areas where they were thrown together in the 1920s, 30 and 40, from South Shields and Toxteth Tiger Liverpool to Cardiff Bay and London Docklands. The era of moral condemnation: Metis in Britain, 1920-1950, shows that, even if they face the prejudices of some families created new Métis communities in which the exchange of different cultural traditions. It also explores how the perception of official Métis families in contrast to the way people experience.

Reports of newspapers of the time

portray mixed neighborhoods to be dangerous and transgressive, full of crime, prostitution and gambling. Researchers who have studied what was called "the problem of the color" label women in mixed relationships as lower class and lacking moral, their children as tragic outcasts. Even those who have tried to be sympathetic seemed unable to conceive children could be raised in loving and stable mixed families. Orientation of the British government advises women not to marry Indian, Chinese men, Muslim, or "black" and some in the public even called for the introduction of anti-miscegenation laws similar to South Africa for time.

Aspinall said that the field of eugenics in this period was crucial for such attitudes. "If you look at the objectives of the British Society of eugenics in the 1930s was an explicit statement about the dangers of what they called the race through," he said. Marie Stopes, a prominent eugenicist, he pleaded for all "mestizos" should be "sterilized at birth." Connie Hoe, the daughter of a Chinese father and white mother, was one of dozens of Métis children who were experienced in the Company to eugenics to test the relationship between physical appearance and intellect.
• "Measurement of the head and eye color, and noted our complexion. We were normal kids, looking for a job after leaving school, going to work, go to house "remembers Hoe, who grew up in Limehouse and Chinatown in London.

blended families also face state-sponsored interruption. Restrictions introduced by German soldiers during the Second World War spread after the race riots of 1919 to cover all foreign seafarers. This meant that men such as Stanley Ah Foo, who had settled in Liverpool after arriving in Britain in 1912 and worked on steamships, had to wear an ID card, report regularly to police and to obey the curfew. Ah Foo Emily English woman lost her British citizenship by marrying him.

After the Second World War, the Foreign Ministry in 1362 repatriated Chinese sailors who settled in Liverpool after serving in the merchant navy. Government records not to mention their families, but news reports indicate that at least 150 British women were married to each other and there were up to 450 children.

However, despite their efforts, the establishment could not stop people from various things in general. It is this sense of the ordinary, couples, families and individuals simply focus on their lives, Knight argues that the challenges, including the current views on the racial composition. "What surprised us were the stories of everyday, ordinary, where people lived in communities where many couples are mixed. They do not look as different. "
Many of these stories are told in a new series, mixed Britannia. Diffusion through the season of mixed ancestry from the BBC, is based on research to trace the history of Métis Britain from 1910 to today.