‘Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Black Man?’: Representation and Lived Experiences in the Post-war Period

Abstract

While scholarly work on mixed race children in care reflected some of these issues, the complexity and nuance found by academics was overlooked in the media. In Fitzherbert’s 1967 study of mixed West Indian/British children in care—part of a larger study on West Indians in London—she found that while nearly all the 41 white mothers were ‘of the social type which cannot make the grade in our competitive society’ (58) and 11 of them showed ‘evidence of prostitution’ (56), most were not the ‘prostitute class’ or ‘bamboozled’ young girls made out in the press; in fact, over half had already had one or two white children before having had a child with a West Indian man. The factors that had led to their children being placed in care were diverse and, racial rejection from family and discrimination in housing notwithstanding, similar to white mothers of white children in care: mental health, poverty, social incapacity. Moreover—and contrary to Fletcher’s earlier pronouncements about such mothers—Fitzherbert noted that ‘one feature of these women incapable of running their lives, and coping with jobs, housing and neighbours, was that they were often very affectionate and emotionally satisfying mothers. Motherhood was their only skill, yet they were so ineffectual at providing the necessary conditions for it, that Child Care Officers often considered reception into care necessary’ (59). Furthermore, Fitzherbert noted the willing role that many West Indian fathers were willing to play, with 7 taking their illegitimate children into their married homes and several others expressing willingness to be involved in their children’s lives, though, she remonstrated, these overtures were often passed over by Child Care Officers.

Scott (2015: 58) reveals that Breen instructed Ealing Studios to ‘eliminate’ the pair’s mutual attraction and avoid showing any physical intimacy between them, as well as to cut other brief scenes of interracial interaction between black men and white women that the original script contained. Scott also argues that while Breen was happy to allow ‘agonized, blackface miscegenation’ in a number of American films, he resisted the depiction of ‘modern, normalised interracial relationships’, a tendency that, as we also argue later in this chapter, was frequently repeated throughout the twentieth century.