I grew up in Lincolnshire, a part of England whose famous sons include John and Charles Wesley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet, John Smith of Pocahontas fame, and many more. It’s not a hugely diverse part of the country, and was even less so in the sixties and seventies. My father, who was from Dominica in the Caribbean did something quite unusual in bringing us up in the English countryside where my mother was raised, rather than an urban area, where most of the West Indian community are based. Lincolnshire is home to Lincoln Cathedral, once believed by locals to be the tallest building in the world.
Lincoln Cathedral is associated with two ‘saints’, both of whom have stories relevant to this county and region to this day, to this very day actually. The better known of the two is Hugh, originally of Avalon, later Saint Hugh of Lincoln, a French Benedictine monk who later became Bishop of Lincoln after it was damaged in a major earthquake in 1185. It is said that Henry II, during whose reign saw the murder of Thomas Becket, tried to make him a political appointee to his post, but that Hugh fought against being bought off, showing his independence from the influence of the Crown. He established himself as Defender of the Jews, something to which the cathedral tour guide, a Jewish lady herself, held very dear to her heart.
Hugh of Lincoln was, by all accounts, a good man, the real deal.
The second Hugh associated with Lincoln is a less happy story, that of Little St Hugh, more recently referred to as just Little Hugh. Little Hugh was an eight-year-old boy whose body was found at the bottom of a well. In a swirl of controversy, false narratives, xenophobia and antisemitism, it was determined that the boy had been ritually scarified and later crucified by a local Jewish man called Copin, close to whose property the well was located. Later exhumation of the child’s body proved no such crucifixion had taken place. If you’ve ever heard of the term ‘blood libel’, this is a textbook case of it. Anyway, the false narrative prevailed, a confession was eventually tortured out of Copin, a show trial conducted, and he and eighteen Jews were hanged at the Tower of London for the supposed ritual sacrifice of an eight-year-old child who may have just died accidentally. It took until the twenty-first century for this to be acknowledged as a travesty of justice
I had no idea that pogroms ever took place in England, least of all on my own doorstep; it’s not the type of thing they teach you in school.
So, you have two Hughs, both associated with the county in which I grew up, with whose names are associated very different stories of what this county and indeed this country is at heart.
Fast forward almost a millennium and you have that same clash being played out in different people’s lives.
Back in the mid-to-late nineteen-seventies I attended a football match (soccer to my North American friends) with a bunch of school friends at the Old Showground, previous home to Scunthorpe United FC. I had attended several games previous. This was the hey-day of football hooliganism, of course, but we had just gone along to support our local team. What differed this weekend to most others was that the opposing team had a black left winger.
Sure as eggs-is-eggs, the instant the ball was passed to that player, a cacophony of monkey noises resounded from our supporters, shortly after which came the menacing rhythmical chant:
“We hate n----rs! We hate n----rs!”
Had many of the fans been able to harm that player, there was little doubt in my mind they would have done so, so long as they vastly outnumbered him, of course.
It was quite apparent that it was by no means the first time it had been chanted, it was far too well practised, too ready off the tongue. As far as I could see, pretty much everyone in the Doncaster Road End was participating in it, including some of the guys I had come to the match with. You may think I overstate what happened. Trust me, if anything, I understate it.
Anyway, they may not have cared for black faces, but there was no shortage of red ones when I turned around and looked at my friends during the chant. Later, on the way home, one of my friends explained that it was all just banter, that nothing was really meant by it. It was all just part and parcel of football. I said nothing. Needless to say, it was the last time I attended a match at the Old Show Ground.
Move forward a couple of years and my brother Linton and I became, for a brief period of time, West Bromwich Albion fans. They had something unheard of – three black players, all greats. Laurie Cunningham, an absolute magician on the ball, Cyrille ‘Smoking Joe’ Regis and Brendan Batson.
Not only that, but Linton had bought his first car, a Triumph 1500, which he bought from his wages as a newly recruited police officer. This meant we could travel, and travel we did to the Hawthorns in Birmingham, and to Old Trafford to wee West Brom beat Manchester United five-three in what was reputed to be one of the best matches of the nineteen-seventies.
The reason we joined the West Brom tribe was because its players to a greater or lesser degree looked like us, came from our community, even if they were from a completely different part of the country. We could relate to them.
Fast forward again to the Euro 2020 final, the England team does the very same thing, but its minority players are more sure-footed, more comfortable in their own identity than my generation was at their age. The majority of the team are from immigrant backgrounds and every one of them celebrates that fact, along with their white counterparts, who are, to a man, extremely supportive.
Some of them, Rashford and Sterling in particular, have proven themselves to be incredibly articulate, helped enormously by Southgate’s genuine leadership from the front. But, as we have seen, barely moments after Chiellini lifted the European trophy, even such well-balanced players are only one miss, one bad performance away from a torrent of abuse. The racism of the seventies hasn’t gone away. It just reinvented itself, several times. It’s more covert now, less overt.
When these players articulated how they were taking a knee against racism, they were derided as woke, virtue signalling, engaging in gesture politics, even adhering to a Marxist agenda.
But go back in time. Martin Luther King was derided as a communist sympathiser, an agitator and was vehemently opposed by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Mandela was supposedly a terrorist and a threat to the South African nation’s security. There is ALWAYS a false narrative drawn up in opposition to the fight against racism, just as a false narrative determined the fate of those poor innocent souls who were victims of a pogrom almost a thousand years ago. Ignorance and prejudice cannot proliferate without false narrative, whether it's propogated via an ancient mob or the modern media.
Just as at the time of my upbringing, there were people who were great, were friendly, amenable, welcoming. There were people who were ... let's just say less great. I've lived in this country long enough to know how to use classic British understatement.
This country can be the England of the Wesleys, (who incidentally were abolitionists), of Wilberforce, of Hugh of Lincoln. It can be the England that Copin experienced. There is always a constant battle as to which one will prevail.