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Revisiting the “Rivers of Blood” Controversy: Letters to Enoch Powell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Amy Whipple
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Type
Research Article
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , July 2009 , pp. 717 - 735
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2009

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References

1 Powell, J. Enoch, “Speech at Birmingham, 20 April 1968,” in Freedom and Reality, ed. Wood, John (London, 1969), 213–19Google Scholar. All subsequent Powell quotations are from this speech unless otherwise noted.

2 Schoen, Douglas, Enoch Powell and the Powellites (New York, 1977), 37Google Scholar.

3 Foot, Paul, The Rise of Enoch Powell (Baltimore, 1969), 116, 140Google Scholar.

4 For examples of general accounts that address the effect of Powell on public attitudes and policies, see Layton-Henry, Zig, The Politics of Immigration (Oxford, 1992), 79–83Google Scholar; and Solomos, John and Black, Les, Race, Politics and Social Change (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

5 On working-class support, see King, Roger and Wood, Michael, “The Support for Enoch Powell,” in British Political Sociology Yearbook, ed. Crewe, Ivor (New York, 1975), 2:239–62Google Scholar; and Schoen, Enoch Powell, 172–73. For a more recent qualitative analysis of working-class support, see Fred Lindop, “Racism and the Working Class: Strikes in Support of Enoch Powell in 1968,” Labour History Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 79–100. Analyses of voting patterns and party attitudes include Nicholas Deakin and Jenny Bourne, “Powell, the Minorities, and the 1970 Election,” Political Quarterly 44, no. 4 (October–December 1970): 399–415; Studlar, Donley T., “British Public Opinion, Colour Issues and Enoch Powell: A Longitudinal Analysis,” British Journal of Political Science 4, no. 3 (July 1974): 371–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed. (New York, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daniel Lawrence, “Race, Elections, and Politics,” in British Political Sociology Yearbook, 2:55–82; and Studlar, Donley T., “Policy Voting in Britain: The Coloured Immigration Issue in the 1964, 1966, and 1970 General Elections,” American Political Science Review 72, no. 1 (March 1978): 46–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Gilroy, Paul, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: A Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Smith, Anna Marie, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality, 1968–1990 (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bill Schwarz, “‘The Only White Man in There’: The Re-racialisation of England, 1956–1968,” Race and Class 38, no. 1 (July 1996): 65–78; Wendy Webster, “‘There’ll Always Be an England’: Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration, 1948–1968,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 4 (October 2001): 557–84.

7 Diana Spearman, “Enoch Powell's Postbag,” New Society, 9 May 1968, 667–69.

8 I accessed the first 2,000 letters in the archive (file D3123 1 through file D3123 8) at the Litchfield Record Office, which held the correspondence in 2001. The archive had not organized the letters upon receipt but rather had only divided them into file folders roughly equal in size. There was also no discernible organization (i.e., by geography, date, or content) prior to the archive's receipt. There were a small number of letters written to Powell in 1965 that were randomly interspersed with the Birmingham correspondence. I have not included these in my study.

9 Spearman, “Enoch Powell's Postbag.” It should be noted that Spearman also excluded any letters in which an offensive term was used if the letter writer also made a “a specific complaint”—presumably assuming that a person with a specific complaint was not generally a racist.

10 This article does not address gender identity because I was unable to discern the sex of the majority of letter writers. Many people signed their letters with initials, some wrote as husband and wife, and some did not sign their letters at all.

11 Letter to Powell, 22 April 1968, file D3123 5, Staffordshire Record Office (SRO). In accordance with confidentiality guidelines established by the literary trustees of Powell, I do not cite the city, town, or county from which letters came so as to protect the anonymity of correspondents.

12 Letter to Powell, 22 April 1968, file D3123 2, SRO.

13 Barker, Martin, The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe (London, 1981), 23Google Scholar.

14 Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black.

15 For a finely nuanced analysis of the speech in this light, see Smith, New Right Discourse, chap. 4.

16 Letter to Powell, 22 April 1968, file D3123 7, SRO.

17 Letter to Powell, n.d, file 3123 4, SRO.

18 Letter to Powell, n.d, file D3123 7, SRO (my italics).

19 Letter to Powell, 25 April 1968, file D3123 2, SRO.

20 Schwarz, “‘The Only White Man in There’”; Webster, “‘There’ll Always Be an England.’”

21 Powell, Freedom and Reality, 186, 188.

22 Smith, New Right Discourse, 129.

23 Ward, Stuart, “The End of Empire and the Fate of Britishness,” in History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain, ed. Brocklehurst, Helen and Phillips, Robert (New York, 2004), 242–58Google Scholar.

24 Heffer, Simon, Enoch Powell: Like the Roman (London, 1998), 334–40Google Scholar.

25 As quoted in Heffer, Enoch Powell, 340.

26 In addition to the aforementioned “ordinary, decent fellow Englishman,” Powell also spoke of immigration as an event unprecedented in a “thousand years of English history,” as well as “towns and parts of towns across England … occupied by … the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.”

27 On the English use of “England” and “Britain,” see Bernard Crick, “The English and the British,” in his National Identities (Oxford, 1991), 90–104.

28 Letter to Powell, 22 April 1968, file D3123 1, SRO.

29 Letter to Powell, 23 April 1968, file D3123 7, SRO.

30 Letter to Powell, 21 April 1968, file D3123 6, SRO.

31 Letter to Powell, 9 May 1968, file D3123 6, SRO.

32 Ward, “The End of Empire,” 243–45. In reviewing the historiography on the end of empire and the breakup of Britain, Ward notes that many have assumed rather than demonstrated the connection between these events in postwar Britain. He points out that Commonwealth immigration would have actually allowed Britons to continue defining themselves against an imperial “other,” and he proceeds to ask why “this did not happen.”

33 Alice Marie Ritscherle, “Opting Out of Utopia: Race and Working-Class Political Culture in Britain during the Age of Decolonization, 1948–68” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2005), chap. 5. Also see Foot, Paul, Immigration and Race in British Politics (Baltimore, 1965)Google Scholar.

34 Letter to Powell, n.d, file D3123 4, SRO.

35 Letter to Powell, 30 April 1968, file D3123 3, SRO.

36 Powell's distaste for the liberal political stance of many figures within the Church of England hierarchy became more public in the aftermath of Birmingham. The climax was his televised debate with Trevor Huddleston, bishop of Stepney, in 1969.

37 Letter to Powell, n.d, file D3123 5, SRO.

38 Letter to Powell, 25 April 1968, file D3123 7, SRO.

39 Letter to Powell, 1 May 1968, file D3123 6, SRO.

40 Letter to Powell, 23 April 1968, file D3123 5, SRO.

41 Schoen, Enoch Powell, 172–73.

42 Fielding, Steven, Labour and Cultural Change (Manchester, 2003), chap. 3Google Scholar; David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed. (New York: 1974), chap. 9.

43 Butler and Stokes, Political Change, 306.

44 Studlar, “Policy Voting in Britain.”

45 King and Wood, “The Support for Enoch Powell.” Also see Schoen, Enoch Powell, 172–73. Schoen argues that skilled manual workers actually proved the most steadfast among Powell's supporters. They defected in lower rates than any other groups in subsequent years, and a 1970 Gallup poll showed them most likely to develop more favorable attitudes toward Powell over time.

46 Letter to Powell, n.d., file D3123 4, SRO.

47 Letter to Powell, 28 April 1968, file D3123 6, SRO.

48 Letter to Powell, n.d., file D3123 4, SRO.

49 Ritscherle, “Opting Out,” 140.

50 Letter to Powell, n.d, file D3123 2, SRO.

51 Letter to Powell, 20 April 1968, file D3123 5, SRO.

52 Partial letter to Powell, n.d, file D3123 4, SRO.

53 Letter to Powell, n.d, file D3123 7, SRO.

54 McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London, 1995), esp. 53–56Google Scholar.

55 Letter to Powell, 24 April 1968, file D3123 8, SRO.

56 Letter to Powell, 22 April 1968, file D3123 1, SRO.

57 Letter to Powell, 1 May 1968, file D3123 1, SRO.

58 Letter to Powell, 29 April 1968, file D3123 1, SRO.

59 Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, chap. 3.

60 Letter to Powell, 25 April 1968, file D3123 2, SRO.

61 Letter to Powell, 6 May 1968, file D3123 3, SRO.

62 Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, chap. 3.

63 Letter to Powell, 22 April 1968, file D3123 7, SRO.

64 Letter to Powell, 23 April 1968, file D3123 5, SRO.

65 Geoffrey K. Fry, “Parliament and ‘Morality’: Thatcher, Powell, and Populism,” Contemporary British History 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 139–47.

66 Schwarz, “‘The Only White Man in There.’” On the impact of the loss of empire on Britain in this regard, also see Ward, Stuart, British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001)Google Scholar; Webster, Wendy, Englishness and Empire, 1939–1965 (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; and Ritscherle, “Opting Out.”

67 Letter to Powell, 24 April 1968, file D3123 7, SRO.

68 Letter to Powell, 22 April 1968, file D3123 1, SRO.

69 Letter to Powell, 7 May 1968, file D3123 3, SRO.

70 Letter to Powell, 24 April 1968, file D3123 1, SRO.

71 Letter to Powell, 20 April 1968, file D3123 4, SRO.

72 Letter to Powell, 25 April 1968, file D3123 2, SRO.

73 Letter to Powell, 23 April 1968, file D3123 7, SRO.

74 Letter to Powell, 23 April 1968, file D3123 7, SRO.

75 Letter to Powell, 24 April 1968, file D3123 4, SRO.

76 Ward, “The End of Empire,” 245.

77 Letter to Powell, 21 April 1968, Ffle D3123 8, SRO.

78 Letter to Powell, 27 April 1968, file D3123 6, SRO.

79 Lawrence, “Race, Elections, and Politics,” 61.

80 White originally aired on BBC2 from 7 March through 14 March 2008. See Web site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/white/

81 BBC online discussion, http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?forumID=4418&edition=2&ttl=2008112520292.

82 Martin O’Neill, “Echoes of Enoch Powell,” New Statesman, 10 March 2008, http://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2008/03/powell-peech-british-film-bbc.