During April BBC Radio 4 ran a series of short programmes by Neil MacGregor, former Director of the British Museum touring museums throughout the country. Neil asked each museum to focus on just one object from its collection which in some way speaks about the city or region the museum covers. When it came to the museum of my home town, Bristol, I was intrigued to hear that they had chosen the largest item in their collection – a Bristol ‘Lodekka’ double-decker bus housed in the M-Shed, a part of the museum in Bristol’s former city docks. When we visited the M-Shed some years ago, I sat on that bus feeling no end of nostalgia. These buses were introduced in about 1963 when I was 9 or 10 years old and were the buses on which I went to school and travelled in and out of the city from my home on the Hartcliffe housing estate. As a boy I was fascinated by these new buses. They looked more modern, were longer, had a front entrance/exit with doors controlled by the driver and/or conductor and stairs at the front but, like the older buses still had half-cabs and needed to be crewed by both a driver and a conductor.
None of that, nor nostalgia for that matter, explains why the museum chose the Lodekka bus. Rather, they chose it for what it says about race relations in Bristol in the early 1960’s. By that time the West Indian community numbered about 3,000 people mainly living in the St Paul’s area, a little to the north of the city centre. Like their counterparts in other British cities, they suffered discrimination both in employment and housing. Some were employed by the Bristol Omnibus Company which operated all the bus services in Bristol and surrounding areas but only in lower paid positions in workshops and canteens. Despite there being a labour shortage, none were employed in better paid positions as drivers or conductors.
Around that time, the local press ran a series of articles on the ‘colour bar’ on the buses. The company management admitted that there was in effect such a bar but largely blamed the Transport & General Workers Union (TGWU). The union denied this although in 1955 their Passenger Group had passed a resolution that "coloured" workers should not be employed as bus crews. Andrew Hake, curator of the Bristol Industrial Mission, recalled that "The TGWU in the city had said that if one black man steps on the platform as a conductor, every wheel will stop". In addition, bus workers were concerned that a new source of labour might lower their wages – a complaint still made about the impact of immigrant workers today. In short, the TGWU and the existing bus crews objected to working alongside Afro-Caribbeans and the company management was quite happy not to make an issue of it.
Four young West Indian men, Roy Hackett, Owen Henry, Audley Evans and Prince Brown, formed an action group, later to be called the West Indian Development Council as they were unhappy with the lack of progress in fighting discrimination by the West Indian Association. The group decided to persuade another young West Indian, Paul Stephenson to be their spokesman. Stephenson set up a test case to prove the colour bar existed by arranging an interview with the bus company for Guy Bailey, a young warehouseman and Boys Brigade officer. When the company discovered that Bailey was West Indian, the interview was cancelled. The activists then decided on a bus boycott in Bristol.
The boycott was announced at a press conference on 29th April 1963 after which the Bristol Evening Post, in an editorial pointed out that the TGWU opposed the apartheid system in South Africa and asked what trade union leaders were doing to counteract racism in their own ranks.
What then followed was a rather ugly and contorted public debate. Students from Bristol University demonstrated in support of the boycott but were jeered by bus crews as they marched through the city centre. A Labour Alderman, Henry Hennessey spoke of the apparent collusion between the bus company and the TGWU and was threatened with expulsion by the Labour Group on the city council in response. Tony Benn MP (Bristol North) supported the boycott and Harold Wilson, then Labour Leader of the Opposition spoke out against racial discrimination.
An increasingly bitter war of words was fought out in the local media. The local branch of the TGWU refused to meet a delegation from the West Indian Development Council. Ron Nethercott, South West Regional Secretary of the union, persuaded a local black TGWU member, Bill Smith, to sign a statement which called for quiet negotiation to solve the dispute and condemned Stephenson for causing potential harm to the city's Black and Asian population. Nethercott, attacked Stephenson in the Daily Herald accusing him of dishonesty and irresponsibility. Stephenson then accused Nethercott of libel and took the case to the High Court which awarded him damages against Nethercott.
The Bristol Council of Churches rather danced around the boycott and the issue of racial discrimination when it issued a statement saying “We seriously regret that what may prove an extended racial conflict arising from this issue has apparently been deliberately created by a small group of West Indians professing to be representative. We also deplore the apparent fact that social and economic fears on the part of some white people should have placed the Bristol Bus Company in a position where it is most difficult to fulfil the Christian ideal of race relations.” That in turn drew criticism from the Jamaican High Commission.
The TGWU, the city’s Labour establishment and the Bishop of Bristol tried to work with Bill Smith to resolve the dispute, ignoring Stephenson and the West Indian Development Council. Learie Constantine, the High Commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago and former cricketer put pressure on the Lord Mayor of Bristol, the Secretary General of the TGWU, Frank Cousins and the Transport Holding Company, the Bristol Omnibus Company’s parent. Negotiations went on for months between the bus company and the union. Eventually, on 27th August a mass meeting of 500 bus workers voted to end the colour bar. The day after, the general manager of the bus company announced an end to racial discrimination in the employment of bus crews. Then on 17th September, Raghbir Singh, a Sikh became Bristol's first non-white bus conductor and a few days later two Jamaican and two Pakistani men joined him.
Parliament passed two Race Relations Acts – one in 1965 and a second in 1968 outlawing discrimination in public places (1965) and in housing and employment (1968). Many see the Bristol Bus Boycott as laying the ground for Harold Wilson’s Labour government to act and some argue that it would have been difficult for Wilson to move forward on racial discrimination had it not been for Paul Stephenson’s efforts.
Personally, I have to say I don’t remember the bus boycott but as a boy of 10 I just wasn’t aware of such things at the time. Also, very few people of West Indian or Asian origin lived on the housing estate where I lived and in any case it was on the other side of the city from St Paul’s so the boycott would have had very little obvious impact in my area. The financial impact on the bus company would also have been quite small – the West Indian community accounted for only about one half of one per cent of Bristol’s population at the time. The public rancour, however and its exposure of the hypocrisy of the bus company, the union and society more generally, most certainly had its impact.
Finally, and to show how long it can take for changes in attitude to seep through society, in 2009 Paul Stephenson was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), for his part in organising the bus boycott. Guy Bailey and Roy Hackett were also awarded OBEs. In 2013 perhaps marking the 50th anniversary of the boycott, Unite, the successor to the TGWU, issued an apology. Laurence Faircloth, the union's South West secretary said of the union's stance at the time, "It was completely unacceptable. I can well accept the sense of injustice and pain that has been felt because [of] what happened in Bristol all those years ago".