I have finally got around to reading Sathnam Sanghera’s book, called “The Boy with the Topknot” in the paperback edition
For now I just want to copy an extract from one of his footnotes, which is in turn from a book written by John Selwyn Gummer, together with his father Canon Selwyn Gummer, & published in 1966. The title of the book was “When the Coloured People Come: an analysis of Sikh settlement in Gravesend.”
I used to be a sort of connoisseur of this kind of stuff. You could fill several libraries with worthy, or respectable, academic tomes, which explained the disadvantages suffered by other races – science, medicine, ethnography, anthropology, sociology, development economics, all sorts of experts turned their attentions to it.
“The taste in baby wear is unusual to European eyes … One baby appeared at the age of three weeks wearing a white knitted mob cap, a colourful flowered dress stamped 'Pride of Bombay', a black & yellow coat knitted in a key pattern & blue & red striped leggings … the percentage of literate Asians in the older age-groups is infinitesimal. Naturally the children of such parents are backward … Many of them … are of low intelligence as distinct from illiterate …. When the women are in labour they make a lot of noise which appears to be traditional rather than activated by pain (How would they know about that?) … Rubber condoms & caps irritate the skin of these people & for that reason they are not very popular … the Sikhs are strangers in a strange land & they are intellectually & educationally ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of a modern civilisation.”
The thing is I am sure many of the authors considered themselves kindly souls, enlightened about, & of course tolerant of, such differences. John Gummer lists the publication among his achievements in Who’s Who (2009 edition).
And I expect he did his best to make sure appropriate provision was made for the education of the children of coloured people in the capital when he was a member of the Inner London Education Authority 1967-70
