Avtar Singh Jouhl - How One Man Helped Desegregate Britain’s Pubs

March 16, 2022 5:07 PM

Breaking the Color Bar - David Jesudason, writing at Good Beer Hunting
During the early 1960s, the IWA used these tactics in the town’s pubs, organizing pub crawls with white left-wing university students who would buy their comrades of color pints in a nationwide campaign. When landlords noticed the color bar was being broken, they would bar the “offenders,” and campaigners such as Jouhl would then give evidence at licensee meetings, which resulted in some pub landlords losing their licenses.

[Content warning: This story includes accounts of racist slurs, discriminatory language, and violence.]

posted by CrystalDave (7 comments total)

This is a wonderful piece! And the photos are very striking. Thank you for sharing it.
posted by panhopticon at 8:02 PM on March 16, 2022

Thanks! This was a fascinating & powerful piece
posted by librosegretti at 9:43 PM on March 16, 2022

Smethwick is not far from my house, and I recognise the author's description of it today. The heavy industry of the 1950s and 60s is mostly gone, but it's always been an area of small and medium sized businesses rather than being dependent on a single major employer so there's still a surprising amount of manufacturing in existence. It's a fascinating story, which I had not heard before but the political campaign described is fairly well known, and we're not far from the inspiration for Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech. That racism was as rampant and appalling as described fits.

In case it's not clear, the living conditions described were shockingly overcrowded, but the other features (outdoor toilet, limited hot water and heating) were normal for the area. Inner city terraced homes like those in Smethwick were not as bad as the tenement slums that were being removed at the time, and were mainly modernised in the 60s and 70s with proper indoor plumbing (either by building an extension to the kitchen, or taking over a bathroom) and then central heating.

I had a minor quibble with one of the story elements. I don't know what the issue was with access to food supplies but it wasn't post-war rationing which ended in 1954 (and by that time only applied to meat).
posted by plonkee at 10:24 PM on March 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

This is a fascinating article, and thank you for sharing it. David Jesudason is a great writer and I'll have to search out more of his work. I used to live near the Dartmouth pub in Forest Hill and knew about the attempts to break the colour bar there (mentioned in the article).
posted by Orkney Vole at 5:53 AM on March 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

There was a canteen but no Indian food was provided and therefore we took our food from home, warming up our curry and roti in the casting.

Well, that takes me back! I can’t remember what it was called, but there was some piece of equipment at the power plant where my father worked where they would heat up their lunches in the days before the microwave.

This is a really great article, and it’s making me crave a beer at 11 o’clock in the morning.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:58 AM on March 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I didn't know this piece of history before -- thank you for linking to it.
posted by brainwane at 5:01 PM on March 17, 2022

This is a brilliant article, and from an unexpected source!

If you live anywhere that isn't a completely racist hellhole its only because of the efforts of people like Avtar Singh Jouhl and for the most part their efforts are unnoticed by the wider community, and probably their own community soon enough after the fact. My parents were activists of a similar nature so growing up I'd meet lots of different "uncles" and "aunts" that were engaged in collective action to improve their communities and fight against various forms of intolerance so I kind of feel like Avtar is an uncle in Birmingham that I'm just hearing about for the first time. Their work was vital for changing our countries into places where we can at least live our daily lives relatively unmolested even if it could be taken away on a whim at any time and the real levers of power are still in the hands of the "old stock" people. But as vital as their work was it did come at a big personal and professional cost to them: of all the uncles and aunts I've met only one of their children followed in their activist footsteps.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:50 PM on March 17, 2022 [2 favorites]