As Black History Month starts, the biographer of Liverpool's mixed race community outlines its unique problems. David Charters reports
by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post
THE people weren't political and they weren't correct either on those long lost summer afternoons.
So when the girl with the gentle smile in the white bathing costume strutted down the parade and wiggled and twirled, the eyes on the auld men stared like pickled onions and their wives slapped them on the knee in a manner of mock scolding.
"Tut, tut, don't you be having wicked thoughts at your age," they said, as the shutters opened on the cameras and a breeze shuddered across the open-air swimming pool.
This was history, not one of the great moments that changes the course of nations, but history just the same. For the 19-year-old girl posing for the photographers was black.
In 1958, you didn't have black beauty queens in England. In fact, some people in the audience hadn't seen any black people at all, never mind a young woman in a figure-hugging swim-suit.
But winning that heat in the Miss New Brighton contest was enough to gain Betty Lawson a place in a book about eminent black people from Liverpool, although she is now Elizabeth Drake and lives in Texas.
The book has just been taken to the publisher for final editing, as the city enters Black History Month.
There are some who question the thinking behind this event. Should we still be talking about black Liverpudlians and white Liverpudlians? After all, weren't most candidates for the book a bit of both? Well, the answer to those questions is "yes", according to Ray Costello, the book's author, and the reason is deeply laid.
"The host community, which in itself is an inexact and inappropriate definition, still attaches a stigma to being brown or black or having a black ancestry," he says.
Ray knows all about this. His own background can be traced back to the early 19th Century in Hamilton, Bermuda, where Francis James, a Scottish shoemaker, married a black woman. Their son, Edward, came to Liverpool in the 1850s and married Harriet Barnes of Barnton, Cheshire. There was further racial mixing until Ray was born in Toxteth. After an education at Granby Street School and the CF Mott teachers' training college, he taught in city schools. Later he was awarded a master's degree in education and a PhD from Liverpool University. Now he is a writer and educational adviser.
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