WEST MIDLANDS
Tower blocks bloomed on West Midland skylines. In the sixties and seventies, after the war ended, and reports like the 1946 Housing Survey in Birmingham revealed a city where half of its homes lacked a separate bathroom, slum-clearing programmes were announced. The local councils levelled communities, reducing city streets and their tightly packed terraced housing to rubble. They began to buy up disused green lands on the edges of towns, earmarking these outskirts for regeneration and development.
On the bones of the old terraced rows, tower blocks and mass housing estates were drafted and then slowly assembled. Across the region, long streaks of grey concrete began to sprout on the skyline like beanstalks, new council flats in their hundreds scratching at foggy heavens. The Castle Vale estate, built on an abandoned Second World War airfield in North Birmingham, housed 20,000 people. The Bromford Bridge estate in the east of the city housed around 10,000, its ten high-rises constructed on what was once a racecourse. Further east, on the edges of the city, 1,500 acres of greenbelt in Solihull were cleared for the Chelmsley Wood housing estate, population 12,000.
It was a handful of towns and areas like these, anchoring new housing estates to the earth, that became the centre point for the region's Black and immigrant communities. The inner cities of North Birmingham, in towns like Handsworth and Aston, Nechells and Newtown, were a home away from home for Caribbean immigrants. In Coventry it was Hillfields, north of the city centre. In Darlaston, near Walsall, terraced housing was flattened and two fifteen-storey blocks of flats were erected in replacement: Great Croft House and John Wootton House welcomed their first residents in 1965.
The early seeds of the Black community and Black British music scenes in the West Midlands were forged in these post-war housing settlements. By 1961, 17,000 Caribbean people were living in Handsworth, a sign of a growing Black enclave in the region. In response to the racism they faced, those early generations seized fate to build brighter days and better futures for those who would come after. Black-owned businesses and organisations began to blossom in the community: the Marcus Garvey Nursery emerging in the British Black Power movement and setting firm foundations for the young Black kids of Birmingham before they entered the school system. The Harriet Tubman Bookshop on Grove Lane. The African Liberation Day marches in Handsworth Park. The butcher shops, the churches, the theatre groups.
This is how they arrived here.
And when they did arrive, they brought music.
In Newtown, not far from Handsworth, Cecil Morris, part of this early wave of Black enterprise and business, founded one of Britain's first Black Pirate Radio stations. Cecil had arrived in Birmingham from Brandon Hill, Jamaica, in 1962, when he was around fourteen, and found a haven in the high-rises. After running a record shop and throwing talent competitions and managing local singers and Reggae artists like Steel Pulse, he turned his attentions to radio. In the late seventies and early eighties, the airwaves echoing over Birmingham were dominated by two stations, BBC Radio Birmingham and BRMB 94.8 FM, both white-owned, both in possession of the city's only two legal licences, neither catering for a Black population who had by now existed en masse in the West Midlands for a few decades.
'They reckoned what they broadcast was good enough for us,' he says, 'because we speak English.'
Frustrated by the absence of Black music, he set up meetings with both the stations, intending to bring his people's sounds and identity onto national radio. From the stations, he demanded a daily two-hour programme, a show 'presented by us, in our format, with our accent'.
The meetings bore no fruit. In the session with the BBC, he arrived with local soundmen and other musicians who were flattered when the broadcaster offered a half-hour slot on a Sunday. Frustrated at his colleagues, Cecil walked out, 'because they were giving the management strength by showing interest in accepting half an hour when we should be blazing hell'.
A few hours later, at the BRMB meeting, he was told that the station already had an Indian presenter, that said presenter sometimes played a Reggae record or two, that there was nothing more they could do for him, that his request was futile.
He told them, 'Okay, no problem, I will establish our own radio station.' They laughed at him, one of them saying, 'Mr Morris, that's a good idea, don't you think so, guys?'
He left the meeting determined. He went back to his record shop on the ground floor of a five-storey block, bought a radio transmitter from an English friend, set up some records, plugged everything in, went to his bedroom on the third floor where his bed had an inbuilt radio, and switched it on. Music began to play and his resistance in radio began.
By 1981 he was recording programmes in the weekdays and playing them out via Pirate Radio on the weekends, sending songs of Reggae and home comforts out into the ether, notes whining on the wind, waiting to be grasped by whoever had fine-tuned their dial.
1981 was the same year summer riots swept across Black communities in Britain, a restless storm blowing like wildfire from inner city to inner city. The mood had been tense in the years before the uprisings. Across the country, manufacturing industries were on the decline, inner cities were in decay and the economy was in recession. It was a country where politicians and far-right organisations like the National Front were fixing blame for rising crime and failing economies on foreigners and others. Anti-immigration sentiments were being written into law, and the legislation that freely welcomed Black people into Britain was slowly washed away. The Black Caribbean community in the UK was isolated and antagonised by the institutions governing the nation, by the same country they had helped rebuild.
It was a country where the 'Sus' (from 'suspected person') law1 granted police the authority to stop and search the public without evidence of a crime being committed, a power disproportionately used on Black and ethnic minorities. Consequently, the fractures in an already strained relationship deepened. In Handsworth, young Black men told a local community survey in 1978 that the police were pushing people around, that the police were treating young Black men like dirt, like 'we are still slaves'.2 In Handsworth, after the local manufacturing industries had dried up, an estimated quarter of young Black people in the area were unemployed. So when uprisings began in Brixton in the late spring of 1981, and then spread north in the summer to Black communities in Liverpool and Leeds, Manchester and eventually Handsworth, Cecil found himself in the centre of a storm.
On a Friday afternoon in early July, he was in the Black-owned Harambe Bookshop on the Handsworth frontline, the Soho Road that drives through the spine of the suburb. In the shop he was confronted by a man he describes as a 'massive white guy: hippy, beard. He kind of look like a giant.'
The man told him there would be riots in Handsworth that evening. A few hours later, Cecil walked the street in disbelief. He could see about forty police buses on Soho Road, and as he walked deeper into the frontline and on towards the police station at Thornhill Road, he could see hundreds and hundreds of policemen marching down to the main strip. 'Bang. Bang. Bang, like the Zulu going to war.' After the police battalion charged a gathered crowd, he fled, frightened and 'run like hell to come back over to my place'. Over the next few hours, shop fronts were smashed and cars were set alight. More than a hundred arrests would be made. The damage was estimated at £500,000.
When back home, he gathered his broadcasting equipment, pushed his aerial out of his window and when the broadcast went live, he began to speak, 'telling young Black youths not to go out into this thing here because we will get blamed for anything that occur'. Then he played music, hoping to calm bristling nerves of a generation riled by police, state and nation.
This is how they arrived here.
It was the start of something. In the aftermath, people in the local area began writing to Cecil, telling him that a station was what they wanted. Buoyed by their encouragement, he turned his passion into something permanent.
The first station was called Radio Starr. In those days he would record shows onto tapes that held an hour's worth of space on each side. The tape would be connected to a transmitter and then placed at the peak of a tower block. While the station played, he would sit in his studio, recording the next show, then when an hour had nearly passed, he would rush back into the tower block and flip the tape onto its second hour. For years he went on like this, recording talk shows and playing the sounds of the day to the community, basking the Handsworth air in soft Reggae...
