An Interview With Enoch Powell From 1977

Hat tip: Independent British Nationalism

Widow in Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech really did exist

Widow in Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech really did exist

by FIONA BARTON

Last updated at 22:00 02 February 2007

The passing of Druscilla Cotterill did not merit an obituary in her local newspaper. A diminutive widow, she was mourned by just family and a small circle of friends, who remember her as a "bit of a character", outspoken and fond of a drink.

But Druscilla had a secret.

For almost 40 years, her identity - indeed, her very existence - has remained a tantalising mystery, known only to a diminishing handful of people.

But it can now be revealed that this apparently unremarkable woman played a pivotal role in a moment of British history.

For she has been identified as the inspiration for Enoch Powell's infamous 1968 'Rivers of Blood' speech, in which he warned of apocalyptic social consequences if the rising tide of immigration was not halted.

Evoking the highly emotive image of 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood', Powell railed against proposed anti-discrimination laws which would make it a crime to refuse services or housing on the grounds of race.

Crucially, he used the potent story of a beleaguered, elderly constituent as evidence that it was Britain's white population who were being victimised in their own country.

The Tory MP told his audience he had received a letter about a widowed pensioner who lived in a "respectable street" in his Wolverhampton South-West constituency. The woman, whom he refused to name, had seen every other white family move out of her street and said she was being forced out by immigrant newcomers.

She told of being woken at 7am by West Indian neighbours wanting to use her telephone and being abused when she refused them entry, how she was told to rent out rooms to immigrants by the local authorities and accused of being a "racialist".

The letter, which Powell read to his audience of Conservatives in Birmingham's Midland Hotel, ended: "She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-eyed picaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. 'Racialist', they chant.

"When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder."

The speech was deliberately provocative in its views and language - with the use of the word "picaninnies", a 19th century slang term used in the southern states of America to describe the children of black slaves, causing particular offence.

It caused deep divisions in public opinion with Powell accused of inflaming racial hatred by many, but applauded by others for saying the unsayable.

He was quickly sacked from Edward Heath's shadow cabinet but he received 120,000 letters of support, while dockers and meat porters demonstrated in the streets to protest against the new Race Relations Act which extended the existing definition of racial discrimination to include areas such as employment, housing and other services.

The speech, and the reaction it provoked, still reverberates today as the debate over immigration and integration continues to dominate the political agenda. But in the midst of it all is the story of one woman.

Apart from his inflammatory language, one of the main charges against Powell was that he had invented the story of the widowed pensioner - a view reinforced by the fact that he repeatedly refused to identify her.

Now, however, brilliant detective work by an academic has led to her name being revealed on the BBC Radio 4 programme, Document.

The Daily Mail has now tracked down relatives, former neighbours and friends to reveal the extraordinary story of the widow, Druscilla Cotterill, a story that casts new light on Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech.

Druscilla died 30 years ago, in an old people's home in her home town of Wolverhampton, after a life beset by misfortune.

She was born Druscilla Luevina Childs in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, in 1907, the daughter of a farm labourer and the eldest of five sisters and at least three brothers. It was a close-knit family and she married relatively late, at the age of 33. The wedding took place in 1940, against the background of World War II with her new husband, Harry Cotterill, about to be posted overseas.

Harry, a Battery Quartermaster Serjeant with the Royal Artillery was killed at the age of 44 in Singapore. The couple had no children and Druscilla, who was known in the family as "Druie", never remarried.

Her nephew Roland Mytton said last week: "If you do meet the love of your life, you tend not to look again. She had friends and her family, but it must have been a bit lonely for her. She suffered from mental illness at one stage but she recovered with the help of her sisters."

Through it all, Druscilla remained in the marital home - No 4, Brighton Place - one of a crescent of eight terrace houses in the Merridale area of Wolverhampton.

At first, she supplemented her widow's pension by renting out rooms to lodgers - mainly itinerant workers - but all that changed in the late 1950s. Wolverhampton, known as the 'crossroads of the Midlands', began a transformation with the start of mass immigration.

The trickle of Commonwealth workers to Britain began in 1948 with the boat the Empire Windrush, which brought the first 492 West Indians from Jamaica to start a new life here. Many more were to follow.

Thousands of West Indians and Asians opted to settle in Wolverhampton, drawn by its low house prices and jobs at the Goodyear tyre factory, Villiers Engineering (which made motorcycle engines), the steel works and foundries.

Others found work in the NHS, cleaning hospitals and training as nurses. Some became bus drivers for Wolverhampton Transport department - rising from 18 per cent of the workforce of 900 in 1955 to 66 per cent ten years later.

And the numbers of newcomers continued to grow. In 1954, there were ten Indian families in the town. Just two years later, the Indian workers' organisation had 150 members.

The impact extended to Druscilla's little world in Brighton Place. The electoral registers tell the story. In 1950, the list shows Brighton Place was occupied wholly by British families - the Routledges, the Pannells, the four Hunt sisters, the Walls and the Griffiths.

But ten years later, four West Indian families had moved in and by 1968, Druscilla and the Paynes at No 6 were the last British-born residents left.

Druscilla told her friend Geoff Bangham, who ran the Alexandra pub close to her home, that she felt uncomfortable and outnumbered.

He said last week: "She was a very lively little lady but she was having it rough. She felt the change in the area, and she was getting concerned. She wasn't happy because of the invasion of the immigrants."

It was a concern shared by many in the town in the early days of immigration and ugly divisions quickly emerged between the two communities.

Immigrants found themselves barred from boarding houses and pubs because of their colour, and in 1963 there was a silent protest by 12 West Indian men after they were refused a drink in the Bermuda Tavern in Queen's Square.

Later, the local newspaper reported that white women were refusing to use the same washing machines as black women in the town's launderettes.

Meanwhile, a member of Druscilla's extended family was disowned by his parents for marrying a West Indian woman.

It was amid this mounting tension, which was replicated in towns all over Britain, that the Race Relations Bill was drawn up to try to legislate for 'harmonious community relations'.

This was all too much for Druscilla, who began to withdraw from society. She stopped taking in lodgers because she was accused of discriminating against immigrants, and decided to lock up her spare rooms. According to her nephew, Roland, she only used the kitchen at the back of the house and her bedroom.

"She was felt uncomfortable to find herself the only white person in the road," he said.

And she also confided her fears to a friend - who wrote to Enoch Powell, with extraordinary consequences.

The image of the pensioner held hostage in her own home as excrement was pushed through her letterbox and windows smashed fuelled the already incendiary atmosphere in the country.

According to contemporary witnesses, it is certain that Druscilla was teased by local children who, now adults, admit knocking on her door and running away to annoy her.

But when asked about the allegation that excrement was put through Druscilla's letterbox, Joy Barnes, who was eight when she and her Jamaican parents, Kenneth and Pearline Scarlett, moved into Brighton Place, said the incident happened, but not to Mrs Cotterill.

"It wasn't her house, it was the other British family at No 6 who had it put through the door. There was also a dead dog thrown through their window but it was nothing to do with race. It was all to do with a family feud."

Now married with two children, Mrs Barnes recalled: "Brighton Place was a happy place to grow up because there were so many children to play with. In the street, there were five of us from the West Indies, one family from India and a white family and Mrs Cotterill.

"My dad came to Britain in 1956 and my mum followed him out in 1957. I was born the next year. Dad was a carpenter and cabinet maker in Jamaica but he thought he would have better opportunities here. He started off on building sites but then worked as a carpenter for the council. Mum worked on the assembly line of a factory and they bought their house."

Mrs Barnes, who still lives in Wolverhampton, remembers how the children used to tease Druscilla by knocking on her front door and running away before she answered and being cheeky to her in the street: "It was the sort of thing kids do and wasn't meant nastily. She used to shout at us. She was a bit strange and used to stagger home from the pub.

"I don't know why she used to drink so much. Perhaps she was lonely."

Carol Antonio, who, as a teenager in a Jamaican family, also lived in Brighton Place during the Fifties and Sixties, added: "Mrs Cotterill lived next door to my family and she would come round to our house and have dinner and a drink with us.

"Other times, she could be quite miserable and difficult. I think it might have been the drink. No one disliked her - we got used to her behaviour. She was a bit of a character."

A friend of Enoch Powell, a former high-ranking police officer, is adamant the letter was a true record.

The former officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "I saw the letter and I read it. And I knew the woman. It was Druscilla Cotterill. I know that the incidents described by her were officially reported and investigated but nothing came of it.

"Enoch felt it was the most momentous letter he had ever received. Unfortunately, perhaps, it sent him off on a tangent which ended his ministerial career, but he could never be accused of telling lies.

"She existed - but Enoch never named her, in order to protect her."

Whatever criticism may have been levelled at Powell for his opinions, it was a noble decision to keep Druscilla's identity a secret.

His brave stance, which meant abandoning a libel action against the Sunday Times when it became clear he would have to disclose the letter and Mrs Cotterill's name, encouraged accusations from opponents that the letter was a fabrication, and helped end his political career.

His silence also enabled Druscilla to live out her life in anonymity.

But there is a postscript which perhaps provides a fascinating insight into how far race relations have developed in the 40 years since the Rivers of Blood speech.

Despite her claims of feeling driven out, Druscilla stayed in Brighton Place until ill-health forced her to move to sheltered accommodation.

When she died in 1978, among the bouquets at her funeral there were flowers sent by the West Indian neighbours who she once claimed made her feel like a stranger in her own street.
   

Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' Speech

This is the speech that was considered so controversial. Interestingly, his demographic predictions were pretty accurate!

Speech at Birmingham
20th April, 1968

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing. Hence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: ‘if only’, they love to think, ‘if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen’. Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical. At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it, deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalized industries. After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: ‘If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country’. I made some deprecatory reply, to the effect that even this government wouldn’t last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: ‘I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in fifteen or twenty years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that this country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In fifteen or twenty years, on present trends, there will be in this country 3½ million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to Parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General’s office. There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000; but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by different sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 those born here would constitute the majority. It is this fact above all which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimized lie several parliaments ahead.

The natural and rational first question for a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: ‘how can its dimensions be reduced?’ Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence. The significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is one per cent or 10 per cent. The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.

It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week – and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiances whom they have never seen. Let no one suppose that the flow of dependents will automatically tail off. On the contrary, even at the present admission rate of only 5,000 a year by voucher, there is sufficient for a further 25,000 dependents per annum ad infinitum, without taking into account the huge reservoir of existing relations in this country – and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry. In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative measures be taken without delay. I stress the words ‘for settlement’. This has nothing to do with the entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country, for the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications, like (for instance) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of their own countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded faster than would otherwise have been possible. These are not, and never have been, immigrants.

I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so. Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party’s policy: the encouragement of re-emigration. Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous grants and assistance would choose either to return to their countries of origin or go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent. Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects for the future.

It can be no part of any policy that existing families should be kept divided; but there are two directions in which families can be reunited, and if our former and present immigration laws have brought about the division of families, albeit voluntary or semi-voluntary, we ought to be prepared to arrange for them to be reunited in their countries of origin. In short, suspension of immigration and encouragement of re-emigration hang together, logically and humanly, as two aspects of the same approach.

The third element of the Conservative Party’s policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. As Mr. Heath has put it, we will have no ‘first-class citizens’ and ‘second-class citizens’. This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to inquisition as to his reasons and motives for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it ‘against discrimination’, whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately, with the bedclothes pulled right over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong. The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming. This is why to enact legislation of the kind before Parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.

Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American negro. The negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service. Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants – and they were drawbacks which did not, and do not, make admission into Britain by hook or by crook appear less than desirable – arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another’s.

But while to the immigrant entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by Act of Parliament: a law, which cannot, and is not intended, to operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk either penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine. I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me. She did give her name and address, which I have detached from the letter which I am about to read. She was writing from Northumberland about something which is happening at this moment in my own constituency.

‘Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7 a.m. by two negroes who wanted to use her phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying her rates, she has less than £2 per week. She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were negroes, the girl said ‘racial prejudice won’t get you anywhere in this country’. So she went home.

The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house – at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. ‘Racialist’, they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.’

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word ‘integration’. To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult, though over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one to boot.

We are on the verge of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population – that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate. Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly. The words I am about to use, verbatim as they appeared in the local press of 17th February [1968], are not mine, but those of a Labour Member of Parliament who is a Minister in the Government. ‘The Sikh community’s campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.’ All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow-citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.