Sunday, February 22, 2015
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Why We Now Echo Enoch
Why we now echo Enoch
By: Neil Hamilton
Published: Sun, November 11, 2007
HALESOWEN Tories should revolt at the sacking of their candidate, Nigel Hastilow, for saying, “Enoch was right”
He was. And nearly everybody thinks so, especially in places most affected by immigration such as the West Midlands. None of the main parties will tell the truth. No wonder the BNP is picking up votes.
The spineless response of the Tory leadership proves their recent conversion from windmill-loving and hoodie-hugging is only skin-deep.
They are still miles away from connecting with ordinary people, whose cities have been overwhelmed by immigrants who will neither integrate nor accept our culture. Margaret Thatcher harvested many of her votes because she articulated the fear of being “swamped” by alien cultures. Who speaks for England now?
Enoch Powell was my friend for 30 years. He was no racist. He entered politics in devotion to the Indian Empire and was so saturated in its culture, he qualified as an interpreter in Urdu. He rebelled against the Macmillan Government over atrocities against African detainees at Hola Camp in Kenya in 1959.
But Powell saw mass immigration would create problems. In “That Speech” in 1968, he said, “As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood.”
The Roman was Virgil, whom Powell (a former Classics professor) quoted in the original Latin: “Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno.” Powell feared a backlash from the scale and speed of immigrant settlement in concentrated areas.
Immigration is out of control and millions of indigenous Britons feel like foreigners in their own country. Even Gordon Broon recognises this. A few weeks ago, posing as leader of the Brownish National Party, he promised “British jobs for British workers.”
All spin and lies, of course. EU law, which Broon wants to extend without a referendum, stops us deciding who we want to let into this country.
Two weeks ago, Cabinet Minister Peter Hain (himself an undesirable immigrant) came clean, admitting 1.1 million foreign nationals have taken jobs here since 1997, not 300,000 as previously claimed.
The Office for National Statistics says it is 1.5 million. Governments have routinely deceived the British people about mass immigration. Those, like Enoch, who campaigned to close the door, were abused as fantasists and racists.
Yet, if we had had a referendum 40 years ago, how many of us would have voted to transform our great cities into colonies of foreign cultures?
In the Sixties and Seventies politicians lied about “New Commonwealth” immigration. Now, it is Europe. Tony B Liar said only 13,000 Eastern Europeans would come here when their countries joined the EU in 2004.
He was. And nearly everybody thinks so, especially in places most affected by immigration such as the West Midlands. None of the main parties will tell the truth. No wonder the BNP is picking up votes.
The spineless response of the Tory leadership proves their recent conversion from windmill-loving and hoodie-hugging is only skin-deep.
They are still miles away from connecting with ordinary people, whose cities have been overwhelmed by immigrants who will neither integrate nor accept our culture. Margaret Thatcher harvested many of her votes because she articulated the fear of being “swamped” by alien cultures. Who speaks for England now?
Enoch Powell was my friend for 30 years. He was no racist. He entered politics in devotion to the Indian Empire and was so saturated in its culture, he qualified as an interpreter in Urdu. He rebelled against the Macmillan Government over atrocities against African detainees at Hola Camp in Kenya in 1959.
But Powell saw mass immigration would create problems. In “That Speech” in 1968, he said, “As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood.”
The Roman was Virgil, whom Powell (a former Classics professor) quoted in the original Latin: “Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno.” Powell feared a backlash from the scale and speed of immigrant settlement in concentrated areas.
Immigration is out of control and millions of indigenous Britons feel like foreigners in their own country. Even Gordon Broon recognises this. A few weeks ago, posing as leader of the Brownish National Party, he promised “British jobs for British workers.”
All spin and lies, of course. EU law, which Broon wants to extend without a referendum, stops us deciding who we want to let into this country.
Two weeks ago, Cabinet Minister Peter Hain (himself an undesirable immigrant) came clean, admitting 1.1 million foreign nationals have taken jobs here since 1997, not 300,000 as previously claimed.
The Office for National Statistics says it is 1.5 million. Governments have routinely deceived the British people about mass immigration. Those, like Enoch, who campaigned to close the door, were abused as fantasists and racists.
Yet, if we had had a referendum 40 years ago, how many of us would have voted to transform our great cities into colonies of foreign cultures?
In the Sixties and Seventies politicians lied about “New Commonwealth” immigration. Now, it is Europe. Tony B Liar said only 13,000 Eastern Europeans would come here when their countries joined the EU in 2004.
The article continues here
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Giving Up 1000 Years of Struggle to be Ruled by Foreigners
A patriot and a visionary, J. Enoch Powell (1912-1998) was endowed with a penetrating intellect which enabled him to see the dangers posed to our country by the Common Market and immigration.
He also possessed the courage and eloquence to speak out openly when so many of his contemporaries would do no more than mumble furtive agreement.
The son of two Birmingham schoolteachers, Powell’s intellect secured him a brilliant early career as a Cambridge Classics don, before moving to take up an academic post at Sydney University.
On the outbreak of war he returned to England and volunteered for the Army as a humble private soldier. His character and abilities could not long remain hidden, and he rose from the ranks to become the youngest serving Brigadier in the British Army. Awarded the MBE in 1945, he went on to serve in India, becoming fluent in Hindi and Urdu and acquiring a love for the subcontinent and its people belying later “racist” smears thrown at him.
In 1950, Powell entered Parliament as MP for Wolverhampton South-West, a seat he was to represent until he refused to stand in 1974. A promising ministerial career culminated in being Minister of Health from 1960-63. In the latter position, he ran a ministry which was actively poaching nurses and doctors from poor Third World countries rather than improving pay and training opportunities for British medics. This clearly brought his incisive mind to bear on the whole question of immigration. Powell resigned from the Government in 1963 in protest at what he saw as excessive 2.5% inflation and the Tory Government blaming it on the Trade Unions rather than its own inflationary policies. Powell returned to the Tory Shadow Cabinet in Opposition after 1964.
It was on Saturday, 20th April 1968 that Powell stepped from transient political prominence to enduring greatness, with his famous “Rivers of Blood” speech on immigration.
“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”, he said.
“By the year 2000″, he went on - in words that history has shown were a true prophecy – the immigrant population “must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London… Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.”
As indeed today they are.
He didn’t just raise a widely known, but little spoken of in such senior public circles, problem but also proposed a solution – the same solution as the British National Party proposes now:
“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.
“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 to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent. Nobody knows because no such policy has been attempted.
“In short, suspension of immigration and encouragement of re-emigration hang together, logically and humanly, as two aspects of the same approach”.
If this was not done, Powell ended with a dark foreboding to be realised in riot after riot, and even more chillingly on 7/7:
“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’”.
Powell’s courageous and eloquent words were met with a reaction which was to become familiar on this issue. The public backed him to the hilt; sending him 120,000 letters of support, whilst the political Establishment closed ranks against him.
They did not reply to, still less seek to answer, his points. They simply denounced him as a “racist” and Tory Leader Edward Heath sacked him from the Shadow Cabinet.
When Heath became Prime Minister in 1970, the loathsome traitor proved Powell wrong in his faith that, “The Tory Party stood for the absolute independence of the UK: and that in peace as well as in war, this demanded any sacrifice – including life and limb”.
Yet, as Heath signed the Treaty of Rome and submitted our nation to the Common Market, Enoch Powell’s question was as unanswerable then as it is now, after successive Prime Ministers have signed away even more of our freedom to what is now the “EU”:
“Why give up a thousand years of struggle for our self government and discard our independence and submit to laws passed by foreigners?”
For he is also right that:
“If parliamentary self government is the essence of British liberty, the condition upon which we enjoy it is that the UK is politically distinct and separate”.
A British liberty Enoch Powell sadly failed to secure even when he finally broke with the Tories in 1974. He later return to the Commons as Ulster Unionist MP for South Down and although it was a brave decision, given the IRA threat, it was sadly, politically irrelevant.
At his death in 1998 Enoch Powell lent credence to his celebrated dictum that “all political careers end in failure”.
[Published on BNP Ideas; Aug 18th, 2011]
John Bean commented on the article thus:
As I was no longer a BNP member, in April 1995 I appeared on the BBC Timewatch programme on the history of immigration in Britain. Being BBC the idea of balance was to have ten people who were either immigrants or past politicians who had supported it, and two people who had opposed it: Enoch Powell, as the main ‘anti’ speaker, and myself.
A quarter of an hour before the programme was recorded Enoch Powell arrived in the BBC hospitality suite where the participants in the programme, excluding the ‘noble lords’ (mainly old Labour hacks), were supping tea and nibbling sandwiches.
They looked at Enoch in some awe. I walked over to him to inroduce myself. He looked at me rather shyly when I said: “Well, whether you approve of it or not Mr Powell I am the only other person here who can be said to be on your side. I believe I have been invited here because I gained some three and a half thousand votes in Southall in 1964 on a stop immigration ticket.”
I was given an example of his legendary memory power when he replied in his crisp West Midland tone: “Oh yes, I believe that was some nine per cent of the poll”.
He returned to sipping his tea. Sensing he was marshalling the facts in his mind which would later dominate the programme, I moved away.
He also possessed the courage and eloquence to speak out openly when so many of his contemporaries would do no more than mumble furtive agreement.
The son of two Birmingham schoolteachers, Powell’s intellect secured him a brilliant early career as a Cambridge Classics don, before moving to take up an academic post at Sydney University.
On the outbreak of war he returned to England and volunteered for the Army as a humble private soldier. His character and abilities could not long remain hidden, and he rose from the ranks to become the youngest serving Brigadier in the British Army. Awarded the MBE in 1945, he went on to serve in India, becoming fluent in Hindi and Urdu and acquiring a love for the subcontinent and its people belying later “racist” smears thrown at him.
In 1950, Powell entered Parliament as MP for Wolverhampton South-West, a seat he was to represent until he refused to stand in 1974. A promising ministerial career culminated in being Minister of Health from 1960-63. In the latter position, he ran a ministry which was actively poaching nurses and doctors from poor Third World countries rather than improving pay and training opportunities for British medics. This clearly brought his incisive mind to bear on the whole question of immigration. Powell resigned from the Government in 1963 in protest at what he saw as excessive 2.5% inflation and the Tory Government blaming it on the Trade Unions rather than its own inflationary policies. Powell returned to the Tory Shadow Cabinet in Opposition after 1964.
It was on Saturday, 20th April 1968 that Powell stepped from transient political prominence to enduring greatness, with his famous “Rivers of Blood” speech on immigration.
“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”, he said.
“By the year 2000″, he went on - in words that history has shown were a true prophecy – the immigrant population “must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London… Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.”
As indeed today they are.
He didn’t just raise a widely known, but little spoken of in such senior public circles, problem but also proposed a solution – the same solution as the British National Party proposes now:
“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.
“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 to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent. Nobody knows because no such policy has been attempted.
“In short, suspension of immigration and encouragement of re-emigration hang together, logically and humanly, as two aspects of the same approach”.
If this was not done, Powell ended with a dark foreboding to be realised in riot after riot, and even more chillingly on 7/7:
“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’”.
Powell’s courageous and eloquent words were met with a reaction which was to become familiar on this issue. The public backed him to the hilt; sending him 120,000 letters of support, whilst the political Establishment closed ranks against him.
They did not reply to, still less seek to answer, his points. They simply denounced him as a “racist” and Tory Leader Edward Heath sacked him from the Shadow Cabinet.
When Heath became Prime Minister in 1970, the loathsome traitor proved Powell wrong in his faith that, “The Tory Party stood for the absolute independence of the UK: and that in peace as well as in war, this demanded any sacrifice – including life and limb”.
Yet, as Heath signed the Treaty of Rome and submitted our nation to the Common Market, Enoch Powell’s question was as unanswerable then as it is now, after successive Prime Ministers have signed away even more of our freedom to what is now the “EU”:
“Why give up a thousand years of struggle for our self government and discard our independence and submit to laws passed by foreigners?”
For he is also right that:
“If parliamentary self government is the essence of British liberty, the condition upon which we enjoy it is that the UK is politically distinct and separate”.
A British liberty Enoch Powell sadly failed to secure even when he finally broke with the Tories in 1974. He later return to the Commons as Ulster Unionist MP for South Down and although it was a brave decision, given the IRA threat, it was sadly, politically irrelevant.
At his death in 1998 Enoch Powell lent credence to his celebrated dictum that “all political careers end in failure”.
[Published on BNP Ideas; Aug 18th, 2011]
John Bean commented on the article thus:
As I was no longer a BNP member, in April 1995 I appeared on the BBC Timewatch programme on the history of immigration in Britain. Being BBC the idea of balance was to have ten people who were either immigrants or past politicians who had supported it, and two people who had opposed it: Enoch Powell, as the main ‘anti’ speaker, and myself.
A quarter of an hour before the programme was recorded Enoch Powell arrived in the BBC hospitality suite where the participants in the programme, excluding the ‘noble lords’ (mainly old Labour hacks), were supping tea and nibbling sandwiches.
They looked at Enoch in some awe. I walked over to him to inroduce myself. He looked at me rather shyly when I said: “Well, whether you approve of it or not Mr Powell I am the only other person here who can be said to be on your side. I believe I have been invited here because I gained some three and a half thousand votes in Southall in 1964 on a stop immigration ticket.”
I was given an example of his legendary memory power when he replied in his crisp West Midland tone: “Oh yes, I believe that was some nine per cent of the poll”.
He returned to sipping his tea. Sensing he was marshalling the facts in his mind which would later dominate the programme, I moved away.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
1970 General Election Campaign. Prophetic Video.
Here is a clip of Enoch Powell and his prophetic words during the 1970 General Election run up.
What probably seemed absurd and shocking then, has now come to be common knowledge, plain reality and even more stark in numbers today.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Immigration Speech, Wolverhampton
Speech at Wolverhampton
25th March, 1966
It is absolutely absurd to say that immigration either is not, or ought not to be, an issue at this election [1966], especially for Wolverhampton and other parts of the Black Country. If by an issue we mean a problem which is felt to affect the welfare of every section of the community – repeat, every section – then immigration is pre-eminently such, and has been so for the last decade or more. It would be quite wrong that the policies on this matter of those presenting themselves for election to Parliament should not be known to their prospective constituents.
In my view there is really not one immigration problem, but two distinct and separate immigration problems. One is concerned with the immigrants who are here already. The other is concerned with control over entry to this country.
So far as concerns the immigrants who are here already – and many of them have now had their home in this country for ten years and more – I am for my part resolutely determined that they shall, as far as is humanly possible, have the same rights and the same treatment as anyone else, and I have made it clear as a Member of Parliament that they are as welcome to any help or support I can give them as any other of my constituents.
It will be not years but generations before the social impact of the massive immigration which took place in the decade to 1962 has been effaced. ‘Integration’ and ‘assimilation’ are easy words to say; but the things which they denote will only come about gradually over many years of mutual tolerance, as the immigrants slowly filter into all the classes and callings in our society.
Most of the immigrants, I am sure, will make a success – most of them are making a success already – in their new home; but a small minority are not and perhaps never will. We believe in the Conservative Party that help should be available to such of these as voluntarily desire it to return whence they came. It would be a humane provision, which could do nothing but good all round. Of course, I stress the word ‘voluntarily’: except for deportation after criminal offences, there could be no question of any kind of duress.
But there is one absolutely essential condition for solving this immigration problem – the problem of the immigrants who are here – at all at any time. That is that we solve and soon solve the other immigration problem, namely the question of control over entry. All our efforts at integration, all our determination that a ‘colour problem’ and ‘racial discrimination’ shall remain foreign to this country, will be overwhelmed and swept away if the tide of new immigrants continues to flow in, arousing anxiety and apprehension for the future in the minds not only of the native-born citizens but of the existing immigrant population itself. The Conservative Party asserts that even after the measure of control which we introduced in 1962 and which the Labour Party by a remarkable about-turn reluctantly accepted, still the rate of inflow is far too high.
We say therefore that the rate of admission must be further and greatly reduced. Indeed, for my own part and speaking as one who has represented one of the areas most directly affected, I believe there would be no small benefit in a period of years during which the inflow and the outflow roughly balanced. I repeat that this is a policy which is equally in the interest of all the inhabitants of this town, the newcomers no less than the native inhabitants; and many have been the Indians, Pakistanis and West Indians among my constituents who have expressed to me their support for measures of control and their anxiety at the consequences for themselves if the inflow continues unabated.
25th March, 1966
It is absolutely absurd to say that immigration either is not, or ought not to be, an issue at this election [1966], especially for Wolverhampton and other parts of the Black Country. If by an issue we mean a problem which is felt to affect the welfare of every section of the community – repeat, every section – then immigration is pre-eminently such, and has been so for the last decade or more. It would be quite wrong that the policies on this matter of those presenting themselves for election to Parliament should not be known to their prospective constituents.
In my view there is really not one immigration problem, but two distinct and separate immigration problems. One is concerned with the immigrants who are here already. The other is concerned with control over entry to this country.
So far as concerns the immigrants who are here already – and many of them have now had their home in this country for ten years and more – I am for my part resolutely determined that they shall, as far as is humanly possible, have the same rights and the same treatment as anyone else, and I have made it clear as a Member of Parliament that they are as welcome to any help or support I can give them as any other of my constituents.
It will be not years but generations before the social impact of the massive immigration which took place in the decade to 1962 has been effaced. ‘Integration’ and ‘assimilation’ are easy words to say; but the things which they denote will only come about gradually over many years of mutual tolerance, as the immigrants slowly filter into all the classes and callings in our society.
Most of the immigrants, I am sure, will make a success – most of them are making a success already – in their new home; but a small minority are not and perhaps never will. We believe in the Conservative Party that help should be available to such of these as voluntarily desire it to return whence they came. It would be a humane provision, which could do nothing but good all round. Of course, I stress the word ‘voluntarily’: except for deportation after criminal offences, there could be no question of any kind of duress.
But there is one absolutely essential condition for solving this immigration problem – the problem of the immigrants who are here – at all at any time. That is that we solve and soon solve the other immigration problem, namely the question of control over entry. All our efforts at integration, all our determination that a ‘colour problem’ and ‘racial discrimination’ shall remain foreign to this country, will be overwhelmed and swept away if the tide of new immigrants continues to flow in, arousing anxiety and apprehension for the future in the minds not only of the native-born citizens but of the existing immigrant population itself. The Conservative Party asserts that even after the measure of control which we introduced in 1962 and which the Labour Party by a remarkable about-turn reluctantly accepted, still the rate of inflow is far too high.
We say therefore that the rate of admission must be further and greatly reduced. Indeed, for my own part and speaking as one who has represented one of the areas most directly affected, I believe there would be no small benefit in a period of years during which the inflow and the outflow roughly balanced. I repeat that this is a policy which is equally in the interest of all the inhabitants of this town, the newcomers no less than the native inhabitants; and many have been the Indians, Pakistanis and West Indians among my constituents who have expressed to me their support for measures of control and their anxiety at the consequences for themselves if the inflow continues unabated.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Saturday, January 2, 2010
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.
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