Jill Westby

Q1. To begin, could you set the scene: what prompted the actions at the Mechanics Arms and how did events unfold?

The immediate spark was the colour bar enforced at the Mechanics Arms on Alfred Street North, where rooms were effectively segregated—one for Black patrons, one for white. Mixed-race couples or groups would be refused service, or drinks would be snatched back the moment a Black person was seen at the bar or at a table with a white person. After one collective visit, police were called and the pub cleared. About a month later, George Powell went back to speak with the landlord and, especially, the landlady. She admitted she was frightened of Black people, recounting an earlier incident in which a Jamaican man allegedly threw a stool, smashing glasses and mirrors. Whether George’s visit softened their stance is unclear, but the pub closed not long after—likely because the brewery decided the takings weren’t worth the mounting controversy and loss of custom.

Q2. What was the broader strategy of the Anti–Colour Bar campaign in Nottingham?

It was deliberately performative and coalitional. We leafleted allies—people in the Labour Party, CND, anti-apartheid groups, student bodies—and asked them to enter targeted pubs in small mixed groups (ideally Black and white together), order halves, and sit for hours so the pub could neither profit nor easily segregate. The plan was to make the practice impractical, highly visible, and morally indefensible. Importantly, the tactic was rehearsed public theatre: the act of ordering, the refusal, the collective witnessing, the letters to breweries and press. We knew breweries hated bad publicity; some—Mitchells & Butlers and Banks’s were mentioned—did close or discipline houses under pressure.

Q3. How did law and custom intersect here? Wasn’t discrimination already unlawful?

The legal environment was muddy in practice. Although legislation in 1964 had made explicit “colour bars” untenable, landlords still retained wide discretion to bar individuals, and many used it to police race by other means. You couldn’t lawfully exclude because someone was Black, but landlords could invent other “reasons” (rowdiness, house rules). In Nottingham the reality was de facto segregation by room—a “Black room” and a “white room”—or simple refusal of service. Our campaign weaponised publicity and numbers to test that gap between letter and practice.

Q4. What actually happened on the night you and George tried to buy drinks?

I ordered two halves of bitter because we knew if George asked he’d be refused. As the glasses and coins were about to trade hands, the landlady clocked George, snatched the drinks back, and said words I later repeated in court as a witness: she would serve “an Indian or a Pakistani,” but “not many of those Black n——s.” Some visitors did manage to sit a while, but the room soon descended into shouting; the landlord and landlady were clearly overwhelmed by the number of people challenging their practice. In the resulting proceedings, the pair were bound over to keep the peace. The brewery soon closed the pub.

Q5. Why call it the “Anti–Colour Bar” campaign? Was there a link to anti-apartheid?

The name felt obvious to us, but it resonated with broader currents: anti-apartheid was active locally, and the idiom of “colour bar” had currency through the 1950s–60s in Britain. We were aware of other cities’ struggles—Bristol buses, Birmingham pubs—and of the tactic of documenting landlords’ behaviour and making the case to breweries and press. Our work paralleled anti-apartheid’s moral theatre: local action plus national conscience.

Q6. Beyond pubs, what institutions or networks were you and George embedded in?

We straddled activist and civic spaces. I was a CND organiser (accidentally elected local secretary after only one meeting), and George’s affiliations were wide: Communist Party earlier, Labour Party later (he was a Labour councillor by 1963), anti-apartheid, and various local coalitions. He co-founded the Black People’s Freedom Movement (Nottingham) and helped convene groups that seeded the Afro-Caribbean Centre—bringing together the Afro-Caribbean ex-servicemen’s association and other community bodies. Our activism was secular in political practice, notwithstanding people’s private faiths; that secular frame made cross-community alliances possible.

Q7. How did cultural work and community memory enter the picture?

George understood culture’s civic role—he always pressed for centres that would provide black history classes, basic skills, music groups, youth projects, and women’s groups. The Afro-Caribbean National Artistic Centre (ACNA) name itself signalled that politics and culture were entwined: posters, badges, Saturday schools, even making things out of coconut shells—vernacular arts that carried pride and pedagogy. Later, archiving became crucial. I worked with Panya (Nottingham Black Archive) on a blue plaque for George and chased images from Vanley Burke and others. We learned that getting plaques made or bus names approved involves months of patient, often invisible labour—care work as political practice.

Q8. What about museums and galleries? Did they engage with these histories at the time?

Not much in the 1960s–70s. Our cultural work happened outside those institutions—centres, upstairs pub rooms, community halls, improvised classes. A later wave of interest came via projects like Primary and exhibitions at Nottingham Castle, but historically most “official” spaces were distant from the political and social realities we addressed. That’s why community-led archives and displays matter: they recover vernacular art as public pedagogy.

Q9. Which other personalities and organisations shaped Nottingham’s ecosystem then?

Names thread through: Dick “Decka” Skyers, Mohammed Aslam (who supported people with paperwork and finances), Ken Coates (CND/END), Peter Price (Labour councillor), the International Marxist Group (IMG) and anti-apartheid activists, later Nottingham Black Archive. There were resonances with London (as seen in Small Axe), Birmingham (Stop the Seventies Tour), and a sense that our story echoed others’—George wasn’t unique in kind, but he was exceptional in constancy, helping people with visas, rights, and court navigation without seeking credit.

Q10. Can you speak to the contested figure of Eric Irons, Nottingham’s first Black JP?

It was complicated. Irons (a Jamaican RAF veteran) became a Justice of the Peace and was appointed an education officer despite limited background in that field. The council’s habit was to funnel all Black residents’ problems—housing, schools, benefits—to him. That bureaucratic routing risked turning him into a gatekeeper rather than fixing systemic access. Some said he was harsher on Black defendants, though that’s part of a larger, documented but contested story. We tried to publicise the structural issue: appointing “representatives” to contain problems is not the same as changing institutions.

Q11. You mentioned CLR James and Selma James—how do they enter Nottingham’s story?

Through intellectual and organising circuits. We once sought Selma James’s advice on a campaign to stop councils appointing “race liaison” officers who displaced normal departmental responsibilities. She was clear: credit her as Selma James, not “the wife of CLR James.” CLR himself came to Nottingham; Ken Coates’ twins remembered him as “the man with the hat.” Those visits remind us that anti-racist municipal struggles and global decolonial thinking were mutually illuminating.

Q12. How did you experience the Windrush-to-1970s arc—riots, rights, and “political Blackness”?

The post-war promise soured quickly. Signs like “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” gave way to institutional exclusions—jobs, housing, pubs. The 1958 disturbances in Nottingham began, by some accounts, around a rare desegregated pub; in court many white assailants were convicted because the violence was explicit. By the late 1960s–early 1970s, second-generation youth were asserting self-respect and rights in the face of policing and far-right provocation. “Political Blackness” became a strategic solidarity that bridged Caribbean and South Asian experiences.

Q13. What everyday evidence of structural racism did you encounter?

Beyond pubs: hiring discrimination uncovered by matched-accent telephone tests (some devised locally with Alan Simpson, then an MP). Black callers were told posts had gone, while white callers were invited to interview hours later. Add to that quiet exclusions in schools, and a persistent waste of talent—as Panya often notes—where generations were stymied. Even in the arts, gatekeeping kept people out: creative writing courses that later employed those they once rejected.

Q14. How do you situate care, mentoring, and domestic labour within anti-racist practice?

They’re central. Political life was sustained by care work—child-minding for activists, hosting, feeding visitors, supporting elders. I helped raise children in houses where activists lived collectively; ACNA ran Saturday schools (basic skills, Black/Jamaican history), youth music, and women’s groups. These practices rarely get celebrated on posters, but they are the infrastructure of solidarity.

Q15. What was it like to be a mixed-race couple publicly challenging racism?

We were unusual then and sometimes conspicuous, but we refused to be cowed. The era was already one of public challenge: Aldermaston marches, student protests building toward 1968, anti-apartheid pickets. The Anti–Colour Bar actions were consistent with that spirit—convivial and confrontational at once. And yes, there was fun in it: an element of mischievous subversion, of “cocking a snook” at the stay-at-home cynics.

Q16. How did CND shape your political imagination?

Profoundly. CND’s appeal was humanitarian as well as strategic; it assembled professors, poets, workers, students—a civic commons on the move. A national CND “Four Exercises” simulation (a response to NATO’s “FALLEX 62”) had us leafleting the same streets night after night, staging nuclear scenarios to provoke thought. The organisational culture—patient, educative, mass—bled into anti-racist practice: audiences not only mobilised but taught.

Q17. Could you reflect on ageing, COVID, and intergenerational transmission?

Ageing brings practical limits: toilet logistics on marches, asking others to do what one once did oneself, a COVID-shaped reticence to go out. But it also clarifies role: pass on experience without presuming to give orders. Younger people have new idioms and issues; the task is to translate values—dignity, solidarity, secular cooperation—into their vocabularies. Many of my closest companions are younger; the conversations are there if we respect difference and avoid nostalgia.

Q18. Looking back, what feels most distinctive about Nottingham’s contribution?

Not uniqueness, but particular density: a small, tight, cross-racial cadre whose secular, coalition politics achieved concrete shifts—closing pubs that segregated, forcing breweries’ hands, establishing an Afro-Caribbean centre that delivered education and culture, challenging municipal gatekeeping. And an insistence that art and everyday care were not add-ons but part of the political method.

Q19. Finally, if you had to distil lessons for researchers and curators documenting these histories, what would they be?

Three, at least: (1) Stage and script: understand the performative logic of campaigns—the sit-ins, the slow drinking, the orchestrated letters, the court witness statements. That’s art-adjacent, pedagogical work. (2) Archive the ordinary: cafés, Saturday schools, child-care rotas, leaflets, and blue-plaque campaigns tell as much as rallies do about how coalitions persist. (3) Name the mechanisms: don’t just recount racist incidents; document the structures—brewery economics, municipal routing, hiring tests—that activists targeted. That’s how local struggle achieved leverage.