The HMT Empire Windrush has become a fitting symbol of the plight of Black Britain. The ship—which transported 1,027 passengers and two stowaways from Jamaica on June 22, 1948, a journey whose 75th anniversary was recently celebrated—has also become a shorthand for all the Caribbean citizens who uprooted their lives to move to the United Kingdom.
From 1948 until 1971, when a law was passed which attempted to block Commonwealth migration, citizens of Britain’s former imperial territories were encouraged to relocate to rebuild the country’s economy after the Second World War. The vessel itself lived a life which resonated with their experiences: It was constructed by the Nazis in 1930s Germany before falling into the hands of the Allies as war spoils.
Many of the so-called Windrush Generation fought in the war, and afterwards they arrived in the U.K. to slog away in manual jobs or become nurses in the newly established National Health Service—like my mother, who came from the Malay Peninsula to work in a small hospital in rural Hertfordshire. The conditions they experienced in Britain were often brutal and hostile: Racism was common in the workplace, on the street, and especially in the pub, where the color bar was widespread. Many had to travel far to find a safe, unsegregated space to drink in.
In the area of Southeast London where I live now, none of the pubs would serve non-white customers. “There wasn’t anything for Black people at the time [here],” says Lana Bewry, who grew up in the area and still runs a pub locally. Instead, from the 1960s onwards, they traveled west to the Jamaican-owned pubs in and around Brixton. These venues were frequented by British-Caribbean customers, and were run by a series of trailblazing Black landlords. They were busy, raucous places where customers could drink, sing, and play dominoes, free from other pubs’ racist policies.
This is the story of the landlords who changed the drinking culture of South London and who paved a way for integrated pubs. In many cases, information about their lives is scant, records contradictory, and details difficult to pin down. Most have since passed away. But what remains of their collective legacy is testament to the impact that they had for London’s Black residents.
“They were the only pubs we could go in. We couldn’t go to the white man pub.”
“They were the only pubs we could go in,” says 82-year-old Jeff Carlow, who traveled to Brixton to drink and play dominoes in these pubs. “We couldn’t go to the white man pub.”
The majority of South London’s Jamaican-owned pubs were located on Coldharbour Lane, a major thoroughfare which runs between the neighborhoods of Brixton and Camberwell. It was a poor area even before members of the Windrush Generation settled in London, and with their arrival came depictions of the area as a ghetto by the white media, even though the newcomers were able to forge a strong sense of community. From the 1960s onwards, Coldharbour Lane witnessed a flowering of Black-owned businesses, especially in and around Brixton Market, including grocers, barbers and record shops.
Many Black residents lived on stretches of Mayall Road and Railton Road, an area that would later be dubbed “the Frontline,” a shorthand for a community living with day-to-day police harassment. According to a Nationwide BBC TV program from 1980, this is where they were told to go and live from the 1950s onwards, as there were “colored” houses here. These were the days when white people looking to rent rooms would brazenly display “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs” signs, unofficially instituting segregated housing policy. Against this discriminatory backdrop, the pubs on Coldharbour Lane became a sanctuary. From the late 1960s onwards, venues like The Atlantic, which was managed by an Irish landlord and later a Black landlord, happily served non-white customers.
Prior to these havens, the places where many members of the Windrush Generation relaxed and socialized were informal blues parties, which offered an alternative to the mainstream clubs which frequently barred Black visitors (the Ram Jam Club on Brixton Road was an exception, and hosted Jimi Hendrix in 1966). Instead, these parties were often held on Friday and Saturday nights in cramped rented accommodations and started with calypso music before becoming more blues-orientated as years went on, with revelers “rubbing up a tune” or grinding to huge sound systems. Party-goers discovered these gatherings through word-of-mouth or by visiting record shops in South London, and were often treated to curried goat and rice, though they typically had to pay for beers or rum.
“It was women who ran these first parties,” says Alanna Lauder, whose father was pub landlord Tony Waller. “But when they moved into professional premises they were cut out.” There was still a clamor for social spaces for London’s British-Caribbean residents, however, and eventually individual pubs began to be taken over by Black publicans, on Coldharbour Lane and beyond.
What did a British-Caribbean pub of that era look, sound, and smell like? As shown in the aforementioned BBC TV program, The Angel—which was run by Lauder’s father, Jamaican-born Tony Waller—looked very much like a traditional British pub (think brown wood and frosted glass windows) but with more merriment. Most crucially, it was an inclusive space that typically featured an even mix of men and women. And as the program, filmed on New Year’s Eve, shows, they wore smart clothes to go out: suits with waistcoats and glittery dresses.
Many of the people I speak to tell me about the lock-in events, when drinkers were discreetly served while the pub was officially closed—up until 1988, England had antiquated licensing laws which meant pubs closed for a period after lunchtime and for all but a few hours on Sundays. And they also tell me about the “go-go dancers.” Pubs like The Angel may have had an inclusive approach to their clientele, but upstairs there was a strip bar: still a common part of British pub culture in the 1970s.
As for smells, although this pub culture was drink-based, jerk pork would be served on an ad hoc basis, and The Angel’s regulars would sometimes be provided tinned salmon and brown bread sandwiches with black pepper, raw onion, finely diced tomato, and Tabasco sauce.
Was marijuana another smell? No: Waller was fiercely anti-cannabis, his daughter tells me. And when I asked Bewry if weed was prevalent in the pubs of the era, she made me feel almost ashamed to pose the question.
“What would your parents think if they caught you smoking it? These people were that age.”
Waller is a figure who looms large in this story. He was someone who loved jazz, and was both a Louis Armstrong look- and sound-alike. His life was marked by booze from the very start: He was born in Jamaica and named Appleton after the rum, according to Lauder, because his alcoholic father thought it would be funny; the name didn’t stick, though, and he was always known by Tony. Waller grew up to be a chainsmoker and an alcoholic like his father; he also maintained two families.
Mostly, he was a complex, pivotal figure. He opened numerous pubs and an off-license on Coldharbour Lane, and even tried to become a part of the British establishment. He used to boast to his family and friends about having a debenture seat at London’s storied Lord’s Cricket Ground, though that would have been very unlikely in the 1970s. Unreliability aside, Waller opened pubs because he believed in empowering Black people and giving them safe spaces to drink.
“The Angel pub is a landmark for Black men,” he told BBC Nationwide. “It’s the first pub I had my very first drink in when I came to England and I never dreamt the day would come that I would be the first Black man to own it.”
“The Angel pub is a landmark for Black men. It’s the first pub I had my very first drink in when I came to England and I never dreamt the day would come that I would be the first Black man to own it.”
Waller left school when he was 12, was a communist, and came to the U.K. in 1958 after he was deported from the U.S. because of his political beliefs. He met Lauder’s mother, Valerie, who was white, when he was a victim of the color bar and she was working as a bartender.
“The first time my mother noticed my father,” Lauder says, “was during an altercation between the landlord who was insisting he and his friend Uncle Peter [Peter McRoy, a friend of Waller’s who also ran a pub in the area] also couldn’t be in the nicer saloon bar, which was whites-only.”
In those days it was tough to be in a dual-heritage relationship, and when they went to a pub in South London, a racist landlord set his German shepherd on them. “My mum always had a scar from that dog attack,” she tells me. The couple took to traveling to more permissive Soho in Central London for dates to avoid those kinds of incidents.
Despite the commitment Valerie showed, Waller maintained a secret, second family. He married his childhood sweetheart and they had four daughters, all while fathering three daughters with Lauder’s mother.
“He was generous,” Lauder admits when I ask her if he had any positive sides. “He was funny. He was very warm. He was sexy. He was intelligent. He liked women and he actually liked talking to them. I’m an old-school feminist so I’m going to say he’s a misogynist like all men of his generation but he had flashes of progressiveness. He only had daughters [in both families] and he would’ve been appalled if any of us dated someone like him, but he was very clear that intellectually we were a man’s equal and there’s nothing we couldn’t do professionally.”
During the BBC Nationwide program, Waller claimed to have opened up a club on Coldharbour Lane after saving money working in a paint factory; it was this club that led to The Angel being opened in the early 1970s. He then ran—sometimes simultaneously—other pubs, including The Golden Anchor, which is the last of the remaining South London Jamaican-owned pubs, and is now run by Bewry. He worked hard to establish these pubs, but by 1983 he was a diminished character due to a stroke. He passed away in 1994.
“[Waller] didn’t do no work,” says Jamaican-born Talbot Murray, aged 81, who used to drink in the pubs in Brixton. “He was the boss.”
Determining the first Black pub licensee in London is difficult, but the family of George Berry makes the case that it was him, claiming he took over the Coach and Horses on Coldharbour Lane in June 1965 (although records suggest it was a few years later than that). Berry was married to a white woman called Rose, and he trained as a refrigeration engineer before becoming a publican, according to his relations.
Berry told his extended family decades later that his pub was burned down shortly after his wife died in the 1970s, claiming it was an arson attack by racist far-right group the National Front. Despite extensive research, however, I could not find one news report of the fire. And the story gets murkier when I talk to numerous people who used to drink there.
Murray claims that Berry’s pub would never have been targeted by the National Front because it “was a police pub,” and that he witnessed corruption as well as drug-dealing during his occasional visits. He even believed cocaine deals happened in the 1970s involving police, and Murray revealed he knew the family well because he worked for Berry’s father, who he describes as a “rich, millionaire man.”
“The other pubs the police might pass through,” Murray says. “But they never stay [like in the Coach and Horses]. When I was at Brixton Domino Club [which was based at The Atlantic and then Lloyd Leon Community Centre, both on Coldharbour Lane] they’d come in and have a sip of wine and then go. But here they would stay and George commanded favors off them.”
Lauder remembers her father’s drivers taking large boxes of booze to Brixton Police Station to give to officers as a form of protection money, and claims the biggest racketeers then were the “law enforcers.” It mirrors a story I was told about a desi pub that had to become a police pub in East London in the late 1980s to stop gangs extorting money from the owner. It also shows the large amount of cash that used to pass through these venues.
Although Berry’s relatives claim he was the first Black pub landlord in London, three miles away from the Coach and Horses was the historically significant Swiss Tavern in Nunhead. Berry’s friend Martin Luther Perkins ran the pub; previously, he had worked with Berry at the Coach. When the Swiss Tavern opened, it was a noteworthy occasion: The ceremony saw Luther Perkins serve the first pint to the Jamaican High Commissioner Sir Laurence Lindo.
The Swiss Tavern soon became known for its music. As the Jamaican-born Kilroy Gladstone tells me, he didn’t drink much in those days because he worked hard as a bricklayer and had a mortgage to pay, but the one pub he loved was the Swiss Tavern, as he could dance there.
“I’ll go there on a Saturday night. My wife had the kids to look after but she knew I liked dancing. I never missed a Saturday at the Swiss.”
“I’ll go there on a Saturday night,” Gladstone says. “My wife had the kids to look after but she knew I liked dancing. I never missed a Saturday at the Swiss.”
There are a lot of gaps when it comes to Berry and Luther Perkins’ stories, and neither the Coach and Horses nor the Swiss Tavern exist today. But on the same road as the latter sits The Golden Anchor: the lone living link to these Jamaican-owned pubs.
Of all the landlords I research for this piece, Bewry is the only one who is second-generation Jamaican; she’s also one of the few women. Her parents, Nelly and Raphael (known as Pompey), came to the U.K. in 1957; her mother initially worked as a nurse and her father was employed by a biscuit factory.
Bewry was born four years after their arrival. She started working at The Golden Anchor as a bartender for “cash in hand” in the early 1980s, working part-time on Sunday lunchtimes to supplement her day job at a bank. “The punters seemed so much older than me,” Bewry tells me when I ask what the clientele and atmosphere were like. “I didn’t encourage [flirting]. It was raucous—they had striptease on a Sunday, which was stopped by the 1990s.”
In those days The Golden Anchor was a popular community venue. When Bewry worked there, it was owned by an African man called Nelson; Waller had owned the pub previously. He would often visit even after its sale, and Bewry remembers going with him to other Jamaican-owned pubs, especially for lock-ins.
“People would go between here and the Swiss Tavern,” Bewry tells me. “Both the Swiss Tavern and [The Golden] Anchor were always busy and full.”
By 1998, Nelson had died. In a Guardian interview, Bewry spoke about how the Jamaican landlords who took it over after his death were looking for someone to take on the license, as the younger generation was dealing drugs and generally “running things.” She kicked them out with help from her brother, and the pub has remained in her hands since then. It even appeared on a TV series called “Saving Britain’s Pubs” in 2020.
Bewry believes she wouldn’t have had a long career in the pub industry if it weren’t for Nelson’s support. “He was one of the people who led the trend around here for Black people to want to own pubs,” she said in that Guardian article. “He showed that it was achievable.”
Despite owning or running numerous pubs, Nelson remains an opaque character throughout my research. No one I speak to can recall his surname, his country of origin, or when he died. But whenever his name is mentioned, the people who remember him talk about him warmly, and reminisce about how he changed the pubs he owned for the better.
Bewry says that Nelson was employed as an accountant at The Golden Anchor before he took over, making it his first pub. He then went on to run or own at least eight other pubs around South London, including the Red Bull in Peckham and the Kings on the Rye in East Dulwich, which was apparently the most luxurious of these pubs. One man, who declined to share his name but was drinking in the Kent Drovers pub in Peckham, told me that Nelson would say to customers he liked that he could set them up as bar managers: “If you want a pub, tell me.”
“Everyone was happy around Nelson,” adds Ronald Williams, who used to drink in The Golden Anchor.
Nelson was also famous among the people I interviewed for organizing “go-go dancers” and for providing jerk pork outside the Red Bull. But most of all he instilled a pride in these pubs.
“I met him when I was 16,” says Ken Jauval, who used to drink in pubs that Nelson ran. “He produced something—the Kings on the Rye and the Red Bull were brilliant.
“Every pub he took he turned them around. Because of him, people started to go into pubs. When he took over The Anchor he put in things like optics. It was so pleasing to go there. He had about eight or 10 pubs, and we used to follow him to each one.”
Despite their landmark influence, these landlords are mostly remembered now by the remaining drinkers who used to frequent their pubs; few have received wider credit or celebration for all that they did to make pubs more inclusive. The legacy of the Windrush Generation in London has been depicted in music, film, and literature, but until now, their unique drinking traditions and venues have been little explored.
That story is still living and breathing, even if it has largely decamped to Wetherspoons, a budget pub chain with garish carpets that is much maligned for mistreating staff and suppliers, and for pursuing a pro-Brexit agenda. After people like Perkins, Waller, and Nelson died, many of the community spaces they established did too. Wetherspoons—where the drinks and food are consistent and affordable—has become a refuge, but not one that speaks to the specificity of their shared history. (That said, the chain does have anti-racist policies, and even took over a pub that ran a color bar up to the mid-1990s.)
Today, few pub regulars would travel across South London every day to sit with their friends. But in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, it was necessary and even vital to do so. Leading up to the 1981 Brixton riot, racism and hostility had grown more loudly visible, compounded by mass unemployment sparked by Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. Waller was lucky enough to save money, and in 1980, he reflected on the attitudes he experienced in the era:
“My first job in England was in a paint factory,” he says. “I was the first Black man to work there. I was a bit of a novelty: I was well treated because of the fact people go overboard to be nice to me because they never worked with a Black man before. But as the numbers [of Black people] increased their attitude changed.”
Today, most memories of these landmark pubs—and the British-Caribbean men and women who run them—have largely been lost. Partly, that’s due to the fact that few of these pubs still exist. Some of the ones that do remain have been absorbed into chains; some have been steamrolled by the forces of gentrification, turned into expensive apartments or restaurants. It’s only The Golden Anchor that remains as-is, a living symbol of a time when domino games were common, reggae was on the jukebox, and Black people partied away from the white gaze.
“We didn’t take photos,” Carlow concludes. “We had no idea how important it was. We were too busy having fun.”
Words by David JesudasonIllustrations by Colette Holston
