Looking Back: Celebrating our wonderfully ethnically diverse city
This month we have celebrated Black History Month. In 1951 the largest group of immigrants in the UK were the Irish, totalling half a million.
These included my mother who had left the Republic of Ireland in the late 1930s to seek better prospects in Sheffield by answering a call to help with the staffing of hospitals in existence before the inception of the NHS in 1948.
They experienced a certain amount of racism. Boarding houses would display notices offering vacant rooms but no Irish, Blacks or Dogs.
But by and large Sheffield has always been a welcoming place for people wanting to obtain a better standard of living for themselves and their families even though leaving their homeland has often meant much heartbreak.
The wonderful exhibition at the Weston Park Museum ‘Caribbean Footsteps’ shows Sheffield families and their relatives who came over from Jamaica on HMT Empire Windrush and other ships, from 1948. and making a profoundly valuable contribution to the economy of our country. In Sheffield this was more or less the start of the wonderfully culturally diverse city we live in today.
As a child of primary school age practically the only knowledge I had of black races was the misguided encouragement at school of taking money to be sent to the missionaries in Africa who were ‘saving’ souls of black babies from pagan fates, and the knowledge that in Heaven their souls would be white!
I realised years later from primary school group photos that some of my classmates were mixed race. It isn’t something relevant when you are a child. You have to be taught racism.
During the late 1950s a large number of young men came to Sheffield from Yemen in answer to a recruitment drive by Sheffield steelworks. They didn’t find that they were always welcomed too warmly but many stayed and made their home in Sheffield. One of the more non-judgemental places was the ‘El Mambo’ coffee bar on Union Street which became a meeting place for these young men. A most interesting place of great diversity it sadly closed in the early 1960s.
Today we have over 280 ethnic groups in Sheffield with students from over 150 different countries. We truly are a City of Sanctuary!