SRH in the Birmingham Black Oral History Project

The BBOHP was a community oral history project supported through “collaboration” with Birmingham City Council’s Race Relations Unit.Footnote ¹³ Both national and local government had long been involved in Black community organizing and research, with Birmingham City Council among the most active.Footnote ¹⁴ Race relations research, as Rob Waters has argued, often functioned on less democratizing and consensual principles than “social democratic sociology,” research that developed in parallel to “state-sponsored research” focused on communities of color.Footnote ¹⁵ Race relations researchers “consistently narrated the migrant other as a ‘stranger’,” but research undertaken beyond that remit was also critiqued for its racialized assumptions.Footnote ¹⁶ As Lisa Amanda Palmer has argued, “white sociologists” working in Handsworth (a Birmingham neighborhood subject to considerable interrogation by researchers and the media alike from the 1960s onwards) “were failing to question the most obvious common-sense racialized assumptions found in their own analysis that paralleled the common-sense racism in circulation within popular British media discourses on race.”Footnote ¹⁷ As such, it is important to attend to the ways in which projects like BBOHP understood Blackness, and to remain alert to the presence of racial prejudices, even in an overtly anti-racist project.

The BBOHP’s organizing team explained that it understood “Black” as “African, Afro-Caribbean and Asian.”Footnote ¹⁸ This definition accords with ideas of “political Blackness” that, as Waters maintains, “was frequently used to speak of an alliance of non-white people seeking to end racism and transform British society.”Footnote ¹⁹ Understandings of political Blackness—which saw people with “West Indian,” South Asian, and Afro-Caribbean backgrounds “thinking Black” as a diverse but common political entity—had been well established for at least a decade before the formation of BBOHP.Footnote ²⁰ Such political thinking had never been hegemonic. Around the same time as the BBOHP was conducting its interviews, scholars such as Tariq Modood were critiquing the notion of political Blackness on the grounds that it had been imposed upon British Asians as a political concept and served to obscure the racism to which they, in particular, were subjected.Footnote ²¹ Kieran Connell has identified the “fragmentation of political identities” in Birmingham that formed around diverse understandings of race and ethnicity, while also identifying that political Blackness and “Black globality” were rendered “both intelligible and, in the eyes of many, a political necessity” by the specific local context.Footnote ²² This was especially so in the ethnically diverse neighborhood of Handsworth, where the BBOHP was based.Footnote ²³

The BBOHP was made up of volunteers and several paid members of staff who conducted and transcribed interviews, arranged publicity, and administered the project.Footnote ²⁴ Its approach to interviewee recruitment varied; the project team hoped that a physical presence in Handsworth would foster “liaison with the public,” but most interviewees were invited directly, especially those who had stories of achievement or success to relay.Footnote ²⁵ Although the project’s lead interviewer was white, its staff of volunteers was majority Black and South Asian.Footnote ²⁶ They understood this as productive for their project. Researchers in the early 1990s were actively discussing the practical, political, and epistemological impacts of “mixed race studies,” with feminists especially interested in the impact of white women interviewing Black women.Footnote ²⁷ While many argued against such practices because they tended to operate from Eurocentric worldviews and reproduce colonially rooted racist paradigms, others saw benefits to cross-cultural research collaborations provided white researchers could relate to Black interviewees “in subjective ways on their own terms.”Footnote ²⁸ Archived photographs, such as Figure 1, suggest friendly, positive working relationships and a supportive, collaborative culture.Footnote ²⁹ If these impressions are mirrored in the reflections of several BBOHP volunteers, they also remembered Price’s potential to “raise hackles” with questions or statements that betrayed a lack of insight into several historic and contemporary issues facing her racialized interviewees.Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, the racialized experiences of SRH embedded within the BBOHP interviews can only be fully understood by acknowledging and unpacking the ways in which both the Black interviewee and the white interviewer, and the dynamic between them, shaped the resulting recording.

Figure 1.

(From left to right) Samera Charles, Doreen Price, Ranjit Sondhi, Ravi Thiara, Mel Thompson, and Geoff Wilkins pictured working at the BBOHP premises on Villa Road, Handsworth. Photograph taken by Ranjit Sondhi, DA6/3/6, CRL.

The aims of the BBOHP were multiple and were not solely focused on the documentation of racism. One project document, written by a worker of color, argued that “the negative aspects of racism must be balanced with an approach to the Black cultures which is positive and enriching.”Footnote ³¹ The BBOHP thus solicited interviews from some leading local figures. Although the project’s focus on race and its work within a racist climate resulted in the recording of many memories of racism, its focus and the resulting oral histories were more complex and nuanced recollections. This allows historians to hear both racialized SRH experiences and the ways in which interviewees placed SRH memories within metanarratives of race and racism.

Political Blackness informed more than just the makeup of the group; it also informed their understanding of oral history. Anticipating the question “what is oral history” from both its volunteers and members of the public, the group penned an answer that appeared in staff training documents and publicity material. “Very simply” they explained, “oral history is a living memory of the past preserved through the vocal tradition.”Footnote ³² The emphasis on “vocal tradition” is significant. As Alex Haley has highlighted, the oral tradition of storytelling is a marked feature of several Black historical traditions. Haley draws on African American family stories of enslavement and West African

The BBOHP was not necessarily attempting to tap into an unbroken narrative line, though, as Mary Chamberlain has suggested in relation to her work with Caribbean interviewees, “family memory creates an ethos which shapes the lives of its members” further down the generational or collective line.Footnote ³⁴ Their interest was more firmly in the recent past, particularly postwar migration to Birmingham. Despite this, and their seemingly more formally institutionalized oral history training, their emphasis on “vocal tradition” highlights both an intellectual and political position. Black political movements in Britain, as elsewhere, placed great emphasis on “recording and making accessible” histories of Black experiences, especially resistance to racial oppression.Footnote ³⁵ It was in this spirit that the BBOHP set out to conduct their interviews in the early 1990s.

The BBOHP collected life histories, “In-depth biographical interviews … conducted over several sessions and many hours.”Footnote ³⁶ In adopting this approach, the project sought to record the experiences of interviewees’ lives from their earliest memories through to the moment of the interview itself. The ways in which interviewees recalled their childhoods and education offer the first kernel of interest to historians of SRH, as interviewees were often asked for or volunteered information about their memories of family structure and gendered experiences of socialization at school. These themes are particularly apparent in interviewees with Jamaican heritage. Price displayed a keen interest in the apparently high levels of “illegitimacy” in the “West Indies.” It is unclear where this interest came from. Ranjit Sondhi, who was interviewed for the project that he chaired, recalled Price fondly as a kind, friendly woman and a talented interviewer. He did not remember any discussions about illegitimacy as a West Indian “problem” within the project, which suggests that it was Price herself who initiated this line of inquiry.Footnote ³⁷

Illegitimacy was a marked concern for imperial authorities in the Caribbean, and acted as one factor among others that served to create “African-Caribbean families … as the mirror opposite of the ‘ideal’ family advocated by the white, colonial authorities.”Footnote ³⁸ Price’s interest in questions of illegitimacy reveals an enduring colonial fascination with “West Indian” sexual morality. Such interest, and the ways in which questions around illegitimacy were raised, appear at odds with what is known of Price’s politics and those of the BBOHP. The paradoxical nature of these questions speaks to the complex ways in which questions of “race” functioned in a multicultural city during a “postcolonial” period. The anti-racist politics of the BBOHP could serve to mask the ways in which colonial and racist stereotypes surfaced during its research. Identifying, analyzing, and historicizing such moments are vital, however, to a more nuanced understanding of postcolonial Britain, a society in which the legacies of colonialism reverberated not only in right-wing or reactionary circles, but in progressive and explicitly anti-racist organizations as well.Footnote ³⁹

Price’s interest in illegitimacy is apparent in her interview with Ryland Campbell, pictured in Figure 2. Born in St Thomas, Jamaica, in 1932, his family was largely agricultural. His grandfather worked felling trees, likely as part of the logwood trade.Footnote ⁴⁰ Shortly after starting her interview with Campbell, Price asked “do you think you were illegitimate?” When Campbell confirmed her suspicions, stating “that’s right,” Price probed further, couching a statement in the form of a question: “there’s a lot in the West Indies wasn’t there?” Price’s query could have directed Campbell into simply agreeing with her. Instead, he took the opportunity to offer a critique rooted in a postcolonial analysis of Jamaican imperial history. Illegitimacy, he claimed, was not a “product of that [i.e. Jamaican] society” but rather of the British imperial economy that relied on enslaved labor.Footnote ⁴¹ He argued that “illegitimacy is a frowned word in England but they had created it in the West Indies,” invoking the enduring legacy of slavery on Black reproductive bodies.Footnote ⁴²

Figure 2.

Ryland Campbell. © Kate Green, Birmingham Black Oral History Project.

As Stella Dadzie and others have shown, enslaved women’s reproductive potential was a source of constant concern for their enslavers. Either they were viewed as reproducing too rapidly, increasing the risk of slave revolts, or they were seen as reproducing too slowly, reducing the “stock” of enslaved labor.Footnote ⁴³ Enslavers attempted to regulate the reproductive health and caring networks of the women they enslaved in an effort to maintain and expand their system of racial capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁴ As enslavers and the British imperial government navigated these colonial concerns, ideas about birth and family patterns, including legitimacy, were exported to, and entrenched in, Jamaica’s plantation economy. Abolitionists also played a significant part in this export of normative morality around marriage and family patterns, “encouraging monogamous marriages” as a means of “resolv[ing] the problem of female infertility and low birthrates” as well as to mitigate against the “moral and social costs” associated with illegitimacy.Footnote ⁴⁵

In other interviews, Price did ask more explicitly about SRH. This was the case during an interview with Sakiina Haaruun, pictured in Figure 3. Haaruun had been born in Jamaica in 1952 and changed her name from Clover Smith when she converted to Islam in the mid-1980s.Footnote ⁴⁶ Having asked Haaruun about “alternative medicine” and “the old witch doctors,” statements that further reveal her exoticist stereotyping of Jamaican life, Price then asked whether, by her early teenage years, “were you taught anything about or had you become aware of sex?”Footnote ⁴⁷ That these questions fused the quasi-medical with the sexual may have been an opportunity for memories of contraception, abortion, or sexual health to emerge. Haaruun, though, took the question literally, answering that she “certainly [had] the awareness of … the difference between male/female,” but “not sex in the sense of active sexual … experimentation.”Footnote ⁴⁸ For Haaruun, information about sex and reproduction was strictly limited. Her knowledge about sexual difference emerged from her lived reality as a young woman in a Jamaica that she recalled as being socially divided along gendered lines. This resulted in both a single-sex social life and a lack of education about sexuality, reproduction, and sexual health.

Figure 3.

Sakiina Haaruun. Photograph taken by Kate Green. Publicity information and photographs, DA6/3/2, CRL.

Here, too, Price steered the conversation towards questions of illegitimacy, which she appeared to link to youthful sexuality. “Where I actually come from” Haaruun explained, “I’ve never actually known of any very young people who do have children.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This was meant as further evidence of a lack of sexual education in her memories of Jamaica, offered as evidence that perhaps there was no need for any. Price interjected to say that “there was a lot of illegitimacy.” In several of the BBOHP interviews, Price intervened to state her own understanding or opinions about what the interviewee was saying.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this case, it seems likely the intervention was designed to elicit memories of illegitimacy in Jamaica. Haaruun rejected the notion that illegitimacy was a particularly Jamaican phenomenon, pointing instead to its colonial roots. “It’s not because they actually started doing anything at a young age,” she argued, “there’s a history behind behaviors which was actually inherited, it’s a legacy inherited from colonialism which is going back to [slavery].”Footnote ⁵¹ Both Campbell and Haaruun thus reminded Price, a white woman, that it was colonialism and slavery that had undermined Black women’s bodily autonomy and significantly impacted Jamaican family structures, suggesting her own historical complicity in the stereotypical narratives she was eliciting.

Other late twentieth-century oral history interviews with people who migrated from Jamaica to the UK (such as those conducted by the Southampton Oral History Unit in the mid-1980s) captured very few memories of SRH and did not display the same interest in questions of legitimacy or “family life.” When “Mrs. Powell,” who migrated from Jamaica to Southampton in 1954, offered to tell the oral historian Dawn McCollin “about my marriage life, if you want to know about that,” McCollin replied “No. I would like to know about when you first came to England.”Footnote ⁵² Black-led oral history projects, contemporary with the BBOHP and those conducted decades later, also did not pursue questions about legitimacy.Footnote ⁵³ This suggests that these questions were driven by Price and that, rather than emerging from a broader intellectual agenda, they formed part of “common-sense racialised assumptions” being made by “white sociologists” at the time.Footnote ⁵⁴

Researchers writing throughout the 1960s, a formative period in Price’s life and a decade of significant discussion of Commonwealth migration, debated whether Britain was “the site of collapse or redemption for the West Indian family.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Questions of illegitimacy were central to these debates and, as Jordanna Bailkin has noted, “West Indians in Britain were continually stigmatized for their ‘habitual’ acceptance of illegitimacy.”Footnote ⁵⁶A review of ten studies of Jamaican family patterns by Benjamin Schlesinger in the late 1960s argued that “Most authors dealing with the Jamaican and other West Indian families spend quite a bit of effort in analyzing the reasons for promiscuity and, in turn, the reasons for the large illegitimacy rate.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In part, this was because the rate of illegitimacy in Jamaica in 1961 was just under 73 percent.Footnote ⁵⁸ In studies of “lower-class family patterns … [t]he fact of illegitimate births is one completely taken for granted.”Footnote ⁵⁹ These researchers did, however, caution against drawing on these family patterns to reach moral conclusions anchored in Anglo-American normative value judgments about formal marriage, emphasizing that “illegitimacy” did not automatically equate to “fatherless” families.Footnote ⁶⁰ In other words, an illegitimacy rate of nearly three-quarters of the population should not indicate a lack of sexual morality, but instead the lack of salience that ideas about “legitimacy” held. As the American anthropologist Carol Stack argued in the 1970s, concerns that coded “female-headed households and illegitimacy” as dysfunctional or amoral overlooked “the great variety of domestic strategies in urban black communities.”Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, as Mary Chamberlain has shown, “high illegitimacy rates” could also be attributed to the colonial state’s inflexible inability to capture forms of marriage beyond those they sought to establish as the norm. In 1921, for example, the rate of illegitimacy among East Indians in Trinidad was 89.9 percent, “largely because neither Hindu nor Muslim marriages were legally recognized.”Footnote ⁶² The British state remained inflexible on questions of legitimacy in its imperial “afterlife.” Fathers who migrated to the UK were unable to avail themselves of the right to apply for custody of their children born outside of marriage as the Legitimacy Act 1959 restricted this right to fathers “domiciled in England at the time of the child’s birth.”Footnote ⁶³ Legal restrictions such as this, coupled with ongoing interest in alternative family patterns from social scientists, psychologists, and the press, led to what Bailkin describes as the “recent metropolitan creation” of “the illegitimate West Indian family,” a claim that echoes the counterarguments of several of Price’s interviewees.Footnote ⁶⁴

Price’s interest in illegitimacy was likely marked also by the domestic context in which she was working. As Pat Thane and Tanya Evans have argued, “the most outspoken and persistent attack on lone mothers” occurred in Britain during the 1990s, when rates of “divorce, cohabitation, and births out of wedlock reached unprecedented levels.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Black single mothers were a totemic symbol of the racialized and misogynistic “vilification of inner-city womanhood,” which Jessica White has identified in the late twentieth century,Footnote ⁶⁶ despite the fact that they were more likely to be in regular supportive contact with the fathers of their children than white unmarried mothers.Footnote ⁶⁷ Birmingham in particular had been the site of much discussion and research about “unmarried West Indian mothers” during the 1980s, as well as of resistance to uninformed interventions on the subject.Footnote ⁶⁸ As Pauline Davies, a social services community worker and a self-identified “West Indian single mother” put it in the early 1980s, “there needs to be greater understanding of West Indian culture before intervening in problems of West Indians.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Questions of illegitimacy were also closely tied to a decades-long moral panic over the supposedly excessive sexuality of Caribbean men in Britain.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is likely that a combination of the enduring colonial interest in “West Indian illegitimacy,” alongside growing cultural and racialized anxieties around unmarried mothers and licentious West Indian fathers, forged Price’s particular interest in this subject and gave her license to broach the issue with her Jamaican interviewees.

Yet some of the Jamaican-born interviewees in Birmingham offered narratives of illegitimacy without an initial prompt from Price. Carlton Duncan, pictured in Figure 4, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1941. As he explained to Price, “I remember a great deal about my mother but not one thing about my father since I was a posthumous child.”Footnote ⁷¹ Duncan spent the first twenty years of his life in Jamaica before moving to the UK in 1961, a move which we will return to shortly.

Figure 4.

Carlton Duncan. Photograph taken by Kate Green. Miscellaneous photographs, DA6/3/8, CRL.

As with many interviews in the collection, Duncan narrated his memories of early life and education, which included normative thinking on courtship and gender roles.Footnote ⁷² In his interview, Duncan is explicit about his memories of sex education. “It wasn’t allowed. At age nineteen, I couldn’t talk about having a girlfriend; I’d be crucified.” Duncan explained that “We learnt all [of] it in our own way, nobody, erm, bothered to teach us anything, but there you are.”Footnote ⁷³

For Duncan, the “strict regime” he experienced was “a pity” because it resulted in “so many illegitimate children.”Footnote ⁷⁵ That Duncan himself raised the issue of illegitimacy allowed Price to question him further about attitudes towards reproductive rights in mid-twentieth-century Jamaica. Speaking of a figurative woman who found herself pregnant outside of marriage, Price asked:

This short exchange is revealing on two fronts. First, it established a national hierarchy that reinforced colonial power structures, one in which the United Kingdom was positioned as modern and progressive, in comparison, at least, with Jamaica that was coded as reactionary and backward. When Duncan said that “it’s only relatively recently abortion in this country is legal,” the country he was referring to was the UK where abortion was decriminalized in 1967.Footnote ⁷⁶ At the time of writing, abortion remains illegal in Jamaica. Mention of the “relatively” recent decriminalization of abortion in the UK through deployment of the word “only” invites comparison between the UK and Jamaica, one that rested on the colonial assumption of the UK’s medico-moral enlightenment. That it was Jamaican-born Duncan who advanced this suggestion is not a surprise. Writing about the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Jacqueline Rose reminds us that, for Hall’s mother, his move from Jamaica to England represented “a major social and racial ascent.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Hall’s mother was part of a Black middle-class generation in Kingston who bemoaned with “bewildered horror” the decline of deference towards the “mother country” (the UK) that accompanied “the growth of a black consciousness” in Jamaica.Footnote ⁷⁸ It is not surprising, therefore that Duncan (born just nine years after Hall but into a family with less social and financial capital) positioned his narrative about abortion access within this colonially rooted national hierarchy.

Second, the exchange reveals that Duncan was reasonably well informed about access to abortion, despite the moratorium on talking about SRH he described, suggesting that thinking and discussions about terminating potential pregnancies were aspects of adolescent relationships in mid-twentieth-century Jamaica. This stands in marked contrast to Haaruun’s answer to Price, which suggested a discursive vacuum around sex. This difference may speak to the extent to which access to SRH information was gendered in Jamaica in the mid-twentieth century. More likely it was age difference that shaped their experience: Haaruun left the island at the age of thirteen, while Duncan left just before turning twenty; he thus had a man’s knowledge of sexuality rather than a child’s. As Nicole Bourbonnais has shown, “various mechanical and herbal methods to induce abortion had been in use on the island since the days of plantation slavery,” with evidence of women actively seeking abortion care in the years leading up to Duncan’s birth.Footnote ⁷⁹ Duncan characterized the lack of access to safe and legal abortion as “a very difficult scene” given that he had “girlfriends, and we did, we experimented and so on.”Footnote ⁸⁰

SRH may not have been the central subject of Price’s interview with Duncan but, as this section reveals, her life history approach, as well as her problematic interest in questions of illegitimacy, provided the space for SRH memories to surface.Footnote ⁸¹ These memories, which recollect the culturally enforced silences around sex within families and schools, suggest experiences that were similar across different national and imperial contexts, but that were also firmly rooted in their local contexts. Such particularities are vital. By homing in on one particular interview, not only is this more firmly established, but it is possible to examine the ways in which SRH memories are narratively composed and culturally situated. Such memories were intimately enmeshed in racialized experiences. Duncan’s lived experience as a Black man in predominantly white environments, and the racism he encountered throughout his life, provided the framework through which he experienced, understood, and narrated his life history, and through which he made sense of his own reproductive health.

Professional, political, and personal memories: establishing a narrative framework

It was not his memories of courtship and abortion that attracted the BBOHP to Duncan, but rather his status as a prominent Black leader. At the time of his interview, Duncan was serving as headteacher of the George Dixon Comprehensive School in Birmingham.Footnote ⁸² Duncan thus folded a major reproductive health experience into a gendered metanarrative of his professional life. Alistair Thomson has recently argued that life story interviews have the valuable potential to show “how events from across the life course may have influenced an interviewee’s experience of a particular topic or incident.”Footnote ⁸³ This was certainly true for Duncan, whose professional and public life shaped how he recalled reproductive health experiences. In the early 1990s, the lack of affirming, non-demonizing cultural discourses about race, Black male sexuality, and SRH prevented Duncan from gaining more purchase on these aspects of his history, and he embedded them instead within a professional metanarrative that was more available to him. Duncan was perhaps unsurprisingly more comfortable discussing his work than his reproductive body. Yet exploring the tensions between the personal and the professional allow us to see how SRH memories were threaded throughout his broader life narrative.

Before coming to England in 1961, Duncan had obtained “two of what was then the leading certificates—at secondary level in Jamaica.” These allowed him a period of probationary teaching, after which Duncan prepared to enter “the most famous teacher training college” in Jamaica.Footnote ⁸⁴ This was the Mico College, Jamaica’s first teacher training college, founded in 1836.Footnote ⁸⁵ Just before entering Mico, however, Duncan received a letter from his mother and stepfather, who were living in the UK, suggesting he pursue the remainder of his studies there. Duncan explained that the letter said:

Duncan was disappointed because the British state did not recognize his Jamaican qualifications, despite having been earned from a colonial institution, an experience common among many postwar migrants.Footnote ⁸⁷ Having sent off applications to many teacher training colleges after arriving in the UK in 1961, Duncan recalled that letters “came back saying ‘we don’t recognize your qualifications, we don’t know what they mean! […] If you want to teach then you must have five O-Levels and, preferably, one or two A-levels’ and so forth.” This was a dispiriting and disorienting experience for Duncan as “it meant starting all over again!”Footnote ⁸⁸ As Paul Miller has argued, this rejection was strategic, part of a “hierarchy of knowledge” rooted in Britain’s colonial past, designed to entrench the power of white overseas-trained teachers (OTTs) and to put “non-white OTTs at the ‘bottom of the heap’.”Footnote ⁸⁹

When Duncan started his studies again, it was in an environment that he experienced as overtly racist. Duncan recalled that: “on my journeys to and from college I’d see these shop windows: ‘Rooms to rent. Sorry, no coloureds, no Irish, no dogs’. This kind of thing. And [laughs] I couldn’t understand that! We were in the mother country!” This fusion of public racism and an unexpected interruption in his career trajectory was a process that Duncan recalled “finding very difficult.”Footnote ⁹⁰ They also echo the findings of historians such as Juanita Cox that the racism that “Windrush generation” migrants encountered in England challenged the “sense of belonging” many had felt before arriving, resulting in uneven and fraught understandings of their own Britishness.Footnote ⁹¹

Despite these setbacks, Duncan went on to have a successful career in teaching. In 1982, he made history as the first Black headteacher of a British secondary school, where students from age eleven studied for certificates of secondary education (which were standardized in 1988).Footnote ⁹² It is important to note that he was not the first Black headteacher in Britain, a title that seems to have eluded outright claim.Footnote ⁹³ Certainly several Black women had led schools for decades before Duncan’s appointment. Yvonne Conolly became headteacher of Ring Cross Infant School in Islington, North London, in 1969, a few years before Betty Campbell became the first Black headteacher in Wales when she took over Mount Stuart Primary School in the Cardiff suburb of Llanrumney.Footnote ⁹⁴ That Duncan repeatedly emphasized that he had been the “first Black headmaster” acts as a further reminder that his narratives were composed along firmly gendered lines.

Duncan continued to compose a narrative in his interview with Price in which he comprehended his life through the lenses of achievements made in the face of racially aggravated adversity. He explained to Price that, having spent three years as a deputy headteacher in a community college in Coventry, he began “looking for my first Headship,” a process that involved applying for vacancies and requesting supporting references from senior members of the Local Education Authority (LEA).Footnote ⁹⁵ Despite an impressive career to that point, which had seen him serve as a committee member of the Rampton Inquiry (a national government-appointed inquiry into the subject of “West Indian Children in Our Schools”), his applications were unsuccessful.Footnote ⁹⁶ Duncan understood that his applications were being sabotaged by Mike Feeley, Coventry LEA’s Adviser on Multicultural Education. Despite their obvious and mutual animosity, Duncan and Feeley worked closely for much of the late 1970s, including on the Rampton Inquiry until Feeley’s resignation in November 1980.Footnote ⁹⁷ Duncan told Price:

After this exchange, Duncan requested that Feeley no longer be used as a reference and recalled immediately being invited for three interviews, revealing the process of racist gatekeeping that stymied many Black and minority ethnic people from advancing in their careers.Footnote ⁹⁹ With Feeley no longer hampering his attempts at promotion, and having attained “white sanction” to progress, Duncan successfully interviewed for the headship of Wyke Mannor, a small, majority white school on the outskirts of the ethnically diverse city of Bradford in 1982.

These sections of Duncan’s interview are rich and reveal much about the history of migration, racism, and education in postwar Britain. This is not surprising: they were, after all, the guiding themes of the BBOHP, the most publicly celebrated aspects of Duncan’s working life, and likely the material Duncan assumed he had been invited to discuss. Yet, exploring them in detail reveals the dividends paid to oral historians who reuse extant life history interviews,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ as they also have much to say about racialized experiences of SRH. Duncan’s narratives of his working life not only speak to broader histories of migration, labor, and racism in postcolonial Britain; in recounting these experiences to Price, Duncan was also constructing the gendered and racialized scaffolding through which he would compose a narrative about infertility treatment.

(Dis)Composing narratives of SRH

The year 1982 was significant for Duncan for several reasons. As he explained to Price: “That’s the year, you see, not only had I made the headlines of ‘first Black Head Teacher’ … but I was hitting the headlines almost simultaneously, ‘World’s first Black test tube twins’.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Duncan and his second wife Satwinder were both “keen on having children” but discovered issues with their reproductive health after trying to start a family. Duncan explained that Satwinder’s

In relaying Satwinder’s experience of discovering issues with her reproductive health, Duncan emphasized the role of private medicine. That he mentioned “some private medicine” discovering Satwinder’s blocked fallopian tubes reveals several facets of the SRH landscape in early 1980s Britain and helps us to situate the Duncans within it. Most people’s experiences of healthcare in Britain are dominated by the National Health Service (NHS), which provides British citizens with healthcare free at the point of use.Footnote ¹⁰³ However, many “endowed hospitals” continued to operate outside of the NHS’s purview, as did many with charitable status or religious affiliation.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ SRH experiences highlight the porousness of the NHS’s operation and its overlaps with charitable and private health providers. As Caroline Rusterholz has shown, charities such as the Brook Advisory Centre, which operated outside of the NHS, were integral mediators of young Britons’ interaction with SRH care and advice.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It was not a common experience for people in the UK to pay for their healthcare, and the Duncans were among the first in what has been an enduring history of commercialized in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Duncan recounted the cost of the treatment (£2,000 per treatment cycle) several times during his oral history interview, underlining the prohibitive cost for most people and the compounded financial, medical, and emotional stress of this time: “A further attempt, four thousand pounds now and again it didn’t work and we thought it’s not going to work for us ‘cause we were running low on monies now anyway so we thought perhaps the best thing to do is adopt.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The Duncans were also significant as parents of color utilizing reproductive technologies, which have been critiqued for relying on and sustaining racialized inequalities.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As the feminist legal scholar Dorothy Roberts observed in 1997, middle-class Black recipients of IVF “[stood] out as rare exceptions” within an emerging reproductive healthcare market inhabited “almost exclusively by white people.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This was despite the fact that in America, the subject of Roberts’s study, those “most likely to be infertile are poor, Black, and poorly educated.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ New reproductive technologies were not targeted at those most in need of them; rather, they perpetuated a racialized image of a nuclear, white family. While the healthcare landscape differed in Britain, press images of “test tube babies” were also dominated by white infants, serving to mark out couples like the Duncans as deviating from a racialized norm.Footnote ¹¹¹

The discovery that Satwinder had a blocked fallopian tube was not the only interaction the Duncans had with private medical providers. Following Satwinder’s ectopic pregnancy, the Duncans decided to seek the advice of Patrick Steptoe, the obstetrician and gynecologist who shot to prominence alongside Robert Edwards in 1978 following the birth of Louise Brown, the first baby born as a result of IVF.Footnote ¹¹² Unlike the medical practitioners who treated Satwinder’s fallopian tubes, Duncan did not negate them in his narrative as simply “some private medicine.” Instead, he referred to Steptoe twice as “the great gynaecologist.” This was likely due to both the prominence of Steptoe in the media in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the fact that, unlike the private doctor who had discovered Satwinder’s blocked fallopian tubes, Steptoe presented a solution rather than a problem.Footnote ¹¹³ As Duncan put it, “we went along and see the great gynaecologist and he gave us a lot of hope.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

On their third attempt at IVF, having already adopted their son James, Satwinder became pregnant with twins who were delivered in August 1982.Footnote ¹¹⁵ As the first “Black test tube twins,” Natasha and Nathan Duncan’s birth was reported by local, national, and international newspapers and broadcast media.Footnote ¹¹⁶

In chronicling this personal history to Price, Duncan, however, placed this narrative of fertility treatment and the birth of his twins within a broader story of racial prejudice that was in fact focused around his working life. Having recounted his memories of the birth of his twins, Duncan was asked more about them.

At first, the narrative direction Duncan takes appears unexpected. Having just shared his experience of making history as the parent of Britain’s first Black test tube twins, one might expect him to dwell on this further. This was likely Price’s hope, given her question about the twins. Duncan, however, steered the conversation away from his experiences of fertility treatment and back towards his working life. Several oral history studies have alluded to male discomfort with emotional discussions around family, and how men prefer to anchor their interviews in narratives of labor or the material world.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Indeed, Duncan likely thought that his experiences as a pioneering Black educator were what the BBOHP was most interested in hearing, given the prominence of this aspect of his public image and the Project’s explicit interest in success stories. However, when taken alongside the subsequent section of the interview, the purpose of this narrative move becomes more apparent. Duncan moved on to furnish Price with a story about a substitute teacher who was able to gain the trust of the teachers at Wyke Manor due, in part, to their shared whiteness and the substitute teacher’s class privilege. As Duncan explained, “he’s a white guy, dresses conservatively, Oxford accent.” His new colleagues assumed that, on the basis of their shared whiteness, the new teacher would also share their racist resentment of Duncan. But not only did he not share these views, he reported them back to Duncan, revealing the ways in which his “test tube twins” were being annexed to pre-existing racist animosities. Duncan explained to Price that:

Duncan’s move to discuss life as a Black headteacher was not a point of departure. Instead, his discussion of the birth of his twins was marshalled as a means of discussing the racialized prejudice and aggression he experienced as headteacher of Wyke Manor. This was not an isolated incident. In addition to having bricks and pieces of wood thrown through his office window by the same racist members of staff who had made derogatory comments about his fertility treatment, Duncan’s family were more directly targeted. As he explained:

Scholars, including Seán McLoughlin and Kieran Connell, have argued that the 1980s were a turning point in Bradford’s history of race relations, one that saw the entrenchment of quotidian forms of racism. Much of that racism was targeted at South Asians and, McLoughlin argues, “schools were undoubtedly the key social setting” for racist antagonism.Footnote ¹²⁰ This was due in large part to the “Honeyford Affair,” a moment of significant division within Bradford following headteacher Ray Honeyford’s opposition to a series of initiatives designed “to address the problem of racism in schooling.”Footnote ¹²¹ South Asians in Bradford (who made up 75 percent of Honeyford’s school) organized concerted opposition to Honeyford. Connell has argued that Honeyford “formalised many of the racialized anxieties” of white Bradfordians, uncomfortable with the increasingly multicultural and ethnic makeup of the city, in addition to attracting the support of far-right racists.Footnote ¹²² In this heated context, it is significant that Duncan’s memories of his first headship are indelibly linked with his experiences of fertility treatment. These experiences were enmeshed because racist actors in 1980s Bradford used the birth of his “test tube twins” as a tool in their violently reactionary arsenal. Narratives of SRH are, as Caroline Rusterholz, Laura Kelly, Annabel Sowemimo, and others have shown, so often riddled with exclusionary and harmful forms of racism.Footnote ¹²³ Duncan’s narrative, however, reveals a historical experience in which Black people’s negotiation of SRH was used against them as part of wider racist logics.

That it is oral history interviews that inform us of these experiences is significant. Not only do they speak to the implications of the Duncans’ IVF treatment beyond the immediate impressions of the documentary archive, they also help us to understand the dynamic social worlds in which Carlton Duncan narrated them. “Oral testimonies,” Hilary Young has argued, “represent a narrator’s attempt to shape his or her world, to fit a picture he or she wishes to present, within the discourses available,” a process oral historians identify as “composure.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Thinking of Duncan’s narrative composure in this way is vital to understanding the ways in which he situated his own reproductive experiences within both his longer life history and the broader cultural scripts available to him. Applied to Duncan’s narrative, it is possible to analyze how SRH narratives feature in his understanding of himself, drawing out wider conclusions about the extent to which SRH has been part of the available cultural scaffolding racialized people use to construct life histories. In telling the story of the birth of his twins via IVF in the way that he did, Duncan positioned them within a narrative of racism that was felt in particular and acute ways across his career. This in itself was part of the broader teleology that Duncan’s life story was composed to convey: one of overcoming adversity, especially adversity imposed by racist individuals and structures.Footnote ¹²⁵

Duncan’s composure reveals more than the fact that he positioned himself within the increasingly available cultural scripts of anti-racist activism, one that the BBOHP was expressly interested in.Footnote ¹²⁶ It also suggests a lack of affirmative, culturally available discourse around race and SRH for Duncan. This is not to say that such a discourse was absent, far from it. As Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe pointed out in the mid-1980s, “Black women have, over the years, played such a vital part in exposing, denouncing, organizing and campaigning around health issues.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Black women in particular were subject to racist “abuse” “at the hands of the Family Planning service” and played active roles in resisting unwanted abortions, sterilization, or the disproportionate prescription of Depo-Provera.Footnote ¹²⁸

However, these were discourses that remained largely unavailable to Duncan. He was likely less aware of Black women’s health activism than he was of anti-racist pedagogy.Footnote ¹²⁹ Certainly, Duncan was less radical than women like Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe, all of whom had been active in groups such as the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent and the Brixton Black Women’s Group.Footnote ¹³⁰ Historian Simon Peplow has highlighted this “division” between Black leaders and activists in 1980s Britain over how to respond to racist policing and judicial indifference to Black issues.Footnote ¹³¹ On the one hand, “liberal” figures lobbied for high-profile public inquiries. On the other, more “radical” people “believed no advancement would or could be achieved through frameworks deemed inherently discriminatory and racist,” frameworks through which public inquiries function.Footnote ¹³² Duncan sat much more comfortably on the liberal side of this divide, serving as a magistrate in Coventry and on the Rampton Committee (and the Swann Committee that succeeded its inquiries into education and multiculturalism), positions that may have obscured or provincialized his view of the Black women’s health movement.Footnote ¹³³

Moreover, Duncan inhabited a cultural and social world in which “West Indian” men had been routinely stereotyped as “vicious, indolent, violent, licentious, and antifamilial,” part of a process of distinguishing “the Caribbean ‘Other,’” which Marcus Collins identifies as hinging on a particular reading of hypersexualized Black masculinity by postwar white Britons.Footnote ¹³⁴ This crude, racist model was widely challenged.Footnote ¹³⁵ Other stereotypes about Caribbean family patterns had clearly permeated Price’s consciousness and impacted the questions she asked her interviewees about illegitimacy; perhaps Duncan was reluctant to discuss his own reproductive history in case Price asked questions anchored in the pervasive racist logics about Black male sexuality. Certainly, those logics remained the dominant cultural script concerning Black male sexuality.Footnote ¹³⁶ Duncan’s narrative occupied a liminal space between that discourse and an exclusively white image of the “IVF baby,” dominated not only by Louise Brown, but also by a pervasive imagery of whiteness. Reproductive technology was spoken about as both a potential miracle for childless white couples, and a “designer baby nightmare” with the potential for “a black woman [to choose] to have a white baby.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Without a more accessible narrative of Black reproductive healthcare—particularly as a father—and in the face of these oppressive racist discourses, Duncan composed memories of his “test tube twins” within narratives that were more personally and culturally resonant for him: his professional life and overcoming racist adversity, topics that were indelibly linked.

Even with the considerable contributions of Black women’s health activism and scholarship, race and racism often remain underexamined in relation to SRH. Annabel Sowemimo has pointed to the “gaping holes in many of our discussions” about race and SRH, both among medical practitioners and the wider public.Footnote ¹³⁸ This is borne out in the SRH activism of people of color in the late twentieth century. At around the time of Duncan’s interview, many Black and South Asian people in Britain were founding “by and for” HIV/AIDS organizations, “community-led services” that were “tailored towards the specific needs of Black gay men” who had been neglected by both the state and HIV/AIDS groups until the late 1980s.Footnote ¹³⁹ When Arnold Awoonor-Gordon returned to the UK from Sierra Leone in the mid-1980s, he

This example makes clear the lack of widespread public discourse around Black SRH, even in an epidemic context, which manifested in a need to create spaces and discourses in which Black Britons could discuss their SRH.Footnote ¹⁴¹ These, though, were few, and tended to be heavily concentrated around specific sexual health concerns such as HIV, or other conditions such as sickle cell disease.Footnote ¹⁴²

These lacunae may go some way towards explaining why Duncan narrated his experience of fertility treatment through a broader discourse of racism and resistance in education: without a more available cultural script about Black engagement with SRH, particularly for men, Duncan positioned his experiences within narratives that were more culturally and personally familiar. In relaying these experiences to Price, Duncan was actively carving out a space for discussions of SRH in which Black people in Britain were the central actors. New oral histories will continue to reveal these experiences but, as I have shown here, existing interviews should continue to be mined both for what they have to say about racialized experiences of SRH, and about the ways in which interviewees negotiated the composure of such narratives.