Ink, p.21
INK!, page 21
What started as a love affair seemed to have evolved into more of a partnership by late 1959. In one quite haughty letter, Manu stated he was instructing solicitors to ‘disassociate with both the Gazette and the Coloured Peoples’ Publishing House’, citing Jones’ ‘very chaotic, most inefficient, uneconomic and unsystematic working’.65 Jones was an editorial powerhouse but was no accountant, and the advice sessions she insisted on giving ate into valuable work time. According to Langford, there were ‘pressure points’: Manu wanted the paper to be run in a more formal way so they would not keep going bankrupt.66 Some of the advertising department’s choices, such as hair or beauty products, did not align with the paper’s political views and this also provoked clashes. Manu never did leave the Gazette, though, and Jones and he remained close – theirs also was a companionship based on common political goals, intellect and a shared colonial background. (Manu hailed from India.)
Other staff included Theo Campbell, the owner of the record store below the offices, who wrote the sports section, focusing on cricket and boxing, and who later introduced the young London Transport bus conductor Hinds to Jones. The talented Hinds was keen to write for the paper and was soon given the title of City Reporter. He often worked shifts on the buses and came to the Gazette wearing his bus conductor’s uniform. Jones’ assistant Alrick Cambridge joined much later (eighteen months before her death), as did the feature writer Ken Kelly, who later wrote for Punch. Inez Lachkan was the women’s editor and both Ashwood Garvey and the Guyanese author Jan Carew are on the masthead as contributing editors. (Carew would later go on to launch Magnet News in 1965.) The staff was bolstered by a number of willing student volunteers.
Nobody was paid at the paper, including Jones. The enterprise had community very much at its heart and finances second. Everybody wanted to be a part of it and strove to make it a success. Hinds said:
Those who were politically aware knew that it had to be done … I knew that a West Indian paper was needed, and also there was a carrot that if the West Indian Gazette did get on its feet, I was going to be the first full-time employee … [The office] was a place alight with optimism for both the individual and the community as a whole.67
Jones had captured a mood. She was living in exile from her family and friends in the US and the Gazette became very much her calling. John added:
It was a rare thing to have a Black newspaper with radical politics run by a declared Communist in London, but it also spoke to the issue of Black people as a displaced pool of labour coming from the Caribbean to Britain, particularly in relation to rebuilding the place after two world wars … It spoke to the community and it spoke to our experience as former colonial people in those islands.68
The paper thrived in those early days after the riots, regularly outselling its print run. Its circulation hit 30,000 during the winter of 1958.
Jones wanted the paper to reach and serve the community in multiple ways. To this end she brought her extensive connections from the Harlem community to bear. The Robesons performed two benefit concerts for the paper, while Flynn championed Jones’ work in the CPUSA’s Sunday Worker, explaining how the Gazette challenged British racism and imperialism. Distinguished US writers such as Du Bois and James Baldwin were also featured frequently in the paper.
In its heyday, the Gazette attracted politicians such as Martin Luther King, Manley, Cheddi Jagan, Phyllis Allfrey and David Pitt, and writers such as George Lamming, Carew, Salkey, Namba Roy, Sam Selvon and John La Rose through its doors.
Said Hinds: ‘As we went into 1959, politicians from what was referred to as the British Caribbean were seen going up the stairs to talk to Claudia … The British media also sought Claudia’s opinions … Claudia was one with the finger on the pulse of British society.’69
International Focus
Jones’ editorials and reporting in the Gazette were stridently Pan-African in nature, linking the issues faced by newly arrived West Indians in Britain to the international struggle against racism and colonialism. In October 1961, she wrote: ‘We oppose colonialism, we stand for the unity of West Indians and Afro-Asian Caribbean people; we stand for peace and disarmament and oppose nuclear weapons, we want to build friendship and understanding of all … world peoples, based on the recognition of equality and dignity of all peoples and nations.’
Styled as a tabloid over twelve pages, the paper carried news and analysis, popular features, film and book reviews, and sport.70 Its cover price was sixpence. A number of classifieds added bulk, with small ads featuring anything from hair salons and tailors to grocers that catered for the Black community. Grimaldi Lines, Encona and Mount Gay rum regularly took out full-page ads.
The Gazette’s geographical scope and reach rivalled that of the British mainstream media, which devoted few column inches to the Global South. Such was the intellectual heft of its columns, particularly the editorials penned by Jones, that readers were fully informed on the horrors of apartheid, including the Sharpeville massacre, where police fired on a number of Black anti-apartheid demonstrators, killing or wounding up to 250 civilians, and the Rivonia trial, where a number of anti-apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, were convicted of treason and imprisoned.
The Gazette regularly ran cover stories and editorials on the progress of the anti-apartheid movement. In January 1960, it called for boycotts of South African goods as a means of putting economic pressure on the government.
Indeed Jones and the WIG kept the pressure on the South African government when the British media’s silence could be seen as being complicit with a racist regime. In August 1960 a news story by S. Stewart outlined Trinidad’s boycott of South African goods, with dockers refusing to unload South African corn and Trinidadian women mobilising and marching in the streets against apartheid. The article stated: ‘The callous and inhuman treatment of Africans at Sharpeville served to arouse the indignation and resentment of peoples all over the world thereby crystallising world resentment against Dr Verwoerd’s slave state.’
The paper’s words were matched with actions. A year on from the Sharpeville massacre, Jones organised a protest in Trafalgar Square to mark the anniversary on 21 March 1961. Her good friend Eslanda Robeson spoke, reminding the audience that ‘the reason the Murders at Sharpeville are important to the world is because they exposed once again, the evils and dangers of racial discrimination, segregation and oppression’.71 While in May 1964, Manu and four other activists took part in a seventeen-day hunger strike calling for economic sanctions against South Africa.
Readers were regularly kept abreast of international decolonisation movements. In Hinds’ words, ‘It shook its fist at the Congo civil war and the abandonment of Patrice Lumumba.’72 The paper took the bold decision to print the last photograph of Lumumba on the back of a truck, bound without his spectacles, about to be delivered to his rival Moïse Tshombe’s henchmen, and the last letter of the first democratically elected leader of the Congo was printed on the cover in April 1961. Meanwhile, a triumphant cover story in November 1960, ‘And Now Nigeria – 35 Million Africans Free’, is illustrated with a beautiful picture of turbaned women smiling and celebrating Nigerian independence the previous month.
Serving as an information repository on the Black world at a critical juncture, the Gazette’s contribution to history was invaluable, although staff did not realise it at the time: ‘I don’t think I really grasped the true fact that I was in the presence of history,’ surmised Hinds.73
Closer to home, a public house in Ladbroke Grove operating a colour bar was a front-page splash in April 1961: ‘Archie Spencer asked for a pint of bitter and was told “we don’t serve coloured people here”.’ While the controversial Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, which was pushed for by Conservative Home Secretary Richard Butler and became law in July 1962, was also tackled. In November 1961, Jones informed her readers in perspicacious terms of how Butler’s ‘colour bar bill’ would establish ‘a second-class citizenship status for West Indians and other Afro-Asian peoples in Britain’. The Gazette continued to complain loudly about the act, with Jones consistently outlining its racist design and intention.
In a sign of its political clout, the WIG also organised a demonstration in London outside the US embassy to coincide with the historic march on Washington for civil rights in August 1963. Cambridge stated that Jones, as the chief organiser, ‘managed to bring together groups of people from many different walks of life, Asians, Africans, West Indians and British, from different political persuasions and even from different faiths’. He argued that in doing so Jones extended her ‘internationalist understanding to a struggle against the national oppression of black America which her imagination had never left behind’.74
A long colour piece gives a real insight into Jones’ life and that of non-whites in Britain at the time. In ‘I Spend a Night in a Notting Hill Police Station’, Jones recounted an incident where she went to the opening of the Red Stripe House – ‘a gay party with lots of people present’ – and was given a lift home by friends, the Bartholomews. The husband George was stopped by police and arrested for drink-driving. The reason for the suspicion is lame: the group had been seen leaving a noisy party. Jones accompanied George to the police station and naturally got into a long discussion with the inspector about the treatment of West Indians in the UK, eventually doling out copies of the Gazette ‘which I carry everywhere. Thereupon, the station became a reading room’, with ‘Officer 367’ and others perusing the paper.75
When people of colour were a rarity on stage and screen and scarcely reviewed in mainstream newspapers, the WIG’s review pages championed writers and artists from the community. In December 1961, Pearl Prescod’s role as Harriet Tubman in the BBC documentary Come Along to Freedom was reviewed, while work by actors such as Cy Grant, Corinne Skinner-Carter, Sydney Poitier and Nadia Cattouse was profiled regularly.
Jones reviewed James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Hinds interviewed the great writer following the publication of Another Country in 1962; novels by George Lamming, Roy, V.S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey and E.R. Braithwaite were also critiqued.
Philanthropic causes were also on the paper’s radar. A benefit concert was organised by the Gazette for victims of Hurricane Flora, which devastated the Caribbean in 1963.
But perhaps the most memorable institution the Gazette and Jones established was that of carnival in the UK. In November 1958, a Caribbean carnival committee was set up by the paper for the purposes of showcasing West Indian talent and culture, in the aftermath of the Notting Hill riots.
According to Pearl Connor: ‘Everyone wanted to run away and leave. The fear was in the area and she [Claudia] was thinking about how to do something about it.’76 No one on that committee was aware that they were witnessing the origins of what would become the largest annual street event in Europe – the Notting Hill carnival – attracting crowds of more than a million over the August Bank Holiday.
On Friday, 30 January 1959, the first carnival took place indoors in London’s St Pancras Town Hall to coincide with the annual carnival in Trinidad, and it was televised by the BBC. Tickets were priced 7s 6d and could be obtained from the Gazette. Jones and her committee had taken great care with the decorations, decking the hall out in palm fronds, colourful shell mobiles and other memorabilia from the Caribbean. The dress code was smart: the men’s suits featured knife-edge creases, while the women rocked full-circle swing skirts and ballgowns with long elbow-length gloves, their waists cinched in with wide belts. There was the odd tropical shirt, despite the winter chill.
In her introduction in the carnival’s brochure, entitled ‘A People’s Art is the Genesis of their Freedom’, Jones stated that she was determined that the events of Notting Hill and Nottingham should never occur again. She goes on to extol ‘the role of the arts in bringing people together for common aims, and to its fusing of the cultural, spiritual as well as political and economic interests of West Indians in the UK and at home’.77
Jones wanted to celebrate and restore pride in West Indian culture – a culture that had been seriously baited by the events of August 1958. The carnival, with its dances and Carnival Queen beauty contests (the feminist Jones knew how important it was to celebrate Black beauty), was a means of linking the cultural with the political.
The carnival was a huge success, featuring costume mas players, the Trinidad All Stars and Hi-fi steel bands, dance troupes, and artists such as Cleo Laine and calypsonian Mighty Terror, and culminating in a Grand Finale Jump-Up. It became an annual occurrence, always sponsored by the Gazette, and in 1962 Jones managed to secure the great calypsonian, the Trinidadian Mighty Sparrow, as a headline act.
Despite carnival and the harmony it attempted to restore to a battered community, the racist murder on 17 May 1959 of young Antiguan Kelso Cochrane, who was stabbed by white youths, forced a reassessment. In a display of unity, more than a thousand mourners, of all races, attended his funeral in Kensal Green cemetery. According to Hinds: ‘After Cochrane’s death, we had to rethink everything, we had to revise our faith in the Union flag.’78
Jones and the Gazette tried to get justice for the young Black carpenter and his family, but they were thwarted at every turn. There were accusations of police complacency in dealing with the racist killing, treating it initially like a robbery, and claims of a cover-up. Cochrane’s killers were never found, although Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement was heavily implicated.
Labour of Love
In her editorials for the Gazette, a weary Jones continually campaigned against racism in Britain, the colour bar and the insidious spread of extreme right-wing parties, but this campaigning fervour did little to assuage the paper’s financial difficulties.
Despite its high-profile and starry supporters, the Gazette was unable to turn a profit. Circulation flatlined at a disappointing 10,000 in late 1959 and advertisers, which were more often than not small businesses in the Black community, were often late with subscriptions as they suffered from financial difficulties themselves. The paper was constantly struggling to pay the monthly printing bill and was often late. It was not unusual for two editions of the monthly paper to merge in order to save costs. Hinds said: ‘Looking back it seems preposterous that the only coherent voice from the black community in Britain was a monthly paper so strapped for cash, it often could not find the £100 to pay the printers.’79
In 1962 fractures began to appear among the Gazette’s most loyal and committed staff. Hinds had started a young family and had less time to devote to the paper, while Kelly had opted to go freelance. Personal circumstances changed for much of its volunteers and the Gazette, very much a labour of love, was the first casualty. To compound things, the relationship with Campbell had become strained and the paper had to find new premises off Brixton’s Coldharbour Lane. Hinds recalled: ‘We all loved Claudia and respected her, but we were not always there for her. Some people were very cautious of her Communist connections at a time when the cold war was at its hottest. The majority had families and all had their livings to make … I was not as readily accessible to the cause and the great woman as I would like to think.’80
Jones was well aware of the fragility of the paper. As early as February 1961 the Gazette’s accountant was preparing to sue her over unpaid fees. Jones had written to her friend Eslanda Robeson in June 1960 that she was at ‘a point where the exhaustion and the weight of the problems are weighing me down a bit. WE CANNOT FAIL. Too much has gone into the establishment of this paper – too much in terms of work, concepts and sacrifice, personal and otherwise for this to happen.’81
She went on to expound the need for investors and a printing press. Sadly none of this came to fruition and a bruised Gazette limped on, an increasingly stretched Jones taking on most of the work. In a situation that mirrored that of Edwards’ a century earlier: this charismatic and bold editor was struggling against the odds to keep her vision afloat.
Letters to Manu outlined the grievous state of both Jones’ and the paper’s finances. In October 1962, she wrote that she was not relishing the prospect of flat hunting again. Her health required a place on higher ground ‘with central heating, if not too costly’. Other letters focused on bills – phone, electric, printers – before moving on to editorial issues such as the ‘absence of Donald’s column’, the need for lighter features and Manu’s preponderance for long sentences ‘70 words or more’.82
Celebrity friends occasionally came to her aid. Pablo Picasso, whom she had met in France in 1957, gave her two drawings to sell to raise money. (It is not known if they were actually sold or what happened to them after her death.) As Hinds stated, ‘Claudia loved and understood people, more than she did the balance sheet.’83
As the Gazette struggled, so did the woman who embodied it. By now Jones was seriously ill and being hospitalised regularly. Furthermore she had been threatened with eviction for rent arrears. Money worries plagued her. She received a little money from her sisters in the US but this and a £4 a week stipend she paid herself in expenses could hardly sustain her. In 1963, she narrowly avoided prison for outstanding debts owed to a travel company, while in the year of her death, she was being sued for non-payment of council rates. Letters from the bank habitually papered her doormat, each missive the same: the Gazette’s overdraft had not been paid. In the last year of her life, she refused to slow down – participating in protests outside the South African embassy in London, working with the ANC to organise a hunger strike against apartheid and travelling to Japan for a conference against atomic bombs at which she gave a keynote speech, and then on to China in the autumn, fitting in an interview with Martin Luther King on the way.
It is not known what she thought about Khrushchev’s secret speech in February 1956 outlining Stalin’s abuses of power, which led to many Communist Party members’ disillusionment, but six months before her death, she wrote: ‘I am certain that mankind will take the high road to a socialist future.’84 According to Cambridge, it was Jones’ loyalty and commitment to Communist principles avowed by Lenin that informed her ‘deep ethical compass’.85
