44 • The Sunday Times MagazineI
n 1978 The Sunday Times Magazine sent
the photographer Chris Steele-Perkins
to Wolverhampton to document the
city’s minority ethnic communities a
decade after Enoch Powell’s infamous
“rivers of blood” speech. Speaking to
Conservative Party members in
Birmingham on April 20, 1968, Powell,
then the MP for Wolverhampton South
West, had railed against immigration from
Commonwealth countries, declaring: “It is
like watching a nation busily engaged in
heaping up its own funeral pyre.” Powell
also attacked a race relations bill that would
prohibit discrimination in employment,housing and public services. In the
aftermath of what The Times called “an evil
speech”, racist attacks were reported in
Wolverhampton and across the UK. The
speech’s divisive, racist rhetoric persists
today: the phrase “Enoch was right” is still
popular among members of the far right.
In 1978 Steele-Perkins spent ten days in
Wolverhampton among the local Indian
and African-Caribbean population, working
with the writer Gordon Burn to create
what he describes as “a sketch of the
community that was an honest statement
about their aspirations and hopes in a
multicultural England”.He captured intimate moments of their
everyday lives — families at breakfast,
women dancing to reggae, worshippers
praying at church and men gathering on
the grass to play cards.
More than 40 years on, Steele-Perkins
says he hopes his work serves as “a respectful
document of difficult times for England
and migrant communities — and a ‘f***
you’ to the kind of racist bile excreted by
Enoch Powell and his supporters” nWolverhampton 1978 by Chris
Steele-Perkins is available from
caferoyalbooks.com at £6.50 ALL IMAGES © CHRIS STEELE-PERKINS / MAGNUM PHOTOS