Black Star
The story of 50 Carnaby Street, London
She would have been noticed walking down Carnaby Street. Short in stature, she was described as ‘hauntingly beautiful’ with an impeccable stylish dress sense, befitting a person with such a captivating and charismatic personality.
In 1936, stylish dressers would have stood out on the street. It would not be for a further three decades before Carnaby Street attracted well respected followers of fashion. It was a down-at-heel working street, home to tailors, dressmakers, cloth merchants, haberdashers and lacemakers. Many of the overcrowded sweatshops served the needs of the Savile Row tailors, a few blocks to the west.
Two centuries earlier the street was home to Huguenot protestants escaping persecution in Catholic France and Greeks who fled oppression under the Ottoman Empire. Settling here from the 1880s and giving a boost to the area’s clothing trades were Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms elsewhere in Europe. A working street that was home to people building new futures: this was an ideal place for what Amy Ashwood had in mind.
The thirty nine year old had already established herself as a black feminist leader, a pioneering theatre producer and dramatist, a world-class journalist, successful businesswoman and co-founder of the Black Star shipping line. On Carnaby Street she was to establish one of the first and most significant of London’s black music clubs. The venue that she set up expressed a cultural politics that has served as a foundation for Britain’s black communities ever since, and in its future incarnations helped to define the multiculturalism that we all enjoy today.
Brown Sugar
“If ever there was a life of lived Pan-Africanism, it was that of Amy Ashwood Garvey. She not only lived in many parts of the Black world, but participated in the major events — from the founding of Garvey’s UNIA to the Pan-African Conference of 1945 and the independence of Ghana in 1957”.
Born in Jamaica, Amy Ashwood was just seventeen when she co-founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) with her future husband, Marcus Garvey, in 1914. Today, the UNIA remains the largest Pan-African organisation in history — advancing the idea of a united Africa. Moving to Harlem, she used its streets to refine her skills in oratory, political theatre and UNIA recruitment. Able to hold an audience in the palm of her hand, hers was a passionate internationalist politics that won huge support.
Walking the streets of Harlem and Brooklyn, knocking on doors, extolling the virtues of her pan-African vision, she had built a UNIA membership that was 35,000 strong in her own area alone — part of a movement that embraced a further six million people worldwide. She helped to found the Negro World — the world’s first and most widely circulated black newspaper, for which she also wrote and served as an editor.
The wedding of Ashwood and Garvey in 1919 was celebrated widely as the two charismatic giants of the pan-African movement joining together, but their marriage was short-lived. She left for London in 1922 where she co-founded the Nigeria Progress Union. This evolved into the West African Students’ Union which became a focus for many future African political leaders who were studying in London during the inter-war years.
Returning to New York two years later, she developed her talents as a dramatist and theatre producer, activities that remained rooted in her political activism. This was in collaboration with her new partner Trinidadian Sam Manning, who had become calypso’s first international star. This early phase of their joint work climaxed with their show Brown Sugar which opened at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre in 1927. Amy Ashwood wrote and produced the show, while Manning wrote the music which was he performed along with Fats Waller & His Harlem Serenaders. Her shift into musical theatre reflected the flowering of African American culture at that time — the Harlem Renaissance — as an expression of a new black identity and political vision.
Manning’s music captured the promise and challenge of the pan-African ideal. He brought together calypso and other musics from the Caribbean with American jazz, while his lyrics reflected on the life of new migrants to the USA, attracting both American and West Indian audiences. Drawing on the musical cultures of Trinidad, Jamaica and other islands, along with that of African Americans, his contribution to the future development of black music is considerable. It has been said that his career “was to influence recordings of music from the English-speaking West Indies in the Caribbean, United States, and Britain for the next 35 years”.
The impact of migrants from Britain’s West Indian colonies on the music and culture of the United States is often under-stated. Until the time of Windrush, most migration from the islands was to America. By the late 1920s, up to a quarter of Harlem’s population was from the Caribbean. These migrants brought their own music, culture and ways of life, which was not always looked upon favourably by African Americans, creating a friction that Manning — along with others — reflected in his music.
Working together, Ashwood and Manning were at the forefront of pan-African politics, the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance, the revolution in jazz and the rise of a ‘race record’ cultural industry that brought jazz, blues, gospel and calypso to the people. Their next step was to take their creative politics to London.
London calling
50 Carnaby Street was where Ashwood and Manning founded The Florence Mills Social Parlour in 1936. It was named after Florence Mills, a legendary African American singer, campaigner for civil rights and popular with London audiences. The club — a landmark in the history of black culture in Britain — was where black intellectuals and activists could come together to socialise, discuss politics, and enjoy live music. Naturally, the club also played a vital role in promoting Pan-Africanism and decolonisation. For Ashwood and Manning, London was key to the pan-African project — the imperial capital where many of the leaders of Africa’s post-imperial future could be found.
London’s black community in the 1930s was relatively small but growing, most coming from Britain’s Caribbean colonies, with fewer numbers from Africa and America. Black communities had developed in Brixton, Notting Hill and Canning Town — the latter having been established in the nineteenth century with the settlement of former sailors in the port area. Black Londoners were beginning to make their mark politically with John Archer of Barbadian heritage becoming Mayor of Battersea in 1913.
The Social Parlour wasn’t the only club in Soho catering for a largely black clientele. The Shim Sham Club on Wardour Street (which we will explore in a further post) has been described as ‘London’s miniature Harlem’. It was queer-friendly and had a reputation for its cutting-edge black jazz music. As such it had a very different profile to the Social Parlour which was much more a place for jazz, calypso, tea and politics.
As Lloyd Bradley has described, at this time “Soho became one of the very few genuinely multi-racial, multicultural areas in Britain, where black lawyers, waiters, students, dancers, seamen, doctors and actors rubbed shoulders with cockney market traders, jazz fans in from the suburbs, pimps, prostitutes, debutantes and landed gentry.”
At the Florence Mills Social Parlour suburban jazz fans would be rubbing shoulders with future heads of state. It was to 50 Carnaby Street that many young black radicals would come to enjoy food, music, and conversation, at a time when social facilities for London’s black community were few and far between. Regulars included C.L.R. James, a Trinidadian writer, pan-African activist and leading Trotskyist. He was also The Guardian’s cricket correspondent — a game which he saw as a symbol of black resistance. James would often be seen in conversation with Jomo Kenyatta, who later led the fight for Kenyan independence and became the country’s first President.
The Social Parlour existed for only four years until it closed in 1940. It was a place where music and politics came together at a critical juncture in history creating a focus for those activists who were to successfully lead the struggle for post-colonial independence across the world. 50 Carnaby Street was to reopen as a very different music venue during the war — and we will pick up its story in part two of this post.
Ashwood and Manning remained politically active and international in their focus for the rest of their lives. They returned to Britain often and spent much time in Africa celebrating the rise of independence across the continent. Sam Manning died in Ghana in 1961, while Amy Ashwood returned to Jamaica where she died in poverty in 1969. Her legacy is one of courage, determination, and commitment to social justice, pioneering the Pan-African movement, embedding feminism within the black struggle and paving the way for future generations of activists.
“There must be a revolution among women. They must realise their importance in the post-war world … Women of the world must unite.”
Amy Ashwood, 1944
