Welsh Journals

fighting broke out in which many were injured and large numbers of police were required to separate the contestants. Before this separation occurred the windows of houses in which coloured men were living had been smashed by stones and the coloured men had replied with warning revolver shots and by arming themselves with pokers and staves. Two houses in George Street were cleared of their furniture (including a piano) and this was taken to a nearby railway siding where it was set alight. In Commercial Road plate glass windows were smashed and food removed. Chinese laundries and a Greek lodging House in Dolphin Street were attacked, followed by the houses of some coloured men in Ruperra Street. A general melee involving whites, blacks and police ended with 20 coloured men and 2 whites being arrested. 34 The next evening was tense; plain clothes and mounted police were drafted into the Pillgwenlly district of the town in anticipation of outbreaks. Groups of 'youngsters' congregated and stones were thrown at the houses of foreigners. At 11.30 p.m. a crowd suddenly appeared before some coloured men's boarding houses in George Street and stoned them. Windows and doors were shattered and "Women screamed and fainted, men fell like logs, and for a period pandemonium reigned". Police converged on the area and after a short sharp fight the white crowd was driven away. 35 Apparently there was little overt conflict after this. What happened in Newport established the pattern for the disturbances throughout South Wales; a minor dispute led to a larger scuffle which in turn led to white attacks on black property. Coloured men, heavily outnumbered fearing for their lives, defended themselves as best they could with the weapons to hand, including knives and revolvers. The police intervened to separate the contestants and arrested those seen with weapons, or those held to be the ringleaders of the white crowds. The motives of the white rioters emerged from statements made at the time, overheard by reporters or by the police or from statements made in court "We went out to France, and when we came back we find these foreigners have got our jobs, our businesses and our houses, and we can't get rid of them." "It's very hard lines for my wife and children. This is what one gets for fighting for the country". "We are all one in Newport and mean to clear these niggers out." "I did it for the benefit of the seamen, of whom I am one, and cannot get a job because of these niggers being here. We have tried other ways; we now intend to take the law into our own hands."36 Black men had become the scapegoats of post-war economic and social dislocation. On Wednesday, 1 1th June at Cadoxton, near Barry a discharged white soldier Frederick H. Longman accosted a French West-Indian fireman Charles Emmanuel in the street saying "Why don't you go down your own street". A scuffle developed and other white men joined in, one hitting Emmanuel with a poker. He drew his pocket knife and stabbed Longman near the heart, killing him. Longman had 20 previous convictions (chiefly summary ones) for offences including drunkeness and disorderly conduct, the last of these for threats in July 1914. Then he had joined the army and spent 41 years with the Royal Field Artillery in Palestine and France. After the killing, Emmanuel and a com- panion were chased by a large crowd and Emmanuel was arrested literally red-handed; later he was sent to prison for five years for manslaughter after a charge of wilful murder had failed.37