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'Colonialism, Racism, and the British Empire in 'Around the World In 80 Days' (Amanda-Rae Prescott, 2022)

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'Colonialism, Racism, and the British Empire in 'Around the World In 80 Days' (Amanda-Rae Prescott, 2022)

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Colonialism, Racism, and the British Empire in ‘Around the World In 80 Days’

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Adapting Verne’s outdated source material for modern audiences is a mixed bag

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Tré Ventour Ed | Twitter, Instagram, Facebook | Linktree

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View treventoured's Linktree. Listen to their music on YouTube, Spotify here.

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Living inside this brain...

I often see neurotypicals telling

autistics how to be more autistic (for their comfort)

I mean, they hijack discussions that aren't even theirs

they tell us "not that sort of autistic"

and like "that's not autistic enough" ...

they tell me my autistic means broken

that my thoughts should be spoken

as quickly as possible

if I'm to ever be acceptable

like allistic expressions are incontrovertible

neurotypical standards

have been making their way onto my timeline

interrupting my ability to think

neurotypical thoughts that

declared themselves the default

masking is for protection

stims are our pepper spray

and our hyperfixations...

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Living inside this brain... I often see neurotypicals telling autistics how to be more autistic (for their comfort) I mean, they hijack discussions that aren't even theirs they tell us "not that sort of autistic" and like "that's not autistic enough" ...

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'How working with a local community project forced me to rethink the Windrush Scandal

NorFAMtoN continues to show the importance of community organising (Photo Credit: NorFAMtoN)

Previously published by the NN Journal - 29th May 2021

When NorFAMtoN CEO Shereen Ingram asked me to join her project to help members of Northampton's Windrush Generation, I jumped at the opportunity without a second thought, to give back to the people that raised me. I am still firmly of the belief that the village raises the child and for me, that village was Northampton's Caribbean communities recalling my sites of childhood like the former-West Indian club on Claire Street. Additionally, watching men like my grandfather play steelpan across Northampton, including Monks Park Working Men's Club on the Wellingborough Road bringing communities together over the melodies of my countrypeople.

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'How working with a local community project forced me to rethink the Windrush Scandal When NorFAMtoN CEO Shereen Ingram asked me to join her project to help members of Northampton's Windrush Generation, I jumped at the opportunity without a second thought, to give back to the people that raised me.

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Drama set in London's East End during the 1950s, based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth.

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Meet Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan | Spyfall: Part Two | Doctor Who: Series 12

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Who is Mary Seacole? | Behind the Scenes | Doctor Who: Flux

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Episode 6 Trailer | Demons Of The Punjab | Doctor Who: Series 11

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'Battle fatigue: will British cinema’s second world war obsession ever end?' (The Guardian, 2022)

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'Battle fatigue: will British cinema’s second world war obsession ever end?' (The Guardian, 2022)

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re you British and reading this piece at the age of 94? If so, as you will know, you may actually have fought in the second world war. Widen the metric to anyone born by the end of the conflict, and the demographic swells: 76 and up. Even so, the greater part of the country could only know the era through parents, grandparents or grandparents' parents. Yet January has still begun with two new depictions of wartime Blighty. Such is British film. Whatever year the calendar says it is, the nation's cinema is always here to put an arm a little too tightly around your shoulder and pull you into a fusty back room to look at its Airfix Lancaster Bombers.

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The first of the new films, Munich: The Edge of War, adapted from Robert Harris's novel, in fact unfolds in the last moments of peace, as Hitler carved up Czechoslovakia. Dial forward to 1943 and the second movie is Operation Mincemeat, a true story of deception plotted in a Whitehall basement. In each, the Nazi menace looms before expertly tensed British actors. The cast of Mincemeat is led by Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen; in Munich, Jeremy Irons is Neville Chamberlain, George MacKay a jittery adviser.

Britain has made a remarkable amount of films about the war. But as with any genre, not every one is alike. Moods change. Like canny politicians, the trick is to channel them. To make the right war film at the right time, tuned into the British id.

So something telling may be happening with these two new movies. In each, patriotism now comes with caveats. The atmosphere is less than triumphal. Of course, Munich could hardly fail to be downbeat. But if Operation Mincemeat is a tale told with the larky air of a heist movie, cynicism colours it, too. Of its two leads, Macfadyen is overshadowed within his own family by a dead war-hero brother. Firth also has sibling issues. His is suspected of being a communist spy. And in British high command, plenty are as interested in personal vendettas and their own postwar careers as thoughts of noble sacrifice.

It makes quite a contrast with the last cluster of British war films, which began in 2016 with the release of Dad's Army. A few months later came Their Finest, Gemma Arterton cast as a scriptwriter drafted into a propaganda film about Dunkirk. By summer 2017, Christopher Nolan had released the actual Dunkirk. It became a sensation. It was followed by another smash, Darkest Hour, which saw Gary Oldman morph into Churchill under heavy prosthesis. The movie was the second such biopic in the same cycle; a year before, Churchill saw the PM played by Brian Cox.

And in the middle of it all, of course, was the EU referendum. Aside from the sheer explosion of product, the tone of the biggest hits was striking. Dunkirk was an Imax blockbuster tightly focused on the microcosmic courage of ordinary Britons; Darkest Hour saw a cometh-the-hour Churchill communing with the public on the Tube. Neither was made in response to the Brexit vote. By then, Darkest Hour was already greenlit; Nolan was shooting Dunkirk in Swanage. But each was patriotic, a lavish British whipper-upper. As successful movies do, they caught the mood. They tapped the id.

How could second world war films not be addictive? They offered Britain an endless national Marvel movie

Of course, it would be just the kind of weird exceptionalism to which Britain can be prone not to register that other countries' films also fixate on wartime glory. Russian box office records were broken in 2019 by T-34, a movie named after, and tied up with, a Red Army tank. Last year Chinese audiences made The Battle at Lake Changjin - a Korean war epic of a clobbered America - the most popular film in national history.

Britain's equivalents are an inch less gung-ho, and yet cinema remains the place where we roll out wartime memories. That is only fitting. Whatever pathology surrounds Britain and the second world war, movies helped make it. The conflict began in the heyday of cinema; British films were put to work as propaganda. They did it wonderfully. The problem was, it proved hard to lose the habit. The audience stayed in their seats even as the real thing slipped out of view.

How could second world war films not be addictive? They offered Britain an endless national Marvel movie. The particular British identity that came with the package diffused through a million screenings of The Dam Busters on bank holiday telly. As the country fractured, second world war movies remade us whole. When Britain felt small, they enlarged us. And if the ghosts of empire threatened a guilty conscience, they recast us as an underdog nation of little boats. Who wouldn't vote for that?

Old news, of course. But although the conveyor belt of war movies has rolled on since 2016, the national mood has shifted. Five years after Nolan's Dunkirk, the shine has come off. Britain is in a more sceptical place now. So, too, are its second world war films. These are still mainstream stories. Operation Mincemeat is not the film, for instance, to tackle misgivings about Churchill. But it feels a lot less giddy and a little more grown-up, from the shits climbing the military hierarchy to the knowing wink at how much fiction war involves.

And the past looks different too in Munich: The Edge of War. For one, its Chamberlain is an idealist and strategist, desperate to keep the peace after the horror of the first world war, buying time for Britain when he can't. Historically, the jury remains out on that. It still makes some novelty for British cinema. Churchill can't be Churchill without Chamberlain as his antithesis; the feeble boob before the fearless bulldog. Chewier yet is the focus put on an anti-Hitler plot from inside Germany, based on the thwarted Oster conspiracy - one that in a different timeline might have lopped the head from Nazism in 1938. British dramatists have long loved counterfactuals in which we were successfully occupied. Munich offers a new How About: what if the Nazis had withered and the war never happened at all?

Where would modern Britain be now? If that weren't a mind-bender enough, a related question might ask the same of British films. The answer comes close to the unthinkable. So many actors, so many costume departments, all needing another script. Of course, in reality, they never did. And they won't. Now, as in 1945, British cinema will dim the lights and restart the sirens, making sure we'll meet again, the way we always do.

Munich: The Edge of War is in cinemas now and on Netflix on 21 January; Operation Mincemeat is in cinemas from 22 April.

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Battle fatigue: will British cinema's second world war obsession ever end?

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re you British and reading this piece at the age of 94? If so, as you will know, you may actually have fought in the second world war. Widen the metric to anyone born by the end of the conflict, and the demographic swells: 76 and up.

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'How World On Fire’s Women Complicate Traditional War Drama Narratives' (Amanda-Rae Prescott, 2020)

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'How World On Fire’s Women Complicate Traditional War Drama Narratives' (Amanda-Rae Prescott, 2020)

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How World On Fire's Women Complicate Traditional War Drama Narratives | Den of Geek

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The women of World on Fire are not passive housewives waiting for their husbands to return. They have their own stories.

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'World on Fire: Returning Diversity to the Forefront of Wartime' (Tré Ventour, 2020)

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'World on Fire: Returning Diversity to the Forefront of Wartime' (Tré Ventour, 2020)

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World on Fire: Returning Diversity to the Forefront of Wartime

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In watching World on Fire, I want to hope this is a cornerstone of how the small screen can do diversity in The Period Drama, showing that…

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'How World On Fire Spotlights Previously Untold Queer History' (Amanda-Rae Prescott, 2020)

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'How World On Fire Spotlights Previously Untold Queer History' (Amanda-Rae Prescott, 2020)

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Albert is clearly the gender mirror to Connie's (Yrsa Daley-Ward) story, but also her opposite in terms of military status and how they define their nationalities. This is important because, as a professional musician, war would likely end Albert's career. Connie has a strong Manchester accent while Albert has a faint trace of a non-Parisian accent. His adamance in defining his nationality as French indicates he likely immigrated from a former colony. Before the war, many people from the colonies moved to Paris for improved educational and employment opportunities. In an era where various nationalist movements legally or socially stripped citizenship from naturalized citizens, Albert is defying these trends in his own way.

Webster and Albert's budding romance in Episodes 2 and 3 takes a common period romance trope and redefines it. Just as Caroline Penvenen on Poldark uses a medical appointment excuse to flirt with Dr. Dwight Enys, Albert visits Webster at the hospital after an injury, however World on Fire breaks from other period dramas by normalizing queer expressions of affection. The camera doesn't shy away from Webster and Albert in bed together or kissing. Although Albert and Webster have to distance themselves on a park bench, the show treats their relationship with just as much sympathy as Kasia (Zofia Wichłacz) and Harry (Jonah-Hauer King)'s short-lived marriage. The audience gets the sense Webster is falling in love for the first time and Albert is showing him how to undo all of the years of repressed desire.

Few previous period dramas depict the experiences of gay men during World War II. In an interview for the BBC, screenwriter Peter Bowker said:"We are hopefully now at a time where we can tell a story about two gay men living during the Second World War that is not sublimated into Brief Encounter." Although Home Fires combines military and civilian queer experiences, thee queer characters featured are British women. Cabaret and Bent have theater and film adaptations that present the German gay experience in which Nazi party suppression was implemented several years before the war. Bowker's careful research into the era proves that, just because these stories were not featured before, they have always been there, waiting to be told.

Albert's story is also an opportunity to explore black identity outside of American or British history. The French also have a very long history with colonialism and slavery, but differences in government structure, culture, and religion altered the course of French colonialism. Black characters in period dramas are frequently framed through a distinctly American or British cultural lens. Although some may question Albert's career choice as a trope, Paris between the wars was a refuge for entertainers such as Josephine Baker whose careers were stunted by legal segregation.

Episode 4 brings one aspect of the war directly to Webster and Albert. The hospital is already showing signs of Nazi influence. Although the Americans are officially neutral at this point in the war, Webster is making the professional choice to align himself with the anti-Nazi armies. The rules say he must turn away Jewish patients, but he ignores them. He still treats a pregnant Jewish woman and he supports a Jewish nurse who decides to stay and fight.

Towards the end of the episode, Albert finds a swastika painted with blood and a pig's head outside his door. Albert realizes that his safe space in Paris is under attack while Webster still believes their future together is bright. Smith said: "Webster is still, for better or for worse, very good at maintaining those blinkers, at keeping any threat at bay, because that's how he learned to survive." The audience remembers through all of these scenes aunt Nancy's counsel, but we see Webster hasn't completely connected the dots.

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How World On Fire Spotlights Previously Untold Queer History | Den of Geek

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Albert is clearly the gender mirror to Connie's (Yrsa Daley-Ward) story, but also her opposite in terms of military status and how they define their nationalities. This is important because, as a professional musician, war would likely end Albert's career. Connie has a strong Manchester accent while Albert has a faint trace of a non-Parisian accent.

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'Why Walter is still a hero today' (NQ, 2018)

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'Why Walter is still a hero today' (NQ, 2018)

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Tre Ventour reflects on the continuing impact of Walter Tull… Three months into 2018 and evidence of the importance of Black history is everywhere. From the success of Ryan Coogler’s Black Pa…

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'The amazing adventures of Walter Tull' (NQ, 2017)

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'The amazing adventures of Walter Tull' (NQ, 2017)

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Tre Ventour examines the life and times of Water Tull...
Today, there are numerous black footballers being adored by fans and earning millions of pounds in the British Premier League. But when the game began, it was more or less exclusively white. Well, until one Black Briton had the courage and candour to cross the white line.

Nearly one hundred years ago, he was one of the first, black professional footballers. He was playing at the very highest level. You'd think that swimming among with the sharks would guarantee him his place in the history books. But he has been lost to history. Not only was he a sporting hero, he was the first black officer in the British Army - an institution that referred to black people as "woolly-headed niggers" on official correspondence.

Yet, he still fought and died for his country, this country. His name, Walter Tull.

Modern, British society has perpetuated the idea that Black British History begins and ends with slavery, and Windrush. But it isn't so. Walter Tull is proof of that. There are pioneers out there, many of whom have been lost to history.

In order to understand the story of Walter Tull, one must know where the Tulls came from.

Born in Barbados in 1856, his father Daniel Tull was the son of slaves Anna Lashley and William Tull. Daniel was a carpenter and he could read and write - a rare thing for a person of colour in Victorian times, times where education for non-whites was illegal. By 1876, Daniel had migrated to England, decades before the Windrush.

England was a magnet for colonists looking to make better lives for themselves. Whilst the Irish looked to the United States, the West Indians looked to England. There were as many as 20,000 black slaves in London in 1787. Immigration is as British as apple pie is to the United States.

In late-Victorian England, Daniel Tull would meet Alice Palmer at Grace Hill Wesleyan Chapel in Folkestone (Kent) - a white, English woman who wasn't in the least bit prejudice or racist. They married, and had six children: Bertha, William, Edward, Walter, Cecilia and Elsie. However, their happiness was short-lived, as Breast Cancer would kill Alice. The children needed a mother and Daniel married Clara, Alice's cousin. He would then die from heart disease on 10 th December 1897. Alice's parents were dead and her extended family were poor working-class people with families of their own.

With no money to feed the children, they were now devastated and destitute. Not even Charles Dickens could rival this. The workhouse clawed at their minds. They were prisons for the poor and a spectre that haunted working-class families. It stopped them rising above their position and kept them in their place. The British working-class population would do anything to avoid it.

But there was a light. Bonner Street Children's Home in Bethnal Green (London) would take Walter and Edward Tull. Here, there were three hundred and forty tough, city street kids.

It's dawn. The boys in their rooms rise from their beds and get dressed. Being the new kids, they start at the bottom, in the gutter. They cleaned the shoes and boots of the household. Not simply one pair but all the pairs of the orphanage, the sisters' especially. Having finished scrubbing fifteen pairs of shoes, an inspection by the sisters is enacted. If positive, they are put away in various lockers. Breakfast arrives like a happy release.

The Tull brothers were orphans and that connotes a lacking, of: joy, hope and happiness. Misery and disadvantage would follow them wherever they went. And being of mixed-race, they would be marginalised within society. In 1900, Edward Tull was adopted by a Glaswegian family. Walter was now alone.

Walter found a release in football. He was exceptional and at age twenty, he was playing for Clapton Orient. In 1909, he was spotted by Tottenham Hotspur F.C. He was their star player - young, handsome and the world was his oyster. He was in his prime at the height of football in Edwardian Britain and was one of the most high profile black men of the time, shamelessly nicknamed "Darkie Tull" because of his skin colour.

Racism to British society was as valuable as a battleship. These colonial values put white on a pedestal and people of colour in the gutter. It was done on the street level. It was done via organised religion. It was done via missionaries and popular culture. Racism was not illegal in Britain until 1965. The arguments against it were moral and ethical, not legal. These racist values said to Black Britons that "You may be born here but this is our patch and you are not going to come here and do well."

On 2 nd October 1909, Tottenham's bout with Bristol City would see the end of Walter Tull's career at Tottenham. It was over before it had barely started. A mob of 20,000 football fans abused him through ruthless racist chants and Spurs weren't prepared to stand up for their player. He was pushed from the first team and into the reserves. Simply, the club believed it was too much hassle. It wasn't good for business.

A report from the game stated:

"Let me tell these Bristol Hooligans that Tull is so clean in mind and method, as to be a model to all white men who play football. Tull was the best forward on the field."

Like many players since, Tull didn't react to the racist abuse. He rose above it and that truly showed the measure of the man. Despite everything, he persevered and soldiered on. He had great composure, courage and resolve, all qualities he'd take to the Western Front. He had to be brave, even at home where he fought a war every day.

The racism through these vessels was a metaphor for colonialism. It was upholding the British Empire at home as well as abroad. Walter was British but he was black. Bristol's colonial history runs deep. Deep like the scars of slavery that visible in the West Indies, even today. You can see the very same scars in England as well. Whether we're talking street names or stately homes, the British Slave Trade made its mark and Walter Tull is a product of that. Cities like Bristol were slave ports during the times of import and export of human cargo. And into the 1970s and 1980s, the Windrush Generation suffered. Black neighbourhoods were set ablaze, a fire that Walter would have seen on the football field.

1901 saw the death of Queen Victoria, a motif of imperialism that lasted decades. Her death did not bring an end to imperial rule. The Empire was still vast. It didn't have the tagline where the sun never set for no reason and Britain continued to rule with bureaucracy. Though, in the early 20 th century, football was leaving its private school origins. Its spectators were heavily made up of the working-class. And due to leaving those origins behind, men like Walter were given a chance. This was his chance to prove that he was more than a "woolly-headed nigger", as he (and others like him) were branded in the British Army.

And by 1911 he was playing at Northampton Town, a small industrial settlement in the East Midlands. It wasn't cosmopolitan like London. It was the sort of place, like Folkestone, where nobody would have seen any black people before. Nonetheless, at Northampton, Tull was on top of the world - scoring goals and thriving. And that was a form of protest against the white fear and prejudice that followed him.

After a tragic childhood, it looked like he was winning. He was doing what he loved, playing football. He was respected by his team mates. Then the war came and football was labelled as a distraction. Conscription was not mandatory in 1914 but Walter volunteered to fight. On 21 st December 1914 he went to London to present himself at the recruitment office. He was ready to fight for the nation that he was born in. The nation he was raised in - the same nation that had shown him contempt and disrespect in his footballing career. And the British Army showed much of the same.

The 1914 Edition of The Manual of Military Law states:

"Troops formed of coloured individuals belonging to savage tribes and barbarous races should not be employed in a war between civilised states. The enrolling, however, of individuals belonging to civilised coloured races and the employment of whole regiments of disciplined coloured soldiers is not forbidden."

The same Manual of Military Law states:

"Commissions in the special reserves of officers are given to qualified candidates who natural-born or naturalised British subjects of pure European descent."

These quotes speak volumes. Legally, he should not have succeeded, but Walter Tull was not an unknown black man in England. He was one of the most high profile black men of the time and a famous name in sports, up and down the country. He was physically fit and in the best condition he could be. The British Army could not turn him away like they did with lots of Black Britons (who were not of European descent). But this was Walter Tull. He got on with the job and put his head down.

He fought in battle after battle. He was respected by his peers and his superiors. He had the leadership qualities every officer should have. His only "disadvantage" was that he was "of non-European descent" (black). However, he was recommended for officer training in late 1916. How? Surely, it was illegal. Maybe it was mixture of luck, circumstance and skill that allowed Tull to be put forward. Among the 17 th and 23 rd Footballers' Battalions he was able to himself. The men were players who all knew each other. They could be men, footballers and soldiers.

On 25 th March 1918, a German soldier fired his gun at 2 nd Lieutenant Walter Daniel Tull. He was hit in the neck. He fell to the ground, face forced into the mud in Pas-de-Calais in France. He didn't get up. But he accomplished so much. He led white men into battle, something an "alien" officer isn't lawfully allowed to do. He broke the colour bar and the white line.

The story of Walter Tull is the sacrifice of a generation - a generation of men who should be remembered. Men from the colonies (and their descendants) who gave their lives have just as much right to be remembered as the white Europeans men who are remembered every year.

From slavery to football to the war, the Tulls had done well. 2 nd Lieutenant Walter Daniel Tull was good at his job. He was a friend, a brother, a soldier and above all, a down to earth human being. His life is an example of the extremities of tragedy and heroism. It's a lesson to those dishing out prejudice today, no matter if we are white, black, a president or a student.

No matter our colour or creed, it is possible to defy expectations. We remember Frederick Douglass and Dr Martin Luther King. I grew up reading about them but Black History is not just American history. It did not begin with Christopher Columbus in 1492. The roots are way deeper. We must look at the Arawaks and the Maroons. We must look at the black people who came with the Romans from North Africa. We must remember the Black Georgians like Francis Barber, and the Black Tudors like John Blank. And we must remember Walter Tull who is special to Northampton, a town rich with history and community. His story resonates with me because I am a Black Briton like him. His story could have been mine had I been born in the 1880s instead of the 1990s. And it truly shows that most of our ancestors did not wear crowns but were more simply working people, slaves and peasants.

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Tre Ventour examines the life and times of Water Tull... Today, there are numerous black footballers being adored by fans and earning millions of pounds in the British Premier League. But when the game began, it was more or less exclusively white. Well, until one Black Briton had the courage and candour to cross the...

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The tragic stories of the 1919 race riots | Alt History - BBC

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'Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place' (Nirmal Puwar, 2004)

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'Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place' (Nirmal Puwar, 2004)

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Space Invaders Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place by Nirmal Puwar (z-lib.org)

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'Decolonise, Not Diversify' (Kavita Bhanot, 2015)

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'Decolonise, Not Diversify' (Kavita Bhanot, 2015)

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by Kavita Bhanot

Since the recent failure of World Book Night to include any writers of colour in its 2015 list, there has been a fresh bout of conversation about the need for more 'diversity' in the literature that is published and awarded in Britain, as well as amongst those working in publishing.

Alongside a series of Guardian articles, there has been a call for contributions to Nikesh Shukla's crowd-funded anthology on race and immigration (in itself a great idea); writers of colour have been invited to come forward, to contact Shukla. #diversedecember, a twitter initiative set up by bloggers Naomi Frisby and Dan Lipscombe, has been encouraging people to 'read with diversity' and share the 'diverse' books that they are reading. Many organisations and individuals, readers and writers, are joining in to help bring more 'diversity' to publishing.

To whom is all this directed? Who should read more 'diverse' literature? For whom is literature written by minority writers 'diverse'? For whom are minority writers 'diverse'? Can I describe myself as 'diverse' - do I exist in that space called 'diversity'?

The concept of diversity only exists if there is an assumed neutral point from which 'others' are 'diverse.' Putting aside for now the straight, male, middle-classness of that 'neutral' space, its dominant aspect is whiteness. Constructed by a white establishment, the idea of 'diversity' is neo-liberal speak. It is the new corporatized version of multiculturalism. It is about management, efficiency, box-ticking. As writers of colour, we parrot this idea back, reminding white institutions that they need to increase their diversity; appealing to them to let us in, to give some of us a seat at the table too. To help convince them, institutions are reminded that 'diversity' is actually good for them too, that it will help them to make more money. Danuta Keane writes, in the ' Writing the Future' report on the need for improved cultural/ethnic diversity in literature: 'this isn't about making the industry feel good. Monocultures are bad for business....within 20 years the UK BAME population will be 25%. If books don't reflect that, they will become increasingly irrelevant and unprofitable.' Similarly, Shukla writes in a Guardian article: 'I wouldn't be wasting my time if I didn't feel there was a potential financial reward for investing in BAME writers.' Meanwhile, a tweet on #diversedecember tells us, through a posted article, that 'just being around people of different ethnicities may literally make you smarter.'

Although the lack of interest in our work on the part of white publishers is a very real problem, when we respond to and celebrate 'diversity', we don't deeply challenge a white system. We only appeal to it, try to fit ourselves into it, make ourselves attractive to it to, trying to sell our 'diversity'. We go to workshops that tell us how, as BAME writers, we can brand ourselves better, package ourselves, make ourselves more marketable; to get funding, to find a publisher, to sell books. And in this way, we define ourselves through this system, softening ourselves, performing our identities and ethnicities for it. Perhaps there's little choice when you're entering the mainstream space as an isolated individual, as a writer or an editor; it's the only way to get in and survive. We don't talk about racism, just 'lack of diversity'. As Ellen Berry says in the recent article, ' Diversity is for white people: The big lie behind a well-intended word', 'Diversity is how we talk about race when we can't talk about race. It has become a stand-in when open discussion of race is too controversial or - let's be frank - when white people find the topic of race uncomfortable. Diversity seems polite, positive, hopeful.'

And it's just this non-threatening positivity, hopefulness and cheery celebration that we've seen in this new phase of 'diversity in literature' campaigning, co-curated by the Guardian, drawing on data and recommendations by the recent 'Spread the Word' report. '#diversedecember is a celebration of books by BAME writers. For December 2015, read with diversity and spread the joy of stories' is the message on the twitter page for this worthy cause. 'Diverse December lifts the Christmas spirits,' writes Jackie Kay in the double-page article in Guardian Review, ' How do we stop UK publishing being so posh and white? ' Meanwhile, the extraordinary success of Nikesh Shukla's crowd-funded anthology of essays about race and immigration has left him feeling 'a mixture of relief and vindication that there is such a fierce appetite for BAME voices out there.'

Such diversity campaigns make it all look so easy. Through one concrete action, or perhaps a list of actions, everyone can help to sort out the problem. You can recommend your favourite 'diverse' book on #diversedecember. Feeling virtuous, you can read a 'diverse' book this month; a bit like medicine, reading a diverse book is good for you, it opens up your mind, teaches you about another culture/country. 'Today, we'd really like to receive recommendations of books by Muslim authors, please!' #diversedecember tweeted on the 9th December. 'Also don't neglect your genre fiction in #diversedecember - crime novels especially are an amazing way of reading about non-Western life,' says one retweet.

Or you can contribute money to the proposed collection of essays on 'race and immigration' (avoiding the word 'racism'). 'I think this will be an important, timely read. Help fund The Good Immigrant (I've donated at link below)' tweets JK Rowling. (How can race, racism or immigration be timely, you wonder, 'flavour of the month'?)

Rowling, after a generous contribution, is now patron of Shukla's anthology. Her name will grace the front cover of the book. Nobody questions the fact that a book on 'race and immigration' has also now become about Rowling as celebrity white saviour. 'JK Rowling inspires surge to fund book on race and immigration in three days,' the Guardian article, carrying her photograph, tells us. This is the same writer who was recently criticised in two excellent letters by Mia Oudeh (a fan of the Harry Potter series), for signing the 'Culture for Coexistence' letter, supporting Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and opposition to the BDS movement. According to Rowling, 'boycotts singling out Israel are divisive and discriminatory'.

Like accusations of reverse racism or casteism, there is not only naïvete, but also violence in erasing historical and continuing oppressions and power hierarchies, labelling the oppressed who seek to redress, 'divisive' and 'discriminatory'. It is the same conciliatory, ahistorical approach that can ground these diversity in literature campaigns. There is a sense that everyone only needs to come together, make a bit of an effort with a few simple acts. Diversity is about forgetting the past, and celebrating a multi-coloured present. Diversity initiatives often involve a Benetton style ad of 'diverse looking' people's faces, and we see such an image adorning the cover of the Guardian Review which contains the aforementioned article, 'How do we stop UK publishing being so posh and white?'

In this article, various writers, publishers, organisers of festivals have listed the things that they have done or pledge to do to improve the situation. Jackie Kay tells us that Carol Ann Duffy has offered to give up her place on the list of books for World Book Night for a 'diverse' writer. Nick Barley, Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival pledges that he will, among other things, 'buy another copy of The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma and give it to someone as a Christmas present'; 'try to persuade Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to visit the UK with a group of emerging African writers'; 'invite Jackie Kay to talk to Syrian refugees in Scotland and share their stories at the book festival" and 'ask Kamila Shamsie and Mohammed Hanif to recommend Pakistani writers not yet known here, and invite them to Edinburgh'. Meanwhile Simon Prosser of Hamish Hamilton writes in the same article, 'luckily, there are partners we can work with. The Caine prize for African writing, the Muslim writers awards and the DSC prize for south Asian literature, for example, do a great job in showcasing diverse writers, as do magazines such as Wasafiri and SABLE LitMag'.

We see here one of the problems with quick-fixes to the 'diversity' problem: they usually involve reaching out for the handful of well-known names, writers, organisations that immediately come to mind, promoting them or asking them for advice and recommendations (although there have been some new and lesser known writers recommended and highlighted on #diversedecember). Not to undermine the good work that some of these magazines and prizes do, but this approach ensures that literature remains in the same circles of power, within one class and caste. Such tokenism also means that it is often the writers of colour who are most visible, who work the hardest to turn themselves into shiny friendly packages, who are most acceptable and amenable, that are reached for. These includes international writers who are westernised, cosmopolitan, upper class and upper caste, or British writers whose ideologies and world views, articulated through their fiction and non-fiction, most resemble that of white Britain, right wing or left-liberal. My research, which has included close readings of contemporary published British Asian literature, has shown that the writers who overtly spout the kind of racism that it is no longer 'politically correct' for a white public figure to articulate, are often the most visible and celebrated. The racism in the books and articles by these writers is acceptable, since they are of South Asian origin, and it is invisible because it is normalised in British society. It is perhaps inevitable that writers who are a product of British society, education, literature, media, will internalise and reproduce white supremacy. The literature they write is directed towards white readers; it is about Britishness, about assimilation, about becoming a British citizen. Their representations of 'difference' often feed racism and stereotypes, with their focus primarily on the 'reverse racism' of their families and communities.

It is perhaps not an accident that these writers are so often given a voice and platform. Diversity boxes are ticked, without really shaking things up too much. Even within this double-page spread Guardian article, two or three of the writers, doing okay themselves, undermine the claimed intention of the piece by writing that they don't really see that there is too much of a problem. Sarfraz Manzoor 'would be wary of an excessive focus on race and religion', while Akhil Sharma feels that he has actually "'benefited from being an ethnic writer ... Because I am writing about things that are not well known, and I am writing about a community that people are curious about, I have received a great deal of attention ... my complaining would feel churlish since I have benefited so much from being a minority'.

Who are the 'people' who are curious about the community that Sharma is writing about, allowing him to 'benefit' from his ethnicity? Certainly not the community he is writing about. It is clear in what Sharma says, who his work is directed towards, who he writes for. 'People' here equals white people. So much of our writing consciously or unconsciously reproduces this assumption, and subtly reveals internalised white supremacy. There was an uproar when Marlon James talked about the pressure on writers to pander to white women, but such pressures, on the part of agents and editors, are real. Although it is not necessarily a conscious, cynical pandering, we often unconsciously direct our work towards the white reader, privileging the white reader, since that is the normative perspective. We will continue to do this unless we consciously interrogate ourselves, unless we read each others work and our own critically, to 'see' white supremacy (along with upper class and caste, male, heterosexual supremacy) in what has come before and what continues to be produced. In order to write differently. This will certainly not happen in university creative writing courses, mentoring schemes, through mainstream editors or discussions at literature festivals, where white literature is held up as the 'real' literature that we all need to aspire towards.

Adopting a phrase that is being used by radical anti-racist campaigns and movements growing and connecting across the world today, as writers and editors we need to 'decolonise, not diversify', and that is what we need to demand of publishers, creative writing courses, and mentoring schemes too. Decolonisation does not airbrush colonial history, decolonisation takes continuing white supremacy head-on. And if publishers or organisers of literature festivals are not interested in literature that comes from this place, that doesn't privilege the white reader, we need to use models such as Shukla's crowd-funded book, to produce our own literature. We need to organise our own festivals. There are writers, publishers and organisations that have been and continue, despite all odds, doing this.

But to focus only on numbers, as the 'Writing the Future' report does, to talk only about the need for a greater 'diversity' of writers in terms of background, is a limited and misleading approach. The real problem is not simply a monoculture but a mono-ideology, a mono-perspective. I'm sorry to spoil the party, but this is not a problem that was going to be solved this December or even, now that #diversitydecember has become #ReadDiverse2016.
All work published on Media Diversified is the intellectual property of its writers. Please do not reproduce, republish or repost any content from this site without express written permission from Media Diversified. For further information, please see our reposting guidelines This article is part of our You can find out more and support Bare Lit Festival 2016, giving authors and poets of colour the platform and visibility they deserve here Did you enjoy reading this article? Help us continue to provide more! Media Diversified is 100% reader-funded -you can subscribe for as little as £5 per month academic experimental space for long form writing. A space for provocative and engaging writing from any academic discipline. .
Kavita Bhanot grew up in London, lived for many years in Birmingham, then moved to India, where she directed an international literature festival, worked as an editor for India's first literary agency and set up and ran a guest house in Himachal Pradesh. Having spent some years in Manchester (she recently completed a PhD at Manchester University, in Creative Writing and Literature) she now lives between UK and India. Her short stories and non-fiction have been published in anthologies, magazines and journals, two of her stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and she is the editor of the short story collection Too Asian, Not Asian Enough (Tindal Street Press, 2011). She is a reader with The Literary Consultancy. Kavita has, over the last fifteen years, been working with writers in the UK and South Asia, as mentor and editor, as well as through organising events, workshops, reading/writing groups and conferences around the politics of reading, writing and representation. Her focus, through these events, through academic research, through social media, and in her fiction and non-fiction, has particularly been on punjabiyat, ideology and white, upper class/caste and male supremacy in 'British Asian' literature.

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by Kavita Bhanot Since the recent failure of World Book Night to include any writers of colour in its 2015 list, there has been a fresh bout of conversation about the need for more 'diversity' in the literature that is published and awarded in Britain, as well as amongst those working in publishing.

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The King's Man | Official Trailer | 20th Century Studios

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War Horse (2011) Trailer 2 HD - Steven Spielberg Movie

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'Laurence Fox apologises to Sikhs for 'clumsy' 1917 comments' (BBC, 2020)

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'Laurence Fox apologises to Sikhs for 'clumsy' 1917 comments' (BBC, 2020)

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"Even in 1917 they've done it with a Sikh soldier, which is great, it's brilliant, but you're suddenly aware there were Sikhs fighting in this war. And you're like 'OK, you're now diverting me away from what the story is'."

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Laurence Fox apologises to Sikhs for 'clumsy' 1917 comments

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"Even in 1917 they've done it with a Sikh soldier, which is great, it's brilliant, but you're suddenly aware there were Sikhs fighting in this war. And you're like 'OK, you're now diverting me away from what the story is'."

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Parade's End | New TRAILER | Benedict Cumberbatch

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'The Good Immigrant' (ed. Nikesh Shukla, 2016)

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'The Good Immigrant' (ed. Nikesh Shukla, 2016)

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The Good Immigrant by Nikesh Shukla (z-lib.org)

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Search for: Amanda-Rae Prescott, Bianca Hernandez-Knight, Kerry Sinanan and Tre Ventour-Griffiths

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ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 (ISSN 2157-7129) is an online journal that serves as a forum for interactive scholarly discussion on all aspects of women in arts between 1640 and 1830, especially literature, visual arts, music, performance art, film criticism, and productio…

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'Inspiring Bridgerton: the real South Asian women in Regency-era England' (Durba Ghosh, 2022)

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'Inspiring Bridgerton: the real South Asian women in Regency-era England' (Durba Ghosh, 2022)

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The second series of Regency romance hit Bridgerton will welcome Simone Ashley, a British actor of South Asian descent, in a lead role - and and many have speculated that the storyline of her character, Kate Sharma, could draw on histories of people from Asian heritage in Regency England. Durba Ghosh, professor of history at Cornell University, introduces the real elites of Asian descent who socialised in the ballrooms of Georgian London...

The image of Georgian and Regency England, received from accounts by Jane Austen and others , suggests a series of balls, teas, and theatre that allowed elite women and men to meet and marry in a socially appropriate way. Film and TV adaptations of Austen novels might make us think that 'elite' meant 'white', and that whiteness was the only way to join London's social circuit. In fact, at the turn of the 19th century, elites of Asian descent circulated through London, socia lisin g with those who gathered in the city that would become the heart of empire. Considered aristocratic because of their status at 'home' on the Indian subcontinent, the women who moved through tea parlour, salons, and ballrooms would have been educated, fluent in English and Persian, and used to living among Europeans.

Even though women of Asian lineage are typically not known for being free to travel or socialise with members of the opposite sex, the histories of Kitty Kirkpatrick, Helene Bennett, and Elizabeth Ducarel suggest otherwise.

Kitty Kirkpatrick, aged four, arrived in London with her brother, William, sometime in September 1805 accompanied by a British official. Her father, James Achilles Kirkpatrick, and her uncle, also William, had been residents, who were representing British political, economic, and military interests in the princely courts of India. Members of the East India Company's administration, the Kirkpatrick brothers were "white Mughals", as historian William Dalrymple has called them. When James Achilles Kirkpatrick died, he asked that his children be sent to England and cared for by family members. Born of his relationship with Khair-un-nissa, a young Muslim woman in the household of the nizam 's princely court in Hyderabad, the two children were separated from their mother and raised as Europeans. Once in England, the children were renamed William George and Catherine Aurora.

Catherine, whose nickname became Kitty, later became acquainted with Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who described her as "a strangely-complexioned young lady, with soft brown eyes and floods of bronze-red hair, really a pretty-looking, smiling and amiable, though most foreign bit of magnificence and kindly splendour; ... half-begum in short; an interesting specimen of the Semi-oriental [sic] Englishwoman." Kitty and Carlyle travelled in the same social circles, in which it seemed widely known that Kitty's mother was Asian.

Kitty's mother, Khair-un-nissa, was dispossessed of her children and remained in India. But several women who had been members of courtly households in India and partnered with British or European officials in India were brought to London, particularly if they had the skills to read and write. One example is the case of Halima Begum, who was a Muslim noblewoman at the nawab's princely court in Lucknow. She was also the sister of Faiz Bakhsh, the longtime partner of William Palmer, a military official who had served as a resident of the by German artist Johan Zoffany in the unfinished Palmer family portrait East India Company in Lucknow. Halima, who was painted was previously (and mistakenly) identified as Palmer's second wife. We now know she was attached to General Benoit de Boigne, a French mercenary soldier who had fought for the East India Company. (below)

Halima likely met de Boigne when he visited Palmer in Lucknow, sometime between 1783 and 1788. She was considered accomplished because she could read Persian and English. While still in India, they had two children. When de Boigne left India, he had a huge fortune and was able to bring Halima and their two children with him to London, likely in 1797. Even though Halima and de Boigne never married, the four of them settled on Great Portland Street, which was emerging as a fashionable area that was further improved by the development of Regent's Park. Shortly after, however, de Boigne left Halima for a young aristocratic French woman whose family had been thrown out of Paris after the revolution; nonetheless, he continued to provide an income for Halima and their children, as well as for the other children he had fathered in India.

Their daughter, who they called Banu, was renamed and baptised Ann, and their son Ali was renamed Charles. The children remained under the care of their mother and for a time, and lived near Hammersmith. Halima, now known as Helene Bennett, corresponded regularly with de Boigne, writing letters in English and updating him on their children's education. Ann was sent to France to be with her father when she was just 15 , but contracted an illness while travelling and died in her father's apartment in Paris. De Boigne returned to his hometown of Chambèry, in the Savoy region of France, where he became a well-known civic patron (the bronze monument that he sponsored - the Fountain of Elephants - has become a local landmark and tourist destination). After the death of their daughter, Helene Bennett moved to the outskirts of London while their son completed his education at St Edmund's College in Hertfordshire. Charles, the son, moved to Chambèry around 1814, where he was formally adopted by his father. He became the Count de Boigne, after his father died in 1830. Helene Bennett lived the remainder of her life in England, in a cottage in Horsham, outside London. She died in 1853, and her tomb in the local cemetery reads that she was the widow of de Boigne.

Halima, aka Helene Bennett, was not alone among women of South Asian descent who came to England in this period. Elizabeth Ducarel, who was originally called Sharaf-un-nissa, had a much more visible life in England, living publicly with her husband and children. She met Gerard Gustavus Ducarel when he was the supervisor of the district of Purnea, shortly after the revenues of Bengal had been granted to the East India Company. She was only 13 years old when they met, leading to speculation that she had been an enslaved person or had not consented to the relationship. When she was 13, she gave birth to their first child; they had six children in total. She followed him in his various positions, eventually to Calcutta where he became the superintendent of the khalsa, or the department of revenue. The children were sent to England to be educated when they were four or five years of age. When Ducarel returned to England in 1784, he brought Elizabeth with him, and they married in an Anglican church in 1787.

In her time in England, Mrs Ducarel learned English competently enough to maintain a steady correspondence with her children and extended family members. She was also proficient in Persian, as she continued to write to her family in India. From these accounts, we know that she was socially quite active, attending several evening events every week and being deeply involved with the familial affairs of her children, all of whom married respectably into British society. One Indian traveller to Britain, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, reported that she was "very fair and so accomplished in all the English manners and language, that I was sometime in her company before I could be convinced she was a native of India."

Ducarel died in 1800 . Elizabeth survived him until 1822 , when she died in the home of her eldest son in Gloucestershire.

These examples - of Kitty Kirkpatrick, Helene Bennett and Elizabeth Ducarel - are a small but very real piece of the history of Georgian and Regency England that rightly inform the casting for the next season of Bridgerton.

Although these women lived and died in England, many in Britain had the experience of siblings, half-siblings, cousins, and relations who had remained in India.

One final example should serve as a strong example about how a long-lost sibling in India informed British literature: Kitty was not the only Indian child whose English father insisted that she be relocated to England. These deathbed requests showed how Englishmen made their children European by divesting them of their Indian ancestry. Amelia Thackeray, half-sister of famed novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, had a "natural" child with a woman who was unnamed in his will. In Richmond's last testament, he instructed that "Amelia" and William should return to England under Anne's care and guardianship. Richmond's career in India had been successful: he asked that £100 yearly be granted to his daughter and son each, and £500 to his wife, putting them into the ranks of the very wealthy in England. William eventually attended Charterhouse [school], and then went up to Cambridge; he inherited a substantial sum when he turned 21, which he quickly gambled away. should have arrived in London around 1816. Their father, Richmond Thackeray, had died in Calcutta after having served as a district collector in Bengal and secretary to the Board of Revenue of the East India Company. Although Richmond was legally married to Anne Becher, a white woman whose father was also involved with the East India Company, Richmond had

Recent genealogical research suggests that Richmond Thackeray's instructions were never followed, and his daughter never arrived in London. "Amelia" was actually Sarah Redfield and she remained in India, marrying James Blechynden (the son of the Richard Blechynden who became famous as the diarist who recorded his many sexual exploits in India). The name Amelia, given to his half-sister by his father, no doubt inspired William Makepeace Thackeray to develop the character of Amelia Sedley, who appeared in his novel Vanity Fair as the compliant and mild-mannered heroine who serves as the socially appropriate foil to the ambitious social climber, Rebecca Sharp.

We might be tempted to think of these Asian women as social climbers, aspiring to join the ranks of the elite and cultivated in England. Instead, we should recall that they were elite and educated in India, which allowed them to adjust to the expectations of social life in Georgian and Regency England.

Professor Durba Ghosh teaches at Cornell University on modern South Asia, the British empire, gender, and colonialism. Her research specialises on the history of British colonialism on the Indian subcontinent

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Inspiring Bridgerton: the real South Asian women in Regency-era England

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The second series of Regency romance hit Bridgerton will welcome Simone Ashley, a British actor of South Asian descent, in a lead role - and and many have speculated that the storyline of her character, Kate Sharma, could draw on histories of people from Asian heritage in Regency England.

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'African Europeans' (Olivette Otele, 2020)

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'African Europeans' (Olivette Otele, 2020)

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African Europeans An Untold History by Olivette Otele (z-lib.org)

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'The Real history Behind Bridgerton' (Amanda-Rae Prescott, 2020)

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'The Real history Behind Bridgerton' (Amanda-Rae Prescott, 2020)

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The series evades the question of how this wealth came to be and for a good reason. During the Regency era, most of the real-life Ton acquired their wealth through direct or indirect involvement in slavery or colonialism. Although the British officially banned the international slave trade in 1807, this ban did not result in immediate divestment from the economic activity that was powered by slave or colonial labor. British landowners still exported cotton, sugar, coffee, wood, and metals from their overseas properties or were involved in firms manufacturing consumer goods out of those raw materials. Anyone involved in the shipping trade pre-1807 still made money off of transporting slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and America.

For those who believe there is no precedent in pop culture to discussing these issues, the novel Mansfield Park includes some discussion about Regency-era wealth generated from slavery but some of the adaptations cut or heavily downplay it. Ned Despard opposing expanded exploitation by the Honduran mahogany plantation owners is covered extensively in Season 5.

Based on the lack of discussion, the audience can assume any number of things about where their wealth comes from. Simon and Lady Danbury could own property in Africa and the Caribbean and produce valuable raw materials by salaried laborers. This is not unheard of in the era because American laws designed to keep Black and mixed race people from owning property did not exist in these UK colonies. An argument can be made that Simon's wealth is purely from collecting rent from his tenants and selling the agricultural products produced. It's also possible long term investments in various industries are paying per annum. The possibilities are endless in this fantasy world.

Prince Friedrich

So much of the discourse around the series has revolved around Queen Charlotte's African ancestry, but there hasn't been as much discussion around Prince Friedrich. Prince Fredrich is introduced in Episode 3 as the Queen's nephew searching for a princess among the Ton. There was a Prince Frederich Wilhelm Ludwig of Prussia, but in real life, he was the son of her niece Princess Fredericka of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

In a series already skewed towards showing the marriage market for the elite families of Regency society, it makes sense for the especially politically ambitious Dukes and Duchesses to desire to be connected by marriage to the Queen. Daphne (Phoebe Dyvenor) potentially blocking the path of the social climbers makes for good drama and gossip from Lady Whistledown even if it didn't quite happen that way in history.

Regency Smoking Habits & What is Snuff?

The miniseries featured tobacco use in a way not typically seen in other early 19th Century period dramas. Lady Danbury and other women were seen smoking. Quite a few fans were confused about Queen Charlotte's penchant for sniffing something up her nose while cuddling her slightly smaller than at the time pomeranian. She was using snuff, dried tobacco, and not cocaine as some folks mistakenly posted on Twitter. During the Regency Era, clay pipes and cigars fell out of fashion for public consumption due to the unpleasant smell. Snuff was extremely popular among the real Ton as there was no traceable odor to other people. Smoking adds a dramatic effect to any situation where a character feels stressed out but pipes and cigars, in reality, maybe likely only to be used where others can't see.

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The Real History Behind Bridgerton | Den of Geek

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The series evades the question of how this wealth came to be and for a good reason. During the Regency era, most of the real-life Ton acquired their wealth through direct or indirect involvement in slavery or colonialism.

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'The Personal History of David Copperfield' (2019)

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'The Personal History of David Copperfield' (2019)

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TW: racism, white supremacy, violence, enslavement.

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ROOTS miniseries premiere - January 1977 ABC-TV

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'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackary (1848)

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'Blackamoores: Africans in Tudors England...' (Onyeka Nubia, 2013)

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'Blackamoores: Africans in Tudors England...' (Onyeka Nubia, 2013)

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When we think of Tudor England we do not automatically think of Africans being present. Instead we limit such an African presence to modern times, implying that cultural diversity is a relatively new concept in Britain. However, Onyeka in this book emphasises that Africans were present across Tudor England: in cities and towns such as London, Plymouth, Bristol and Northampton. Significantly, these Africans were not solely enslaved peoples occupying the lowest portions of society. The few modern historians who have written about Africans in Tudor England suggest that they were all slaves, or transient immigrants who were considered as dangerous strangers and the epitome of otherness.

Onyeka references a variety of documents: both manuscript and printed, some of which have been found by him for the first time, whilst other evidence has been neglected or forgotten - until now. This book is long overdue. Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England is changing the way we look at the Tudor period, and challenging our perception on it, as well as our perception of this country.

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Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England - Narrative Eye

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When we think of Tudor England we do not automatically think of Africans being present. Instead we limit such an African presence to modern times, implying that cultural diversity is a relatively new concept in Britain. However, Onyeka in this book emphasises that Africans were present across Tudor England: in cities and towns such as London, Plymouth, Bristol and Northampton.

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'Black Lives in the English Archives' (Imtaz Habib, 2007)

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'Black Lives in the English Archives' (Imtaz Habib, 2007)

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Imtiaz Habib - Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677_ Imprints of the Invisible-Routledge (2007)

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'The Constant Princess' (Philippa Gregory, 2005)

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'The Constant Princess' (Philippa Gregory, 2005)

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Gregory, Philippa - The Constant Princess (2005, Touchstone) - libgen.li

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'The King's Curse' (Philippa Gregory, 2014)

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'The King's Curse' (Philippa Gregory, 2014)

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[The Cousins' War Book 6 ] Gregory, Philippa - The King's Curse (2014, Touchstone) - libgen.li

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Miranda Kaufmann - Black Tudors_ The Untold Story (2017, Oneworld Publications) - libgen.lc

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'Black and British: A Forgotton History' (David Olusoga, 2016)

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'Black and British: A Forgotton History' (David Olusoga, 2016)

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Olusoga, David - Black and British (2016, Pan Macmillan) - libgen.lc

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The Spanish Princess | Official Trailer | STARZ

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'A Lady of York: migration, ethnicity and identity in Roman Britain' (Leach and colleagues, 2010)

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'A Lady of York: migration, ethnicity and identity in Roman Britain' (Leach and colleagues, 2010)

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Alt History: Black British History We’re Not Taught in Schools - BBC Stories

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Septimius Severus: Extracted from 'Alison Hammond: Back to School' (2021)

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Septimius Severus: Extracted from 'Alison Hammond: Back to School' (2021)

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Septimius Severus: The African Roman Emperor that shaped Britain

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This series is explicit ... get permission from parents, families, guaridans, elders etc etc before watching!!

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Spartacus: Blood and Sand | Official Trailer | STARZ

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'Black British History: New Perspectives' (ed. Hakim Adi, 2016)

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'Black British History: New Perspectives' (ed. Hakim Adi, 2016)

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[Blackness in Britain] Hakim Adi (editor) - Black British History_ New Perspectives (Blackness in Britain) (2019, Zed Books) - libgen.li

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'Cheddar Man changes the way we think about our ancestors' (The Guardian, 2018)

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'Cheddar Man changes the way we think about our ancestors' (The Guardian, 2018)

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In 1903 workmen digging a drainage trench in Gough's Cave in the Cheddar Gorge, in Somerset, uncovered the remains of a young man, sealed under a stalagmite. The figure, feet curled up underneath him, was small, at about 5ft 5in, and would have weighed around 10 stone when he died in his early 20s. The cause of death has still not been determined by palaeontologists.

The skeleton's antiquity was revealed when fossil experts dated his bones and realised that Cheddar Man, as he quickly became known, was almost 10,000 years old. This is still the oldest virtually complete skeleton that has been unearthed in the British Isles, although it is unclear whether the young man died in the cave or was brought there by fellow tribesmen and was then buried there.

The British Isles have been occupied by several different human species over the past one million years.

The earliest evidence of human occupation in Britain was found at Happisburgh, Norfolk. Stone tools and footprints discovered there have been dated as being about 900,000 years old. The people who made them may have been members of Homo antecessor, an early predecessor of the current Homo sapiens.

The oldest human fossils in Britain were found at Boxgrove, West Sussex. The find consists of two teeth and a piece of lower leg bone that had been gnawed by a large carnivore and which probably belonged to a species known as Homo heidelbergensis, another early forebear of Homo sapiens.

Neanderthal fossils thought to be around 400,000 years old have been found at Swanscombe, Kent. Later Neanderthal remains, dated at about 225,000 years old, have been uncovered at Pontnewydd, in south-east Wales.

Neanderthals became extinct about 40,000 years ago, and the first members of Homo sapiens are thought to have begun visiting Britain around this time. The first continuous occupation did not begin until around 11,000 years ago.

Around 8,000 years ago Britain became an island when the land bridge with Europe - Doggerland, now beneath the North Sea - was inundated, leaving those members of our species who were then visiting our shores as founders of the British people.

The first stone age farmers arrived 6,000 years ago and settled in growing numbers across the country. This period coincides with the construction of the first enclosures and henges, which culminated in the erection of giant stone rings and rows at sites such as Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury in Wiltshire.

The Roman conquest of Britain, which began in 43AD under Emperor Claudius, is regarded by convention as the point when prehistoric Britain came to an end.

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His antiquity has since ensured his importance to historians and scientists who study how the British Isles were populated - a topic that went viral last week when geneticists published new research that showed the young man would have had black hair, blue eyes - and dark skin.

A great many widely held - but incorrect - assumptions about the expected pale-skinned, fair-featured nature of Britain's founders were promptly overturned, to the rage of some commentators and the joy of many. "I just wish I knew about you when I was growing up and people asked me where I was 'really' from. North London, bruv," the Labour MP David Lammy tweeted.

The news was certainly intriguing, for apart from revealing some home truths about the implications of how skin colour can change over time, the new research underlines some essential and unexpected features about the ancestry of the British people. According to one geneticist involved in the latest study of Cheddar Man, Mark Thomas of University College London (UCL), it is now clear that about 10% of our genes come from the mesolithic hunter-gatherer folk, of which Cheddar Man was a member.

Mesolithic land bridge

"That does not mean that 10% of the British population today is descended directly from him," cautioned Thomas. "It means that the average person in Britain today carries around 10% of the genes of these ancient hunter-gatherers."

Thus the DNA of Cheddar Man shows there is a 10,000-year-old unbroken genetic lineage from people who inhabited Britain long before agriculture reached our shores to British men and women of today. We are not a nation of farmers (or shopkeepers, for that matter) but can trace our ancestry to nomadic hunters, who - 300 generations ago - carved antlers to make harpoons for fishing, used bows and arrows, and trained dogs that would have assisted them in the hunt for animals such as red deer, aurochs and boar, as well as protecting their masters from competing predators such as wolves.

Cheddar Man was a member of a population of nomadic hunters who thrived during the middle stone age, also known as the mesolithic age, about 10,000 years ago. These were the western European hunter-gatherers, whose remains have been found in Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary. Crucially, the DNA of these people also shows they had dark skin and blue eyes and were similar, genetically, to Cheddar Man.

At this time, Britain was a peninsula of northern Europe, linked by an area of land that now forms the seabed of the southern North Sea and the Channel. As a result, nomadic people, often following migrating animals, undertook frequent visits and made the most of the British landscape, which was then flourishing in the wake of the retreat of the glaciers that had covered the country a few thousand years earlier.

But change was at hand. Like the rest of the world, Europe was continuing to warm, and ice caps were melting, raising sea levels. Around 8,000 years ago, the last land connection between Britain and Europe - a stretch of terrain called Doggerland, which linked north Norfolk with Holland - was inundated. Britain became an island, and the few thousand individuals who were then roaming its forest and heaths in search of food were isolated. By accident, these hunter-gatherers became the founding mothers and fathers of Britain.

It is an intriguing scenario which raises a host of questions. If these dark-haired, dark-skinned people were the nation's founders, what happened to our complexions in the intervening millennia? What triggered the emergence of the pale aspect of the typical Brit?

Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London traces the cause to the first farmers who reached our shores around 6,000 years ago, as agriculture spread eastwards after its birth in the Middle East several thousand years earlier. "These farming people would have had relatively poor diets, based only on one or two cereal crops, and would have lacked vitamin D. By contrast, hunter-gatherers, although few in number, probably had very healthy diets with lots of fish and liver that were rich in vitamin D. Cheddar Man had very healthy teeth, which suggests a good diet, for example."

Diets low in vitamin D would have had an impact on these early farmers, who would have developed soft bones, skeletal deformities and other problems. However, vitamin D is also created underneath our skin in response to sunlight. As a result, nutritionally deprived farming folk evolved lighter skin in order to boost their vitamin D, while gene variants for dark skin disappeared. Genes for lighter skin were brought to our shores by these farming people.

"Farming may have provided poorer diets in those days but it also allowed far greater numbers of people to live per acre of land compared to those who lived as hunter-gatherers," added Stringer. "In other words, they had the numbers and so, once farming became established in Britain, the genes for lighter skin would have taken over the population."

The existence of blue eyes, also revealed by the Cheddar Man geneticists, is more difficult to explain. "Using classic genetic surveys, it was thought that blue eyes first appeared in humans between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago," said Thomas. "Now studies of ancient DNA are showing it was already well established in some populations."

How it became established is not known, however, nor is it clear that it conferred any evolutionary advantage on those blessed with blue eyes.

"The continent was awash with migrations, and it may be that the trait was just picked up and passed on to us," added Thomas.

This last point is also crucial. Ten or 20 years ago, many historians and archaeologists argued against the concept that new fashions and technologies, from metalworking to agriculture, were passed on as ideas and were not imported directly. "Genetics has shown this is simply not the case," added Thomas. "It is now very clear that migration has been the standard agent for bringing about cultural change."

This point was endorsed by Dr Richard Bates of St Andrews University. "When we do more of this kind of deep genetics, on other ancient remains, we are going to find an incredible diversity among the people of this time," he said.

Our predecessors moved around a lot more, he added, and were able to move far greater distances than we have given them credit for until now.

"It is only when farming arrived that we became sedentary, and when that happened we also got the concept of land ownership and with it the idea of defence - and in its wake came conflicts," said Bates. "It took generations to occur, and it happened in many other parts of the world. Nevertheless, it was the biggest social change that ever affected our species. The story of Cheddar Man gives us a feeling for the profundity of that change."
Topics

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Cheddar Man changes the way we think about our ancestors

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In 1903 workmen digging a drainage trench in Gough's Cave in the Cheddar Gorge, in Somerset, uncovered the remains of a young man, sealed under a stalagmite. The figure, feet curled up underneath him, was small, at about 5ft 5in, and would have weighed around 10 stone when he died in his early 20s.

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'GCSE pupils to be taught that the nation's earliest inhabitants were Africans who were in Britain before the English' - Daily Mail Online (2016)

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'GCSE pupils to be taught that the nation's earliest inhabitants were Africans who were in Britain before the English' - Daily Mail Online (2016)

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GCSE students are to be taught that some of our nation's earliest inhabitants were Africans who arrived here long before the English.

The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the extraordinary rewriting of our island's history - the politically correct work of a Marxist academic - will be offered to thousands of history students throughout England from September.

Its creators claim the course addresses the 'white male-dominated' view of history - but it has outraged some of Britain's most eminent thinkers.

Booker and Nobel prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul said: 'Once again political correctness is distorting our history and the education of our children.'

And historian Sir Roy Strong, author of The Story Of Britain, said: 'This stands history on its head, projecting back on to the past something that isn't true.'

The 'Africans in Britain' quotation is the opening line of a key book on the course reading list by a Marxist historian and refers to a Roman legion of North Africans briefly stationed on Hadrian's Wall in the 3rd Century, before the arrival of Anglo-Saxons.

Up to 500 'Aurelian' Moors - named in honour of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, popularised in the film Gladiator - manned a fort near Carlisle.

But there is no evidence they ever settled there.

Offered by the Oxford and Cambridge examination board (OCR) and approved for use in schools, the course literature states: 'This course will enable students to learn how the movement of people - European, African, Asian - to and from these islands has shaped the story of this nation for thousands of years.

'The history of migration is the story of Britain: in 1984, Peter Fryer wrote, "There were Africans in Britain before the English came." '

The course - Migration To Britain c. 1,000 to c. 2010 - was created with academics from the Black and Asian Studies Association but has been condemned as 'pro-immigration propaganda' at a time when the subject is especially sensitive.

Last night, eminent military historian and author Antony Beevor said: 'Migration is a very valid area to study, but if it's a question of rewriting history to bolster the morale of certain sections of the population, rather than a scrupulous attitude towards facts, then that is a total distortion and it's outrageous.'

Sir Roy Strong said: 'The only Africans who came here were a few with the Romans who came and then left! I find it disturbing that our children should be taught something that is clearly designed to feed into contemporary problems rather than tell our island's story properly.'

V. S. Naipaul added: 'This absurd supposition of Africans inhabiting Britain before the English only goes to show how our once esteemed centres of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, have been insidiously eroded by a dangerous dogma that, very like IS today, wrought misery and havoc in Russia, China and the Eastern bloc, where for all practical purposes it has failed.'

Although the new course takes its starting point as the Middle Ages, one section is headed 'Population diversity in England before 1066'.

Professor Alan Smithers, of Buckingham University, a specialist adviser to the Commons Education Committee, said: 'This seems to be aimed more at indoctrination than education. It is dangerous because a cohesive society depends on an authentic shared view of history.'

And Campaign for Real Education chairman Chris McGovern said: 'The country is being sold down the river by the politically correct brigade and national identity sacrificed for minority groups to feel included. It's pro-immigration propaganda.'

But Professor Mark Ormrod, of York University, one of the historians researching the new topic, said: 'It is an outstanding example of how a long view of history helps us to understand and to find a place for ourselves in contemporary society.

'Our research project shows how, for example, in the late Middle Ages, no one was more than ten miles from an immigrant.'

Mike Goddard, head of history at OCR, said: 'There is no political bias. The GCSE will present facts. It is not pushing any particular argument.'

And Martin Spafford, of BASA's education committee, stressed that 'students will hear both positive and negative views about migration. It's been a controversial subject and we don't shy away from that'.

The Department for Education said: 'The law is crystal clear - all political discussions in schools should be unbiased and balanced.'

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GCSE pupils taught Africans were in Britain before the English

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GCSE students are to be taught that some of our nation's earliest inhabitants were Africans who arrived here long before the English. The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the extraordinary rewriting of our island's history - the politically correct work of a Marxist academic - will be offered to thousands of history students throughout England from September.

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'Selma star David Oyelowo: I had to leave Britain to have an acting career' - Radio Times (2015)

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'Selma star David Oyelowo: I had to leave Britain to have an acting career' - Radio Times (2015)

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David Oyelowo is riding high at the moment as the star of Oscar-nominated historical drama Selma, in which he plays Martin Luther King.

And he says a lack of roles for black actors in Britain meant he had little choice but to make the move stateside in order to further his career.

Speaking in this week's Radio Times, Oyelowo says "We make period dramas [in Britain], but there are almost never black people in them, even though we've been on these shores for hundreds of years,

"I remember taking a historical drama with a black figure at its centre to a British executive with greenlight power, and what they said was that if it's not Jane Austen or Dickens, the audience don't understand.

"And I thought 'OK - you are stopping people having a context for the country they live in and you are marginalising me. I can't live with that. So I've got to get out.

"There's a string of black British actors passing through where I live now in LA. We don't have Downton Abbey, or Call the Midwife, or Peaky Blinders, or the 50th iteration of pride and Prejudice. We're not in those. And it's frustrating because it doesn't have to be that way. I shouldn't have to feel like I have to move to America to have a notable career."
Read Radio Times' review of Selma here Read the full interview in this week's Radio Times, on sale from the 3rd February

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Selma star David Oyelowo: I had to leave Britain to have an acting career

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David Oyelowo is riding high at the moment as the star of Oscar-nominated historical drama Selma, in which he plays Martin Luther King. And he says a lack of roles for black actors in Britain meant he had little choice but to make the move stateside in order to further his career.

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'To Sir, with Love' - Sideny Poitier (1967)

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'To Sir, with Love' - Sideny Poitier (1967)

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TO SIR, WITH LOVE (1967) – International Trailer

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'In the Heat of the Night' (1967) - Sidney Poitier

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'In the Heat of the Night' (1967) - Sidney Poitier

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In The Heat Of The Night (1967) | Official Trailer | MGM Studios

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'Small Island - Naomi Harris, David Oyelowo, Ruth Wilson, Benedict Cumberbatch and others (2009)

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'Small Island - Naomi Harris, David Oyelowo, Ruth Wilson, Benedict Cumberbatch and others (2009)

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'Queen of Katwe' - David Oyelowo, Madina Nalwanga and Lupita Nyong'o (2016)

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'Queen of Katwe' - David Oyelowo, Madina Nalwanga and Lupita Nyong'o (2016)

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Queen of Katwe Movie CLIP - Eight Moves (2016) - David Oyelowo Movie

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'Come Away' - David Oyelowo and Angelina Jolie

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'Come Away' - David Oyelowo and Angelina Jolie

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Come Away | UK Trailer | 2021 | Angelina Jolie | Family Adventure

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The lack of recognition and reward for black actors in the film industry is a long-running scandal but debate on the topic significantly intensified in 2016 when the Academy Awards voters failed to nominate the black talent in Straight Outta Compton and Creed (both 2015), two critically acclaimed narratives about the African American experience. That Sylvester Stallone was nominated in the best supporting actor category for Creed, while Michael B. Jordan 's stellar turn as the lead was overlooked only rubbed salt into the wound. Many industry players spoke out and boycotted the ceremony, with the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite flooding social media.

As Viola Davis said in her speech last year when she became the first African American woman to win the Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama series: "The only thing that separates women of colour from everyone else is opportunity... You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there."

#OscarsSoWhite would suggest that this lack of opportunity extends more generally. If the situation is bad in the States, what does it say about the environment in the UK that a host of our own black actors have left to work in Hollywood? As David Oyelowo, who moved to Los Angeles in 2007, has said: "If I looked like Benedict [Cumberbatch] or Eddie Redmayne, I could do the films they have done that are being celebrated now. But myself, Idris Elba and Chiwetel Ejiofor had to gain our success elsewhere because there is not a desire to tell stories with black protagonists in a heroic context within British film."

It's clear, then, that from an actor's perspective, the UK film industry has failed to make enough films that reflect and/or represent the multicultural makeup of the country - estimated by the 2011 census to be 7.5 percent Asian or Asian British, and 3.3 percent black or black British - or do enough to increase the diversity of its workforce. But to what extent is our understanding based on the assumed knowledge and incomplete analysis inherent in the imperfect and patchy existing histories of UK film? And how can we improve our understanding in such a way that, over the long-term, the record of ethnic diversity in film can be transformed?

The BFI is undertaking a research project to provide concrete data that will offer some clarity and context for these questions. Starting with a sample drawn from the most recent 10 years, from 1 January 2006 to the end of August 2016, a list of UK films has been identified in order to establish the proportional number of black actors in lead and named character roles.

In this context, 'UK films' were defined as fiction films of 40 minutes or longer length that were released theatrically in the UK by a member of the Film Distributors' Association and produced or funded in full or in part by a company based in the UK or films certified as British by the BFI's Cultural Test. This means that as well as obvious candidates such as Adulthood (2008), the data also includes the likes of American Gangster (2007) and Selma (2014). It is hoped that this sample will provide a substantial indicator of the true state of diversity in the UK film industry for film historians, critics, academics and researchers to interrogate, providing a catalyst for change and improvement. The BFI's film-funding, policy-making and cultural competencies make it the best organisation to provide an overview of the landscape of film development, production, distribution, reception and heritage.

Of the 1,172 British films released from 2006-16, 476 featured at least one black actor in a lead or supporting role, around 40 per cent of the total. Many of these actors have been relatively prolific throughout their careers, with 70 of the 897 actors appearing in five or more UK films. However, when you break these figures down to investigate how substantial these roles are, the picture changes considerably. Of around 45,000 roles credited to actors in the UK in this period, only 218 were lead roles played by British black actors, which means only 0.5 per cent of all the credited roles were black leads. In fact, you would only need to watch 47 films to catch 50 percent of all these performances.

Only 14 actors from the sample have played more than two lead roles in this period, five of whom are women. Furthermore, only four black actors appear in our list of the 100 most prolific actors in UK films over the last decade - Noel Clarke, Nonso Anozie, Jumayn Hunter and Ashley Walters. All of this seems to confirm Oyelowo's assertion that it is nearly impossible to play a black British lead protagonist in the cinema.

Looking at the types of roles black actors might play in films, it is perhaps unsurprising to note that the genre least likely to feature black actors is the historical/period drama, with around 80 per cent of the films in this period failing to feature a single black actor with a named character. Animation and romance are also underrepresented, with 79 percent of UK animation features and 69 percent of romantic encounters not involving any black actors.

Even in the most prolific genres with the most films produced in this period - horror, drama, comedy - the majority of titles do not feature a single black actor in a named character role. On the other side of this spectrum, 64 percent of UK crime films have found roles for black actors, with 15 percent of all films featuring black actors in this period focused on crime narratives.

Where black actors are being cast, they are mainly in stereotypical roles or stories that pigeonhole them and limit the range and depth of possible representation. The subjects that recur most frequently where a film has a more diverse cast, are slavery, racism, apartheid, colonialism, crime and gangs, with 12 Years a Slave (2013), Selma (2014) and this year's Brotherhood all making the list of films that have cast the most black actors. It could be argued that where there are black roles, they are telling us nothing new - how great would it be to see more black British horror stars or romantic leads?

Is there really an assertion that audiences aren't interested in diverse representations or narratives? In terms of box office there appears to be no suggestion that these factors affect revenue. On average, there is less likely to be a black lead in a film with a higher budget (£10m or more) - nine percent of higher-budget films in this time period had a black lead, against 18 percent in films with a budget of less than £500,000. Lower-budget films are more likely to have lower box-office takings (due to their lower marketing budgets etc), so though the data may suggest black leads are less likely to result in higher box-office takings, those figures are likely to be misleading as that's probably the result of them having less financial backing to succeed in the first place.

The issue here is how to increase the diversity in our narratives in order to appeal to audience tastes we are failing to serve. Noel Clarke is highest on our list of most prolific black actors in the UK, with eight lead roles to his name, and he also writes, directs and produces many of the films in which he stars. His latest offering, Brotherhood, completes a trilogy of films where he has done just that. Since its release at the end of August, it has made more than £3.3m at the box office, dispelling the myth that there is no audience for more diverse stories.

Noel has often spoken about how he feels "massively disrespected" by the film industry. He talks about having to take on all these roles in order to get his stories on screen and give the opportunity for diverse audiences to see themselves represented within them: "Everything I create will always be diverse because that's what I see, that's my life, that's how I grew up ... [my audience] can look at people like Stormzy and Tinie [Tempah] and Dizzee [Rascal] and they can think, 'We can achieve.' When I was growing up I could barely look at anyone who made me believe I could achieve."

This article originally appeared in Sight & Sound magazine

This research is still at a very early stage, with more work to do to provide a larger, more detailed sample of data. What the research doesn't encompass is television and theatre, only providing a snapshot of the landscape of acting roles in the UK for black actors. The BFI is looking at forming partnerships with other organisations in these areas to continue to enhance the data and our understanding of these issues across the arts.

Representation seems to be the key to forging changes in our film industry. We need to stop seeing 'diversity' as something to aspire to but recognise that we live in a diverse society and capture it as such. To slightly adapt a comment Geena Davis made at her symposium about gender in film at last year's BFI London Film Festival: if you can see it, you can be it. This data paints a true picture of diversity in our recent moving image history and, as David Oyelowo asserted at this year's Black Star symposium at the LFF, enables us to stop talking about diversity and instead "start to do diversity".

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Infographic: The true picture for black actors in the UK film industry

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The lack of recognition and reward for black actors in the film industry is a long-running scandal but debate on the topic significantly intensified in 2016 when the Academy Awards voters failed to nominate the black talent in Straight Outta Compton and Creed (both 2015), two critically acclaimed narratives about the African American experience.

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'Black Edwardians' (Jeffrey Green, 1999)

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'Black Edwardians' (Jeffrey Green, 1999)

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Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain 1901-1914

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This study reveals the presence of black people in all walks of life all over the British Isles at the height of the imperialist era - challenging conventional views on imperialism, racism and British social history. Historians of British society have largely ignored this most visible of minorities,…

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Julian Fellowes says theatre needs more diversity, but not necessarily in period productions (Herald Scotland)

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Julian Fellowes says theatre needs more diversity, but not necessarily in period productions (Herald Scotland)

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Julian Fellowes feels "quite strongly" that there needs to be more diversity on the stage, but that for his production of Half A Sixpence only a white cast would be appropriate because of the time and place in which it is set.

He said that for period dramas, like his West End musical, it would be untruthful to cast ethnic minorities because it is set more than 100 years ago.

The Downton Abbey creator said that for contemporary theatre, though, there needs to be a focus on more adventurous casting, following a report commissioned by Andrew Lloyd Webber last year into the "hideously white" British theatre industry.

Julian Fellowes (Ian West/PA)

Julian, 67, told The Stage: "I feel quite strongly that ethnic minorities don't get a sufficient look-in.

"The way to get a better balance in our artistic community is in casting. We need much more adventurous casting.

"When you are doing a modern drama there is absolutely no reason why anyone can't play most of the parts.

"In every contemporary drama, there is a completely realistic option of a much more variegated cast than we are usually being given."

But he said that for Half A Sixpence, which is based on the 1905 novel Kipps by HG Wells, to have anything other than an all-white cast would be unrealistic.

Julian, who included a storyline featuring a black character in TV period drama Downton Abbey, said: "You can't make something untruthful. My feeling is about contemporary drama and there is absolutely no reason (why there shouldn't be diverse casting).

"But Sixpence is set in 1900 in a seaside town. You're in a different territory."

Julian Fellowes (Anthony Devlin/PA)

Julian said the Shakespearean character Othello has previously been played by white actors although now "it isn't right any more" to do so, and that the overall consensus would be to welcome a black actor portraying Henry V, particularly on camera.

He said: "I think at times you have more latitude on the stage than you do on camera - particularly in the great classical roles."

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Julian Fellowes says theatre needs more diversity, but not necessarily in period productions

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Julian Fellowes feels "quite strongly" that there needs to be more diversity on the stage, but that for his production of Half A Sixpence only a white cast would be appropriate because of the time and place in which it is set.

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Akala: Why we need more black, working class period drama (Kirstie Grant, BBC)

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Akala: Why we need more black, working class period drama (Kirstie Grant, BBC)

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Akala: Why we need more black, working class period drama

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Akala speaks to Radio 1 Newsbeat about filling the gaps in historical fiction.