Oral History Interview - Mr Aubrey Rouse
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Audio file
Production date
15/07/1998
Object number
2016.34
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Audio recording of an oral history interview with Mr Aubrey Rouse, who was born in St Kitts and moved to England in 1960. They discuss their Caribbean background and racism experienced in the UK.
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Cassette Tape
Digital file (.wav)
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INTERVIEW WITH MR. AUBREY ROUSE
Q. Mr. Rouse, can you tell me what year you came to England?
Aubrey Rouse (AR). 1960
Q. Thank you. I have a set of questions, which I want to put to you. Can you tell me a little about your life in the West Indies before you came: what for example did your parents do for a living?
AR. Well they were in building work and I worked at the local factory where they make sugar and I worked on the transport division. I left that and travelled to the United States before I came to this country.
Q. What island did you come from?
AR. I came from St. Kitts
Q. Were you enjoying life there at the time?
AR. Yes, I would say so. I mean, of course, as you would realise that most of anything, which you are using, or you are seeing in those islands are marked made in somewhere else. We used to be anxious to know about other pans of the world. That’s why many people travel.
Q. Was there a history of people leaving the island, for example to go into the army? Were any of your family involved with the British army?
AR. I can’t remember any, but quite a few of them left for other places. In their opinion. Life might be better.
Q. Can you remember any proverbs from the Caribbean that helped to guide you through life?
AR. Well. I remember at school, speaking particularly about this country when they used to say ‘England is a pleasant place for those who are rich and high. But it’s a cruel place for such poor folks as I’. Some people say they wouldn’t travel for that.
Q. But you did travel. What prompted you to come to England’? What was it that made you decide that you were going to give this country a try?
AR. Well. The sugar factor at home was our main support. And sugar was as profitable as it is today. Main’ of us did very well during the crop season, which lasted roughly eight months, from late January through to August. After that people did repairs. Or got on to other things, which you had to do. The sugar crop was the main support of the island. After that started going downwards, people got fed tip with not having much to do and we decide to travel. That was one of my reasons, as well as a niggling idea that I ought to move on. You know when you are at a place working too long and you are not one hundred per cent happy, you feel that you could move on.
Q. So did you have much of a sense of coining to the mother country?
AR. No. not really. We would have preferred to go elsewhere. An opportunity came that I could travel to the United States, and I took it straight away. Everything happened in a rush. We started preparing on a Saturday morning and by the following Tuesday we were leaving.
Q. So you went to the States first and then you came to England?
AR. Yes.
Q. What made you leave the States for England?
AR. We went there on a contract, and when the contract was up you had to go home. You could return again. Everything depended on the way you lived whilst you were there. We signed up to do agricultural work, fruits, vegetables, tomatoes and so on, that’s what we looked after. When we went back home things wasn’t as bright as before and we decided to travel again and England was one of the places we could have come, and although they say ‘a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush’, we decided to travel.
Q. What do you most remember about the journey to Britain?
AR. Well, when we came on the boat. We had a rough time for the ten days sailing. Last port Montserrat, first port Southampton. And crossing that body of water as you can see on the map. Many of the other islanders were not very kind, some of them were very rude in the true sense of the word, but we got here without any body being desperately hurt or anything, if you know what I mean.
Q. So. What you are saying is that some of the other islanders were not very friendly?
AR. As someone, who had travelled before and had me people from other islands, I had a way of getting on with almost anybody. But some people are alright to travel with, some are not.
Q. So what kind of expectations did you have?
AR. Well. I came to work and to go home again.
Q. Did you have an idea of when the time would be right, or the conditions under which you would be doing so?
AR. Well, for me personally, I decided that when I thought of going home, it would be to live the way I wanted to. Not to be doing the same work as I used to do before. But recession hit the whole world and things get harder. I am not against going home; we still make preparations, but you know we can’t foretell what’s going to happen the following day.
Q. When you got here, how easy was it to find work in England?
AR. I came to an industrial area in Berkshire, and I live within 200 yards of the biggest industrial area in the country. I came here on a Saturday, and had a job by the following Tuesday, which wasn’t bad compared with what I heard from other people.
Q. Once you found work, how easy was it to get promotion within your job? If that was your ambition?
AR. Well, my mind was to work so that I could maintain myself, and I could lend a hand to relatives I had back in the West Indies. I didn’t find that difficult to do, but on the promotion side, I don’t think that it was that easy. It wasn’t.
Q. What difficulties did you face?
AR. Well, you had instances where you would start working before other individuals, and they would come in and learn the job off you and then after a while they were in charge, which would be unfair to the other person.
Q. So did you move jobs often as a result of this?
AR. I met a lot of that, and I might have moved jobs, but I don’t think I directly changed because of that. My last change was that a man whom I knew, and we worked together for more than six years after he was promoted and he was making it difficult for those who worked under him, and that was one of my reasons for leaving.
Q. What was the housing situation like when you arrived?
AR. Awful, awful. Well we make a record for the number of fourteen men one woman and us living in a three-bedroom house. That just give you an idea of what accommodation was like in those days.
Q. Where was this?
AR. In Berkshire.
Q. I always think that when people come out of the Caribbean, that they are not that colour conscious. In Britain, were there any particular incidents which made you realise that colour mattered?
AR. Yes. I got on a bus one night. We were at the end of the queue, the bus was really loaded, and the conductor said to us — myself and another black person — that there was no room on the bus, he can’t take any more passengers. No one got off, but passengers got on, so we went on as well. And, doing our shopping one Saturday, it was our turn in the queue to be served with groceries, the man in that particular grocery store who was to serve us and went to an English woman who said ‘it isn’t my turn, it’s their turn’, and he passed us and went down and the people said no it’s not their turn its who was at the head of the queue. Well. I was urged to go and to see the manager. But I thought I’d forget about it and go somewhere else.
Q. Is that how you coped with that kind of petty prejudice? Where you went somewhere else where you were better received?
AR. Yes in most cases.
Q. How conscious, how aware were you of the differences among white people that after a while you became aware that some are Scotch, sonic are English, and some are Irish. Were you aware of differences? And did you recognise any differences in temperament and how they related to you?
AR. Yes after a while, by the accents you could tell who was who. As I said, really I get on with most people, but one bloke I worked with was outstanding. He was very kind and friendly, but I’m talking about the 60’s.
Q. How much social mixing was there at the time between black and white?
AR. Not a lot really. Even on the bus, they see you coming and they would try to prevent you from sitting next to them, just with the movement you could see what they mean but they wouldn’t tell YOU.
Q. What kind of places did you go for entertainment, and were there white people there as well?
AR. Well, that was very limited in that part of the country. Not by law, but we as West Indians realised the way they were and would buy a radiogram to play our own music, and we would have it in the house, and we enjoy ourselves. Then again we were limited again with that, with too much noise and being disturbed.
Q. How well did you get on with the local women — the English women?
AR. Apart from those I met in the church, or those that I worked with, I wasn’t close with any of them, because I came here with a view to send for my partner from home, which I did.
Q. So you entered Southampton, worked in Berkshire. What brought you to Hackney?
AR. I got married in this country and the marriage broke down, so to be on the peaceful side, I travelled again.
Q. As you settled down here did you take part in any of those saving schemes, such as pardner hand etc?
AR. For me pardner hand is a dirty word, since back home, and the same luck happened here. I’m not despising it, but for me personally it is a non-starter. Some people are only interested in holding theirs, but to pay out, it causes trouble. A lot of people are that way; they are only interested when it is their time to get it.
Q. Although you have partly answered this question, what kinds of things did you do for domestic entertainment? Was it only music, or were there parties and food?
AR. I could cook before I travelled from home. I was the oldest in the home in the West Indies, and when my parents had to leave home in the mornings, I would look after my younger brothers and sisters and go to school afterwards. So, I had no problems with that.
Q. You mentioned travelling with other islanders, but when you came to Britain, how much did your sense of identity change? Did you stop seeing yourself as coming from a particular island?
AR. We keep in touch with our compatriots from home, and on certain Sundays they used to come over or we would go over, but we had friends from different islands.
Q. But you mainly mixed with those people from your own island is that what you are saying?
AR. Not really, because those people from my own island was few and far between in Berkshire. I knew the Jamaicans from the 1950s because I worked with them in the States, but as you would realise that there are good and bad everywhere. I have very good friends from all over the Caribbean. We must not leave out the Bahamas. They regard themselves as Americans. They don’t mix easily with the other islanders. In American, when they were in the same came, a referee would do very well there; lie would always get work, because they were always fighting.
Q. You spoke earlier on about being the eldest in the family, so you must have a very good sense of how families operate. Are there major differences about how families operate here in England and back in the West Indies?
AR. Certainly here, the youngsters say to their parents, that they didn’t ask to be born, you must have heard that. On the other hand we decide we have the right to look after our parents, and I can’t see many West Indians who would be proud to put their families in homes, or their elders in homes, just because they could take them to a home. They would rather look after them. I still feel that the young should look after the aged. The young ones seem to be drifting to the other side. Their attitude is that it is their life to enjoy. We think we should look after our parents because they looked after us first.
Q. Do you find that people here have different attitudes about their children from those back in the Caribbean?
AR. Yes, I had a neighbour and you could hear her regularly asking her son to leave. She would rather have tum out. In the West Indies, many parents don’t mind you living with them up to when you are forty. That is the main difference.
Q. Again, looking at the younger generation. We talked a little bit about the differences in their attitude to family, but what other differences do you notice in the second and third generations of Black Britons?
AR. I think you would have to preach it to those who are born here that they should adapt certain ways of life. At home they are not as forceful as they are here, you still have a bit of control at home. I tell my children that when I was almost twenty I used to still get licks, and that is true. I could not think of hitting them when they get to that stage. Or even hitting them at all. For example one of my daughters was a little unruly, she was still under twelve and she used to ride her bike on the pavement, and although we spoke to her several times she would still do it even though she promised she wouldn’t. So one day I told her that the only thing that was going to stop her riding on the pavement was if I took off the wheels. That was it. No lashes.
Q. What about their attitude to work, it is often said that the people who came first were very hard working. Do you think that there is a difference with the younger generation?
AR. Yes. I would agree with that. On average the older generation were harder workers. If they had parents who would talk to them and explain the difference in life many would do better. Parents allow the children to do what they like, even before the age of five. When you have children behaving like that, well almost anything can happen.
Q. Mr. Rouse, can you tell me what year you came to England?
Aubrey Rouse (AR). 1960
Q. Thank you. I have a set of questions, which I want to put to you. Can you tell me a little about your life in the West Indies before you came: what for example did your parents do for a living?
AR. Well they were in building work and I worked at the local factory where they make sugar and I worked on the transport division. I left that and travelled to the United States before I came to this country.
Q. What island did you come from?
AR. I came from St. Kitts
Q. Were you enjoying life there at the time?
AR. Yes, I would say so. I mean, of course, as you would realise that most of anything, which you are using, or you are seeing in those islands are marked made in somewhere else. We used to be anxious to know about other pans of the world. That’s why many people travel.
Q. Was there a history of people leaving the island, for example to go into the army? Were any of your family involved with the British army?
AR. I can’t remember any, but quite a few of them left for other places. In their opinion. Life might be better.
Q. Can you remember any proverbs from the Caribbean that helped to guide you through life?
AR. Well. I remember at school, speaking particularly about this country when they used to say ‘England is a pleasant place for those who are rich and high. But it’s a cruel place for such poor folks as I’. Some people say they wouldn’t travel for that.
Q. But you did travel. What prompted you to come to England’? What was it that made you decide that you were going to give this country a try?
AR. Well. The sugar factor at home was our main support. And sugar was as profitable as it is today. Main’ of us did very well during the crop season, which lasted roughly eight months, from late January through to August. After that people did repairs. Or got on to other things, which you had to do. The sugar crop was the main support of the island. After that started going downwards, people got fed tip with not having much to do and we decide to travel. That was one of my reasons, as well as a niggling idea that I ought to move on. You know when you are at a place working too long and you are not one hundred per cent happy, you feel that you could move on.
Q. So did you have much of a sense of coining to the mother country?
AR. No. not really. We would have preferred to go elsewhere. An opportunity came that I could travel to the United States, and I took it straight away. Everything happened in a rush. We started preparing on a Saturday morning and by the following Tuesday we were leaving.
Q. So you went to the States first and then you came to England?
AR. Yes.
Q. What made you leave the States for England?
AR. We went there on a contract, and when the contract was up you had to go home. You could return again. Everything depended on the way you lived whilst you were there. We signed up to do agricultural work, fruits, vegetables, tomatoes and so on, that’s what we looked after. When we went back home things wasn’t as bright as before and we decided to travel again and England was one of the places we could have come, and although they say ‘a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush’, we decided to travel.
Q. What do you most remember about the journey to Britain?
AR. Well, when we came on the boat. We had a rough time for the ten days sailing. Last port Montserrat, first port Southampton. And crossing that body of water as you can see on the map. Many of the other islanders were not very kind, some of them were very rude in the true sense of the word, but we got here without any body being desperately hurt or anything, if you know what I mean.
Q. So. What you are saying is that some of the other islanders were not very friendly?
AR. As someone, who had travelled before and had me people from other islands, I had a way of getting on with almost anybody. But some people are alright to travel with, some are not.
Q. So what kind of expectations did you have?
AR. Well. I came to work and to go home again.
Q. Did you have an idea of when the time would be right, or the conditions under which you would be doing so?
AR. Well, for me personally, I decided that when I thought of going home, it would be to live the way I wanted to. Not to be doing the same work as I used to do before. But recession hit the whole world and things get harder. I am not against going home; we still make preparations, but you know we can’t foretell what’s going to happen the following day.
Q. When you got here, how easy was it to find work in England?
AR. I came to an industrial area in Berkshire, and I live within 200 yards of the biggest industrial area in the country. I came here on a Saturday, and had a job by the following Tuesday, which wasn’t bad compared with what I heard from other people.
Q. Once you found work, how easy was it to get promotion within your job? If that was your ambition?
AR. Well, my mind was to work so that I could maintain myself, and I could lend a hand to relatives I had back in the West Indies. I didn’t find that difficult to do, but on the promotion side, I don’t think that it was that easy. It wasn’t.
Q. What difficulties did you face?
AR. Well, you had instances where you would start working before other individuals, and they would come in and learn the job off you and then after a while they were in charge, which would be unfair to the other person.
Q. So did you move jobs often as a result of this?
AR. I met a lot of that, and I might have moved jobs, but I don’t think I directly changed because of that. My last change was that a man whom I knew, and we worked together for more than six years after he was promoted and he was making it difficult for those who worked under him, and that was one of my reasons for leaving.
Q. What was the housing situation like when you arrived?
AR. Awful, awful. Well we make a record for the number of fourteen men one woman and us living in a three-bedroom house. That just give you an idea of what accommodation was like in those days.
Q. Where was this?
AR. In Berkshire.
Q. I always think that when people come out of the Caribbean, that they are not that colour conscious. In Britain, were there any particular incidents which made you realise that colour mattered?
AR. Yes. I got on a bus one night. We were at the end of the queue, the bus was really loaded, and the conductor said to us — myself and another black person — that there was no room on the bus, he can’t take any more passengers. No one got off, but passengers got on, so we went on as well. And, doing our shopping one Saturday, it was our turn in the queue to be served with groceries, the man in that particular grocery store who was to serve us and went to an English woman who said ‘it isn’t my turn, it’s their turn’, and he passed us and went down and the people said no it’s not their turn its who was at the head of the queue. Well. I was urged to go and to see the manager. But I thought I’d forget about it and go somewhere else.
Q. Is that how you coped with that kind of petty prejudice? Where you went somewhere else where you were better received?
AR. Yes in most cases.
Q. How conscious, how aware were you of the differences among white people that after a while you became aware that some are Scotch, sonic are English, and some are Irish. Were you aware of differences? And did you recognise any differences in temperament and how they related to you?
AR. Yes after a while, by the accents you could tell who was who. As I said, really I get on with most people, but one bloke I worked with was outstanding. He was very kind and friendly, but I’m talking about the 60’s.
Q. How much social mixing was there at the time between black and white?
AR. Not a lot really. Even on the bus, they see you coming and they would try to prevent you from sitting next to them, just with the movement you could see what they mean but they wouldn’t tell YOU.
Q. What kind of places did you go for entertainment, and were there white people there as well?
AR. Well, that was very limited in that part of the country. Not by law, but we as West Indians realised the way they were and would buy a radiogram to play our own music, and we would have it in the house, and we enjoy ourselves. Then again we were limited again with that, with too much noise and being disturbed.
Q. How well did you get on with the local women — the English women?
AR. Apart from those I met in the church, or those that I worked with, I wasn’t close with any of them, because I came here with a view to send for my partner from home, which I did.
Q. So you entered Southampton, worked in Berkshire. What brought you to Hackney?
AR. I got married in this country and the marriage broke down, so to be on the peaceful side, I travelled again.
Q. As you settled down here did you take part in any of those saving schemes, such as pardner hand etc?
AR. For me pardner hand is a dirty word, since back home, and the same luck happened here. I’m not despising it, but for me personally it is a non-starter. Some people are only interested in holding theirs, but to pay out, it causes trouble. A lot of people are that way; they are only interested when it is their time to get it.
Q. Although you have partly answered this question, what kinds of things did you do for domestic entertainment? Was it only music, or were there parties and food?
AR. I could cook before I travelled from home. I was the oldest in the home in the West Indies, and when my parents had to leave home in the mornings, I would look after my younger brothers and sisters and go to school afterwards. So, I had no problems with that.
Q. You mentioned travelling with other islanders, but when you came to Britain, how much did your sense of identity change? Did you stop seeing yourself as coming from a particular island?
AR. We keep in touch with our compatriots from home, and on certain Sundays they used to come over or we would go over, but we had friends from different islands.
Q. But you mainly mixed with those people from your own island is that what you are saying?
AR. Not really, because those people from my own island was few and far between in Berkshire. I knew the Jamaicans from the 1950s because I worked with them in the States, but as you would realise that there are good and bad everywhere. I have very good friends from all over the Caribbean. We must not leave out the Bahamas. They regard themselves as Americans. They don’t mix easily with the other islanders. In American, when they were in the same came, a referee would do very well there; lie would always get work, because they were always fighting.
Q. You spoke earlier on about being the eldest in the family, so you must have a very good sense of how families operate. Are there major differences about how families operate here in England and back in the West Indies?
AR. Certainly here, the youngsters say to their parents, that they didn’t ask to be born, you must have heard that. On the other hand we decide we have the right to look after our parents, and I can’t see many West Indians who would be proud to put their families in homes, or their elders in homes, just because they could take them to a home. They would rather look after them. I still feel that the young should look after the aged. The young ones seem to be drifting to the other side. Their attitude is that it is their life to enjoy. We think we should look after our parents because they looked after us first.
Q. Do you find that people here have different attitudes about their children from those back in the Caribbean?
AR. Yes, I had a neighbour and you could hear her regularly asking her son to leave. She would rather have tum out. In the West Indies, many parents don’t mind you living with them up to when you are forty. That is the main difference.
Q. Again, looking at the younger generation. We talked a little bit about the differences in their attitude to family, but what other differences do you notice in the second and third generations of Black Britons?
AR. I think you would have to preach it to those who are born here that they should adapt certain ways of life. At home they are not as forceful as they are here, you still have a bit of control at home. I tell my children that when I was almost twenty I used to still get licks, and that is true. I could not think of hitting them when they get to that stage. Or even hitting them at all. For example one of my daughters was a little unruly, she was still under twelve and she used to ride her bike on the pavement, and although we spoke to her several times she would still do it even though she promised she wouldn’t. So one day I told her that the only thing that was going to stop her riding on the pavement was if I took off the wheels. That was it. No lashes.
Q. What about their attitude to work, it is often said that the people who came first were very hard working. Do you think that there is a difference with the younger generation?
AR. Yes. I would agree with that. On average the older generation were harder workers. If they had parents who would talk to them and explain the difference in life many would do better. Parents allow the children to do what they like, even before the age of five. When you have children behaving like that, well almost anything can happen.
