The 1960's

Bernie arrived in Britain during a shameful period in British Race Relations. Due to Labour shortages after the war, skilled Asians and West Indians had been encouraged to come to Britain to take up jobs in public services. Their presence however was widely resented, and many experienced ugly and violent attacks and personal abuse, as well as discrimination in jobs, housing, education, policing and in community life.

Many believed that Black people threatened jobs and opportunities for white people, and that they presented a challenge to the British "way of life". In 1968, some 82% of people supported the views of Conservative MP Enoch Powell who famously warned of "rivers of blood" if immigration was not halted.

Bernie did not intend to stay in Britain but to gain qualifications and to return to Guyana. His mother had already arrived in the UK, and lived with his younger sisters in Haringey, and he joined her in 1963. He described vividly his first impressions of Britain:

In his own words:
"The first thing that struck me was how cold it was. Everything you touched was cold - the food was cold, the furniture was cold, the table was cold. I couldn't understand it, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe the way the houses were built - all joined together, they looked like dolls' houses to me. They were so small. I also noticed that there were white people who seemed very poor. Everything was colourless, grey. Just the one colour. Everyone had grey overcoats, there were no bright colours or anything like that. For the first few months I was pretty miserable. There was no great culture shock, but when I saw the conditions that the black community were living under I wanted to go back home."

He found his race a barrier to finding work, but eventually got a job as a railway clerk, but like many of the new generation of black immigrants, found it hard to ignore the endemic attitudes towards black people.

In his own words:
"When I arrived here there were still the signs on the windows - no blacks, no Irish, no dogs, no children. Then there was the Race Relations Act of 1964 which outlawed all that. But what I found was that the problem lay in this institutional racism, hidden policies which you found in housing, in education and so on. There would be a policy which said that to get a house you needed such and such connections with the borough. Then they would define 'connections' as having your family living there for three generations or whatever. It was moving the goalposts, and it meant that black families hadn't a hope of getting a house. There were many policies in education that discriminated against black people. It was easy enough to deal with overt racism; you could fight the people concerned and that would be the end of it. The institutionalized variety just kept going. So I became involved with a lot of anti-racist work".

He went on to Tottenham College in 1965 to study A levels, and then to Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh to study for a degree in Mining Engineering.