March 22nd: Today’s Feature
- webbworks333
- Mar 22
- 5 min read
March
Guy Reid-Bailey - Part 1
Guy Reid-Bailey was a hero of a civil rights movement in the UK that is only now being given its due. A central figure in the struggle to end the unofficial segregation – the notorious “colour bar” – rampant in the UK in the 1960s, he took part in the Bristol bus boycott, which is credited with encouraging politicians to bring in the first Race Relations Act in 1965. He went on to found the first black housing association in Bristol and set up a cricket club to challenge discrimination in sport – one that is still bringing joy to generations of black Bristolians today.
When he arrived in Britain in 1961 at the age of 16, Reid-Bailey was a self-described “country boy” from Jamaica. His parents had sent him to live with his aunt in Bristol, assuming that the “mother country” would give him a good education. But he quickly realised, he says, that it was “a mother without any affection for black people”. Reid-Bailey had three brothers in Jamaica, but told them not to follow him to the UK because “I had to grow up very quickly and I wouldn’t wish my other brothers to experience what I did”. Not much has changed in that regard. He still believes that “if you’re a black person, you suffer a mental lack of freedom”.
Almost 60 years on, the hurt in his voice is palpable as he describes the shock of having constantly to look over his shoulder, “because there was always a gang somewhere likely to attack”. Living in perpetual fear, he says, affected him throughout his life. “I felt I had to be serious at all times. I found it very difficult to relax, whether it was at home or out when I was younger. It was difficult to have fun.”
It was not just the physical racism that wounded. Reid-Bailey vividly recalls walking the streets of Bristol in the 60s looking for a home, and being confronted by the ubiquitous sign “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. Being put “in the same category as a dog was heartbreaking”, he says. White landlords would rarely rent to black people, which, before the Race Relations Acts came into force in the UK, was perfectly legal.
That was one of the reasons he lived with his aunt and her husband until well into his 20s. It allowed him to avoid the deeply racialised housing market, where overcrowded, shared accommodation was often all that was offered to the black community. When we think of segregated living areas in towns or cities, we often think of the US, but Britain had many of the same ingredients.
In Bristol, St Pauls was the district where black immigrants found themselves – a tight, closed-in area with everyone packed on top of one another. It is a vibrant neighbourhood, but it also locked the community into a cycle of living in cramped housing in a polluted and deprived environment that continues today.
Reid-Bailey was only able to secure his own three-bedroom house in the 80s. One problem was that, as in the US, banks in the UK were complicit in housing discrimination. They made it “very difficult to get a mortgage” if you were black, he says, which restricted would-be buyers to the bottom end of the inner-city housing market. To get round this, those who did not want to wait as long as Reid-Bailey used a community solution – the “pardner” system.
“We had to be our own banks,” he says. A group of people would pay in a sum of money every month, and each member would take a turn in drawing from the pot. If 10 people put in £100 each month, they would each take turns drawing down the £1,000 in a form of interest-free credit. In the 70s, he explains, a house in St Pauls cost between £400 and £500, so pardner money was enough to buy a house. The system is still in use today.
In part due to his personal experience, Reid-Bailey became a champion of affordable housing. In 1985, with the support of Bethel United Church, he founded the United Housing Association – the first black housing association in Bristol. At first it offered sheltered accommodation for elderly people who had never been able to buy their homes and were in dire straits in their retirement. “Black people were not getting a fair share and it was difficult to get accommodation from other associations,” he says.
By the time he stepped down 20 years later, they were “housing quite a lot of people”, as Reid-Bailey modestly puts it: more than 2,500 units, ranging from one- to five-bedroom homes, for those in need. In 2005, he was awarded an OBE for his work. “It was remarkable because I felt I had achieved something I did not dream of doing until it happened,” he says.
Racial discrimination in the housing market is still a significant problem. Ethnic minorities have to wait longer for social housing and are more likely to be accommodated in flat shares and areas of deprivation. The government’s hostile environment immigration policy, which imposes a legal responsibility on landlords to check the immigration status of tenants, has exacerbated this. Reid-Bailey believes there is still a great need for a black-led housing association to provide accommodation for black people. At 75, he continues to offer advice to what is now the United Communities Housing Association.
But Reid-Bailey first made history in 1963 when he was, reluctantly, at the centre of the Bristol bus boycott. The boycott was one of the first mass mobilisations to challenge racism in the UK. At the time, he was out of work, and the bus company was recruiting. He saw it as a potential career and, being relatively new to the country, was still fascinated by the double-decker buses.
His mentor was Paul Stephenson, who was working at a local youth club and would go on to become one of Britain’s leading civil rights activists. In the folklore of the boycott, the job interview that Stephenson helped set up has been painted as a test case used by activists to prove that bus companies were operating a colour bar. But if that was the case, the 18-year-old Reid-Bailey was unaware of it. He was just excited at the thought of getting a job. Despite calling in advance to confirm the interview, when he arrived he was greeted by a bemused receptionist who scampered to the office of the manager exclaiming that “the appointment for two o’clock is here and he’s black”.
Continued in Part 2