Black Special Constable

From the collection of

MACE is the strategic lead organisation for screen heritage for the East and West Midlands regions. An independent charity based at University of Lincoln, MACE preserves and makes accessible a collection of more than 100,000 historic moving images representative of the diverse cultures and histories of communities throughout the heart of England from the Lincolnshire coast to the Welsh border.

Black Special Constable

Media Archive for Central England
Gloucestershire
1964-01-31
Sound
1m

In Gloucester in January 1964, Astley Lloyd Blair makes history by becoming the first black special constable in Britain.

Reg Harcourt talks to new volunteer special constable Astley Lloyd Blair in the city of Gloucester. Blair, who had previously served with the police in Jamaica, had broken in to the police force which, like every other force in the UK at that point, was a whites only operation. His duties appear to be traffic related and the Chief Constable thinks that he'll only be working the summer months. So despite this minor victory there was still a long way to go.

Black Lives

Portraits of public and private lives against the shifting social climate of 20th century Britain.

Black communities, like many Global majority groups, have long been ill-served by a mainstream British media accustomed to reflecting predominantly white, middle-class lives - a problem entrenched in the second half of the 20th century with the rise of television. Yet a rich tapestry of work from across the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, film and TV, made for (though not always by) black people, does exist. This selection contains many surprises – some joyous, some sobering, some heartbreaking – and highlights the often painfully slow progress in addressing negative representations and stereotypes on screen. Impassioned and sometimes violent dispatches from the front line in the fight for racial equality can be found here, but so too can records of progress: in the pioneers breaking new ground in culture, politics and sport, and in the more mundane glimpses of everyday life. And this story is not just London’s story: the selection takes a journey around Britain, to a Nigerian wedding in 1960s Cornwall, an ‘African village’ in Essex and a Caribbean restaurant opening in West Bromwich; Newcastle