Winds of Change

Just as I was beginning to feel settled in our life in the UK, racial tensions began to grow on both sides of the Atlantic. On April 11th 1968, Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis and a wave of race riots spread across major US cities. Within an amazingly short space of time ripples of racial disquiet reached Britain. On April 21st, Enoch Powell made his historic “rivers of blood” speech. Powell, a distinguished classical scholar, made his point most eloquently: “As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Romans I see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. He went on to say that Britain must be, “mad, literally mad as a nation to admit 50,000 dependents of immigrants into the country every year”. The present situation he concluded is like a nation “busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”…