The 1919 Race Riots in Cardiff, Newport and Liverpool
In June 1919 white crowds attacked Black and Arab seamen in the ports of Britain. Five men died, and the government answered by shipping Black and Arab seamen out of the country.
In the summer of 1919, a few months after the end of the First World War, white crowds in the port towns of Britain turned on their Black and Arab neighbours. Houses were wrecked, lodging houses burned, men chased through the streets and killed. The worst violence came in June, in Liverpool and in the three South Wales ports of Newport, Cardiff and Barry.
The men who were attacked were mostly seamen from the British Empire: West Africans, Caribbeans, Somalis and Yemenis, many of whom had sailed through the U-boat war to keep Britain supplied. The government's answer to the riots was not to protect them but to try to ship them out of the country. This page tells what happened, town by town, and why it is still barely marked on the streets where it took place.
The 1919 riots in key facts
- Where: Glasgow, South Shields, Salford, London, Hull, Newport, Barry, Liverpool and Cardiff.
- When: from January to August 1919, worst in June.
- Killed: five men across Britain: Charles Wootton in Liverpool, three men in Cardiff and one in Barry.
- South Wales: Newport from 6 June, Cardiff from 11 to 14 June, Barry from 11 June.
- Who was targeted: Black, Arab, Chinese, Malay and mixed-race residents, and white women married to them.
- Afterwards: an estimated 3,000 Black and Arab seamen and their families sent away from Britain between 1919 and 1921.
Why 1919?
South Wales had grown rich on coal. Cardiff went from about 6,000 people in 1801 to around 173,000 in 1901, and Newport and Barry grew into busy export ports beside it. When war came in 1914, recruitment for the army left the ports short of sailors, and men from the colonies filled the gap. Many settled in Cardiff's Butetown and the dock streets of Newport and Barry.
In 1919 the soldiers came home to unemployment and a housing shortage. Shipping companies preferred to sign on white foreign seamen rather than Black British ones, and the seamen's unions pressed to keep Black men off the ships. Out-of-work Black seamen found themselves cheated of benefits they were entitled to. On top of all this came a poisonous press campaign about Black men "taking white men's jobs" and, above all, about Black men with white wives and girlfriends. The riots were about work and housing, but they were driven by racism.
Liverpool: the killing of Charles Wootton
Liverpool had a Black community going back to the 18th century, and its riots were the most ferocious and sustained of the year. In early June, after police raids on Black boarding houses that followed an attack on Black men by a group of Scandinavian sailors, crowds of thousands roamed the streets attacking Black people and their homes.
On 5 June a young ship's fireman from Bermuda, Charles Wootton, was chased by a mob to the docks, forced into the water and pelted with stones until he drowned, while police were present. No one was ever convicted of his death. Around 700 Black residents had to be taken into police protection for their own safety. When Black men fought back, it was usually they who were arrested.
The story of Liverpool's older history, the slave trade, is on our page Liverpool and the slave trade.
Newport, 6 June
The South Wales riots began in Newport on 6 June 1919, the day after Wootton's death. A white soldier attacked a Black man over a remark allegedly made to a white woman, and the fight spread into a riot through the docks area. Crowds attacked the homes and businesses of Black, Arab and Chinese residents. Eight houses in the docks were wrecked, and furniture from two of them was burned in the street. The rioting lasted several nights.
Cardiff, 11 to 14 June
In Cardiff the violence broke out on 11 June between white men, many of them soldiers back from the war, and the residents of Butetown, mostly Yemeni, Somali and Caribbean. For four days crowds that grew into the thousands marched on the docks district. Arab lodging houses and restaurants were attacked, smashed and looted. Fighting spread to Grangetown and parts of the city centre. Bute Street, the main road of Tiger Bay, was left covered in broken glass, its windows boarded up.
Butetown fought back. Residents, many of them ex-servicemen themselves, barricaded their streets and told the police they would defend their homes. Older people in the Bay still repeat the story that the mob was held off for days.
Three men died in Cardiff:
- Mohammed Abdullah, 21, a ship's fireman, died in hospital of a fractured skull after a white crowd broke into the lodging house where he lived, 264 Bute Street. He is buried in Cathays Cemetery.
- John Donovan, 33, a former soldier, was shot dead at a house in Millicent Street in the city centre.
- Harold Smart, 20, died after his throat was cut. It has never been clear whether his death was part of the riots.
Hundreds were injured and dozens arrested. Repairing the damage cost the city council £3,000.
Barry, 11 June
On the evening of 11 June a former soldier, Frederick Henry Longman, was stabbed to death in Beverley Street, Cadoxton, in a fight with a Black seaman, Charles Emmanuel. Angry crowds gathered and chased Black men through the streets until after midnight. Police formed barricades, and on 13 June about 300 soldiers arrived and camped at Cadoxton to keep order. Emmanuel was found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter, and sent to prison for five years.
The courts: two kinds of justice
After the Cardiff riots, 18 white men and 10 non-white men came before the courts. At first the non-white men, who had mostly been defending their homes, were dealt with far more harshly. Nine Black men from Cardiff were charged with the murder of John Donovan and tried in Swansea. The prosecution offered no evidence, the charge was reduced, and the jury found them all not guilty without even leaving the box. For the killing of Mohammed Abdullah, nobody was convicted.
Sent away: repatriation and the 1925 order
The government had begun a scheme to send colonial seamen "home" in February 1919. After the June riots it pushed it much harder, out of fear of what officials called a "black backlash". Men were offered a small resettlement allowance to leave. Between 1919 and 1921 an estimated 3,000 Black and Arab seamen and their families were removed from Britain. Many had lived in Britain for years, had British wives and children, and had no home elsewhere to go back to.
For those who stayed, worse followed. The Aliens Order of 1920 and the Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order of 1925 forced "coloured" seamen who could not prove they were British to register with the police as aliens. In Cardiff, Newport and the other ports, British subjects from Africa, Arabia and the Caribbean were treated as foreigners and kept off ships. We tell that story on our page about Tiger Bay.
Remembering 1919
For most of the 20th century the riots were hardly mentioned in Welsh or British history books. It was historians in the 1980s, and the memory of families in Butetown, that brought the story back. At the centenary in 2019 the National Archives set up displays in Liverpool and Cardiff, and a heritage project on the riots was launched at the Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay.
Yet as late as 2020 there was still no memorial or plaque in Cardiff, Newport or Barry to the people who died or were driven out. A century after the riots, the streets where they happened carry no sign of them. That silence is part of the story too.
Visiting: where it happened
- Bute Street, Cardiff: the main road of Tiger Bay and the centre of the 1919 fighting. Walk it from Cardiff Bay station north towards the city.
- The Pierhead Building, Cardiff Bay: free to enter, with an exhibition on life in Tiger Bay from the 1880s to the 1950s.
- Cathays Cemetery, Cardiff: the grave of Mohammed Abdullah.
- Glamorgan Archives, Cardiff: police records, court papers and photographs of the 1919 riots, open to researchers.
- Newport and Barry docks: both are a short train ride from Cardiff Central.
- The National Archives, Kew, London: the Home Office and Colonial Office files on the riots and the repatriation scheme.
For more on Wales, visit our sister site Wales Adventures.
Tours and experiences
Cardiff Castle and Cardiff Bay are often combined on day trips from London. Entrance fees for the sights on a tour are always included in the price. Tips for your guide are not included, but they are welcome.
Where the men came from
- West African soldiers in the First World War: the war that brought many of these men to Britain.
- British Somaliland: the home of many of Cardiff's seamen.
- Sierra Leone: Freetown, the port where many West African seamen joined British ships.
- African Independence: our pan-African site.
Read next
The community the rioters attacked, and what became of it.
The West African sailors of the British merchant fleet.
How Africans in London organised against the colour bar.
Another northern city with a long Black history.
The African side of the story
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- Ghana: Ghana-Net · Cape Coast Castle · Elmina Castle · James Fort, Accra · They Made Ghana · War Cemetery Cape Coast
- Across Africa: Kenya Web News · Explore Nigeria · Gambia Vibes · Zambia Vibes
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