Do you have to be ‘famous’ to be a worthy subject for ‘history’? At Historycal Roots we don’t think so. ‘History’ is the accumulation of millions of people living their lives, contributing to society, doing their bit, even if it’s only a relatively small bit. Cecil Holness lived his life and did his bit. His life is worth celebrating.
Clara Jarrett (later Mrs Holness) lived her life too and this is her story as well as his. We’ll start with her.
Clara Florence Jarrett was born on 2nd November 1922, she was the daughter of Joseph Nathaniel Jarrett and Phoebe Jarrett (formerly Phoebe Ayres). They lived in London at 33 Ponsonby Place, Westminster. Currently valued at over £2 million, in 1889, thirty years before Clara’s birth, Charles Booth’s poverty maps had classified the inhabitants of Ponsonby Place as ‘fairly comfortable, good ordinary earnings’. The birth certificate shows that Clara’s father was a ‘cook at a restaurant’ which suggests that the nature of the area hadn’t changed all that much since Booth’s survey.
What is particularly interesting about the Jarretts is that, according to Mike and Trevor Phillips in their book ‘Windrush – The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain’ (page 39), they were ‘West Indians who had lived in Britain since the First World War when [Joseph Jarrett] had joined the British Army.’
Were the Phillips brothers correct in their assertion about the Jarretts?
Phoebe Ayres was born in 1899, in the village of Uffington (not far from the market town of Faringdon) in what is now Berkshire. Her father, James, worked on the estate of Faringdon House (by the time of the 1911 census he had worked his way up to ‘woodman’, later, in 1921, his occupation was shown as ‘game keeper’). Phoebe’s mother, Jane, had been born in the nearby village of Longcot. Whilst you should never say ‘never’, there really is nothing to suggest any black heritage on this side of Clara’s family.
By his own account, Joseph Nathaniel Jarrett was born on 12th August 1888 (this was the date he gave at the time of the special 1939 census) but we haven’t yet been able to trace a record of his birth. Someone of that name was born in Jamaica but he clearly isn’t our man, and a plain ‘Joseph’ Jarrett probably isn’t either (this Jarrett was born in March 1888). So, as is often the way, a key piece of the jigsaw cannot be found (indeed, sometimes it feels as if the picture on the lid of the box is missing too!).
As we shall see in a moment, we know that Clara was ‘coloured’, so one of her parents must have been black, Nathaniel seems the more likely candidate. We will leave for another time the question of whether Nathaniel really did serve in World War One.
Returning to Clara, on 17th November 1944 she married James Emanuel Brown. Brown was born in Jamaica, the parish of Westmorland, on 8th September 1918. The wedding took place at the Register Office in Newcastle. We don’t know how James and Clara got together but we do know that he was 25 years old (she was 22) and a ‘fireman (mercantile marine)’, his father’s occupation was also shown as ‘able seaman (merchant marine)’. Perhaps they married in Newcastle because he was based in the North East? At the time he was living at 8, Louvain Terrace which is closer to the town of Blyth than it is to Newcastle. She gave her address as the Young Woman’s Christian Association, Saville Road which is in North Shields also some distance from Newcastle itself.
This was a dangerous time to be at sea and we must presume that James Emmanuel died at some point before 1949 as this is when Clara re-married. Her husband’s death wasn’t the first family tragedy Clara experienced, her mother had died of cervical cancer in January 1931 when Clara was just eight years old.
By 1947 she was working as an assistant nurse at St Benedict’s hospital in Tooting, South London and that is when we first became aware of her. Her name was mentioned in a story in the South London Press dated 5th November 1948. The story tells us that Clara was ‘the only coloured nurse’ at St Benedict’s Hospital, Tooting. It went on to explain that ‘all nurses were allowed to invite two friends to the [staff] dance’, but the matron at the hospital, Miss Elizabeth Cole, had refused to allow a Jamaican, male friend of Clara’s, Leading Aircraftman Cecil Honess (sic), to attend. The matron cited ‘trouble after a previous dance in April when two Jamaicans attended as guests of Miss Brown.’ Actually the paper has spelled the young man’s name wrong, this was almost certainly Cecil B Holness, to whom we shall return. It’s also interesting that, if the matron’s recollection is accurate, ‘April’ would place the previous dance before the arrival of the Windrush.
To their great credit, ‘a letter of protest to Mr Linstead [Chairman of the Wandsworth Group Hospitals’ Management Committee] went from about 100 members of staff.’
Hugh Linstead also happened to be the MP for Putney and two of his fellow MPs asked questions in the House concerning discrimination in hospitals. Hansard records the questions and the Minister’s response:
Hospital Staffs (Coloured Persons)
HC Deb 04 November 1948 vol 457 c95W
- 76. Mr J Lewis – asked the Minister of Health if he is aware that recently at St. Benedict’s Hospital, Tooting, the matron imposed a ban on all coloured guests attending the nurses’ dance, and in view of the fact that Clara Brown, the only coloured nurse at the hospital was thus deprived of the facility afforded to all other nurses to invite a guest, if he will undertake that in no institution under the control of his Department will racial discrimination of any kind be permitted.
- 79. Mr Anthony Greenwood – asked the Minister of Health whether he will bring to the notice of Regional Hospital Boards the undesirability of permitting discrimination against coloured members of the staff in hospitals tinder their control.
- Mr Bevan replied – I am inquiring into the incident mentioned by my hon. Friend. and will write to him. I will not permit any form of colour discrimination in the National Health Service.
The National Health Service was, of course, in its infancy, having been established on 5th July 1948, just four months earlier.
Linstead acted quickly and, to his credit, the matron was forced into a humiliating climb down and the paper reported ‘she has withdrawn a colour bar which she put up at the last staff dance.’ The matron’s humiliation was complete when Linstead’s reply to the letter of protest ‘was posted on notice boards throughout the hospital‘. The letter explained that the Management Committee had interviewed the matron and ‘we discussed with her the circumstances which had led her to take the action she did and she has decided not to issue such instructions in future. Will you please let Miss Brown know that this has been done.’
Although she did not travel on the Windrush, Clara’s experience demonstrates in microcosm the daily battles that the early Windrush pioneers had to fight (it also clearly shows the presence of a Black British community well before the Windrush docked at Tilbury). She was obviously a determined young woman who, it appears, was well liked by her colleagues, so there are grounds to hope that her life turned out well.
And what of Cecil Holness?
Cecil Benjamin Holness was born on 27th December 1922 on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. He was 22 years old when he joined the R.A.F. in 1944. Like many West Indian recruits, he wanted to escape island life and go on an adventure. He arrived in Liverpool in June 1944 and was taken to Filey in Yorkshire where he completed his basic training. After this, Holness was moved to another base where he trained as an aircraft fitter as well as an office administrator. When the Second World War ended, Cecil continued to work as a volunteer in the R.A.F. until he was sent back to Jamaica, he departed English shores from Avonmouth on 24th January 1948.
However, like many service personnel from the West Indies, he did not stay in the Caribbean for long. Four months after his repatriation, Holness claimed to have voyaged back to Britain on the Empire Windrush. We say ‘claimed’ because his name does not appear on the passenger list and so we must assume that, like a number of ex-RAF personnel (including at least one who went on to serve as a magistrate), he managed to stowaway. Another explanation, of course, is that the passenger list isn’t accurate.
Strangely, there was someone called Holness on the passenger list when the Windrush docked at Tilbury on 22nd June. But this was Alphonsus Holness, age 29, a cabinet maker. As far as we can establish, he was no relation to Cecil.
It would be a fitting end to the story if we could say that Clara and Cecil were married and lived happily ever after, wouldn’t it? Well, as it happens, we can!
On 23rd July 1949 Cecil B Holness and Clara Florence Brown (‘otherwise Clare Florence Jarrett’) were married at the Methodist Central Hall, on Tooting Broadway. Clara’s address was shown St Benedict’s Hospital, Tooting.
We don’t know where they lived immediately after their marriage but the electoral register for 1951 shows them living at 5 Fernside Road, not far from Wandsworth Common train station. If they owned that house today it would be worth £1.5 million. Clearly they didn’t own it and in all likelihood they had a room in a house with shared kitchen and bathroom facilities as five other people are listed as living at the same address. Because it was difficult for Black people to find accommodation (this was very much the era of ‘no dogs, no Irish, no blacks’) it was common for new arrivals to share accommodation and one of the other tenants at No.5 was Vincent Benjamin who had definitely been on the Windrush (and as a fare paying passenger at that!).
Using electoral registers and telephone directories it is possible to trace Cecil and Clara at various addresses in South London (all within a couple of miles of each other) before they finally settled at Undine Street, not far from Tooting Broadway. This would have been a convenient location for Cecil to get to the West Indian Ex-Servicemen’s Association club in Clapham Manor Street, just four stops away on the Northern Line, where boisterous games of dominoes still take place on a regular basis.
Cecil attended Avery Hill College in Greenwich and eventually became a youth worker in Brixton until he retired in 1987. Alongside his career, Cecil played an active role in keeping the memory and sacrifice of the recruits from the Caribbean alive, he was a founding and pivotal member of the Ex-Servicemen’s Association in Clapham.
Clara died in Lambeth in January 1994 and Cecil died in December 2002 aged 80. Perhaps if Elizabeth Cole, the matron at St Benedicts, had had her way the story might have been very different but, as you can see, Cecil and Clara enjoyed a long life together.
I think we can say that they both earned their place in the collective memory that goes by the name of ‘history’.