And on the Tube people would get up and move away. "I remember people stopping and staring at us in the street. His dad, who had taken a huge cut in salary faced racism from the start.ĭarryl remembers one of their neighbours walking past while he was cutting the hedge saying: "How can people like you afford a house like this."ĭarryl's father found it so tough he suffered a mental breakdown and was sectioned for three months.ĭarryl in Kenya on his third birthday in 1967 It caused a massive backlash against ethnic minorities living in Britain.ĭarryl, now 57, had to start school while his family were living in a bedsit in Muswell Hill before moving to Finchley. They were part of an exodus of immigrants who came to England at a less than welcoming time when Conservative politician Enoch Powell made his "Rivers of Blood" speech in which he slammed mass immigration and quoted a line from a Roman poet saying: "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'." Harsh laws clamping down on Asians in the country meant some 100,000 Kenyan Asians took up British passports in the late 1960s and arrived in droves in the capital. It's funny fate isn't it? If things had been different I never would have made it to England at all."Īs it was, Darryl's family were part of a wave of immigrants from Kenya who came to England in 1968. "I remember the driver's face as he got out of his car. "I still remember it, I nearly died," he says almost 55 years later. Darryl pictured campaigning after the Soho bombing in 1999
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