Injustice on our Doorstep: Revisiting Constantine vs Imperial hotels (1944)

By Coryn Gyimah

As UCL students, we tend to think of Bloomsbury and Russell Square as the backdrop to our bustling day-to-day: the place where we trot past the British Museum and leisure over our lunch in Gordon Square, all whilst paying tribute to the history our own institution was built on. We think much less about how the streets themselves helped shape the law, and in particular, how one of them shaped the history of race and the law in Britain.

If you were to stand at the IOE and look east across Russell Square, facing back at you would be the row after row of identical, perfectly symmetrical windows that all of us students are all too familiar with: those of the Imperial Hotel. Whilst this hotel might fade into the backdrop for many of us, the hotel that once stood on that very spot was central to one of the most important cases in British civil rights history, Constantine v Imperial Hotels (1944) and set a Black British icon on his path.

To understand this cases significance, we first have to understand the law as it stood when Constantine arrived at the Imperial’s doors. In 1943, there was no statute in England prohibiting racial discrimination. The Race Relations Act, which first made it unlawful to refuse service on “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins” in places of public resort, would not come into force until twenty-two years later. Protections on the grounds of race were few and far between.

Under the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914, for example, people born across the Empire, from Trinidad to Lagos, held the same status as British subjects as anyone born in London. Constantine’s case however, would show that, in practice, that status gave them little protection.

Even in 1943, Learie Constantine was no ordinary patron. He was hailed at the time as one of the most famous cricketers in the world and nicknamed the “Trinidad Idol” by the press. During the war, he also worked in Liverpool as a welfare officer for the Ministry of Labour, looking after West Indian workers who had come to support the war effort.

That summer, he travelled to London to play in a high-profile wartime match at Lord’s, the famous home of English cricket, as part of a team of players from across the Empire taking on England. He booked four nights at the Imperial Hotel, accompanied by his wife and his daughter. With an understanding of the racial climate, he took all the necessary precautions: he paid the room deposit and checked in advance that his race would not be a problem. But despite his due diligence, when he arrived on 30 July 1943, he found that this was not the case.

On arrival, the manageress objected to his presence, using openly racist language to describe the Constantine family. In protest, Constantine argued calling back to the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914; he was a British subject and saw no reason why foreign guests, the white American servicemen staying at the hotel whom she feared offending, should be preferred over him.

It, however, made no difference. The family were told they were able to lodge for the night would have their thing thrown out at dawn if they were still there and were subsequently moved to the Bedford Hotel nearby.

To many, taking the case to court would have seemed futile. The “colour bar” in hotels, dance halls and lodging houses was rarely written down, but it was widely enforced. Cases such as Amelia King’s rejection from the Women’s Land Army in 1943 had already reached the courts, but without legislation, anyone turned away had almost no legal remedy. The question was whether the common law, which had no concept of racial discrimination, could offer one at all.

Constantine, however, persisted, and his lawyers turned to one of the oldest rules of the common law: an innkeeper must receive any traveller who is able to pay and fit to be received. Represented by Sir Patrick Hastings, Constantine sued. In 1944, Mr Justice Birkett found that the hotel had breached its duty and described the manageress’s words as grossly insulting. He refused, however, to award exemplary damages. Constantine received just five guineas, about £5.25, worth only a few hundred pounds today.

The bigger picture

Constantine won, but the case did not define him. He was called to the Bar in 1954, was knighted in 1962, served as Trinidad and Tobago’s first High Commissioner in London. Through this he also continued his work fighting for racial equality, he backed the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott, and in 1969 became Britain’s first Black peer. Yet his victory also exposed how narrow the common law’s protection really was. He succeeded only because the Imperial was an inn, bound by an ancient duty to receive travellers. Had he been refused service in a shop, a room by a landlord or a job by an employer, he would have had no claim at all.

During this Black History month, stories such as this are important as they exemplify why the Race Relations Acts mattered. The 1965 Act outlawed discrimination in places of public resort, the 1968 Act extended this to housing and employment, and the 1976 Act let individuals bring claims themselves. Discrimination had finally become a wrong.

Today, his treatment would amount to direct race discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, with damages for “injury to feelings” assessed using the Vento bands, currently £1,300 to £62,900. A public, openly racist refusal in front of his family would likely sit above the lowest band. Five guineas would not even reach the bottom of it.