Ivor Cummings

Ivor Gustavus Cummings (1913-1992) was a British civil servant.[1] Of Sierra Leonean ancestry, in 1941 he became the first black official in the British Colonial Office. He has been dubbed the 'gay father of the Windrush generation'.[2]

Life

Ivor Cummings was born in West Hartlepool on 10 December 1913. His father, Ishmael Cummings, the son of a wealthy merchant from Sierra Leone, was a doctor. His mother, Johanna Archer, was an English nurse. The couple had met when working together at the Royal Victoria Infirmary. Ivor Cummings grew up with his mother in Addiscombe, where the family befriended the widow of the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, to whom they were related by marrriage. After being bullied at Whitgift School, Ivor tried joining his father in Freetown. However, feeling an outsider there, he returned to England where he showed academic strength at Dulwich College.[1]

The family did not have funds to support Cummings training as a doctor. After briefly working in Freetown as a clerk for the United Africa Company, he returned to England looking for medical scholarships. Abandoning those plans, in 1935 he became warden of Aggrey House, a government-run centre for colonial students, arranging meetings, lectures, dances and social events there.[1] There was competition between Aggrey House and the hostel of the West African Students' Union (WASU). In August 1937 Cummings even informed the police that two Aggrey residents had taken girls to spend the night the WASU hostel.[3]:235–6 Aggrey House closed in 1940, after reports that communists had come to dominate the House Committee and that one student had brought a sex worker into the hostel.[3]:240–1

Cummings himself enjoyed London's 1930s night life, as a gay member of 'the group', a set of African intellectuals in London which included the American singer John Payne and the British composer Reginald Foresythe.[1] He joined the Colonial Office in 1941, and by 1942 its new public relations office was heralding his appointment as evidence against the existence of racial discrimination in Britain. He served as secretary of a new Advisory Committee on the Welfare of Colonial Peoples in the United Kingdom, a Colonial Office initiative to assume direct responsibility for housing colonial students.[3]:364–5 After the war he worked to recruit African nurses for the National Health Service.[1]

In 1947 Cummings visited Lagos on official business.[3]:379–81 When the Greek proprietor of the Bristol Hotel there refused him a room because of his race, the scandal hit the British press.[4]

He was awarded the OBE in the 1948 Birthday Honours. In June 1948 he was the official representative who met the West Indian immigrants arriving on the Empire Windrush, the beginning of the Windrush generation, helping them to find accommodation and jobs. His choice of a former air raid shelter beneath Clapham Common as temporary accommodation for Windrush arrivals lacking prearranged accommodation resulted in Brixton becoming a permanent centre for the African Caribbean community in Britain.[2]

Cummings visited the United States on a fellowship, co-authoring a survey of colonial students. He was invited to become Colonial Secretary in Trinidad, but in 1958 resigned from the Colonial Office to work for Kwame Nkrumah, training diplomats in post-independence Ghana. He was posted to the Ghana High Commission in London to recruit West Indian professionals, including Ulric Cross. He later worked as a training officer as Yengema Diamond Mines in Sierra Leone, and as puplic relations adviser to the London-based distillers Duncan, Gilbey and Matheson.[1]

Cumming died of cancer in Westminster Hospital,[2] on 17 October 1992.[1]

References
  1. Val Wilmer, Obituary: Ivor Cummings, The Independent, 4 December 1992. Accessed 15 November 2020.
  2. Nicholas Boston, Ivor Cummings was the ‘gay father of the Windrush generation’ – so why haven’t we heard of him?, The Indepdendent, 25 June 2019. Accessed 15 November 2020.
  3. Marc Matera, Black Internationalism and African and Caribbean Intellectuals in London, 1919-1950, PhD thesis, Rutgers University, 2008
  4. John Flint (October 1983). "Scandal at the Bristol Hotel: Some Thoughts on Racial Discrimination in Britain and West Africa and its Relationship to the Planning of Decolonisation, 1939-47". Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 12 (1): 74–93.
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