Travellers' Tales      
 A Musical Documentary on Immigration into Britain, London, Camden

The multi-cultural cast portrays students answering the question: "What does being British mean?" 

•  They do a rap 'newscast' of migration into Britain since Roman times.  
• Olaudah Equiano sings of his experience in "Slave Trade"
• Irish immigrant Thomas Murphy fights for democracy in 1850s St Pancras 
• A Lascar sailor describes Bengal's prosperity in agriculture and textiles before the coming of the East India Company
• A Somali tells how straight lines drawn on a map by Europeans destroyed a way of life.  A poem by young Somali Abdullahi Botan describes London today
            "Travellers' Tales" dramatises successive waves of immigration:

• French refugees from the Revolution came to Somers Town - which was a centre of revolutionary agitation with Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Correspondence Society.  Spanish refugees in 1820 held meetings by an old oak in Euston Square which they called The Guernica Tree, and in Fitzrovia, 'South American heroes' including Simon Bolivar worked for the independence of their continent.

David, Lord  Pitt of Hampstead	Beryl Gilroy, London's first Black Headteacher

David Pitt was the first Afro-Caribbean to be elected to London County Council, and the first Black physician to head the British  Medical Association. His surgery in West Euston was  fire-bombed because he a leader of the anti-apartheid movement. 

Beryl Gilroy survived widespread racism in the 1950s to become Head of Beckford Primary, West Hampstead. A successful novelist, she wrote stories for her students based on their own lives, and believed in literature that could "heal".
 
 

"White" pupils are intrigued by  Beryl Gilroy, their first Black teacher:   "Miss, can I touch your hair?  Cor, ain't it soft!"

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