Coming home after university can open up your eyes up to your hometown in new ways. After graduating and settling back into Slough, I was determined to discover more about the history of my area after taking in Oxford’s for three years.
Slough always seems to get a bad rep, even though John Betjeman’s daughter apologised. Personally I’ve always been lovingly protective of Slough. I love the way the front of the train station looks, the willows down the bottom of Salt Hill Park, the smell of chocolate in the air as I cycle past Mars Factory and belonging to one the most racially diverse areas in the country. Slough has always felt like home.
However, when I found out that Slough was also home to the UK’s first Black woman to become mayor, I was stunned. Why hadn’t I learned about her in school? As a young Black poet seeking to immerse herself further into her community, Lydia was a historical starting point that I could have never have dreamed of stumbling across.
A teenager of the Windrush Era, Lydia was born in Montserrat in the late 1930s, and moved over to the UK in the 1954 to join her parents who were already living in London. She moved to Slough in the 1960s and became active in politics, joining the Labour Party in Slough and serving from 1979 to 2007.
In 1983 she was elected as Deputy Mayor, and in 1984 she ran for mayor and made history as the UK’s first Black woman to hold this position.
There is nothing new under the sun. As Audre Lorde reminds us there are no new methods, but only different combinations of actions that we must be willing to try. Sometimes by studying older methods of activism we can begin to formulate these new combinations. Sometimes the solutions we are currently looking for exist in the ways in which pioneers have organised policies and rallied against racism in the past, especially when they have been successful.
Lydia was the first Black woman to become mayor in a decade where signs denying Black people housing were common. Her success was a powerful reminder not only of the ways in which a lack of knowledge can stop us from building on our history, but also the excitement of thinking about Black women in positions of political power.
What would a Black woman as mayor of Slough look like, back in 1984 and now? I began to ask myself. What issues would she choose to tackle first? I started to ask people if they knew about Lydia, and while my mum knew of the family, the majority of my friends were as amazed as myself. I desperately wanted to know more about Lydia. What were the policies she enacted during her time as mayor, and what pressures she must have inevitably faced as a Black woman running a campaign for such a central and visible political position during the 1980s.
When Slough Borough Council ran their Black History Month Grants this year, I pitched for funding to try to discover as much about Lydia Simmons and her impact in Slough as I possibly could. I was awarded the grant at the beginning of October this year and have resolved to try to discover Lydia’s story as holistically as possible; delving into the archives (as well as reaching out to get in touch with her) in order to preserve her story through the medium of poetic film. I look forward to sharing as much as I can find, from her approach to wider community issues to her experience of the period, the feats she tackled, and what her proudest accomplishment was during her time as mayor of Slough.
This is the first blog post in a series of three parts following poet Theophina Gabriel’s documentation and poetic preservation of Lydia Simmons through writing and film as commissioned by Slough Borough Council’s Libraries & Culture Black History Month Grants 2020.
You can read the second post about Theophina writing to Lydia in this series also on this blog