Page 32 - Great Elizabethans

Paul Stephenson served in the Royal Air Force before becoming one of Britain's most successful and inspiring civil rights activists, campaigning for Black Britons to be treated equally in all areas of life in Britain.
DIFFERENT FROM OTHER CHILDREN
In 1937, a little boy called Paul was born in Essex in the south-east of England. His father was West African and his mother was British, of mixed heritage.
At the beginning of the Second World War, when he was three, Paul was evacuated to a care home in a village called Great Dunmow in Essex, because his mother was working in the army during the war. Paul was sometimes made to feel like the odd one out because of the colour of his skin. A teacher at his school even cut a lock of his hair to keep because it looked so different from their own. People also stared at his mother when she came to visit, because they’d never seen a Black woman in an army uniform before. But he loved playing with his friends, paddling in streams and hunting for rabbits – even if there were no other children there who looked like him.
Paul’s grandmother, Edie Johnson, had been a successful West End theatre actress in the 1920s.
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ENGLAND WAS HIS COUNTRY
He went back to London in 1947, but even though there were more Black people in the city, he still didn’t always feel welcome. He was the only Black child in his secondary school. People would sometimes call him horrible names as he walked down the street, and some teachers treated him badly at school. Paul felt strongly that he was English and that England was his country – many years later, when he wrote his autobiography, he called it Memoirs of a Black Englishman. But he often felt as though he didn’t belong, or that other people tried to make him feel that way. Throughout his life, he would fight for the right of Black people to be fully included and valued in Britain.
Because Essex Council had taken good care of him as a child and fostered him during the war, Paul and his wife, Joyce, later fostered eight children alongside their own!