Chapter 5 explores the reasons why the Sheffield area settlement (as well as those located by marriage records for other British towns) has remained largely unnoticed by historians and questions the prior assumption that the presence of non-white immigrants in an area can always be located by remarkable instances of resistance by state institutions or by the working-class population. It also closely examines evidence and personal testimony of the everyday lived experiences of natives and newcomers who inhabited the same neighbourhoods. These individuals frequently describe integrated lives and point to a non-ideologically aligned phenomenon, here described as ‘everyday tolerance’, which existed within many working-class communities. Fostered by values of ‘getting by’ and ‘mucking in together’ and of bonds of family, work and neighbourhood, many neighbourhoods were able to accept the inward migration and intermarriage of non-white newcomers without the hostility and violence displayed during the port riots of 1919–1920. To view the period through a historical lens focused on hostility is to overlook much of the nuance and fine grain of quotidian relations between natives and newcomers.

The ’inter-racial’ or ‘mixed’ marriage should be, Chapter 4 argues, central to discussion of South Asian immigration to Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter examines evidence from the marriage records and argues that the role and widespread distribution of mixed marriages across Britain have been neglected by historians. It explores the backgrounds and social position of women who entered into relationships with South Asian men and questions J. B. Priestley’s assertion that mixed working-class couples were formed from ‘the riff-raff of the stokeholds and the slatterns of the slums’. Couples in mixed marriages have also been presented by historians as isolated from the neighbourhoods they inhabited. This chapter, however, argues that these couples were often thoroughly integrated into their neighbourhoods and maintained frequent contact not just with close friends, but also with blood relations, in-laws and neighbours. Additionally, these marriages, and the families and households they formed, played a significant, if not crucial, role in acting as anchor points in enduring chains of migration spanning the inter-war period and into post-Partition era.

In this chapter, I argue that feminist responses to the ‘servant problem’ cannot be reduced to a narrative of selfish middle-class women refusing to share their new-found emancipation with their domestics. They must also be considered in relation to a wider problem of housework. Whether performed by a servant or a housewife, the burden of housework during this period was immense. Keeping a house involved a great deal of heavy manual labour, carried out in unhealthy conditions. Feminists argued that the housework problem affected, and indeed united, women across the classes, whether they were single or married, professional women or mothers. Housework was viewed not just as a practical problem, but also as a political issue. It was widely recognised that the all-absorbing and time-consuming character of housework prevented women from taking an interest in the world outside the home and especially from participating in movements for social and political change. Housework was also politicised by opponents of the suffrage movement, who fixated on domestic labour – or rather, women’s failure to do it – as shorthand for feminism’s destructive influence.