Seeing off Empire: the life of Pearl Prescod

Abstract

This article retrieves the life and cultural contributions to Britain of Trinidadian Pearl Prescod, singer, campaigner and the first Black female actor at the National Theatre. She is one of a generation of artists, performers, singers and intellectuals whose contribution to the creation of a Black and anti-colonial strand in British culture in the 1950s and ‘60s has been neglected. By tracking her life from her colonial origins through her migration to Britain and struggles to find work in the 1950s, to her brief break-out professional success in the 1960s and early death in 1966, she is pulled from the historical margins. Her life story, which touches on movements of so many hues – Negritude, Pan-Africanism, Black Power, Communism, campaigns for colonial freedom, the March on Washington, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination − reveals the strong community connections and internationalism of the time. Pearl, the piece argues, was typical of a whole overlooked ‘West Indian generation’ (of educated and politically militant artists, writers, dramatists and actors) whose anti-colonial consciousness and creative activities challenge the popular accepted narrative of an undifferentiated ‘Windrush generation’. The piece contains an account of witnessing Pearl and her fellow actors perform at the National Theatre.