Mixing the breed....

Mixed marriage has become something of a hot topic, possibly because latest surveys show that they are on the increase and that mixed-race births are on the increase (well they would be, wouldn’t they) and partly because of a TV series headed up by George Alagaiah.

George is the ideal person for the programme. He is an enormously experienced foreign correspondent, now a BBC anchor, speaks Received English, is extremely good-looking, and he is a Sri Lankan married to an English woman.

I am not entirely unacquainted with the subject. A close relative successively married an English woman, a Malaysian, and a Chinese. Thirty-odd years ago, an Irish friend who was a judge in Botswana married the Indian headmistress of the local girls school, and used restaurants and hotels in neighbouring South Africa at the height of apartheid without ever being challenged. I have another chum who is built like an anorexic jockey married to a statuesque Jamaican with a brilliant daughter at University. There is a local guy married to a Vietnamese who has really got his life sorted. She is Executive Vice President of an international company and he fishes all day in the Mekong River. I worked with a Jamaican Rhodes Scholar married to an English artist; unsurprisingly the kids are very bright indeed.

And why not?

The simple truth is that we English are the product of ethnic mixing since time began; Picts, Scots, Iceni,  Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frieslanders, Scandinavians, Normans, Jews, Huguenots, Italians, West Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indians, Chinese and  all the rest of the great melting pot that makes us what we are.

And there is a great deal of truth in the old saw that it’s a wise child that knows  its own father. Some years ago, the Sunday Times did a DNA study of a select group from various ethnic backgrounds. The West Indian who guessed his paternal ancestor might have been a slave from Sierra Leone, as in ‘Roots’,  discovered that  he was German down the paternal line. There was a German influx to Jamaica in the early 19^th century (hence Germanstown) which interbred and has now vanished, except in one remote village where they have clung to both their racial identity and their language).

The great irony is that we now know that Alex Haley himself was actually Welsh in the paternal line!

There are some sound biological reasons for mixing the breed. Exclusiveness tends to make the stock deteriorate with humans as with animals. That is why so many of the aristocracy seem to come from the shallow end of the gene pool. And maybe why the mongrel English have such a propensity for strong drink, lechery, riotous assembly, fighting, exploration, Empire-building, and survival.

From observation, mixed marriages are as successful as others, perhaps more so because it takes particular binding to succeed against the prejudice of others. Where they fail seems to be mostly due to irreconcilable cultural differences. A Muslim man marrying an American woman would soon be in trouble if he tried to treat her as if they were in Islamabad not New York. Similarly an English woman who married her Renta Rasta would rapidly find that marital fidelity was not on his agenda.

But there is one aspect that Dave has promised to deal with (and he always keeps his promises, don’t he) and that is discrimination in adoption. Homosexual men can adopt boys with all the attendant dangers but woe betide a mixed-race couple who try to adopt a child. The race relations industry, being by definition racist, has a policy on this. Remember the white husband and Asian wife? They couldn’t adopt a white child because she was too dark, and they couldn’t adopt a coloured child because he was too light. Truly, it’s a mad, mad world, my masters!

Years ago there was little race consciousness in the UK, probably because most people had never seen a person of colour. In 1955, the non-white population was only 125,000. That was the year I entered the army, and in all my service when I must have seen literally thousands of soldiers nary a one was black. The pendulum now seems to be swinging back. To the younger generation, pigment is an irrelevance; in fact, it is becoming distinctly cool to be of mixed race, with so many role-models around, like Lewis Hamilton. Open the pages of the Sunday Times ‘Style’ magazine and many or most of the models have honey-coloured skin.

One of the most extraordinary products of a mixed race marriage is Mechai Vivavaidya.

Mechai’s father was one of the Thai elite. In the 1930’s he was selected for medical training in Scotland. There he met a Scots student whom he married after they both qualified as doctors. The circumstances of their marriage were a reflection of the times and the attitude towards miscegenation. To her family, marriage across a colour line was to be deplored; to his he was seen to be marrying beneath himself.

But it was a great success and they practiced medicine together in Bangkok.

Mechai went to school and university in Australia. Some years after his return to Thailand he founded the Population and Community Development Association which promoted birth control and in particular the use of condoms partly to counter the growing AIDS problem and partly to arrest the alarming population growth rate. When he began his campaign the average family was 7 children. Today it is 1.5.

People who have met him say his personality is such that you can feel him enter a room; truly magnetic. He clearly has the charm and intelligence of his Thai family background and the sheer grit of his Scottish mother.

His biography is ‘From Cabbages to Condoms’; it is riveting.

Of course, you will always get the ‘sucker’ question ‘Would you like your daughter to marry a coloured man?’ That one telegraphs its arrival about three days in advance. The answer is ‘It’s not the colour, stoopid, it’s the culture!’ If my daughter wanted to marry a Jamaican, I would look at him carefully because some Jamaicans make notoriously bad husbands. If she wanted to marry Lewis Hamilton, I would do handstands! She’s old enough to be his granny.


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