Category: What Goes Around
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Chris Steele-Perkins
In 1978 the renowned photographer Chris Steele-Perkins made a trip to Wolverhamptonand visited some of my old haunts. He made a truly a wonderful collection of black andwhite photographs and it is worth checking out. https://theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/28/chris-steele-perkins-my-best-shot-wolverhampton-reggae-club
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The Irish-Jamaican Thing
There’s a long, not very well known, history of relationships between Ireland andJamaica that goes back to the very first years of when Britain took over the islands inthe Caribbean that were first claimed by the Spanish. Irish indentured labourers werebrought from Barbados around the time when there were only about one thousandAfrican slaves in…
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Yardies and Even More Badness
Unfortunately, with the passing of time the Yardie has become something of aromanticized figure but if you were living in the West Midlands when the Yardies werearound you would know that they were viewed as anything but. Theirs was a reign ofterror that was relatively short; a bit like many of their lives as individuals.…
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Good Cops, Bad Cops, No Cops
There have been many deaths at the hands of police officers in Britain and the North of Ireland and numerous miscarriages of justice which do not have to be listed here. Instead, I want to highlight the countless daily exchanges between police officers and people of minority groups be that ethnic, religious, or people who…
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No Stone Unturned review – a scrupulous documentary
This documentary unsparingly recounts the 1994 murders of six men and wounded of five others at O’Toole’s Bar in County Down. But to illustrate how difficult it is to find the answers that would lead to some form of justice, two of the journalists who supplied material for the film were arrested by the Police…
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The Themes of What Goes Around
By the time I began to write my story back in the 1990s one of my preoccupations had become the lack of access to justice for people without much money, ‘social status’, or connections. Distance in time and space, as I had by then immigrated to Canada with my wife and four children, had helped…
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Enoch Powell
Wolverhampton became a byword for hostility towards inhabitants who were not white and British when in 1968 Enoch Powell, a local MP, made a speech to his fellow Conservatives in which he called for people like my parents to be repatriated. As warning of what could happen should immigrants continue to be allowed into Britain…
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The Background Story
It was the soot belching from the foundries that was the cause of the area in the Midlands of England becoming known as ‘The Black Country’ and not, as some people assume, because of the influx of peoples from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent. I was born in an industrial town (now a city) called…
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The No Alibis Bookstore
The No Alibis Bookstore in Botanic Avenue is one of the best independent outlets for fans of crime fiction. It had not been opened for business that long when owner Dave Torrans kindly hosted the launch of What Goes Around in Belfast. I am delighted to report that 25 years later that the store is…
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Looking Back at the Old & Celebrating the New.
A quarter of a century has passed since my debut novel What Goes Around was first published
Ralph Robb 