Druscilla Cotterill

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Druscilla Luevina Cotterill, née Childs (1907 – 1978) was a British war widow who lived in Wolverhampton. She was revealed in 2007 to have been the woman whose story of being the only white resident of a street was described in a letter to her Member of Parliament, Enoch Powell, and later related by Powell in his 'Rivers of Blood' speech in April 1968. Powell deliberately did not identify Cotterill and resisted any attempts to identify her later.

Background

Cotterill was born in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, the daughter of a farm labourer. In 1940 she married Harry Cotterill, who was about to leave to fight in the Second World War. As a Battery Quartermaster Sergeant with the Royal Artillery, he was stationed in Singapore but was killed in the war, and his widow never remarried. She remained living in Brighton Place in Wolverhampton, which had been all English at the time they moved there; in order to increase her income she rented rooms to lodgers.

Racial tensions

From 1960, the homes in Brighton Place started to be occupied by immigrant families from the West Indies and from the Indian subcontinent. By 1968, there were only two homes where the occupiers were white British. Cotterill did not wish to rent rooms to West Indians and stopped taking in any lodgers when the Race Relations Act 1968 banned racial discrimination in housing. She locked up the spare rooms and lived only in two rooms of the house. According to those who remember the period, the many children in the street regarded her as a figure of fun and taunted her. Cotterill was also aware that the other white family in the street had been the subject of direct victimisation.

Contact with Powell

Cotterill ascribed this treatment to racial differences when describing her life to a friend, who wrote to the local Member of Parliament Enoch Powell. Powell reported the contents of the letter in a speech to the West Midlands Conservative Political Centre on 20 April, 1968 in which he prophesied "the River Tiber foaming with much blood" if mass coloured immigration continued. The speech caused immense controversy and Powell was dismissed from the Conservative shadow cabinet immediately; he refused to identify the individual case mentioned in the letter, which led some to assume that it had been made up. Powell abandoned a libel action against the Sunday Times (which accused him of "Goebbels-like propaganda") when it became clear that he would have to disclose the letter.

Death

Cotterill eventually moved out to a nursing home when she was unable to cope for herself. At her funeral in 1978, some of the West Indian neighbours from Brighton Place sent a wreath.

Identification

The BBC Radio 4 programme Document broadcast in January 2007 identified Cotterill by examination of the electoral registers of Wolverhampton.

References

Fiona Barton, "Widow in Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech really did exist, Daily Mail, 3 February, 2007
Document, BBC Radio 4