Alfred Fagon: Remembered

By Chris Wright, 3rd Year History

A young Alfred Fagon

Alfred Fagon was one of the most influential Black British playwrights, poets, and actors of the 1970s and 80s, who spent the majority of his career living in St. Paul’s, Bristol. Born on 25 June 1937 in Clarendon, Jamaica, Fagon was the author of seven plays and renowned for his seminal work, ‘The Death of a Black Man’ (1975).

In 1955, Fagon emigrated to Nottingham at the age of eighteen, where he worked for British Rail and as a part-time Calypso singer. Three years later, Fagon joined the Royal Corps of Signals. There he became Middleweight Boxing Champion in 1962, the year he left the Army. Fagon soon moved to Bristol where he concentrated on writing and acting.

His first stage appearance was at the Bristol Arts Centre, formerly Dighton Street, where he starred in Henry Livings’ ‘The Little Mrs Foster Show’ (1969). After numerous television appearances, Fagon successfully auditioned for Mustapha Matura’s ‘Black Pieces’ the following year. The play was included in the Institute of Contemporary Arts ‘Black and White Power Plays’ in London, the first ‘Black theatre’ season in the UK. Inspired by the way Matura wrote his characters to include authentic Caribbean patois (dialect), Fagon began to write and produce plays on the Black British experience.

The themes of Black expression and Black politics are particularly salient throughout Fagon’s work. In both ‘No Soldiers in St Paul’s’ and ‘A Day in the Bristol Air Raid Shelter’, Fagon explored the experience of Bristol’s Black community during a period of tense inter-racial liaisons.

After numerous failures by the police to mitigate widespread racial discrimination, the St. Paul’s riots in April 1980 fully realised the anger of especially younger British Black men, and their treatment as second-class citizens. Soon after, Fagon wrote ‘The Death of a Black Man’ and continued to explore these themes. Unlike the trends of early 1970s ‘Black Theatre’, which had a particular focus on the stories of ‘back home’ life in the Caribbean, Fagon’s play is one of the earliest to focus on the lives of the children of the ‘Windrush generation’ in Britain.

The play is set in 1973, which is significant for many reasons. It is in the middle of a decade which begins with Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 and ends with the rise of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 but also demonstrates a time of growing Black confidence. The West Indies cricket team beat England 2-0 in the Test series in the same year and the Notting Hill Carnival expanded, which continues to be one of the biggest celebrations of Blackness/Caribbean heritage in Europe.

The Death of a Black Man was first performed at the Hampstead Theatre in 1975 and follows the three characters of Shakie, Stumpie, and Jackie. They are all first-generation British citizens with a Jamaican heritage. All three are motivated to achieve success, as they negotiate their way up the social ladder in Britain, with full knowledge of the position of Black communities at the time. Fagon was not afraid to take on the big themes. Discussions of cultural appropriation with Black art and music, race, class, colonialism, religion, and capitalism all feature in his work. While Fagon’s gender politics are especially controversial for modern twenty-first-century audiences, there is no denying the contemporary resonance of the play.

The presentation of the Black death is undoubtedly the most poignant theme of the play. When Shakie’s father, a renowned musician dies alone in Manchester, Shakie refuses to attend his funeral. Instead, his death is shown to be unmemorable and insignificant: ‘The man who died in the gutter of Manchester was the death of a black man, and thousands of black people die every day with gun, bullet and syphilis […] I am afraid the death of one black man in Manchester doesn’t move me.’

Sadly, Fagon’s life appears to imitate his art, and he died of a heart attack near his South London flat in 1986 at the age of 49. He was given an anonymous pauper’s burial, despite the police searching his flat and failing to notice his passport, letters and BBC script next to his bed.

In remembrance, a bronze bust was sculpted by David G. Mutasa. It was commissioned by the Friends of Fagon committee in Bristol and was unveiled on the first anniversary of his death in 1987. At the time, Fagan was the first Black person to have a statue erected in their honour in the city, however, it was attacked during the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020. The statue is now a Grade II-listed monument and can be seen on the corner of Ashley Road and Grosvenor Road in St Paul’s.

The bronze bust of Alfred Fagon, sculpted by David G. Mutasa

Today, Fagon is also commemorated by the annual Alfred Fagon Award which marks an outstanding new piece of writing by a Black British playwright with Caribbean or African heritage. Recent winners have included Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You (2020) and most recently Inua Ellams’ Once Upon A Time in Sokoto (2024). There is also a new musical for the Bristol Bus Boycott (1963), entitled To The Streets, currently in production.

Alfred Fagon deserves to be remembered as one of the most important and influential Black British writers and someone who pursued the artistic freedom to reflect the times in which he lived. He championed the West Indian diaspora in his writing and captured the political and social reality of the Windrush generation, long before the term erupted into public consciousness. Ultimately, Fagon was one of Bristol’s forgotten talents and he should be remembered for his prolific body of work and extraordinary life.

Edited by Ben Bryant and Scarlett Bantin

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