Chris Searle (born 1 January 1944) is a British educator, poet, anti-racist activist, and socialist. He has written widely on cricket, language, jazz, race, and social justice, and has taught in Canada, England, Tobago, Mozambique, and Grenada. He has been associated with the Institute of Race Relations since the 1970s, and is on the editorial board of Race & Class. He writes a weekly column on jazz for the left-wing newspaper Morning Star.
Life
Chris Searle was born in Romford, Essex, in 1944. He was a young cricketer for England, and graduated in 1966 from the University of Leeds. That year he went to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where in 1967 he completed an M.A. in English Literature at McMaster University, which included a thesis on the East End of London poet Isaac Rosenberg.Christopher R. Searle, "Isaac Rosenberg: Glimpses of a Plan Terrific" (thesis), McMaster University, August 1967. He became a schoolteacher in Canada, and then in 1968–69 taught English at a secondary school in Tobago, in the West Indies. His 1972 work The Forsaken Lover: White Words and Black People, which won the Martin Luther King Prize, is based on his experience in Tobago.Biographical blurb in The Forsaken Lover.
Stepney School strike On returning to England in 1970, Searle taught in the East End, and was involved in the Stepney School strike of 1971 in the borough of Tower Hamlets. He was dismissed from the John Cass Foundation and Red Coat School when he published Stepney Words, a collection of his pupils' poems; however, he was reinstated after his pupils went on strike in protest.
Later life He spent 1977 and 1978 working in Nampula Secondary School in northern Mozambique during the Civil War there. His book We're Building the New School! Diary of a Teacher in Mozambique, published in 1981, presents his experiences in diary form.People's Power in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau, Issue 19. Mozambique, Angola, and Guiné Information Centre, 1982
Searle spent time in the early 1980s in Grenada, and wrote and edited several books about that Caribbean island, including, in 1981, Grenada: Education Is a Must! with Grenada's Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Bishop had been involved in March 1979 with a coup by the Marxist New Jewel Movement, which suspended the country's constitution, and established a People's Revolutionary Government. Searle also edited In Nobody's Backyard: Maurice Bishop’s speeches 1979–1983.
He taught at the Earl Marshal School in Sheffield between 1990 and 1995. Later he was a lecturer in education at Goldsmiths College, London.Carrington, Ben, and Ian McDonald (eds), Race, Sport and British Society. Routledge, 2002. In 2007, Searle was a visiting social sciences professor at York University, Toronto.
According to John Berger: "At his best Searle's compassion, anger and sense of historical morality as a storyteller are reminiscent of the early Gorki. I can see no other writer in Britain with whom to compare him."Profile of Searle at Inpress publishers.
Bibliography
Stepney Words (editor), 1971 Firewords (editor), 1971 – a national anthology of children's poetry Poilu: a novel, 1971 Elders: a collection of poems by elder citizens (editor), 1972 The Forsaken Lover: White Words and Black People, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972 (Penguin Books, 1973) This New Season: Our Class, Our Schools, Our World, 1973 Mainland, 1973 – poems Ferndale Fires: a children's story, 1974 Classrooms of Resistance, Writers and Readers, 1975 The Black Man of Shadwell: four stories, 1976 The World in a Classroom, 1977 Beyond the Skin: How Mozambique is defeating racism, 1979 Grenada: "Let those who labour hold the reins", 1979 – interview with Bernard Coard Red Earth: Poems, 1980 Tales of Mozambique (with Chaz Davies and Ruhi Hamid), 1980 Bricklight: Poems from the Labour Movement in East London (editor), 1980 Grenada: Education Is a Must! (with Maurice Bishop), 1981Is Freedom We Making': The New Democracy in Grenada (editor), 1981 We're Building the New School! Diary of a Teacher in Mozambique, Zed Books, 1981 Sunflower of Hope: Poems from the Mozambican Revolution (editor), Allison and Busby, 1982 Grenada Is Not Alone (editor), 1982 In the Spirit of Butler: trade unionism in free Grenada (editor), 1982 In the Mainstream of the Revolution (editor), 1982 To Construct From Morning: making the people's budget in Grenada (editor), 1982 Common Ground, 1983 Grenada: The Struggle against Destabilization, 1983 Wheel Around the World (editor), 1983 Words Unchained: Language and Revolution in Grenada, Zed Books, 1984 In Nobody’s Backyard: Maurice Bishop’s speeches 1979–1983 (editor), Zed Books, 1984 Calalloo: Stories from Grenada (editor), 1984 Our City (editor), 1984 All Our Words, 1986 Poems for Peace by Sheffield Schoolchildren (editor), 1987 Children of Steel: A Sheffield Anthology (editor), 1988 Racism and the Press in Thatcher's Britain (with Nancy Murray), Institute of Race Relations, 1989 Your Daily Dose: Racism and the Sun, 1989 Grenada Morning: A Memoir of the "Revo", Karia Press, 1989 One for Blair (editor), 1989 – tribute to Blair Peach Remember Hillsborough: a memorial anthology (co-editor, with Steve Chew), 1990 Freedom Children: a tribute in poetry to the children of South Africa from the children of Sheffield (editor), 1990 A Blindfold Removed: Ethiopia's Struggle for Literacy, Karia Press, 1991 Outcast England: How schools exclude black children (with Jenny Bourne and Lee Bridges), 1994 Living Community, Living School: Essays on education in British inner cities, 1997 Changing Literacies (with Colin Lankshear, James Paul Gee and Michele Knobel), 1997 None But Our Words: Critical Literacy in Classroom and Community, 1998 Pitch of Life: Writings on Cricket, Parrs Wood Press, 2001 An Exclusive Education: Race, Class and Exclusion in British Schools, Lawrence & Wishart, 2002 Lightning of Your Eyes: new and selected poems, Smokestack Books, 2006 Cosmopolis Toronto (editor), 2007 Tell It Like It Is: How our schools fail black children (with Bernard Coard and others), 2007 Forward Groove: Jazz and the Real World from Louis Armstrong to Gilad Atzman, Northway Publications, 2008 Toronto Generations (editor), 2008 Mandela, Manchester (editor), 2009 Doodlebug Boy, 2011 Red Groove, Five Leaves Publications, 2013 Footprints: Poems by Peter Blackman (editor), Smokestack Books, 2013 Isaac and I: A Life in Poetry, 2017; reprint Five Leaves Publications, 2022, The World is in Our Words, Five Leaves Publications, 2022. Talking the Groove: Jazz Words from the Morning Star, Jazz In Britain, 2024. Global Groove: Words of a Jazz Cosmos, Jazz In Britain, 2026.
References
External links Chris Searle: The Great Includer, October 2009. Special issue of Race and Class, a festschrift on his 65th birthday. "The Stepney School Strike of 1971", Spitalfields Life, 16 August 2011. Michael h Baldwin, " Tales for Perspiring Teachers. Chapter 2. Revolution in the air" - In which 900 children go on strike and march to Trafalgar Square. Fran Abrams, "Sacked radical head doomed to repeat the lessons of history", The Independent, 31 December 1995 "Former head chronicles a passion for jazz and justice" (interview), Sheffield Telegraph, 14 November 2008.