Paul Robeson in Hampstead

An American in London

Paul Leroy Robeson arrived in London for the first time in 1922, a twenty-four-year-old law graduate from Rutgers University and Columbia Law School who had already demonstrated the remarkable versatility that would define his career. He was a former college football star — named an All-American end twice — a singer of extraordinary natural gifts whose bass-baritone voice possessed a depth and resonance that contemporaries described as almost physically overwhelming, and an actor of growing reputation who had appeared in Eugene O'Neill's plays on the New York stage. He was also, crucially, a Black man in an America where racial segregation was not merely a social convention but an elaborately enforced system of law and custom that circumscribed every aspect of daily life. London, and particularly the intellectual and artistic circles of north London, would offer Robeson something that the United States in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s could not: the experience, however imperfect and provisional, of being treated as a human being first and a Black man second.

Robeson's relationship with London deepened over the following decades. He returned repeatedly throughout the 1930s, 40s, and early 50s, living for extended periods in the city and developing connections with the artistic, intellectual, and political communities of Hampstead and Highgate that would profoundly influence both his art and his activism. His London years are less well remembered than his American triumphs and persecutions — the Broadway productions, the Hollywood films, the concert tours, the blacklisting by the House Un-American Activities Committee — but they were, in many ways, the crucible in which his political consciousness was forged and the period during which he experienced his most sustained period of personal happiness.

The Hampstead and Highgate of the 1930s that Robeson encountered was a neighbourhood in its intellectual golden age. The emigres from Central Europe — fleeing first from political instability and then from Nazi persecution — had transformed north London into one of the most concentrated assemblages of intellectual talent in the world. Sigmund Freud would arrive in Hampstead in 1938, settling in Maresfield Gardens. The architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer passed through. The writers Stefan Zweig, Arthur Koestler, and Elias Canetti all had connections to the area. The Left Book Club, Victor Gollancz's influential publishing venture, drew many of its authors and readers from the progressive circles of NW3 and N6. Into this ferment of ideas and displaced genius, Paul Robeson arrived like a force of nature — and was embraced.

The Hampstead and Highgate Social Circle

Robeson's social circle in north London was extraordinarily wide-ranging. He moved with equal ease among musicians, actors, politicians, trade unionists, academics, and the various left-wing intellectuals who populated the area's pubs, drawing rooms, and meeting halls. His friendship with the Labour politician and future Health Secretary Aneurin Bevan and Bevan's wife Jennie Lee was particularly close. The Bevans lived in Cliveden Place but were frequent visitors to Hampstead gatherings, and their commitment to social justice — which would eventually find its fullest expression in the creation of the National Health Service in 1948 — resonated deeply with Robeson's own evolving political convictions.

Among the literary figures, Robeson's friendship with the novelist and communist intellectual Cedric Dover was significant, as was his relationship with the writer and activist Nancy Cunard, whose anthology Negro (1934) had attempted to document the global Black experience and whose opposition to racial prejudice was fierce and unwavering. The playwright Sean O'Casey, who lived in various parts of north London during the 1930s and 40s, was another close associate; the two men shared both a commitment to working-class solidarity and a love of music that transcended their very different cultural backgrounds.

The salons and gatherings of Hampstead in this period were remarkably fluid, mixing nationalities, disciplines, and social classes in a way that would have been unthinkable in most other parts of London. A single evening at the home of one of the neighbourhood's prominent hosts might bring together a German-Jewish philosopher, an Indian independence activist, a Welsh coal miner turned politician, and an American concert singer — and the conversation, fuelled by wine and strong opinions, would range from psychoanalysis to colonial liberation to the latest developments in twelve-tone composition. For Robeson, accustomed to the rigid racial hierarchies of the United States, where a Black man of his stature might be celebrated on stage but refused service in a restaurant, the openness of Hampstead society was a revelation. He later said that England was the first place where he had felt truly free.

This is not to suggest that Britain in the 1930s was free of racial prejudice. It was not. The country that had built the world's largest empire on the systematic exploitation of non-white peoples harboured its own deep-seated assumptions about racial hierarchy, and Robeson encountered moments of condescension, exoticisation, and outright hostility during his time in London. But the particular social world of Hampstead and Highgate — cosmopolitan, left-leaning, committed to ideas of universal human dignity — offered a space in which Robeson could operate as an intellectual and artistic equal in a way that was simply impossible in America. And it was this experience of equality, more than any single book or political tract, that radicalised him.

Performing in London: The Stage and the Concert Hall

Robeson's performance career in London was prolific and varied. His portrayal of Othello at the Savoy Theatre in 1930, directed by Ellen Van Volkenburg with Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona, was a landmark in British theatre history — the first time a Black actor had played the role on a major London stage since Ira Aldridge in the 1860s. The production was a critical triumph. James Agate, the most influential theatre critic of the era, declared Robeson's performance "magnificent," and audiences responded with an enthusiasm that reflected both the quality of the acting and the cultural significance of the casting. The production ran for six weeks and could have continued longer had Robeson's other commitments permitted.

His concert performances were, if anything, even more remarkable. Robeson's voice — a true bass-baritone of exceptional range and power, capable of filling the largest halls without amplification — was one of the great natural instruments of the twentieth century. His repertoire was eclectic, encompassing African-American spirituals, European art songs, folk music from around the world, and an increasing number of songs associated with working-class struggle and political resistance. He sang at the Royal Albert Hall multiple times, at the Wigmore Hall, at various smaller venues in north London, and at the open-air concerts that were a feature of Hampstead's summer cultural life.

The spirituals were, for many listeners, the core of his art. Songs like "Ol' Man River" — which Robeson famously modified, replacing the original lyric "I'm tired of livin' and scared of dyin'" with the more defiant "I must keep fightin' until I'm dyin'" — and "Go Down, Moses" became, in his performances, not merely beautiful music but acts of political testimony. Robeson sang these songs not as entertainment but as witness, investing each phrase with a weight of historical suffering and moral urgency that left audiences shaken. His performances in London, freed from the commercial pressures and racial constraints of the American entertainment industry, achieved an intensity and a purity of purpose that many critics considered the finest work of his career.

Locally, Robeson's presence at smaller, more intimate gatherings was equally valued. He sang at fundraising events for Spanish Republican refugees during the Civil War, at rallies organised by the Council for African Affairs, at trade union meetings and Labour Party socials in the halls and churches of north London. These performances — often unpaid, often given at short notice, and often to audiences of a few dozen rather than a few thousand — revealed the depth of Robeson's commitment to the communities that had welcomed him. He did not merely reside in Hampstead; he participated in its civic and cultural life with a generosity that endeared him to the neighbourhood and that was remembered long after his departure.

The Political Dimension: Socialism, Civil Rights, and the Cold War

Robeson's political evolution during his London years was dramatic and consequential. When he first arrived in England in the 1920s, he was politically moderate — a product of the Black middle class, educated at elite institutions, and inclined to believe that racial progress in America could be achieved through individual excellence and gradual reform. By the time he left London for the last time in the 1950s, he had become one of the most radical public figures in the Western world — a committed socialist, a vocal admirer of the Soviet Union, a fierce critic of American imperialism, and an advocate for the independence of colonised peoples across Africa and Asia.

The transformation had multiple causes, but the intellectual environment of 1930s Hampstead was among the most significant. The neighbourhood's left-wing culture — its book groups and discussion circles, its refugee committees and solidarity campaigns, its pervasive assumption that capitalism was a system in crisis and that a more just social order was both possible and necessary — provided the framework within which Robeson's own experiences of racial oppression acquired a broader political meaning. He came to see the struggle of Black Americans not as an isolated phenomenon but as one manifestation of a global system of exploitation that encompassed colonial subjects in Africa and Asia, industrial workers in Europe and America, and all those who were excluded from power by the structures of class, race, and empire.

His visit to the Soviet Union in 1934 was a turning point. Robeson was received with enormous enthusiasm in Moscow and reported being treated with a respect and equality that he had never experienced in the West. He enrolled his son Paul Jr. in a Soviet school. He learned Russian, adding it to the extraordinary collection of languages — including Chinese, Arabic, and several African languages — that he had acquired through years of study. And he became, from that point forward, a public defender of the Soviet experiment, praising its achievements in education, healthcare, and racial equality while minimising or ignoring the repressions of the Stalin era.

This stance would ultimately prove catastrophic for Robeson's career in America. The House Un-American Activities Committee summoned him to testify, and when he refused to disavow his communist sympathies or to name associates, the American government revoked his passport, effectively imprisoning him within the borders of the United States for eight years. His concerts were cancelled, his recordings were withdrawn from sale, his films were suppressed, and his name was removed from the record books of Rutgers University's football programme. The persecution was systematic, vindictive, and staggeringly disproportionate — directed not at a spy or a saboteur but at a singer and actor whose crime was to hold political opinions that his government found inconvenient.

Friendships with Local Intellectuals

The friendships Robeson formed in Hampstead and Highgate were not merely social connections but intellectual partnerships that shaped his thinking on race, class, and culture. His relationship with the Trinidadian historian and activist C.L.R. James, who lived in various parts of north London during the 1930s, was particularly important. James, the author of The Black Jacobins (1938) — a landmark study of the Haitian Revolution — brought to his conversations with Robeson a Pan-African perspective that connected the struggle of Black Americans to the liberation movements of the Caribbean and Africa. The two men discussed the relationship between art and politics, the role of the Black intellectual in a white-dominated world, and the question of whether cultural achievement could ever be a substitute for political power.

Robeson's friendship with the Indian independence activist Krishna Menon, who lived in Camden and was closely associated with the left-wing circles of Hampstead and Highgate, was another significant connection. Menon, who would later serve as India's defence minister, introduced Robeson to the ideas and personalities of the Indian independence movement, and the two men found common ground in their opposition to British colonialism and their belief in the solidarity of oppressed peoples across racial and national boundaries. Their conversations, conducted in the pubs and drawing rooms of north London, prefigured the anti-colonial politics that would reshape the world in the decades following the Second World War.

Among British intellectuals, Robeson's relationships with the scientist J.B.S. Haldane and the politician Stafford Cripps were particularly noteworthy. Haldane, a brilliant and eccentric geneticist who lived in various parts of north London and was a prominent member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, brought a scientific rigour to discussions of race that complemented Robeson's experiential understanding. Haldane's work had demonstrated the biological meaninglessness of racial categories — a conclusion that was enormously important to Robeson, who had spent his life confronting a system that treated race as the most important fact about a human being. Cripps, a Labour politician of austere moral conviction who would later serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Attlee government, shared Robeson's commitment to social justice and his belief that the British Labour movement had a responsibility to support liberation struggles around the world.

These friendships were sustained not only by shared political convictions but by genuine personal warmth. Robeson was, by all accounts, an extraordinarily charismatic presence — a man of immense physical stature, devastating charm, deep learning, and a voice that could silence a room simply by speaking, let alone singing. The intellectuals of Hampstead and Highgate, accustomed to the company of clever and talented people, recognised in Robeson something exceptional, and their admiration was reciprocated. Robeson spoke throughout his life of the debt he owed to the people of London — and particularly to the people of north London — for providing him with the intellectual community and the personal acceptance that his own country denied him.

The Wider Context: Race and London in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Robeson's experience in Hampstead must be understood against the broader backdrop of race relations in mid-twentieth-century London. The city in the 1930s and 40s was, by comparison with American cities, relatively integrated — or, more accurately, relatively un-segregated. There were no Jim Crow laws, no "whites only" signs, no formal barriers to Black people using public facilities or living in particular neighbourhoods. But this absence of formal segregation did not equate to an absence of prejudice. Black people in London faced discrimination in employment, housing, and social life, and the arrival of larger numbers of Caribbean and African immigrants in the post-war period would expose and intensify these patterns of discrimination in ways that the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 would make brutally visible.

Hampstead, however, occupied a distinctive position within this landscape. The neighbourhood's long tradition of political radicalism, its cosmopolitan population, its concentration of intellectuals committed to principles of equality and social justice, created an environment that was, by the standards of the time, unusually welcoming to people of colour. This was not a matter of mere tolerance — the passive acceptance of difference that the English middle class has historically practised — but of active engagement. The progressive circles of Hampstead did not merely refrain from discriminating against Robeson; they sought him out, invited him into their homes, listened to his views, and treated him as a valued member of their community. This distinction mattered enormously to a man who had spent his life navigating the humiliations of American racism.

At the same time, it is important not to idealise the situation. Robeson's acceptance in Hampstead was, to some degree, conditional on his exceptional talents and his exceptional fame. Whether an ordinary Black American — a student, a worker, a person without Robeson's gifts and celebrity — would have been received with equal warmth is an open question. The history of race in Britain suggests that the answer is more complicated than the warm reception of a handful of exceptional individuals might imply. Robeson himself was aware of this complexity, and his political activism was directed not at improving conditions for the fortunate few but at dismantling the systems that oppressed the many.

Legacy: Robeson's Hampstead and Ours

Paul Robeson's connection to Hampstead and north London is commemorated in various ways, though perhaps not as prominently as his stature warrants. A blue plaque was unveiled at his former London residence, acknowledging his years in the city. The Paul Robeson Theatre at the Hounslow Arts Centre bears his name. Various streets and buildings across London pay tribute to a man who, despite being an American citizen, spent some of the most important years of his life in the British capital.

But the most significant legacy of Robeson's Hampstead years is not physical but intellectual. The political education he received in the drawing rooms and meeting halls of NW3 and N6 — the exposure to Marxist analysis, Pan-African thought, anti-colonial activism, and the broad tradition of British radical dissent — shaped the man who would become one of the most important political figures of the twentieth century. When Robeson stood before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 and declared, "You are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves," he was drawing on reserves of conviction and intellectual confidence that had been built, in part, during his years in north London.

Hampstead, for its part, was changed by Robeson's presence. His time in the neighbourhood demonstrated that the progressive values the community claimed to hold — equality, solidarity, respect for human dignity — were not merely abstract principles but commitments that could be tested and, at their best, honoured in practice. Robeson challenged the neighbourhood to live up to its own ideals, and the fact that many of its residents rose to that challenge remains one of the more admirable chapters in the long history of NW3.

Today, as Hampstead continues to evolve — becoming wealthier, more international, and in some ways less politically engaged than it was in Robeson's era — the memory of his presence serves as a reminder of what the neighbourhood has been at its best: a place where ideas matter more than origins, where talent is recognised regardless of race, and where the pursuit of justice is understood not as an optional extra but as a fundamental obligation of the privileged. Paul Robeson found in Hampstead a home that his own country denied him. The neighbourhood should never forget the honour, and the responsibility, that his choice conferred.

*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*