Secrets of Old Brighton Place

Nearly 40 years after Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, the Black Country street which inspired it has been revealed. PETER RHODES and STUART POLLITT report from Brighton Place

Right: Peter Rhodes tracks down hidden secrets

So this is where it all began. Rivers of Blood and all that. Today, it's just an unkempt dirt track leading off Merridale Road, Wolverhampton.

Forty years ago in 1967 this was Brighton Place, a once-proud line of eight Victorian villas. It had seen better days.

For Brighton Place was changing complexion. In 1950 every property had been occupied by British-born families. By 1967 Mrs Cotterill was the only English person left, flanked by Asians and West Indians.

Mrs Cotterill, devastated by the death of her husband Harry on active service in Singapore, had recovered from mental illness but was "a bit strange," according to some who knew her.

She was fond of the occasional drink at her local, the Alexandra. She lived in obscurity and would have died that way were it not for the letter she wrote to her local MP about immigration.

Druscilla Cotterill became the inspiration for the landmark 1968 speech in which Powell, using an image from ancient Rome, thundered that mass immigration would lead to "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

The MP was instantly sacked from Ted Heath's shadow cabinet, but not before the nation had heard Mrs Cotterill's account.

This, according to Powell, was her story: "She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. She is becoming afraid to go out, windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes out to the shops she is followed by children, charming wide-grinning picaninnies."

Enoch Powell steadfastly refused to identify his source. The Express & Star tried without success to find her. Fleet Street had no better luck.

Many people believed she did not exist and was fabricated either by Powell or by the National Front. Such scepticism was natural. The then Express & Star editor, Clem Jones, believed Powell had a weakness for propaganda put out by the NF.

The MP had earlier repeated the NF claim that one constituent was worried because her little daughter was the only white child in the class.

Clem Jones had ordered his reporters to check virtually every school in the constituency to find either the class or the child. They drew a blank.

By a process of elimination, Dr Burgess came up with Brighton Place, in the MP's old constituency of Wolverhampton South and close to his former semi-detached home (pictured right). By 1968 it was almost entirely populated by immigrant families, except for a 61-year-old white woman living at number 4.

Dr Burgess concluded: "I've been boiling down the 200 names and managed to find one individual who matches most of the essential points in the letter. I can actually put a name to the face by saying that she was Druscilla Cotterill."

Her identity has now been confirmed by two who knew her, former councillors John Mellor and Geoff Bangham.

Druscilla Cotterill died in 1978 - 10 years after the speech which ended Enoch Powell's glittering career but turned him into a folk hero for some working-class whites.

"She was a nice, sensible lady. She only stood about 4ft 6in and was a bit of a character," Mr Bangham said today. "She didn't like her name so we all called her Trudy."

Brighton Place was demolished 20 years ago. The site was briefly used as a scrapyard and later developed as Brighton Mews, off Hartley Street.

Today, it is a quiet, mixed neighbourhood where 1960s semis rub shoulders with the proud, solidly English properties with names like Fernside, Netherwood and Holbrook that Druscilla Cotterill would have known.

For obvious reasons, the locals are reluctant to talk on-the-record about Powell and his rivers of blood.

But in Hartley Street a bearded Muslim in full Pakistani dress is happy to chat, with some affection, about the MP he vaguely remembers.

"Powell was okay," he insists. "He was a good man, an honest man. He said what he believed. But he was against our people."

A Nigerian student, studying for his MSc in biomedical science at the University of Wolverhampton, is surprised to be approached in Hartley Street. He has been in the city for a year, he explains, and this is the first time a white person has engaged him on conversation.

"Wolverhampton is okay," he says. "But English people don't seem to socialise much. They tend to underestimate the potential of foreigners.

"It makes me sad to see such attitudes and I wonder why young people think like this. I suppose it is handed down. We have skills and we have a lot to give."

And no - he's never even heard of Enoch Powell.