Princess & The Hustler: The GCSE Study Guide E-Book

Alicia Pope

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 240

Beschreibung

An essential resource for anyone studying Princess & The Hustler by Chinonyerem Odimba for GCSE English Literature – featuring a complete guide to the text, plus sample questions and answers to help you prepare for assessment. Get to grips with Princess & The Hustler with expert, easy-to-follow breakdowns and analyses of key aspects of the play – including the characters, plot, structure, themes, setting, and language – along with a clear explanation of the historical context. This guide also contains prompts for further reflection and research, to help you get the most out of your study and revision, whether at home or in the classroom. Featuring insights from playwright Chinonyerem Odimba, colour photographs of the original production, and extensive quotes and extracts from the text, this GCSE Study Guide will strengthen your understanding, build your confidence and boost your chances of success. It is also an invaluable resource for teachers approaching the play.

Leseprobe

Contents

Dedication

Foreword by Chinonyerem Odimba

Introduction

Context

The UK in the 1960s

The Windrush generation

Geographical context: Bristol

Geographical context: Jamaica

The playwright

Production history

Plot

Act by act

Scene by scene

Close Analysis

Characters

Phyllis ‘Princess’ James

Mavis James

Wendell ‘The Hustler’ James

Wendell ‘Junior’ James

Lorna James

Margot Barker

Leon

Themes

Race and prejudice

Ambition, hopes, dreams and disillusionment

Family and parenting

Bristol bus boycott, and the colour bar

Structure, Form and Language

Structure

Form

Language

Essay Questions and How to Answer Them

Glossary

Further Reading and Research

About the Authors

Copyright Information

For R, J and K

Foreword

Chinonyerem Odimba

Writing this play, it felt like an important and personal mission to tell this story – but really it was a story that belonged to a whole city, and in fact the whole country.

I had lived in and around Bristol for over twenty years before writing the play, and as someone who worked with and volunteered for lots of community and grassroots organisations, such as St Paul’s Carnival, I knew how important the story of the Bristol Bus Boycott was for historically excluded communities in Bristol.

It was a nerve-wracking play to start, as I had already met and was in awe of many of the campaigners involved in the boycott – who had been instrumental to its momentum and success.

To ease my nerves, I started by visiting Paul Stephenson and his wife Joyce in their home. They were very welcoming and excited that I was writing the play, and shared some of their archive with me that afternoon. That was the day that I knew that writing Princess & The Hustler was important, but also that it was about writing Black British history into the theatrical canon. The play almost wrote itself from that point.

Princess and her family were a joy to write, and the heart of the play – which is about how racism robs us all of our love and our dreams – seemed to beat even louder for me as a writer.

Since writing the play, rarely a day goes by that I don’t feel a great sense of pride that I brought those characters and that history to audiences, and now to students across the country.

This play is not unique in telling the hidden histories of Black lives and experiences in the UK, but its magic is that somehow it now sits beyond what it was intended for. Telling stories is about us using our greatest human attribute – the imagination

– but reading and seeing ourselves in those stories is a greater magic and force for change. I believe for every student that studies Princess & The Hustler, there is something to see in yourselves in Princess’s story. Something to discover about ourselves and our collective histories.

I hope more than anything else that the names and the courage of those that led and supported the Bristol Bus Boycott are never forgotten.

And I hope that we learn. Learn from history. Learn from stories. Learn from the power of justice and dreams.

Princess lives ’ere!

Introduction

Welcome to your study guide for Chinonyerem Odimba’s Princess & The Hustler. This book is designed to guide you through the text, looking in detail at context, plot, structure, characters, language and themes. This book will offer you guidance on the key areas of the play and show you samples of writing to help you prepare for your own exam.

How to use this study guide

This book is designed to help you in a few different ways.

You can use it to guide you through the play when you are reading and after you have read it. There is plot summary and scene-by-scene analysis of the whole play.

When you have read the play you can use the sections on character, themes, context, language, form and structure to focus your understanding of the play.

You can use the exam questions when you are ready to start practising how to answer questions in the exam.

At the back of the book is a glossary of keywords for you to refer to as you are learning, or to use for revision, and there is also a list of suggested further reading if you’d like to do more research around topics in the play.

What happens in the exam?

Your work on Princess & The Hustler will be assessed in Paper 2 of the AQA English Literature exam: Modern Texts and Poetry.

It’s a written exam lasting 2 hours and 15 minutes, and worth 96 marks or 60% of your GCSE.

Only Section A of the exam is about Princess & The Hustler. You should spend45 minutes on this section, and your essay will be worth 34 marks. You will answer one essay question from a choice of two.

You will be marked on four assessment objectives (AOs):

Assessment Objective

AO1

AO2

What do I need to do?

Read, understand and respond to texts. You should be able to:

• maintain a critical style and develop an informed personal response.

• use textual references, including quotations, to support and illustrate interpretations.

Analyse the language, form and structure used by the writer to create meanings and effects, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.

Things to consider

How well do you know the play? What is the play about? What happens in the play? What journey do the characters go on? What do you think about the main ideas in the play? How can you support your views? What quotations will you use? When? Why?

What choices has the writer made in this play and why? How does she use language for impact? Why do certain things happen when they do? What is the effect of these things happening when they do? Tension? Humour? Excitement?

This Assessment Objective is worth:

12 marks

12 marks

AO3

AO4

Show understanding of the relationships between texts and the contexts in which they were written.

Use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation.

What can you say about society from reading this play, e.g. What does it tell you about what it was like to be an immigrant in 1960s Britain?

Are you writing clearly and accurately using a range of vocabulary and sentence structures? Are you using spelling, punctuation and grammar accurately?

6 marks

4 marks

Top-level responses

AO1: You will give a critical conceptualised response to the task and the text. You will use thoughtful references and quotations to support your answers.

AO2: You can analyse the writer’s methods and use careful subject terminology. You can explore how the writer uses their methods to create meaning.

AO3: You can explore different ideas, perspectives and contextual elements.

AO4: Your spelling and punctuation is very accurate. Your writing shows strong control of meaning.

Mid-level responses

AO1: You will give a clearly explained response to the task and the text. You use reference effectively to support your answers.

AO2: You can clearly explain the writer’s methods and use appropriate and relevant subject terminology. You understand the effects of the writer’s methods

to create meaning.

AO3: You show a clear understanding of some ideas, perspectives and contextual elements.

AO4: Your spelling and punctuation is mostly accurate. Your writing uses a good range of vocabulary and sentences.

Low-level responses

AO1: You will give a clearly explained response to the task and the text. You use references effectively to support your answers.

AO2: You can clearly explain the writer’s methods and use appropriate and relevant subject terminology. You understand the effects of the writer’s methods to create meaning.

AO3: You show a clear understanding of some ideas, perspectives and contextual elements.

AO4: Your spelling and punctuation is reasonably accurate. You are beginning to use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures.

Context

The UK in the 1960s

The 1960s are often called the ‘Swinging Sixties’. Life had been hard for people in the 1930s, and this was followed by the Second World War. By the 1960s, Britain was starting to recover from these events. The teenagers of the 1960s were the first group that were not affected by conscription.

What is conscription?

In the spring of 1939 the British government needed to start preparing for war with Germany. Single men aged twenty to twenty-two were approved to have six months’ military training, and 240,000 men registered for service.

When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, the National Service (Armed Forces) Act meant all men between eighteen and forty-one had to register for service. Those who were medically unfit were exempted, as were men who worked in key industries, such as engineering, farming and medicine.

In December 1941 a second National Service Act was passed which led to all unmarried women and childless widows between twenty and thirty being eligible to be called up. Men now had to do National Service up to the age of sixty, which included military service for those under fifty-one.

National Service ended in 1960, with the last national servicemen discharged in 1963.

Many parents had spent their youth fighting and were pleased that their children were free from the shadow of war. Young people were starting to want more freedom and there were lots of cultural changes in the 1960s.

The economy was also starting to recover from the war years, and with this recovery came items that changed people’s lives. The more widespread introduction in the 1950s of household washing machines, fridges and telephones had a big effect on people’s lives. People had more money to spend, which meant they could spend some of it on entertainment and holidays.

Link to the play: Weston-Super-Mare is a seaside town in the south-west of England. It was a very popular holiday destination in this period. Although it is only twenty miles from Bristol, Princess and her family have never been there and it has exotic and exciting associations for Princess.

There were also big changes for women. In 1961 the contraceptive pill was made available on the NHS, and the Abortion Act of 1967 legalised termination of pregnancies under twenty-eight weeks.

There was also the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalised homosexual activity between two men over twenty-one. The Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000 made the ages of legal consent for gay and straight people equal at sixteen. (This change came into effect in Northern Ireland when the Sexual Offences Order was passed in 2008.)

Capital punishment was abolished and there was also a relaxing of laws regarding prostitution and divorce.

Capital punishment is the death penalty. The last executions in the UK were in 1964 and capital punishment for murder was suspended (paused) in 1965, and abolished in 1969. Although it wasn’t used, the death penalty was still legally a punishment for offences such as treason until it was totally abolished in 1998.

Link to the play: When Wendell and Mavis arrive in the UK, capital punishment is still legal: can this be linked to Wendell’s fear of being lynched? Despite Wendell knowing that murder is against the law, would the way he is made to feel isolated and outside of society make him feel vulnerable?

TV became much more popular in the 1960s, with around 75% of homes owning a television by 1961. Nearly everyone owned a radio, and there were also changes there, with more options for news and music. British music changed a lot: rock

and roll and pop were both introduced in the 1950s. One of the most popular bands at the time were The Beatles. ‘Beatlemania’ swept across both Britain and the United States.

In 1964, Labour leader Harold Wilson became the youngest prime minister in 150 years. His government brought in many changes that helped working-class people, such as more university places and help to buy houses.

The 1960s also saw big changes in fashion. Most notably, designer Mary Quant introduced the miniskirt and brought affordable fashion to people. Although women had worn trousers before, it was during the 1960s that women began to wear trousers more frequently and in larger numbers.

Research task: Research fashion designer Mary Quant and the influence she had on British fashion. Who were the Teddy boys, mods and rockers?

The Windrush generation

The ‘Windrush generation’ refers to people who arrived in the UK between 1948 and 1971 from the Caribbean. The name comes from the ship the Empire Windrush, which arrived at Tilbury Docks in Essex on 22nd June 1948, bringing workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands. Thousands of buildings and homes had been destroyed by bombs in WWII and it all needed to be rebuilt. Many countries in the Caribbean were still under British rule and many Caribbeans had served in the British army, so a lot of people answered an advert inviting them to come to Britain to help with the labour shortages.

Link to the play: In Act One, Scene Seven, Wendell refers to when he first came to Britain: ‘When mi come to dis country I was ar good man. Ar soldier. Fight far King an’ country.’ (page 53)

Treatment of Black people in Britain in the 1960s

The 1948 British Nationality Act gave full right of entry and settlement to people born or naturalised in the UK or one of its colonies. However, despite being invited to Britain, many immigrants faced racial discrimination.

Link to the play: Although it could be argued that Wendell doesn’t make as much effort as he could to find work, it was still hard for Black people, especially men, to get jobs. As he says in Act One, Scene Seven, Wendell was ‘ar good man’ as a soldier, ‘But it never make far respec’. Fram dis Englishman’and he struggles with how he is treated when he is looking for work: ‘Even now everywhere mi go looking far work, dem look at mi so so… An’ grown men wit ar family scratching around far even ar paper round.’

People who were well-qualified professionals in the Caribbean were refused work or offered low-paid jobs in the UK, and Mavis is frustrated with Margot not understanding the difficulties she and Wendell face: ‘It’s not Wendell’s fault that the world look at us […] somehow as second-class citizens. This country call upon us to work. Call us! And now we’re here they’re telling us only certain work suit us. Who do you think runs the hospitals and schools in the Caribbean?’ (Act Two, Scene Four, page 82)

Quite often the only housing available was overcrowded, shared accommodation that no one else wanted to rent. Black people were often turned away from accommodation because of their race, and the colour bar was in full force. The colour bar was a policy that meant that Black and Asian people were stopped from entering pubs and bars and from working in certain jobs even if they were qualified for them. This led to many people having to take any work they could get.

Link to the play: Wendell says to Junior ‘Wha’ kinda world put men in de same sentence as dogs?’ (Act One, Scene Seven, page 54). This refers to signsfrequently seen in windows turning Black people away from jobs and

accommodation. The phrase ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’ represents the idea that racism was widespread.

‘With respect to…’

At the start of the printed playtext, Odimba offers respect to a variety of prominent people. The first person listed was a member of the Windrush generation who overcame great obstacles to succeed in her career in Bristol:

Princess Campbell was born in Jamaica. When she arrived in Bristol in 1962 she applied for a job at the Wills Tobacco Factory and became their first Black employee. Princess trained as a nurse, and fought to become Bristol’s first Black ward sister.

Immigrant children in education

Lots of the children who arrived from the Caribbean were bullied at school because they were not white.

Link to the play: In Act Two, Scene Two we are given a hint as to how Princess is treated by children at school: ‘My name is Phyllis Princess James. I want to wear this crown… I want to be the prettiest girl in the whole of Weston- Super-Mare and Bristol… But everyone in school says I can’t be…’ (Act Two, Scene Two, page 66)

In the 1960s, hundreds of immigrant children were labelled as ‘educationally subnormal’, often simply due to their differing use of language or dialect, and were wrongly sent to schools for pupils with special needs. In addition, many children were part of the controversial ‘bussing out’ policy, where non-white schoolchildren were taken by bus to schools outside their local area to try to limit the number of ethnic minority children in schools.

Link to the play: When Princess comes home from school crying in Act Two, Scene One, Mavis assumes that her teacher has been acting on a racist bias: ‘That teacher saying meanness to you again? Those teachers need to realise they can’t keep putting my children on some dunce table.’ (page 59)

Windrush scandal

In 2017 it was discovered that many people from the Windrush generation had been wrongly sent back to the Caribbean. Lots of the people involved had arrived in the UK with their parents when they were children and did not have their own passports. In 2010, the landing cards that they arrived with proving that they were allowed to be here were destroyed by the Home Office (the government department for security including immigration and passports), and many people were wrongly deported even though they had been told that they could stay for good. In 2018, the UK government apologised and said they would give compensation to people who were affected, but many people did not receive payment.

Geographical context: Bristol

Bristol, situated on the River Avon, is a large port city in the south-west of England.

Historically, Bristol was a well-defended port and by the Middle Ages it was well known for cloth and leather. By the fourteenth century, Bristol was England’s second largest port; the harbour was bustling and busy, but the streets were dirty and most people lived in cramped, unsanitary conditions. In 1348, Bristol was one of the first places to be hit by the Black Death. It spread rapidly and wiped out vast numbers of the city’s population.

Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) sailed west from Bristol on his wooden ship the Matthew in 1497 searching for a new route to Asia. Cabot eventually landed in Newfoundland, North America.

Bristol’s trade with Europe and America made the city’s merchants wealthy but the trade also attracted pirates, the most famous of whom is Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the port was incredibly busy, and ships set off with cloth and other goods for Africa where they traded for spices, gold, ivory and slaves.

The enslaved people were then taken to British-owned lands in the Caribbean and sold to work on plantations. The ships then returned to Bristol with tobacco, coffee, rum and sugar. Tonnes of sugar was transported from the West Indies and by 1760 Bristol had more than twenty sugar houses. By the mid-eighteenth century, people were starting to realise how wrong slavery was and after much protest and many years of appalling suffering, slavery was abolished in 1807.

In the 1600s, Edward Colston was a prominent figure in Bristol who made his money from the slave trade. He worked for the Royal African Company, which it is estimated sold around 100,000 West African people in the Americas and Caribbean. To reinforce their ‘ownership’, the company branded the enslaved

people, including women and children, on their chests. Colston made most of his money this way, and used his wealth to fund schools, churches and hospitals in the UK, giving him a reputation as a philanthropist. A bronze statue was erected in 1895 as a memorial to Colston’s good works, however in recent years many people in Bristol campaigned about the statue, suggesting that because of Colston’s link to the slave trade he should not be memorialised. On 7th June 2020, during a Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol, the statue of Edward Colston was pulled down. and thrown into the docks.

St Paul’s

St Paul’s is an inner suburb of Bristol, just north-east of the city centre. The striking Georgian architecture in parts of St Paul’s clearly shows that in the 1800s the area was favoured by wealthy people. In the 1870s, the Brooks Dye Works opened, becoming a large employer and attracting people to the area, making it quite a fashionable place to live.

During the Second World War (1939–1945), Bristol was very heavily bombed and this had a big impact, with people who could afford to move leaving the area. Things didn’t get repaired, and the area became neglected. During the 1950s, when Black migrants started to arrive, they often ended up in run-down areas because they could not afford to rent houses elsewhere or were refused accommodation by white landlords.

St Paul’s is a diverse community, well known for its carnival which has been running since 1968. The carnival was created to challenge negative stereotypes of the St Paul’s area. It started as a community event called the St Paul’s Festival, with residents selling home-cooked food from their front gardens. The organisers wanted to bring communities together. It became very popular and in 1991 was renamed St Paul’s Afrikan Caribbean Carnival. Thousands of people attend the event to enjoy its spectacular parade, sound systems and food.

St Paul’s also made national news in April 1980 because of a riot which took place there.

Keyword:Philanthropist – a person who wants to encourage the wellbeing of others, especially by the generous donation of money to good causes.

Research task: What can people expect from St Paul’s Carnival today? What sparked the riot in 1980? What happened?

Mavis lives with her children in a flat in St Agnes, which is the area directly next to St Paul’s. Many of the grand houses in these areas were turned into flats and several families might have occupied one house.

‘With respect to…’

Many of those listed by Odimba in the front of the playtext lived in or were connected to St Paul’s. Seven of them (labelled here *‘Saint’ mural) are depicted in large murals which were painted on buildings in the suburb or in nearby St Agnes, and Montpellier, by artist Michelle Curtis. The murals are referred to as the ‘Seven Saints of St Paul’s’:

Alfred Fagon was born in Jamaica. He came to England in 1955 and worked for British Rail before joining the army. He began working as an actor in Bristol, where he lived in St Paul’s, and he went on to write and produce his own work, becoming one of the most notable Black British playwrights of the 1970s and 1980s.

Clifford Drummond (*‘Saint’ mural) was born in Jamaica and moved to the UK with his wife Mavis in 1954. Drummond was involved with many community organisations and helped immigrants from the Caribbean and Asia with legal and bureaucratic difficulties they faced. Alongside Owen Henry, also listed by Odimba, he founded Homelands Travel Service in 1962, chartering cheaper flights to the Caribbean.

Delores Campbell (*‘Saint’ mural) was born in Jamaica. She thought equality, integration and community were really important, and she co-founded the St. Pauls’ Festival and the United Housing Association. Delores really cared about children and she became a foster parent; over eighteen years she fostered approximately thirty children.

Tony Bullimore was a white British man from Southend-on-Sea who moved to Bristol in the early 1960s and married Lalel, a West Indian immigrant. The mixed race of the couple caused a lot of controversy and they were very badly treated. In 1966, they opened The Bamboo Club. The club was open to everyone regardless of their race, which was very unusual at the time. The club became very popular; people could meet and enjoy themselves regardless of their race, and the club allowed mixed friendships to flourish.

Link to the play: In Act Two, Scene Two, when Mavis, Margot and Wendell return from their night out, Wendell says: ‘De club welcome everybody for sure. Only inna Bristol yuh see so many different different people in same place.’ (page 68) Could this club be The Bamboo Club?

The docks

Today, Bristol’s harbourside is a vibrant, bustling hub with bars, restaurants, museums and many places to explore, including Brunel’s SS Great Britain and a replica of John Cabot’s Matthew. Historically, the docks were busy and dangerous. The water was busy with vessels and the area was full of large warehouses that stored goods for manufacturing and trade. In the 1960s, shipping goods in containers became much more economical, and Bristol Docks were too small for the large container ships. This led to the docks beginning to decline. It would not have been a nice or safe place to be.

Link to the play: In Act One, Scene Six, Junior is angry that Wendell has left the girls alone at the docks. ‘He brought you here? Where is he now? Why are you waiting for him all alone like this?’ (page 43). Leon also thinks it’s no place for the girls to be by themselves: ‘This is no place for young girls. There is grown men and dirt and machinery.’ (page 44).

Bristol accent and dialect

Bristol has a distinctive accent, and many people use features of its dialect. We see evidence of this in the play, with Margot’s use of words such as ‘lush’ (lush is a positive word that can mean many different things in different contexts. If a person is lush they might be attractive or a nice person or both. Lush food is delicious, a lush day might refer to a great day out, or nice weather. The word ‘lovely’ is a good substitute) and ‘babber’ (baby/my love), and phrases such as ‘Ark at ee!’ (Listen to that/you).

Keywords:Accent – the way you pronounce words; dialect – the words that you use.

Bristol bus boycott

In the 1960s, the Bristol Omnibus Company refused to employ any Black or Asian workers as conductors or drivers. The West Indian Development Council (or WIDC), which included Owen Henry, Roy Hackett, Audley Evans and Prince Brown, joined forces with Paul Stephenson to fight the decision. Stephenson arranged for Guy Bailey to have an interview; he was well-qualified and should have got the job, but when the bus company found out he was Black they refused to interview him. In April 1963, Stephenson got the WIDC to call for a boycott of Bristol’s buses. The boycott began on 30th April and asked for people to stop travelling on the buses and to walk instead. Sometimes people blocked the roads to stop the buses too. Some white people were angry, thinking that if the bus company employed Black workers there wouldn’t be jobs for white people, even though they were short-staffed. The protestors did, however, have people on their side and the newspapers were full of letters in favour of the boycott as well as against it. There were also some high-profile supporters, including Sir Learie Constantine, and Labour MP Tony Benn who involved the prime minister at the time, Harold Wilson. Students and tutors from Bristol University also held a demonstration.

Sir Learie Constantine was a professional West Indian cricketer, and was the High Commissioner of Trinidad and Tobago. In 1943 he won a case against the Imperial Hotel in London because they refused to honour the reservation he had made for himself and his family.

On 28th August, the bus company was forced to end the colour bar. On the 17th September 1963, Raghbir Singh became the first non-white bus conductor. He was soon joined by Norman Samuels and Norris Edwards from Jamaica and Mohammed Raschid and Abbas Ali from Pakistan.

The success of the Bristol bus boycott led to the passing of the 1965 Race Relations Act which made racial discrimination illegal in public spaces. This was followed by the 1968 Race Relations Act which extended the ruling to housing and employment.

Playwright insight: