By Hugh Muir.
1940 RAF Cadets on the steps
2010 WFC Students on the steps
It was 1940 and the 200 students of South West Essex Technical College posed ramrod straight on the sharply inclined steps; ties stiff, uniforms crisp. They were RAF cadets learning science and engineering at the place that was dubbed the People's University. Unsurprisingly, those pictured were all white.
The place is called Waltham Forest College nowadays and the grand steps remain imposing. The porticos, by sculptor Eric Gill, have been lovingly preserved.
But last week, when the east London college recreated that recently discovered archive photograph, everything else was different. The formation was identical to that created with military precision all those years ago, but lining the steps were 200 students from another generation, another century. White Britons, black Britons, teenagers of Asian and African and Mediterranean and Eastern European descent. A student body with links to every continent on the planet. Speakers of 76 different languages. Each standing out in the cold to make a statement. "I told them it was their job to represent their era, just as the cadets in 1940 were symbolic of that time," said lecturer Gaverne Bennett. "They bought into it."
At the front stood a young Muslim woman, her dark blue coat tightly buttoned, her headscarf electric green. In the third row of four there were black girls shivering in their blue beauticians' uniforms. In the next, boys from Asia and the Middle East, easily visible in white catering garb with conical hats to match.
The English as a second language students (ESOL) were the hardest to organise into place, but once the camera shutter had clicked, they were as exuberant as the others. "One day my family will see it and know that I was part of something," Glori Mutshipayi, 19, from Congo, told me; flanked by his associates, two Poles and a Pakistani.
It's not Nirvana. It's a 21st-century college where cultures meet, histories collide. But it works. They live, they learn. Stella Fleming, head of ESOL, recalls worrying about a class containing Bosnians and Croatians, but says she quickly realised it wasn't going to be a problem. "Being away from that situation, their view was that 'we've all lost'. They just wanted to learn the language more than anything else."
