Last year, Jake and Mary Jacobs celebrated 70 years of a beautiful marriage, but they had to overcome many obstacles to get there.
Jake was one of the few black males in the city where Mary, a White lady, and Jake, a Black man, both resided in 1940s Britain.
It would have been easy for Mary to go, but she had fallen in love and would go to any length to remain with her lover, despite her father’s demands.
«When I told my father that I was going to marry Jake, he said, ‘If you marry that man, you will never set foot in this house again.’»
When Jake immigrated from Trinidad during the war, they met at the same technical institution where Mary was taking typing and shorthand lessons and he was going through Air Force training.
Mary, who was at the time a resident of Lancashire, struck up a conversation with Jake.
He and his buddy asked Mary and her friend to join them for a picnic, but a woman riding by noticed them and reported Mary to her father because she was shocked to see two English ladies speaking with black boys. Mary was not permitted to return to see her father after he was frightened.
When Jake returned to Trinidad, they wrote to each other, and he moved to the United Kingdom a few years later to find better-paying employment.
Jake proposed to Mary when she was 19 years old. She agreed, but when she told her family, they kicked her out.
«I only had one small suitcase with me when I left.» In 1948, no relatives attended our registrar’s office wedding.»
While her father was ‘horrified’ that she was considering marrying a black guy, Mary didn’t understand that the rest of society felt the same way.
«The first years of our marriage were hell in Birmingham—II cried every day and barely ate.» Nobody spoke to us; we couldn’t find a place to live since no one would rent to a black man, and we didn’t have any money.»
Walking down the street with Mary was tough because people would point at them.
Mary became pregnant, and the couple relished the prospect of becoming parents, but at 8 months, she gave birth to a stillborn child.
«It wasn’t related to the stress I was under at the time, but it broke my heart, and we never had any more children,» she explained.
With Mary working as a teacher and advancing to assistant principal of a British school and Jake finding a position with the Post Office, their circumstances did improve. They established new acquaintances, but Mary stated that she felt compelled to inform people that her husband was black before introducing them to him.
«My father died when I was 30, and although we were reconciled by then, he never did approve of Jake,» she explained.
Jake, 89, and Mary, 84, are presently residents of Solihull, a town south of Birmingham. They just celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary.
Jake maintains he has no regrets, but he also argues that today’s black youngsters have no idea what life was like for him in 1940s Britain.
«When I first arrived in the United Kingdom, I was subjected to daily abuse.» On a bus once, a guy wiped his hands over my neck and remarked, «I wanted to see if the dirt would come off.»
«And you couldn’t work in an office back then—because a black man in an office with all the white girls wasn’t thought to be safe.»
