Avtar Singh Jouhl

Avtar Johal Singh

Avtar Singh Johal

1958–2022

Avtar Singh Jouhl was born in Jandiala, Punjab in 1937. Jouhl’s father, Lakha Singh Jouhl, was a farmer. Jouhl was the only person in his family to receive an education, and he attended Khalsa High School and Lyallpur Khalsa College. In 1953, when he was 16, Jouhl’s father died and, due to his brothers’ absence, he became responsible for the family. During this period, Jouhl resisted two civil cases by a corrupt officer regarding the ownership of land belonging to his family. These early experiences affected Jouhl’s activism and his socialist politics.

In 1953 he married Manjit Kaur. In 1958 he migrated to Smethwick to join his brother Gashil and his uncle, with intentions of enrolling at the London School of Economics. He lived with fifteen other Indian men on Oxford Road and worked at the Shotton Brothers foundry in Oldbury as a moulders’ mate. Here, Indian men – who constituted a third of the foundry’s workforce – primarily worked in fettling, which was deemed an unskilled job, and no Indian man worked in the highly paid core-making job, which was regarded as skilled.

In 1959 Jouhl organized the Birmingham branch of the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA) with Jagmohan Joshi and became the branch Secretary. The formation of the Birmingham branch of the IWA was instigated by Jouhl’s experience of the colour bar in pubs across Smethwick and Handsworth. In addition, three months into his employment at Shotton Brothers, Jouhl realized that he was being paid less than white workers and, as a result, he encouraged his friends to organize a union. He contacted his acquaintance Jagmohan Joshi, who connected Jouhl with the Birmingham Communist Party, which supported their efforts to unionize. Jouhl was dismissed from the foundry in 1961, at which point all his Indian colleagues were unionized. He subsequently joined a foundry owned by Birmid Qualcast.

In 1960 Jouhl’s wife Manjit migrated to join him in Smethwick. Between 1960 and 1964 he remained General Secretary of the Birmingham branch of the IWA, before becoming a national organizer. In 1971 Jouhl himself faced racism at the border when returning to Britain after a family holiday when he and his wife were accused of being illegal immigrants, underscoring his commitment to challenging discriminatory immigration laws.

In 1964, during Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths’ campaign to become MP for Smethwick, Jouhl and the IWA campaigned for Labour party MPs to challenge what is deemed the most racist political election campaign in British history. Despite their efforts, Griffiths was elected MP. In February 1965 Jouhl and the Trinidadian anti-racist activist Claudia Jones invited the American civil rights campaigner Malcolm X to Smethwick. IWA members took Malcolm X to the Blue Gates pub, which operated a colour bar and refused to serve him, as well as to Marshall Street where white residents were trying to enforce segregation by demanding that the council buy housing on the street so Black and South Asian residents could not be their neighbours. The trip was filmed by the BBC, despite the local mayor’s opposition. Malcolm X told newspapers that he was ‘disturbed' by the reports of discrimination in Smethwick.

In 1967 Jouhl moved to London to work full-time for the IWA paper Lalkar. In the same year, the IWA experienced a split. Jouhl and Jagmohan Joshi led IWA (GB), which advocated for a revolutionary approach that did not cooperate with state institutions such as the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants (NCCI). The NCCI offered Jouhl a seat on their committee, but he declined. Jouhl returned to the Midlands in 1968 and continued to work for the Birmingham branch of the IWA, the IWA national committee and as a foundryman.

By 1991 Jouhl played an important role in remedying the spilt within the IWA. Soon after, he retired as a foundryman and became a lecturer at Birmingham Trade Union Studies Centre. Jouhl shared his life history for the Birmingham Black Oral History project between 1991 and 1992.

Jouhl died on 8 October 2022, aged 84.