Rivers of Blood Speech - Identity of The Woman Mentioned in The Speech

Identity of The Woman Mentioned in The Speech

After Powell delivered the speech, there were attempts to locate the constituent whom Powell described as being victimised by non-white residents. Despite combing the electoral register and other sources, the editor of the Wolverhampton newspaper the Express & Star, Clem Jones (a close friend of Powell who broke off relations with him over the controversy), and his journalists failed to identify the woman.

Shortly after Powell's death, Kenneth Nock, a Wolverhampton solicitor, wrote to the Express and Star in April 1998 to claim that his firm had acted for the woman in question, but that he could not name her owing to rules concerning client confidentiality. In January 2007, the BBC Radio Four programme Document, followed by the Daily Mail, claimed to have uncovered the woman's identity. They said she was Druscilla Cotterill (1907–1978), the widow of Harry Cotterill, a Battery Quartermaster Sergeant with the Royal Artillery who had been killed in World War II. She lived in Brighton Place in Wolverhampton, which by the 1960s was dominated by immigrant families. In order to increase her income, she rented rooms to lodgers, but did not wish to rent rooms to West Indians and stopped taking in any lodgers when the Race Relations Act 1968 banned racial discrimination in housing. She locked up the spare rooms and lived only in two rooms of the house. According to those who remember the period, the many children in the street regarded her as a figure of fun, and taunted her.