Chris Searle

Chris Searle (born 1 January 1944) is a British educator, poet, anti-racist activist, and socialist. He has written widely on cricket, language, jazz, race, and social justice, and has taught in Canada, England, Tobago, Mozambique, and Grenada. He has been associated with the Institute of Race Relations since the 1970s, and is on the editorial board of Race & Class. He writes a weekly column on jazz for the left-wing newspaper Morning Star.

Life

Chris Searle was born in Romford, Essex, in 1944. He was a young cricketer for England, and graduated in 1966 from the University of Leeds. That year he went to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where in 1967 he completed an M.A. in English Literature at McMaster University, which included a thesis on the East End of London poet Isaac Rosenberg. He became a schoolteacher in Canada, and then in 1968–69 taught English at a secondary school in Tobago, in the West Indies. His 1972 work The Forsaken Lover: White Words and Black People, which won the Martin Luther King Prize, is based on his experience in Tobago.

Stepney School strike On returning to England in 1970, Searle taught in the East End, and was involved in the Stepney School strike of 1971 in the borough of Tower Hamlets. He was dismissed from the John Cass Foundation and Red Coat School when he published Stepney Words, a collection of his pupils' poems; however, he was reinstated after his pupils went on strike in protest.

Later life He spent 1977 and 1978 working in Nampula Secondary School in northern Mozambique during the Civil War there. His book We're Building the New School! Diary of a Teacher in Mozambique, published in 1981, presents his experiences in diary form.

Searle spent time in the early 1980s in Grenada, and wrote and edited several books about that Caribbean island, including, in 1981, Grenada: Education Is a Must! with Grenada's Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Bishop had been involved in March 1979 with a coup by the Marxist New Jewel Movement, which suspended the country's constitution, and established a People's Revolutionary Government. Searle also edited In Nobody's Backyard: Maurice Bishop’s speeches 1979–1983.

He taught at the Earl Marshal School in Sheffield between 1990 and 1995. Later he was a lecturer in education at Goldsmiths College, London. In 2007, Searle was a visiting social sciences professor at York University, Toronto.

According to John Berger: "At his best Searle's compassion, anger and sense of historical morality as a storyteller are reminiscent of the early Gorki. I can see no other writer in Britain with whom to compare him."