4. SLOUGH: South Asian Women on Strike

Standing up for yourself is difficult. It’s even more difficult if people assume that you ‘won’t make a fuss’. From 1979 to 1980, the mostly South Asian and female workforce of a bubble gum factory in Slough stood up for themselves in the face of unfairness. The strike at the Chix Confectionery Company confronted stereotypes at the time that viewed South Asian women as passive.

But this wasn’t the first time the British public was surprised to see strikers in saris. How is Chix connected to other resistance movements led by South Asian women in this era?

Not only does this episode highlight how women confronted the stereotypes they faced, but it questions another stereotype… Is Slough as “boring” as we’ve all been told?

Join History Hun (Anouska Lewis) on her trip to Slough as she searches for the site of the Chix strike with a young historian, discusses the importance of intersectionality with an activist and academic, and has tea with a community worker in her eighties who shares her first-hand experiences of discrimination at work in the 1970s.

History Hun is on a mission to prove that no hometown is boring. Because everywhere has a history and history’s never boring!!

She’s spotlighting hidden histories from misjudged places across the UK and supplying you with a few history-hun-facts along the way x

Hometown Boring? is a Mags Creative production for BBC Sounds Audio Lab

Written, produced and presented by Anouska Lewis

Senior Producer – Ryan Nile

Editor – Kit Milsom

Executive Producers – James Norman Fyfe and Kit Milsom

Theme Music and Sound Design – Kit Milsom

Artwork – Ellie Walmsley

Additional support – Amanda Birbara

Commissioning Editor – Khaliq Meer