What’s happened to the Britain I love?
When Delsie, 77, was shockingly racially abused on a Ryanair flight, it made headlines worldwide. Now she tells her full traumatic story — and, after being welcomed here as a Windrush immigrant 55 years ago, she asks ...
AWEEK has passed since Delsie Gayle’s flight landed at London Stansted. She has unpacked, opened all her post, watered the plants and life should be returning to normal. Only the 77-year-old can’t stop shaking and crying.
She hasn’t slept, she has barely eaten and seems far frailer than the plucky grandmother of 12 and great-grandmother of five who boarded the plane to spend four days on the Costa Brava nearly a fortnight ago.
Her daughter Carol, 53, has barely left her mother’s side. ‘She didn’t leave the house for five days,’ she says. ‘I haven’t seen her smile. I keep telling her it wasn’t her fault.’
What Carol is referring to is an incident that happened on a Ryanair flight from Barcelona. Delsie was subjected to racist abuse from a British passenger that was recorded on a mobile phone and uploaded to the internet, where it went viral and made headlines worldwide.
Her abuser, 75-year-old David Mesher, a former railway worker living in Birmingham, became irate when Delsie, who has crippling arthritis and a double knee replacement and had been escorted onto the plane in a wheelchair, was unable to get up from her aisle seat quickly enough to let him past to the window.
In a tirade watched nearly 1.5 million times online, Mr Mesher calls the placid, shocked old lady a ‘stupid ugly cow’ and an ‘ugly black b******’ as other passengers look on in shock.
Yesterday, Mr Mesher appeared on TV denying that he was a racist and insisting he had simply ‘ lost his temper’ with Delsie, to whom he apologised for any distress he had caused.
Asked if she accepted his apology, she simply responded: ‘I don’t think so. You must forget and forgive but it’s going to take a long time for me to get over what he has done to me.’
Meanwhile, she says she has heard nothing — not even a phone call — from the company at the heart of all this.
Yesterday, Ryanair, Michael O’Leary’s budget airline, issued a statement extending its ‘very sincere apologies to this passenger for the regrettable and unacceptable remarks that were made to her’.
A spokesman added that, by reporting the matter to Essex police and apologising in writing to Delsie on Sunday morning (a claim she refutes), Ryanair treated the incident ‘with the urgency and seriousness it warranted’.
Back home in her neat, three-bedroom terrace house in Leyton, East London, where faces of youngsters in school uniform beam from photographs on her living room walls, Delsie still can’t come to terms with what happened. THE indignity of such an impersonal, anodyne response from Ryanair is yet another blow. ‘They haven’t been in contact with me,’ she says in her soft Caribbean lilt. ‘They owe me a proper apology.
‘I don’t know when I’ll get over what he said. To call me that because of the colour of my skin. What is wrong with my colour? Why me?
‘I would never speak to somebody like that. Oh Lord . . .’ Her voice trails off. She wrings her hands.
This man — this foul-mouthed, ignorant individual whom she, ever polite, refers to as a ‘gentleman’ throughout our interview — represents an attitude that saddens her deeply, and one she has never encountered before.
For 55 years have passed since Delsie Gayle moved to this country from her native Jamaica. In that time, Mrs Gayle spent almost three decades working in care homes, devoting her life to looking after the elderly, while raising her four children — three girls and a boy — with her husband Austin.
In the London community where she lives, everybody knows her name. She has travelled the world — to Canada, America and across Europe — and counts as friends people from different ethnicities and backgrounds.
But never in all those years was she subjected to the sort of vile racist abuse she suffered from a stranger last week.
This is not the Britain she knows and joyously calls home, and she is devastated by the cruel reminder that racism is alive in 2018.
‘Why is it happening now?’ she asks. ‘Why is it OK for a man to talk to me like that? Why did nobody tell him off?
‘If it was the other way round, I think I would have been arrested. It wasn’t like this when I came to this country in the Sixties. I never suffered like I did on that plane.’
The trip had been planned as a pick-me-up by Carol, her eldest daughter, a chef. It is almost a year since Austin, Delsie’s beloved husband of 53 years, passed away, and Carol wanted to do something to lift her mother’s spirits — so she planned a four- day trip, just the two of them, to Spain.
‘ I was feeling very low,’ says Delsie. ‘I miss my husband. I think about him every day. Of course I thought about him on holiday, but it was nice. The hotel was lovely. We had a really good time.’
Those happy memories were shattered on the journey home. In the video footage, Delsie appears stunned as her abuser launches into her and another passenger tries to intervene.
Having asked the flight attendant if she could sit with her daughter, both she and Carol — who had been in the lavatory during the incident and didn’t know what had happened — moved to the row behind.
Mr Mesher was allowed to remain where he was, unchallenged and unpunished, despite others on the plane asking for him to be thrown off. Indeed, a flight attendant is heard on camera asking if he is all right.
Back in Britain, mother and daughter were ushered off the plane by cabin crew, who told them there was nothing they could do. They were eventually given a number for customer services and told to ring on the Monday morning. They went home in disgust.
By Monday, of course, everyone had seen the video, with news outlets around the world reporting on it. Mrs Gayle’s doorbell hasn’t stopped ringing. Police — who interviewed Mr Mesher this week — came to take a statement on Thursday, and the Gayles are considering legal action for racial hatred and emotional abuse.
It seems strange, and sad, that Delsie should have had her first taste of racism now. In Sixties Britain, when some 75,000 Commonwealth migrants were arriving every year, racism and discrimination were rife.
But Delsie, who was born in a small town in Jamaica, says the UK made her feel welcome. ‘I lived in Jamaica until my 20s,’ she recalls. ‘It was a happy place. But
everyone I knew was coming to London. There was work and opportunity here. My cousins, my sister and then my husband — we were still sweethearts then — they all moved to England.’ Austin, who worked as a builder and plasterer, came in 1960. He travelled by boat, just like the first Caribbean migrants of that generation, who arrived when the MV Empire Windrush docked in Essex in 1948. Delsie came to Britain by air in December 1963. She wasn’t afraid of the life that awaited, though there was one shock. ‘I remember being very cold when I stepped off the plane,’ she says. ‘It was freezing. I didn’t even have tights on. We didn’t have temperatures like that in Jamaica. I was so cold I stayed inside for weeks.’ Delsie and Austin married in March 1964, at the Baptist church in Stoke Newington. Afterwards, they moved into a shared house in East London.
‘They were good people there,’ she says. ‘They knew my husband and they would say, “You have a lovely wife.” It was a big community, lots of Jamaicans who were like family.’
When she first arrived, Delsie worked in a shoe factory and then, after her four children were born, took a job as night manager at a care home for the elderly. In the late Seventies, she moved to her current house and transferred to a care home near by, where she stayed for 25 years.
‘I liked caring for the elderly. They were very friendly. I loved being around their grandchildren. It was a lovely place to work.’
And not once, she insists, in all those years, did she encounter racism in the UK. ‘Are you joking?’ she asks, at the very suggestion. ‘Never. Sometimes the older people might say a word they didn’t mean, but it was only when their minds were going and they would say sorry afterwards. But never from a stranger in the street.’
Much of this she attributes to her husband, whom she describes as ‘ the kindest man’, and who she believes protected her from any unpleasantness.
‘ With him around, people were always nice — to him and to me,’ Delsie says, with a deep sigh. ‘He looked after me.’
Carol adds: ‘Dad was very friendly. He didn’t let anything bother him and he got on with everybody. Anything bad, he let it go over his head.
‘He was always smiling and joking. You knew him for five minutes and you felt like you’d known him all your life.’
In his later years, Austin, who was 79 when he died last November, suffered from vascular dementia. He became ill and wheelchair-bound, and Delsie and her children cared for him at home until, ten days before he passed away, he had to go into a hospice.
‘It was horrible,’ says Carol, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘He was the centre of our world. Mum has been so low since losing him. That’s why we had our little break — I wanted to take her mind off it around the anniversary.’
Carol found an online travel company offering a flight-and-hotel package to the Costa Brava. ‘I went with Ryanair because the timing of the flights suited us,’ she explains. ‘I know they’re often delayed and I didn’t want Mum to be waiting around late at night.’
The holiday itself was a success. Although the weather was ‘terrible’ they went on boat trips, ate nice meals and sat on the beach throwing bread to the seagulls. ‘But now I can’t think about it without thinking about that man,’ says Delsie.
Carol had booked aisle seats opposite one another for herself and her mother — and paid for the privilege — as well as pre-boarding assistance that meant Delsie, who often walks with a stick, was one of the first to be wheeled on.
It was just after she had taken her seat that Mr Mesher got on board and the nightmare began.
Carol witnessed the first exchange but, needing the toilet and believing it to be settled once Mr Mesher was in his seat, didn’t see the rest. ‘All I knew was that Mum was in a different seat when I came back,’ she says. ‘I asked her what happened and she just said she had wanted to move. So I swapped with someone in the row behind.’
The plane took off and the two-hour flight passed without further incident. But Delsie’s abuser remained in uncomfortably close proximity. ‘When he was getting off he turned and looked at me again,’ Delsie recalls.
Carol realised someone — David Lawrence, a 55-year-old charity worker — had filmed Mr Mesher shouting at her mother initially, but didn’t know he had continued recording. It wasn’t until the plane landed that Mr Lawrence approached the Gayles and she saw the horrifying footage.
Both she and her mother are grateful to him, and to the passenger in the row behind, for encouraging Ryanair to move Mr Mesher or throw him off the plane. Many of the other passengers were Spanish and didn’t understand the gravity of the abuse.
Their anger lies squarely with Ryanair: the flight attendants who witnessed what happened yet did nothing; the ground staff who hurried them off the plane; and those in charge who have failed to offer an adequate apology. A petition to boycott the airline has 250,000 signatures, and the two say they and their family will never fly with Ryanair again.
‘All I want is a written apology so it doesn’t happen to another person,’ Delsie says. ‘I don’t want anyone to go through what I did.’ CAROL adds: ‘ The way they have handled this is disgusting. They’re trying to sweep it under the carpet. It is unacceptable that they tolerate racism on their planes.’
As for David Mesher, Delsie — whose dignified composure falters at the mention of his name — can’t bear to think about him.
Whether there is a case against him is to be decided by Essex police, while the deputy mayor of Barcelona has called for an investigation.
‘I can’t read the papers or look at the news,’ says Delsie. ‘I never want to see his face again.’
Instead she is focusing on the support of family, friends and indeed strangers, whose warmth and generosity has buoyed her through this difficult week.
Someone has offered to treat her to lunch at the Ritz in London; while Virgin Atlantic has offered her return flights to Florida, where she dreams of going to Disney World.
She insists it isn’t bravery that made her speak up about what happened. ‘At first I was afraid of making a fuss,’ she says. ‘But he can’t treat me that way. Nobody should speak to another person like that, whatever the colour of their skin.’
And with that remark, Delsie Gayle, a kind- hearted, humble woman who has lived here most of her life, shows she is far more British, far more representative of this country and the values we hold dear, than her small-minded abuser could ever be.