To Sir, With Love (novel)
First edition
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| Author | E. R. Braithwaite |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Autobiographical novel |
| Publisher | Bodley Head |
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Publication date
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1959 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 200 pp (paperback) |
| Awards | 1961 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award |
To Sir, With Love is a 1959 autobiographical novel by E. R. Braithwaite set in the East End of London. The novel is based on true events concerned with Braithwaite taking up a teaching post in a school there.
In 1967, the novel was made into a film, To Sir, with Love, starring Sidney Poitier and Lulu, and the film's title song became a number-1 hit that year. The setting for the film was changed from post-war London to the "swinging sixties", and, notwithstanding its success, Braithwaite had ambivalent feelings towards it, as he admitted in an interview with Burt Caesar conducted for a 2007 BBC Radio 4 programme entitled To Sir, with Love Revisited (produced by Mary Ward Lowery). Also in 2007, the novel was dramatised for Radio 4 by Roy Williams and broadcast in two parts, starring Kwame Kwei-Armah.
Ricky Braithwaite is an engineer from British Guiana who has worked in an oil refinery in Aruba. Coming to Britain just before the outbreak of World War II, he joins the RAF and is assigned to aircrew. Demobbed in 1945, he is unable to find work despite his qualifications and experience due to racism. After discussing his situation with a stranger, he applies for a teaching position and is assigned to Greenslade School, a secondary school in London's East End.
Most of the pupils in his class are unmotivated to learn, and are only semi-literate and semi-articulate. He persists despite their unresponsiveness to his approach. Students attempt to discourage and demoralise him by disruptive noises, constant use of the adjective "" in the classroom and, finally, the burning of a used sanitary towel in the fireplace. This last causes Braithwaite to lose his temper and reprimand all the girls.
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