Ena Hackett was Brent woman behind Bristol Bus Boycott

She had seen the job advertised, and thought it would help her to bring her brother over from Jamaica, having herself emigrated four years before.

Ena recalled one of the admin staff seeing her waiting for her interview, before going into a back room.

When she returned, Ena was told that the job had already been filled. At home, she told her husband Roy what had happened.

• READ MORE - Three people rushed to hospital after car crash on major Park Royal road

The couple were angry. They both knew why Ena had been turned down – she was black, and the bus company operated a notorious “colour bar” policy.

At that time, employers in Britain could not be prosecuted for discriminating on racist grounds.

The next year, after another black interviewee, Guy Bailey, was turned down by Bristol Omnibus Company, Hackett along with other activists decided to push for a bus boycott in the city.

Within months, the bus company announced that it would end its discriminatory hiring practices.

Shortly afterwards, Ena moved to Brent with Roy, and went on to work as a seamstress at Park Royal Hospital.

Ena Hackett (left) later in life with granddaughter Samantha Thorpe (Image: Emma Thompson)

This was the story of the Bristol Bus Boycott that Ena’s granddaughter, Emma Thompson, grew up knowing. But it is not the one most commonly told.

Emma told Brent and Kilburn Times that most reporting on the boycott focuses on Guy Bailey, and either completely omits her grandmother, or only briefly mentions her in passing.

She said: “I’m fed up with it. The woman has been removed from a historical story. My gran had a story in it too, and I feel it’s been swept under the carpet.”

Her grandparents, she said, had been school sweethearts in Jamaica, with Roy moving to Bristol first, and then Ena joining him several years later.

• READ MORE - 'I have prostate cancer but was refused access to toilets at a car boot sale'

Emma said that her grandfather had been “enraged” by Ena’s rejection from the Bristol bus company job, and it was this that drove him to start his activism.

She added that she was now determined to put her grandmother at the forefront of the story during Black History Month.

“Before she died, my grandmother would always say – ‘they’re not going to worry about me because I’m a woman’," Emma said.

“Not one person has recognised her, but she is as important as anybody else in this story, and I want people to know that.”

Ena Hackett died aged 84 in November 2015, with Roy passing away seven years later, in summer 2022.