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 postwar
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).[1] Also in 2007,
the novel was dramatized for Radio 4 by Roy Williams and broadcast in two parts, starring Kwame
Kwei-Armah.[2]

Plot[edit]
Ricky Braithwaite is a British Guiana-born engineer who has worked in an oil refinery in Aruba.
Coming to Britain on the verge of World War Two, he joins theRAF as aircrew. Demobbed in 1945,
he is unable to find work, despite his qualifications and experience, meeting overt anti-black
attitudes. But after discussing his situation with a stranger whose name he never learns, 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 totally unmotivated to learn and largely semi-literate and semiarticulate. But he persists, despite finding that they are unresponsive to his approach.
Braithwaite decides to try a new approach, and sets some ground rules. The students will be leaving
school soon, and will enter an adult society, so he will treat them as adults, and allow them to decide
what topics they wish to study. In return, he demands their respect as their teacher. This novel
approach is initially rejected, but within a few weeks, the class is largely won over. He suggests outof-school activities, including visits to museums, which the kids have never thought about before. A
young teacher, Gillian Blanchard, volunteers to assist him on these trips. Some of the girls start to
speculate whether a personal relationship is budding between Braithwaite and Gillian. The trip is a
success and more are approved by the initially sceptical Head.
The teachers and the Student Council openly discuss all matters affecting the school and what is
being taught. The general feeling is that Braithwaite's approach is working, although some teachers
still advocate a tougher approach to the kids.
The mother of one of the girls comes to speak to Braithwaite, feeling that he has more influence than
she has with her impressionable daughter, who is staying out late and might be getting into trouble.

In the meantime, Braithwaite and Gillian are deeply in love and are discussing marriage. Her parents
are openly disapproving of a mixed-race marriage, but realise that the couple are serious and both
intelligent people who know what they are doing.