
Sam King -- Image: British Future
Though it will always be 1945 which marks the
transition between war and peace in the history books, a strong case can be
made for 1948 as the year when several of the most important foundation stones
of modern, post-war Britain
were laid. That summer, the nationality and citizenship act gained its
Royal Assent. The NHS was born on July 5th, a fortnight after a boat docked at
Tilbury as the HMS Windrush brought almost five hundred West Indian
immigrants to England.
The images of its arrival – an era when men wore hats with their sharp suits,
as they carried suitcases from a boat – have become central to the iconography
of migration to Britain.
The inclusion of the Windrush, as a paper mache replica made of newspaper
headlines, in Danny Boyle’s Olympic retelling of our island story ratified its
place as a founding moment in the making of a multi-ethnic Britain. The 65th
anniversary, today, is being celebrated as the inaugural Windrush
Day by a broad civic coalition, reaching across the party political
spectrum, as a day of thanksgiving for the positive contribution which those
who have come to Britain
have made to British society. It is also to affirm a commitment, whether we are
migrants, the children and grandchildren of immigrants to Britain, or among those who can trace our family
histories here back many generations to much earlier arrivals to Britain’s
shores, to work together for a shared society.
Yet before it was a symbol, the Windrush was a
boat, and one with a fascinating, chequered history, having been a captured
Nazi German warship before being renamed Windrush. Before its passengers became
iconic pioneers of post-war immigration, they were people who made a personal
decision to seek new opportunities in Britain. I spoke to one of them,
Sam King, now 87, in what is now Brixton’s Windrush Square, as the civic square
opposite the town hall is now known, having been renamed for the fiftieth
anniversary of the boat’s arrival.
“I came here to work. We helped to rebuild London which had been so badly damaged by the
war. It wasn’t easy. We had rationing. I remember walking around London and you would not
see a single black face. But I worked hard and made this my home. I wanted to
build a life for my family and I am proud that my children and grandchildren
have done well here, and now my great grandchildren too”, he said.

Windrush group -- Image: British Future King also told me about another moment when the West Indians believed they had arrived in England. It came two summers later: the pride felt at winning the Lords Test. He was there, and talks about the bowling of Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine as if it was yesterday. None of the West Indian fans had expected the result, he says, but they stayed behind at the end as a lyric to a Victory Calypso, “Cricket, Lovely Cricket” was written on the spot to celebrate. King tells me that the cricket result sent a broader message too: "I think it did us good. The Empire could see that if you trained these people up, they could do the job".
Exploring the history
of the Windrush can sometimes disrupt as well as illuminate some of the
intuitions and narratives that are often now projected onto it. We think
of this as a story of new arrivals - yet many of those coming to Britain on the Windrush were often coming back
to Britain.
That was true of Sam King who, like about a third of those on board, had fought
for the RAF and had his medals pinned proudly to his chest when we met this
week. Indeed, the Windrush had been sent to Jamaica to bring back some West
Indian RAF men on temporary leave. The decision to place an advertisement in
the Jamaican Gleaner newspaper was an entrepreneurial opportunity to fill the
empty berths.
Windrush is a post-colonial story about what happened after Empire
–yet Empire was far from over. From the viewpoint of 2013, with India having become independent, 1948 can seem
like a moment when the need for Britain
was to adjust to its post-imperial power. That was not the intention of the
government at all, with the unanticipated shock of Suez still the best part of a decade away.
Labour’s Herbert Morrison, as Foreign Secretary, was quite as committed to
maintaining imperial possessions as his Victorian predecessors. The Colonial
Office’s rather cloudy crystal ball envisaged holding on to the remaining
colonies for generations, perhaps centuries.
This imperial context was important to the
Windrush story in at least two ways. The persistence of Empire was a
reason to leave for those who could, particularly for those who had been away
from the Caribbean during the war and gone back
to what then looked like more limited horizons than they were willing to
accept. "I did not want my children to grow up in a colony", Sam
King says. He believed that they would have a better life and opportunities in Britain.
Empire also helps to explain what can otherwise sound like a rather
romanticised attachment to the idea of the Commonwealth, and to free movement
within it. It was clearly a reason for Clement Attlee to repel pressure from
ten of his own backbenchers, who had written to him on the day that the
Windrush docked. Attlee’s terse reply understated the impact of Windrush,
suggesting that “it would be a great mistake to take the emigration of this Jamaican
party to the United Kingdom
too seriously”.
“It is traditional that British subjects, whether of Dominion or Colonial
origin (and of whatever race or colour) should be freely admissible to the United Kingdom.
That tradition is not, in my view, to be lightly discarded, particularly at a
time when we are importing foreign labour in large numbers. It would be
fiercely resented in the colonies themselves, and it would be a great mistake
to take any measure which would tend to weaken the loyalty and goodwill of the
colonies towards Great
Britain”.
This was a matter of cross-party consensus. David Maxwell-Fyfe had declaimed
for the Conservatives from the frontbench, during the passage of the
Nationality Act, that “we are proud that we impose no colour bar restrictions …
we must maintain our great metropolitan tradition of hospitality to everyone
from every part of the Empire”.
But one reason that Windrush gained more attention than the Almanzora had seven
months earlier was because it triggered the beginning, too, of post-war anxiety
about immigration, its arrival being raised in the House of Commons and,
somewhat tentatively, in the newspapers. Attlee added that “if our policy
were to result in a great influx of undesirables, we might, however unwillingly,
have to consider modifying it”. In the meantime the door remained open, while
attempts were made to use shipping regulations to discourage any significant
inflow. The door to Commonwealth migration remained open until 1962 when
politicians on both sides began to introduce more restrictive policies.
Trevor Phillips, with his brother Mike Phillips, co-wrote a book and television
series in 1998 which brought the Windrush story to a broader national
prominence, outside the academy and the classroom, and sought to bring out the
real lives of the Windrush generation from underneath the symbolism of the
stories that have been told about them. He is confident that the Windrush
merits its status as something different.
"There is always a philosophical question, about when did anything
begin", he told me, and whether to go back to Adam and Eve. The danger of
implying that there was no previous non-white presence in Britain before 1948 is understood, but there is
little point, he says, in trying to offer a false reassurance that nothing
changed in post-war Britain.
What made the Windrush different from previous waves of migration was that it
was an act of large-scale voluntary migration, says Phillips.
Immigration to Britain
did not begin in 1948 but with the groups who had come before, from the Huguenots
to the Jews, while the story of black migration had been dominated by the
legacies of slavery. What motivated many who took the Windrush was neither
compulsion nor fear driving the need to escape, but their “spirit of
adventure”, Phillips notes. The £28 fare was advertised as a half-price bargain
but, as Robert Winder’s history of immigration notes, it represented six months
wages for many Jamaicans.
The Windrush has naturally been seen as a founding moment of the black British
community for the Afro-Caribbean. It has, over time, become a broader symbol of
other journeys to Britain.
“The experience is a particular Afro-Caribbean one, but the story and the fable
have many connections and resonances”, says Phillips, although the patterns of
migration were often different.
Few people are aware that there were also sixty Polish refugees on the
Windrush too. The presence of the Windrush Poles partly captures the role of
contingency in the Windrush story – these displaced people had been on a
remarkable round-trip by the time the boat was advertising for more passengers
in Jamaica.
They had begun the journey in Siberia, and their route via India, Australia
and New Zealand to Mexico, and then Jamaica, was not the most direct
route to Tilbury. The Polish presence on the boat captures how the
immediate post-war era also continued to be a moment of movements, of
disruptive change, when a great many people were on the move, a story captured
in that greatest of all refugee movies, Casablanca.
Yet the balance of the Windrush passenger list speaks to the shift from
sanctuary to economic migration as the dominant reason that people came to
post-war Britain.
The half a million Poles in Britain are usually found at the end of a long list
of those who have come to Britain – from the Huguenots and the Jews, through
the Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities, to the Polish wave when the country
joined the European Union after 2004. In terms of numbers, there is a truth in
that, but it is not the whole truth. There is a great deal of Polish
involvement in Britain at
many previous points, just as there was a long Afro-Caribbean history of
engagement and involvement with Britain
before 1948.
The Windrush story casts interesting light on contemporary debates
about integration. The Windrush passengers believed that their Britishness was
non-negotiable and yet they were to find, after arrival, that they would have a
long process of negotiation to secure it. This was an important moment of disenchantment:
to find that the idea of Britain
inculcated in Kingston's classrooms was far from
universally acknowledged on London's
streets. In her novel, Small Island,
Andrea Levy (whose father was on the Windrush) gives her fictional ex-RAF man
Gilbert Joseph the plaintitive cry, "How come England did not know
me".
Integration certainly depends, foundationally, on the desire to belong. The
story of the Windrush generation is partly about an unwillingness to accept those
who want to belong; a critical impediment to integration.
Nobody would claim that the history was easy. This is a story about
contribution and change, but also about a sense of loss: the disappointment of
racism shattering ideals and illusions about Britain;
a sense of displacement and dislocation in Britain too. "Every generation
of migrants believes that they have come temporarily, until they have
children", says Phillips. Just as the Windrush generation, by the 1960s,
realised that they were here to stay, Britain was still debating. In
slogans like "send them back" the experiment of multi-ethnic Britain was a
subject for reversal. These were painful years. Yet Windrush has become part of
a shared history that suggests this renegotiation of national identity was,
ultimately, successful.
Questions of who counted as British were largely settled though there is certainly still much anxiety about immigration today, as there was in 1948. What is striking is how often anxiety about the present or future can now be combined with an uncomplicated acceptance of those who came before. That suggests that Britain has more of a history of integration than we tell ourselves, though it can sometimes feel as though integration can be signified when those who were part of the previous wave share an anxiety about whoever may come next.
The arrival of the Windrush was the beginning of a new chapter but is, perhaps, now best understood as a half-way point in Britain's island story. As Zadie Smith wrote at the end of her novel White Teeth, looking back from late in the century at the mutual entanglements of multi-ethnic Britain, "endgames must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story".
Britain will continue to debate and argue about immigration, but the story of social change can also be seen through more than a million individual stories. Today, Sam King, at 87, lives in south London with four generations of his family. He has made an enormous contribution to his adopted home, both during the second world war and since returning with the Windrush. It is good to have a day to be thankful for his contribution, and those of so many others, to our shared country - because he chose to come, and chose to stay.
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