And It Wasn’t A Dream…
by Wrongtom
Last Monday saw the annual celebration of Windrush day, marking 72 years since the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in Essex on June 22nd 1948 when hundreds of West Indian people stepped off the rusty ex-troop ship and onto British tarmac, heralding a new era in trans-Atlantic immigration, the dawning of multicultural England.
Kind of.
Sadly, Windrush is now synonymous with the scandal at the heart of Teresa May’s hostile environment policy, back when she ran the Home Office. Still though, we continue to celebrate the joyful moments, starting with Lord Kitchener’s lilting calypso ‘London Is The Place For Me’ which he performed for Pathé News with wide-eyed gusto as his snappily-dressed fellow travelers alighted behind him. This new era even had a theme song.
Another name sprang to mind on Monday, Dr Harold Moody. He wasn’t on the boat with Lord Kitch, but Moody was also a Jamaican émigré, and you can find a blue plaque marking his former residence on Queens Road, Peckham in the heart of South London. Historian and fellow Peckhamite Stephen Bourne once described the Doctor as Britain’s Martin Luther King, such was Moody’s significance, thanks to his humanitarian endeavours, both locally with his own medical practise, and nationally as a civil rights activist.
Frustrated with the trials and prejudices black people were facing in the UK, Moody set up the League of Coloured Peoples, campaigning against restrictions in the workplace, the military and the medical industry. As a physician, Moody started his own practise in the face of discrimination, and his determination was infectious as the LCP gained traction, attracting celebrity members such as Paul Robeson. He even forced a change in broadcasting standards at the BBC after hearing the casual use of the word “nigger” live on air.
Moody no doubt sounds like a champion of the Windrush generation but, significantly, he died in 1947, over a year before Kitch and co landed at Tilbury. Yes, much to the chagrin of our racist brigade, we’ve had a thriving community of Caribbean Brits for a few decades prior to Windrush, some hundreds of years in the case of the wider African diaspora.
Most importantly for the likes of Kitch and his calypso cohort Lord Beginner who was also on board, there was a ready market for their brand of Caribbean bardery. West Indian musicians had made their mark on the capital at the onset of London’s jazz scene, coming over from New York as members of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra in 1919. The band stayed on for a while, courted by royals and aristos before the Americans headed home, leaving local players to fill their boots. Naturally, seasoned calypso and mento instrumentalists hailing from Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, and Guyana all cut their teeth with the transplanted orchestra, now making waves across a country still recovering from war and a pandemic. A nation desperate to party.
Over the next 25 years London became a meeting place for West Indian and African students, artists, writers, intellectuals and activists. Black run clubs were the norm, some popular with adventurous bohemians, others attracting mainly black crowds, like the Jamaican-run Paramount Ballroom on Tottenham Court Road, and Jigs in St Anne’s Court where Trinidadian Laudric Caton was a resident. Caton arrived in London just before the outbreak of WWII. He carved his niche on our musical history by developing an electric guitar, introducing it to the jazz scene, and in turn rock n roll and, well, you get the idea.
Almost 30 years after the Southern Syncopated Orchestra set foot on our shores, Windrush arrived with a new influx of working class West Indians. Again though, this is only half the story. As Lloyd Bradley describes in his book Sounds Like London, the Windrush “had brought over considerable numbers of Jamaican settlers the previous year”. And not just Windrush, RMS Ormonde carried hundreds of Jamaicans to Liverpool, whilst HMS Almazora sailed from the Caribbean into Southampton, just before Christmas 1947, carrying ex-soldiers ready to join a community of Jamaican WWII vets who’d set up home here in the wake of the war.
So what’s so significant about Windrush day?
In 1947, Canada gained their own citizenship whilst remaining a dominion of the British Empire. On Jan 1st 1948 the British Nationality Act was passed. All colonies could do the same whilst retaining their status as a CUKC (Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies). CUKC’s rights hadn’t changed, essentially, but Atlee’s government used this opportunity to reach out for a new post war labour force in the UK.
With an eye on workers in the white colonies, Windrush’s first port of call was Australia before a stop off in Mexico to pick up 66 exiled Polish people, on their way to the UK, thanks to the Polish Resettlement Act which offered British citizenship to displaced Polish nationals who’d fought against and fled the Nazis. It’s worth noting at this point, and something which understandably never gets mentioned on Windrush day, that the boat was seized from the Nazis who’d used it to transport troops, deport Norweigan Jews, and deliver “racially pure” Norwegian women and children for the SS’s twisted Lebensborn project, in an effort to raise the birth rate of Aryan people.
That might sound like irrelevant information, but I love the fact this ship with a hideous history is now synonymous with multiculturalism.
Anyway, tickets didn’t sell too well in Australia and the Windrush set sail to Mexico way under capacity, so an impromptu ad was placed in Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner offering cheap passage and job opportunities. A queue formed. On May 23rd 1948, 599 Jamaican ticket holders boarded Windrush and set sail for Blighty, invites in hand and hoping to make their fortunes.
Lord Kitchener had been tipped off about Pathé, and spent the next 4 weeks perfecting a song to wow the cameras. In turn, the news team had been told to look out for him, dressed to the nines and ready to freestyle. The clip remains on rotation 72 years later, wheeled out every June as the zero point of Caribbean Britain, Kitsch as the figurehead, full of hope and naive charm. It took less than 30 seconds to create this myth.
Dr Moody might have made lasting changes, but signs in windows still read “NO BLACKS, NO IRISH, NO DOGS”. Those who didn’t have somewhere to go were housed in windowless air raid shelters in Clapham. Racism was rife. As Ruthless Rap Assassins state in their 1990 song ‘And It Wasn’t A Dream’ “Residential areas had a message for mum — you were okay in the jungle, you’ll be fine in the slum!”
There were many success stories, of course. Lords Kitch and Beginner were in the studio recording calypsos almost as soon as they landed, whilst Lord Woodbine would head to Liverpool where he turned to club promotion and later became known as the 6th Beatle, having mentored the young group before taking them to Hamburg. Sam Beaver King would become the first black mayor of Southwark in 1983, and Mona Baptiste cut her teeth on the Soho jazz circuit, singing with the likes of Ted Heath, and Finley Quaye’s dad Cab Kay, a mixed Ghanaian jazzer born in London in 1921.
But the road wasn’t easy, even for the successful ones. Reneging on his arrival song, Kitsch soon cut a single capturing the harsh realities of the Windrush generation. ‘Sweet Jamaica’ is much less of a time capsule than ‘London Is The Place For Me’ and in fact sadly prescient considering the ongoing scandal at the Home Office.
Thousands of people are asking me
How I spend my time in London City
That is a question I cannot answer
I regret the day I left sweet Jamaica
I mean you would pity my position
Because I nearly died of starvation
I worry that the coverage of Windrush frames it in monochrome. It’s easy for the “WE WANT ARE COUNTRY BACK” knuckle draggers to imagine their dream of a white nation before 1948. I’ve spoken to countless people, white and black, who have no idea there was a Caribbean community in London before Windrush. I must stress that’s not to discredit the Windrush generation who’ve contributed so much to what might actually put the Great in Great Britain, from the NHS to a rich heritage of art, music, literature, education, engineering, cultural thinking etc etc etc.
Here’s to Windrush and all who came before, and of course all who, I hope, will continue to join us in the face of an increasingly insular nation.
You can contribute here to the Windrush Foundation, a charity set up to deliver projects and events, locally and nationally, helping to highlight Caribbean and African people’s contributions to the UK both culturally and economically.
