Look again at that picture taken 75 years ago at Tilbury docks. Look at those people as they posed for the historic photographs. Look at their faces; wearied from a month of travel, etched with joy, hope, bewilderment and lurking stage left, just out of sight, foreboding.
As the descendants of that Windrush generation, we get to look at those faces every day in the pictures of our own families that we hang on the walls and in our front rooms. They have the same posed smiles, the demeanour of all adventurers who smile at the outset of an uncertain journey. There were 492 of them and they knew they had to impress and account for themselves. The attire was pin-sharp, whatever could be said of them on arrival, it was not to be that they were slovenly. They knew enough to show that they came in peace. Some sang and exuded bonhomie for Pathé News, but others interviewed on the day sought to echo the self-effacement and deprecation they saw as essentially English. They made the best of it; but they didn’t know much at all. They would have to learn much quickly in turbulent decades.
Where would they live? Around 236 of the men would be bussed to the half light of an underground shelter under Clapham Common in south London. It was dark, a bit damp and cramped, as if they had transferred from a ship to the innards of a submarine. But it was English dry land, and proximity to a labour exchange brimming with postwar work offered the springboard that allowed many to rent rooms and buy homes in nearby Brixton, making it the unofficial black capital of Britain – and Europe. In time they would migrate to other big cities where work was available, Birmingham, Manchester – where dock and construction work could be found – and on to Leeds and Nottingham as well.
But smiling on the dock, how could they have known about the No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs signs to come. The exploitative landlords; the fact that Peter Rachman, known as the worst of them – widely reviled, and rightly so, as king of slum landlords – would become a go-to guy because he at least was willing to let them live in his squalid accommodation, albeit at an extortionate cost. The rapacious exploiter as saviour. They took what they could get.
They didn’t know what lay ahead, and yet they prevailed. They rented rooms, worked hard and saved cash. My uncle, a contractor – a bit of a wheeler-dealer – helped guys find rooms, bought some houses, rented out more rooms. My dad, who arrived in 1953, stayed in one of them: part of the Caribbean-to-UK underground railroad, until he moved into his own place, and thanks to carpentry jobs, bought his own.
Things moved fast. According to the Imperial War Museum, when the first US GIs arrived in Britain in 1942, there were thought to be between 8,000 and 10,000 black people in Britain, scattered mainly around the many ports. By 1958, as families grew, relatives left behind in the Caribbean were sent for and others, like my own father, came by sea and air to try their luck, 125,000 had arrived.
They helped each other prevail. My dad ran the “pardner”, the unofficial savings scheme whereby a group of people threw money in the pot and at the end of the week, one of them received the total for their own use – seed capital for a house or for furniture. People would knock on the door and hand to me, barely a teenager, their contribution to pass on when Dad came home from work. When all the money was in, one of them would come back to collect it all, and bounce away smiling about the acquisition that would follow or the bill that could finally be paid. Sniffy, distrustful banks weren’t an option, so they trusted each other.
They came for employment, but what did they know about what would happen at work? Jobs were available and they were ready to graft, but their faces would fit one day and jar the next. There was no employment or discrimination law on the buses (until the 1960s, a colour bar pertained on Bristol’s buses), or the trains or at Ford or on the building sites. Not until 1968 did the Race Relations Act render unlawful acts of discrimination in employment, housing and advertising. My dad was laid off from one building site because he drove a nicer car than the foreman, and made the mistake of parking it where the boss could see it.
They prevailed, with a bit of help. No blacks, No Irish, said the signs and, for those so targeted, that forged camaraderie. Ruddy-faced Tom Norton worked alongside my dad on the building sites and would tell him of opportunities. One of those led Dad to Lambeth council in south London where he joined the direct labour organisation building homes and at the end of his working life, building Brixton Recreation Centre. Two decades later, when Dad retired in traction, having fallen off scaffolding into an as yet waterless pool, we visited him in hospital, and Tom Norton was there.
Everything was new that first day. What did they know as the ship docked and the news cameras whirred, of how Britain would view their children? How so many in English schools would quickly be condemned by inevitability of geography and by bureaucratic design to the worst classes and over represented in the schools for those deemed educationally subnormal. That was a shock to those who saw the educational opportunities as the prize most worth having. Most thought a free British schooling system staffed by teachers, a highly respected breed in the Caribbean, would be the least of their worries. Instead those in London in 1967 found the proportion of their children diverted to ESN schools (28%) was almost double that in mainstream schools (15%).
Prevailing on education remains an objective today – witness the statistics on race disparities within our schools system – but back then it took many forms. Saturday supplementary schools in draughty halls and churches, campaigns by black teachers and activists and left-leaning institutions exposing the discrimination, and its terrible effects on those least able to navigate the system.
The campaigns were macro and micro. My mother, armed with a bible and a food thermos, with children underfoot, staged a day-long sit-in directly outside our director of education’s private office when my sister was allocated a lesser school than merited. The director hunkered down – for who was he to be challenged by a female immigrant, but she had stuff to eat and read, more patience than him and a deal of indignation. By day’s end, the allocation was changed. It took cussedness to prevail.
How could they ever have known at Tilbury dock that the prejudices of those who regretted their presence here would be conveyed by the forces of law and order? The stops, the searches, the Vagrancy Act 1824, known as the “sus law”, which proved ideal for the targeting of black communities. Who could predict the over-surveillance, the under-protection, the flimsy arrests, the violence, the arbitrary raids.
As a child, I returned home from playing football on a local street to see a row of police vans slowly turning the corner and entered our house to find it dishevelled, my parents angry and traumatised. There had been a very public drugs raid because the police detained someone and said “give us a name”, and so he did, prompting a visit to our house, where all there was to uncover was domesticity and hymn books. We tidied up, we prevailed.
And that’s what I see when I look at those arrival pictures. Bright people, smart people, tough people, adaptable people. People who didn’t know what awaited them but largely did what they intended to do when they bought their tickets: made a better life for themselves and those of us who follow.
And I see a journey that at its end and through the years made this a better country. Their sweat and that of their descendants helped build our infrastructure – physical and social, their creativity infuses our politics, our industry, our arts and culture, our sport.
They faced challenges and today, we their descendants face challenges and a country that has still to come to terms with its ambivalence. Consider the Windrush scandal. Consider this week’s revelation that Suella Braverman has disbanded the Home Office’s own Windrush reform unit. Consider the fact, repeated in a Home Office document leaked last year, that “during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK”.
But then, for today, take a moment, look at the picture, look at them, then look at Britain. Who knew?
Hugh Muir is the Guardian’s executive editor, Opinion
