In the twilight hours of June 21 1948, a weathered five-deck troopship transporting 1,027 passengers moored off Gravesend on the south bank of the river Thames. That evening, immigration officials would begin carefully processing those aboard. The following afternoon, passengers would walk off the gangplank, finally stepping foot on British soil, disembarking at the port of Tilbury in Essex.
The ship that docked in the summer of 1948 was the HMT Empire Windrush. Before arriving in Gravesend, it already had a complicated and disturbing life: it was once a German vessel of war and fascist propaganda, and a mode of transport for Holocaust victims. But it was this one post-war journey from the Caribbean to England that would define it.
As a result of this singular crossing, the ship would come to embody impossibly grand tales of empire and migration, and become a seductive symbol for a country – and a dying empire – that desperately wanted to present itself as tolerant and fair-minded.
