In a black and white photo taken in 1953, a group of nine young black men in suits wander along a street on a quiet Sunday morning in Leeds; one of them plays a guitar, the others banter. They are heading to a cricket ground for a game. Pre-match revelry might not typify grey, forbidding England, but this is the West Indian way. Today, 75 years after the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush, on 22 June 1948, the image seems emblematic of how Caribbean migration changed Britain for ever. Quiet appreciation, with pencils poised over scorecards, gave way to unbridled excitement, with rattles, banjos, horns and empty beer cans filled with pebbles, whether at Headingley, the Oval or myriad other cricket stadiums.
Alford Dalrymple Gardner, an amateur guitarist and wicket keeper, was among the Windrush passengers. Along with his youthful fellow travellers (the average age on the ship was 24), he traded the certainty of devastating Caribbean hurricanes and unemployment for the chance of a better life in bombed-out Britain. His zestful style, undiminished by his 97 years and the challenges faced in his bigoted adoptive country, is commemorated in Finding Home, a memoir co-authored with his son, Howard. The book chronicles Caribbean pioneers’ pitfalls and triumphs in a country that often seemed to despise them. “I’ll never understand,” writes Gardner early on, “how the colour of my skin can make these people so mad.”
Critics scoffed that the sun-kissed West Indians “wouldn’t last one bad winter” in Britain. Finding Home illuminates the antipathy towards the pioneers (prime minister Clement Attlee received a letter from angry MPs warning it was a mistake to admit the migrants), showing that a hostile environment was in place long before the then home secretary Theresa May’s 2012 policy ensnared some of the Windrush generation in a bureaucratic conundrum to prove, decades on from their arrival, that they had a right to live here.
Through her assiduous reporting in The Windrush Betrayal (2019), the Guardian reporter Amelia Gentleman exposed the government’s shameful treatment of black Britons wrongly classified and abused as illegal immigrants, in some cases even deported. Elders that I spoke to for my oral history Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation (2019), including Alford Gardner, fumed over the injustice.
The scandal has galvanised publishers. In the past six months at least 10 Windrush-themed titles have been issued, among them Alexis Keir’s Windward Family: An Atlas of Love, Loss and Belonging, Tony Fairweather’s Twenty-Eight Pounds Ten Shillings: A Windrush Story and A Ladybird Book: Windrush, which I co-wrote with Emma Dyer. Several titles first published on the Windrush’s 50th anniversary have also been reissued.
This trend in publishing, part of an accelerating Windrush industry, is driven by commercial imperatives that favour books that are more personal than political. The new works largely eschew reference to the scandal. The silence is in itself indicative of trauma, a reluctance, perhaps, to accept that the name Windrush has been tarnished permanently by the British government’s cynical policy.
Growing up in a West Indian household in 1960s Luton, I’d never heard of the Windrush. If mentioned at all, it would have been regarded as just another ship. Indeed, the year before its arrival, the Almanzora and Ormonde docked in Britain, each with more than 200 Caribbean folk. The only difference between these ships and the Windrush was that there were camera crews at Tilbury, where it docked, to capture for posterity its passengers, the white-gloved women and zoot-suited men, as they walked down the gangplanks.
This foundation myth of the start of mass migration has been promulgated by texts such as Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1998; republished this year). In the book’s postscript, its authors, Mike and Trevor Philips, write that “the people of the Windrush had been forgotten…For 50 years they had stood, silent in the photographs, unable to resist the narratives [heaped on them] by politicians, villains and fools who found them useful objects.” But even though the book initially reached beyond 1948 to take social snapshots of Britain in subsequent decades, it reinforced the legend of that “original” band of Windrush brothers and sisters, eclipsing others who followed, including migrants from India, Pakistan, Poland and Ireland who, arriving in the period from the late 1940s to early 70s, shared a similar experience and who increasingly describe themselves as part of the Windrush generation.
Max Farrar’s Speaking Truth to Power (2022), a biography of Caribbean migration, with 87-year-old Arthur France, the founding father of the Leeds West Indian carnival, at its heart, gives a platform to countless interviewees, many of whom recall the England of the 60s as a time of constant surveillance. When France rolled out plans for a carnival in 1966, self-conscious fellow West Indians characterised him as “a mad man, playing fool for the white man”. They were wrong. Today locals salute the flamboyant trailblazer with a passion for sequins and feathers as a “glue-gun revolutionary”.
Farrar is an empathic white sociologist whose book, like Alford Gardner’s memoir, is a paean to kinship across class and race. In the early days, though, white British allies often failed to materialise. And what comes across clearly in this crop of titles is the emotional cost of migration; how financial security came with a drain on psychological health, of lives unexamined or emotionally ring-fenced. Psychologist Waveney Bushell, for instance, told me that the trauma of being rejected time and again when searching for accommodation in the 60s has meant that “after 50-odd years in this country, I would be apprehensive going up to anybody’s step in case the person who owns that house is white”.
On the question of belonging, she says there was always tension between romantics who dreamed of going back to the places of their birth and their hard-nosed partners who were determined to stay. As a child in the 1970s, I remember attending funerals where you’d often hear old-timers moan: “Dis country too damn cold fi bury.” But the majority, including Gardner, never made the return leg. “Well, years passed, my life is me, myself and I,” he says. “If I had to do it all over, I wouldn’t change a thing. I wouldn’t change a single thing.”
• Finding Home: A Windrush Story by Alford Dalrymple Gardner and Howard Gardner is published by Jacaranda Books (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• Speaking Truth to Power: The Life and Times of an African Caribbean British Man by Max Farrar is published by Hansib Publications (£13.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
This article was amended on 12 June. An earlier version referred to Max Farrar as a historian rather than a sociologist and the image of Arthur France is now credited to Farrar.
