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.”
