On 22 June 1948, the Empire Windrush approached the docks in Tilbury in Essex. Most of the people onboard – 1,025 known passengers and two stowaways – listed a previous address in one of the Caribbean islands, British Guiana or Bermuda, all then part of the British empire.
But while the journey must have been personally pivotal for many of them, none could have imagined that Windrush would become a byword for a generation arriving from the Caribbean, who would help shape their new homeland.
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Who was onboard?
The passenger list gives a snapshot of their lives before emigrating: most of the passengers were single men, or at least “unaccompanied by” a wife. More than half of those listing Caribbean residency were men in their 20s and 30s.
Most of the women were domestic workers but there were also students and dressmakers, nurses and clerks. The men were mechanics and carpenters, clerks and tailors, engineers and welders, students and scholars; some had served in the RAF and navy.
Some were babies. The youngest, a five-month-old, was among dozens of under-12s on the ship. Like other children who made the journey after them, many sailed on their parents’ British passports. But in doing so, and through no fault of their own, some would face deportation decades later from the country they were about to make their home.
There had been arrivals from the Caribbean before Windrush – including the SS Ormonde in March 1947 and the Almanzora in December that year. There was also an unknown number of Caribbean-born servicemen and women who had stayed in the UK after fighting as part of the British forces in the first or second world wars.
What does the 1951 census tell us?
Three years after the arrival of Windrush, the 1951 census was the first to capture these new arrivals, listing 15,301 people born in the “Caribbean territories” – 6,447 Jamaicans, 1,569 Trinidadians, 5,261 people from “other territories in the Caribbean” and 2,024 from British Guiana, now Guyana, on the South American mainland.
Although the census provided the first snapshot of the Caribbean population who settled in England and Wales – there was no census in 1941 because of the second world war and the 1931 census was destroyed by fire – in relative terms the Caribbean population remained small, accounting for just a fraction of 1% of the total population of England and Wales. That same year, 1951, 4.3% of the population of England and Wales had been born outside the UK.
In 1954, the year in which the Windrush took its last voyage, the number of Caribbean arrivals to the British mainland accelerated and by 1961 there were more than 172,000 Caribbean-born people in the UK. The change was mainly driven by the Jamaican-born population, which grew from about 6,500 people in the early 50s to more than 100,000 a decade later, a 16-fold rise.
By the early 70s the number of those listing their country of birth as “new Commonwealth, America” stood at 294,920, with Caribbean-born people making up one out of seven new arrivals in the decade to 1971. More than half the Caribbean-born arrivals in the 50s and 60s were from Jamaica, or one in 12 people.
What brought them to the UK and how were they received?
The arrival of the Windrush generation coincided with a period of postwar reconstruction that required labour to fill shortages.
An important source of such labour was from Commonwealth countries, given their specific entry and citizenship rights in the postwar period, says Dr Laurence Lessard-Phillips of the University of Birmingham and the Institute for Research into Superdiversity.
“Yet, despite these labour needs, there were (quite often racialised) concerns regarding the movement of Commonwealth citizens to the UK. This led, over the next few decades, to measures restricting entry and settlement of nationals from the New Commonwealth, as well as measures attempting to deal with discrimination, such as the Race Relations Acts.”
What is missing from the official records?
Early census figures help paint the picture, but they do not tell the whole story. While every census from 1841 onwards asked people to state their country of birth, ethnicity – the concept of a shared history, culture and tradition – was not captured until the 1990s. In other words the British-born descendents of the earlier generation are not captured.
The 1991 census was the first in which people were asked about their ethnic identity (although consideration was given to its inclusion in the 1981 census the question was not asked, something the UK’s parliament later said it regretted). Its introduction, says Lessard-Phillips, was more than just statistical, and was seen “as a gesture toward the institutional recognition of the UK as a multiethnic society”.
Just under 500,000 people identified as black-Caribbean in the 1991 census, potentially a smaller number than it should have been given that it excluded people identifying as mixed-Caribbean heritage, which was not listed as an option until 2001.
How many people were affected by the Windrush scandal?
Seventy-five years since Windrush, the UK has changed immeasurably, in part due to those who sailed on the ship and others like it. At the time of the 2021 census, 1,136,135 people in England and Wales self-identified as being of black or mixed Caribbean descent.
The latest census also reminds us just how many people of that early generation remain: almost 104,725 Caribbean-born people who arrived before 1971 were resident in England and Wales in 2021.
It is these people, the children of those early Caribbean arrivals, who were affected by deportation stemming from a Conservative government policy to make the UK “a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants”, a category in which members of the Windrush generation were wrongly classified as exposed by the Guardian in 2018.
It is not known how many people were directly affected by the scandal: about 6,200 have applied for compensation – although not all of them have been found eligible, and only about 1,600 have received compensation payments. More than 16,200 had been helped to secure documentation confirming their status or British citizenship up to the end of March.
Nowadays “Windrush” is not just a byword for the early Caribbean arrivals but also a synonym for a scandal that the government eventually conceded represented “an ugly stain on the face of our country”.
