On the day Empire Windrush arrived in Britain in June 1948, 11 Labour MPs sent a letter to the prime minister, Clement Attlee, proposing that there should be controls on black immigration.
The British people were “blest by the absence of a colour racial problem”, they wrote, adding: “An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our people and social life and cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned.”
The arrival of the ship, carrying about 500 people from the Caribbean, had already been the subject of an anxious debate in parliament. The Daily Express described its approach as “a shipload of worry”.
But within a few years, for many of the passengers the huge significance of that journey had receded to such an extent that they did not tell even their children they had arrived in Britain on that ship.
Mel Gaynor, the musician best known as the drummer for Simple Minds, had no idea his father, George, was a passenger on Empire Windrush until long after his death. “My father didn’t talk about it, which feels sad now,” he says.
Sheine Peart, a university lecturer, only began to appreciate the importance of her father’s journey when a teaching colleague was awestruck when she mentioned it in passing. “She said: ‘He came over on Empire Windrush? That’s like touching history.’”
During their childhoods, the huge cultural import of their parents’ journey was not in the least obvious to many children of Windrush passengers.
“It wasn’t seen as a particularly historic. It would have been like talking about a flight you’ve taken. They didn’t realise it was such a momentous event,” says Deyon Johnston, director of a recruitment company , whose father, Clinton Johnston, was on the ship.
It is only in later life that the children of the Windrush passengers have begun to appreciate the enormity of the decision made, usually by their fathers, to emigrate to the UK.
“I feel pride that he was one of those pioneers. My father had 10 shillings, a cardboard suitcase and a few bits of clothing to start forging his life here,” Sheine’s brother, Icah Peart, a criminal defence KC, says. “He wouldn’t have had the money to go back if he hadn’t liked it. They were really brave coming here, entering an unknown world.”
‘When he broke out into Jamaican patois, I knew it was serious’
– Mel Gaynor
In interviews with 12 children of eight Windrush passengers, it quickly becomes clear the Labour MPs’ doom-mongering warnings of impending “discord and unhappiness” were misplaced. The descendants of the Windrush arrivals witnessed their parents experiencing huge challenges in building new lives here, but say there were few regrets.
The children have gone on to be barristers, headteachers, carers, civil servants, musicians, social workers, academics, hoteliers, shop workers, bankers, actors, surgeons, parents and grandparents.
Conversations about their fathers’ decision to spend £28.10 on a ticket – the equivalent of six months’ wages in Jamaica, or the proceeds of selling three cows – are mostly very cheerful appraisals of busy, complicated lives, filled with admiration, gratitude and pride. But despite a determination to celebrate their lives, memories of the deep hostility they encountered remain acute.
As young children, most began only gradually to realise their families were different. “My father was very gentrified, English during the weekdays – immaculately dressed, suited and booted – but at the weekends we’d all go to gatherings with his friends and there was more of a Jamaican spirit,” says Gaynor.
His father’s Jamaican accent only came out around his friends or when he was angry with his children. “I remember falling in the river in my brand new clothes which got destroyed. He broke out into Jamaican patois. I knew then: OK, this is serious.”
Johnston and her brother Errol, a retired Church of England pensions board employee, knew their father was feeling homesick when he took them to Portobello Road in London to buy ackee and plantain.
“Avocado pears were very expensive then. He used to buy them and hide them on the top shelf in the pantry. We weren’t allowed to touch them. He might give us a little slice, but he was desperate for a taste of home,” Errol says.
They noticed how their father would talk to other black people on the tube and on buses when they rode around London with him. “We assumed he knew them but he was just glad to see a fellow stranger in this country,” says Errol.
Clinton was very outgoing. “He was always making friends. It was embarrassing – he’d always be starting conversations. He was always the loudest in the room,” says Deyon.
“He was quite confident, but as I get older I wonder if it was false bravado because he was in a foreign country,” Errol says. “As if he wanted his personality to come out first before you saw the colour.”
Gloria Brothwood says when her father, Andrew Mowlah-Baksh, was missing home he would complain about his chilblains and talk longingly about the heat in Trinidad; he would put on swing music and calypso, or take the children out to the park to fly kites he had made from the newspaper.
“You could tell from his demeanour. He used to type airmail letters to his sisters, he said you could fit more in that way than with handwriting. They were always sending photos to each other, they never lost touch. We didn’t have a phone at the time so there was always a letter in the pipeline.”
Howard Gardner remembers his grandmother sending rum cake in a parcel for her son Alford, who like many Windrush passengers had served in the RAF during the war and had travelled back to England after a brief return to the Caribbean. “He would have a slice of it. You couldn’t eat much of it – it was very strong.”
‘Her mother was completely racist. She didn’t accept our dad’ – Errol Johnson
As they grew older, the children of the Windrush arrivals who had married white women noticed that some of their English relatives had initially not entirely welcomed their fathers into their families. Clinton, Errol and Deyon Johnston’s father, met their mother, a white typist from west London, at the Paramount in Tottenham Court Road, a dancehall decorated with palm trees.
“Her mother was completely racist. She didn’t accept our dad. I never saw the two of them together,” Errol says.
“None of our mother’s relatives attended her wedding,” Sheine Peart remembers. “They were worried about what it would mean for her, being with a black man, because it was a complete break in the way things had happened. They would have been more comfortable if she’d married someone from the local printing works in Bath, not someone who had come thousands of miles and was unknown and unquantifiable. There was fear and trepidation. It took them a while to realise he wasn’t a bad bloke.”
Jean Thompson’s grandfather on her mother’s side was an Indonesian Muslim foundry owner in Liverpool. He and her grandmother were at first opposed to her mother’s marriage to Wayne Armstrong, a double bass player from Jamaica. “My dad wasn’t accepted by my nan’s family whatsoever, so Mum cut herself off. But the minute the first daughter was born, her mum was straight up the hospital and it was all mended. We lived next door to each other and were in and out of each other’s houses.”
He went on to have seven daughters with his wife, children who have grown up to work for the NHS, become social workers and run their own businesses. “He taught us: if there are barriers in the way, leap over them,” says Thompson, who was the first black civil servant in the Liverpool unemployment office. “He taught us ambition, that if there was an opportunity, you must take it. We always thought, if Dad could have travelled 2,000 miles from Jamaica, why should we be scared of a challenge?”
The family grew up in a white area of Liverpool, where it was common to see the words “blacks go home” scrawled on the walls. Thompson remembers her schoolfriends trying to shield her from it. “When I saw the N-word on the wall near my home, my friends put chalk over it to hide the word.”
Sheine Peart says they were the first family of colour in Reading. Her father had found landlords were reluctant to rent to him, so he saved and bought a family house in a very white area.
“Growing up there were some bizarre assumptions made about us as a family. I remember the people across the road had some difficulties with the police, but the police would assume it was something to do with us. There was an assumption from the neighbours that we would go to the less academically able schools. When my mum said I’d be going to the grammar school, the neighbours asked: how did that happen?”
Icah Peart remembers the day when someone spat at Sheine in her pushchair. “I think my dad would have killed the person who did it if my mum hadn’t stopped him. He was an extremely protective dad. He wasn’t prepared to let anyone slight him.”
Mowlah-Baksh met his Dublin-born wife, Theresa, at a dance in Birmingham when he was serving in the RAF during the second world war. He returned to England on Empire Windrush and they married in 1949. He worked for Rover as a clerk, and they had five children.
“Being a mixed couple in the 1950s, it must have been a lot, there must have been racism, but they didn’t talk about it,” Brothwood, a carer in Birmingham, says. “They wanted to make sure that we grew up in a happy home so they worked really hard to protect us from it, so we never saw the harsh side of things.”
She remembers being vaguely aware of uncomfortable moments at school. “The home economics teacher made me feel one inch tall once,” she says. “I wanted to do woodwork, but she told me: ‘You have to do cooking and sewing.’ I told her: I can already cook and I can sew. She said: ‘Is there anything the natives can’t do?’” She says she didn’t have the language to classify it mentally it as racism, and only realised years later why it had upset her.
Her brother, also called Andrew Mowlah-Baksh, says: “I remember Enoch Powell’s speech when I was 13 or 14, inciting people to have a bad attitude towards race. I remember wishing I could run faster, to get away from lads with an attitude.”
But the family was happy, the children were popular and their parents taught them to shrug off the occasional bits of malice. “They told us it was a good thing: you’re people of the world, you’ve got relations from every country, that’s what matters, not the colour of skin,” Brothwood says.
Gaynor remembers the sudden proliferation of National Front posters when he was a teenager in the 1970s. “I was attacked by sixth-formers when I was about 13. It wasn’t serious enough to leave a scar, but it left a mental scar – making me less trusting, more aware of my surroundings, aware of the no-go areas.”
Thompson realised quite early on that her father faced difficulties that her friends’ parents did not encounter. “I can remember we had a TV that broke; he was good at fixing things, but he just couldn’t do it. He had a friend who was an electrician so he put it in the pram and wheeled it around to him. Later he came home all flustered. He had been stopped by the police. To see my dad flustered was very sad.”
There was a generational shift between how she and her father viewed being targeted by the police. “I can remember when I started to drive, the numbers of times I got pulled over by a policeman. My dad would say: ‘Don’t get angry, this will change in time.’ For him, it was a minor inconvenience and his reasoning was: changes will come. But when you are a young angry black person who was born here, you just want the same as what your friends have and not to be harassed by the people who you thought were there to help you.”
But she notes that her father was right – changes have come. “A few days ago someone asked me: ‘Where were you born?’ I said: ‘Liverpool”. They said: ‘No, I mean where were you before that?’ But it doesn’t happen very often now, and it’s usually the older generation,” she says.
‘He came over to ensure we would have a better chance than he did’
– Icah Peart
As they grew older they became more aware of the sacrifices their fathers had made in the hope of building better lives for their children, even if this was a subject they never spoke about. Many of them took jobs below the level they might have had in the Caribbean.
Armstrong, Thompson’s father, was a qualified engineer and also a talented musician but was unable to work in either of those fields. “He went to a good school in Jamaica, he could speak Latin. I think he wasn’t expecting to do the work that he ended up doing, but he was a modest man. He worked as a dock labourer in the Liverpool docks for 27 years,” she says. “It was just sweeping to begin with but later they realised he had a brain.”
In the evenings he played double bass in bands at local clubs. “His heart was in jazz. He always said there is no racial or social divide in music. He was hugely loved, a big part of the community. There were so many people at my father’s funeral the crematorium didn’t know what to do.”
Clinton Johnston worked as a driver for Findus foods and delivered magazines for Fleet Street publishers in London. “He was far more educated than the jobs he was doing, but I think there were only so many knocks you could take, so in the end he said: I’ll just be a driver then,” Errol Johnston says.
They remember many of their father’s friends being in much worse situations. “We were in a council flat, so we had heating and hot water, but whenever we went to visit them in Notting Hill Gate and Ladbroke Grove, they were living in squalid bedsits. We’d sometimes keep our coats on it was so cold,” says Deyon Johnston.
Errol thinks his father and his friends coped by laughing at the slights they encountered. “They’d talk about the racism. We were kids, and listening, but not really paying attention. But I remember they would joke about it, they’d be killing themselves with laughter about it. It didn’t seem to faze them.”
Somehow their parents’ ambitions – though thwarted for them – were nevertheless implanted into their children. Gaynor’s father, George had been a respected trumpeter in Jamaica, but never spoke about it with his children and found a good job as an engineer in London. He taught his son trumpet from the age of about six, until Mel discovered a drum kit at school and switched.
“He played the trumpet at home and we listened to Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald – nothing Jamaican, mainly jazz – but at the start he didn’t encourage me to become a musician.
“He said: ‘It’s not a sensible career. You need to get a career, son.’ But when he saw that I was absolutely adamant about playing drums and wanting to become a musician, then he helped me enormously. I was spending six hours a day rehearsing in the garden shed driving the neighbours mad. He used to take me to a lot of concerts – that was life-changing.”
On the Windrush manifest, Ralph Peart, passenger No 811, is described as a French polisher, but he worked in Britain as an electrician. and when he retired he was working at Heathrow airport. As a child in Jamaica he had to walk to Kingston to sell vegetables. “That was a challenge he didn’t want for his children. He saw education as the passport out of that. He had huge ambitions for us,” Sheine Peart says.
“He was very keen for me to be a lawyer. Very, very keen,” Icah Peart adds, remembering the copious, unasked-for advice his father would give him about trials he was involved with. “It was pretty obvious that he would have liked to be a lawyer. He wanted his children to succeed. He came over to ensure that his descendants would have a better chance than he did.” His father took huge pride in his children’s achievements. “He was protective and supportive, always on your side. I couldn’t have wanted for a better dad.”
‘They were the first step on the ladder, showing people difference is nothing to be scared of’
– Gloria Brothwood
For some of the children the government’s pointed determination to celebrate the Windrush anniversary this year has left a slightly sour taste. Guilt over the Windrush scandal – in which thousands of people from the Caribbean were wrongly classified as illegal immigrants – prompted the announcement by the government of funding for annual Windrush day celebrations.
The scandal, which affected people from all over the Commonwealth, most of whom arrived in the 1950s and 60s, and which only acquired the Windrush name as a useful shorthand, complicated the lives of some of the families who arrived on the ship.
Until interviewed by the Guardian, Gloria and Andrew’s brother, Joseph Mowlah-Baksh, had struggled for decades to be issued with a passport; the Home Office is now processing his papers.
Armstrong travelled abroad only once, when he went with his wife and the two youngest of their seven daughters on a bingo club coach trip to Spain in 1983, travelling on cheaper temporary British passports, which were available for short trips. On his way back he was taken off the coach at Calais and held in custody for several hours because the French border guards refused to accept he was British.
“My father felt anxiety about travelling after that. He never visited Jamaica again because he was worried about being unable to return home to his family. He was a devoted husband, and he wouldn’t have taken the risk,” Thompson says.
But, mostly, the Windrush arrivals’ children want to put the anger and disappointments and challenges facing their parents to one side and focus on the positives.
Sheine Peart says her father rarely paused to reflect on the immense historical shift to which he contributed. “Of course there were black people in Britain 2,000 years ago, but this was the first big influx of Caribbean immigrants. He was aware that he was part of a significant change, but his direct experience of that change was sometimes quite negative and challenging. His way of managing was not to talk about it; you had to prise things out of him. I’m pleased this is not a forgotten, marginalised piece of history. It’s good it has been pushed to the forefront. The Caribbean people have made such a significant contribution.”
“It’s important to celebrate this moment – which doesn’t make us blind to the tragedy of people waiting to be acknowledged after being here for 50 years,” says Lesley Ewen, a playwright, actor and tutor at Rada.
Her father, Sydney Mowatt, passenger No 791, became a research scientist with the Wellcome Foundation before returning to Jamaica. “It needs to be celebrated. They had epic courage.”
Gloria Brothwood adds: “They were the first step on the ladder, in terms of changing minds, showing people that everyone has something to offer, that difference is nothing to be scared of.”
Design by the Guardian editorial design team: Chris Clarke, Harry Fischer, Ellen Wishart, Alessia Amitrano, Tara Herman