Seventy-five years ago, a ship landed at Tilbury Dock near London carrying more than 800 passengers from the Caribbean to new lives in the UK.
The arrival of the Empire Windrush on June 22, 1948, became a symbol of the post-war migration that transformed the UK and its culture.
The term “Windrush generation” has come to stand for hundreds of thousands of people who arrived in the UK from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, especially those from former British colonies in the Caribbean.
Photo: AP
Windrush Day was marked yesterday with scores of community and official events, including a reception hosted by King Charles III.
Charles commissioned portraits of 10 Windrush passengers for the royal collection as a reflection of “the immeasurable difference that they, their children and their grandchildren have made to this country.”
There was also to be a national church service, a Windrush flag flying over parliament and a set of commemorative stamps from the Royal Mail.
Behind the anniversary celebrations lies a complex story that is still unfolding.
The Empire Windrush carried people from Jamaica, Trinidad and other Caribbean islands who were invited by the British government to help rebuild the war-shattered UK.
Many had fought against the Nazis in World War II. They went to the UK to work as nurses, railway workers and in other key jobs.
Many settled in working-class neighborhoods, including the Brixton and Notting Hill areas of London. The new arrivals were welcomed by some, but faced widespread discrimination in employment and housing.
In 1958, racially motivated attacks on black residents in Notting Hill sparked days of violent demonstrations.
The Notting Hill Carnival — now one of Europe’s biggest street parties — was founded soon after to celebrate Caribbean culture and to bring communities together.
A decade later, then-British secretary of state for health and social care Enoch Powell made an infamous speech predicting “rivers of blood” as a result of mass immigration.
The speech sparked a surge of resistance by Britons of color.
Members of the Windrush generation and their descendants, from the Caribbean and other parts of the former British Empire, have had a colossal impact on British culture.
People such as poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, DJ Don Letts and members of ska bands like the Specials fused Caribbean musical influences and urban youth rebellion in the 1970s and 1980s.
Their influence developed new styles of music including grime, a distinctly London form of rap.
In other art forms, major figures include Turner Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili; 12 Years a Slave filmmaker Steve McQueen; and writers Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo and Nobel literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Commonwealth immigrants who came to the UK before 1973 had an automatic right to settle in the UK.
However, decades later, thousands fell victim to the Conservative government’s aim of making the UK a “hostile environment” for illegal immigration.
In 2018, British news outlets revealed that people who had lived legally in the UK for decades had been denied housing, jobs or medical treatment because they could not prove their status.
Many documents, including passenger cards from the Empire Windrush, had been destroyed by authorities.
Dozens were detained or deported to countries they had not visited for decades.
After an outcry, the British government apologized to the Windrush generation, set up a commission to investigate what went wrong and established a compensation program.
Windrush today has multiple meanings.
Onyekachi Wambu, editor of Empire Windrush, an anthology of black British writing, said it was not until several decades after 1948 that the word “Windrush” began to mean “something bigger than the people who came on the ship.”
“We began to talk about ‘Windrush’ and it became kind of institutionalized,” he said at a panel discussion. “There is now also an element of it that means scandal and betrayal.”
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS