Dan Snow's History Hit - The Windrush Generation & Scandal

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

The journey of the Empire Windrush that docked in Essex with 1,027 passengers & at least two stowaways on 22nd June 1948 has come to define a whole generation of people who arrived in Britain for two decades from the Caribbean until the 1970s. The 802 Caribbean citizens onboard were the first of 500,000 Commonwealth citizens who settled in Britain having been invited to help rebuild the "mother country". Despite having equal rights to British citizenship most faced discrimination, prejudice and abuse. Many had fought for Britain in the war just years earlier and yet when they arrived were often denied jobs, housing and access to public spaces like pubs and dancehalls. But communities among new settlers thrived, arrivals brought with them a rich heritage that shaped British culture from music and literature to food and sport. Communities pooled their resources to buy houses, set up community centres, services and support networks and fought for the rights they were promised.In 2018, the rights of the Windrush Generation entered the news again when they and their descendants became the targets of mistreatment by the UK government, resulting in the denial of their rights, deportation threats, and significant harm to their lives and communities. Dan is joined for the 75th anniversary of Windrush Day by Dr Juanita Cox, who is a research fellow on Nationality, Identity and Belonging at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. She unravels the long history of the Windrush Generation, their struggles and impact on Britain and the scandal with help from the voices of that generation themselves, recorded as part of her oral history project, ‘The Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context‘.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Down Snow's History Hit. It's Windrush Day, the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush, a ship which reached the London docks in the summer of 1948. Interestingly, the Empire Windrush had in fact been operated by a German shipping line in the 1930s and was a German naval troop ship during the Second World War. It was taken by a prize of war. Anyway, on this occasion, it was doing a very different job. It was bringing a group of people from the West Indies to work and live here in the UK. It wasn't the first group of West Indians to arrive, but it's come to represent the migration of people from the West Indies to Britain. And in the 75 years since that generation and their descendants have made a massive contribution to British life. To find out all about the Windrush, what it's about, what it means, I'm talking to Dr Juanita Cox. She's a research fellow on nationality, identity and belonging at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. She's also working on a very cool oral history project called the Windrush

Scandal in a transnational and Commonwealth context. You're going to be hearing the voices of people that she has recorded and interviewed as part of this oral history project because in more recent years there's been a windrush scandal when members of that generation were asked by the british government to show things like evidence of their british citizenship of their right to be in the country and some were asked to head quote unquote home to the west indies it's a scandal for which senior british government ministers the prime minister themselves have apologized for profusely quote-unquote home to the West Indies. It's a scandal for which senior British government ministers, the Prime Minister themselves, have apologised for profusely. And I get a chance to ask why it's important that we remember this history. Enjoy. quite unity till there is first and blank unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Juanita, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan, for having me. Let's talk about the West Indies. Let's talk about the Caribbean in the mid-20th century, 1940, 1950. Islands still under direct British rule? Yeah, very much so. In fact, the first of the islands doesn't become independent until 1962, and the last becomes independent in 1983. So these are British colonial administrations running societies predominantly of black

Afro-Caribbean people? Yeah, I mean, I think, Dan, it's probably useful if we go right to the beginning of the story. And I guess the first thing I want to say is that it's important to be aware that Africans have actually been in Britain in varying numbers since the late 16th century. And that between 1640 and 1807, Britain and Portugal became responsible for 70% of all Africans transported to the Americas. So you've got the 13 British colonies in North America, which are kind of established in 1607 or thereabouts. And then you've got the colonies that are being contested over in the Caribbean between various European powers.

Those colonies seen as more valuable than the American colonies because they were engines of sugar production, tobacco. Astonishing wealth was made on the back of those enslaved people. Yeah, absolutely. And although you have the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, slavery continues until around 1838. Most people sort of assume, well, that was the end of it. Huge amounts of money had been extracted from the Caribbean and been invested in Britain to build the structures that we see around us today and also to fire the industrial revolution. But importantly, it then sees the continuation with indentureship. So you have Africans in the Caribbean, but you also then had people who are being indentured and brought from places like the

subcontinent of India, Portuguese, Chinese, people from all over the place. So actually, the Caribbean, yes, it's predominantly African, but actually, there's lots of other ethnicities that go into the mix as a result of indentureship. And then when indentureship comes to an end in sort of 1917, you then have the continuation of colonialism and the continuation of the extraction of wealth from the Caribbean. And it's not reinvested in the Caribbean, it's invested in Britain. And by the mid-20th century, these people living in the West Indies had been encouraged to think of themselves as imperial subjects. Many of them had served in the World Wars,

serving King and Empire. How do you describe the identity, the kind of how these people would have felt about themselves? It's really difficult to emphasise just how British they felt. Everything they learnt in schools was British. The whole point of the colony was to make people believe that they were British so that they would swear allegiance to the king or the queen, whoever was in power at the time. And I think it's really useful if we listen to a clip from a lady, her name's Joyce Trotman, and she's now in her 90s. She sort of explains, and I think when you hear what she says, you can really hear in her voice just how British she felt. From class, in our reading books, there was a picture of the Union Jack with the red, and we used to chant, red, white, and blue. These are the colours of your flag. Red says be brave. White says be pure. Blue says be true. That was in, what, 1934, 1935. We were British, British. The Operation Ward is British.

Well, that was the voice of Joyce Trotman. And so presumably lots of people like Joyce. Many people had been to the home islands, Britain, during the war. And why do we see the movement of people from the West Indies to Britain in the years, the decades following the war? What starts that? The people that were born in the Caribbean are British. Anybody who was born within a British territory or born in the UK had exactly the same status. They were citizens of the UK and colonies. And that was the title that was given to them specifically under the 1948 Act. But we also see that under the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act in 1914, again, British subjects were any person born in the UK or its colonies.

So apart from the education system, there are also legally British subjects. And so what happens is because people have been involved in the First World War and then also in the Second World War, when they're demob riots and industrial strikes in the 1930s, particularly between 1934 and 1938. And in fact, there'd been something that was called the Moyne Commission, which had been sent to the Caribbean to investigate what was going on there. And they realised that, you know, actually people were living in really awful conditions, and that there was very little employment. The report itself wasn't even published until 1945. And of course, the conditions hadn't changed. So many of those people who had been demobbed realised, well, actually, Britain needs to rebuild. There are many jobs now. There's not enough labour. We may as well go back to Britain. We are, after all,

British subjects. So let's just play our role in rebuilding the country. So that's primarily the main reason why there's a sort of wave of immigration that I shouldn't even call it immigration, to be honest. It's migration. In fact, I think it's really useful to recall there's a quote, somebody, I think his name was Walter Loven, who was a carpenter who came to Britain from Jamaica in 1954. And he says, you know, I was British and going to the mother country was like going from one parish to another. As a Caribbean person, you had no concept of it being any different. And in Britain, there was a welfare state. There was an enormous expansion of government provided health care. There was a huge building project, council houses being built. There was infrastructure build going on. And so there were jobs here in Britain, were there? I mean, there was a pull factor.

This wasn't just an arbitrary decision to suddenly migrate in quite large numbers to somewhere else. No, no, no, no. There was definitely a pull factor. Obviously, the NHS is established in 1948. And coincidentally, you also see that there's a huge drive for nurses. So the NHS becomes heavily staffed with people from the Caribbean, particularly working in the areas that a lot of indigenous Brits, if that's what we term them, didn't want to do. So they worked in the area of mental health. They did the sort of jobs, emptying bedpans, that sort of thing that people didn't want to do.

And even though they had the same qualifications as their counterparts, quite often they were put into these sorts of positions that were undesirable. But yes, I mean, transportation, you know, had the railways and the buses. There was actually a recruitment drive inviting people from Barbados and other territories. Same thing with the nurse. Members of the NHS were doing recruitment drives within the Caribbean. Many also became restaurant workers. There was a drive for postal workers. So yes, there was a lot of work to be done here. That doesn't mean when they arrived, they were warmly welcomed because they weren't. But this is the strange sort of contradiction of British life because, you know, people are invited, but at the same time,

racism just meant that people didn't actually want to work with them. So talk to me about the Windrush, which is a ship that's become synonymous with that generation's journeys across the Atlantic. Why do we remember that one and who was on it? Yes, I mean, it's an interesting question. Why do we remember that one? I mean, obviously ships have been going backwards and forwards from the Caribbean to Britain long before the Empire Windrush. I mean, in fact, there was a ship that arrived in Britain in 1947 that had 200 ex-service personnel returning to the UK from the Caribbean, and that was on the steamship Al Manzora. But we remember this ship for a variety of reasons. Just to explain, the passengers, there was 1,027 passengers on board the ship with at least, I guess, two stowaways.

802 of the passengers gave the Caribbean as their last place of residence. There were women on board that ship. There were around 80 children on board that ship. So it brought back a range of people, including people, Polish, actually, I mean, a lot of people, the focus has always been on the black passengers that arrived on that ship. But actually, there were people who were returning from Mexico, there were people from all sorts of different parts of the world. But the reason why it drew attention or has remained in the sort of our historical consciousness is because the media

were attracted to the ship and they were present and they took photographs and we've got lots of recordings of the ship's arrival, which didn't happen with the other ships. And I should explain that as the ship was coming to the UK, Clement Attlee, who was the leader of the Labour Party at the time, had been concerned about the numbers on board the ship. And I'd actually thought, well, should we divert this ship to Africa and let them go and pick peanuts there since they're coming here to earn money? But then thought, well,

hang on a minute, we've got the Commonwealth, the optics are going to look bad. So no, let's just let them arrive. So there's a lot of hypocrisy going on where Caribbean people are assuming they're going to be welcomed the government in the background doesn't actually want them necessarily to be here but then doesn't know how to handle it well you say the government doesn't want them but the government agencies are partly the people recruiting them right it's a story of slightly anarchic sort of policy making? It's absolutely bonkers, contradictory, sometimes very difficult to understand because, you know, on the one hand, they needed the neighbour. On the one hand, they were actively recruiting. But on the other, they were concerned about what the impact was

going to be in Britain of having large numbers of black people. So it was always about managing the numbers. You could recruit the numbers, but you didn't want too many. You know, obviously, you hear the narrative all the time about keeping Britain white. And that was the main thing, because there were lots of fears at the time about miscegenation. And by that, I mean, you know, the mixing of the races. And there was a concern that Britain wouldn't remain white if too many people of colour came in. What happened to those people of colour when they arrived? Did they find the jobs they'd been looking for and the housing? Many of them had a really horrific experience on arrival and some couldn't find housing. I mean, I know of people who had served in the war,

who ended up having to sleep on the underground at night time, go round and round on the circle line, catch some sleep then, and then try and start the process of looking for work all over again. It was very difficult for them, but it has to be remembered that in order to return on the ship, on the Empire Windrush, they'd had to pay the fare, which was £28 at the time, which is a huge amount of money. And you couldn't then just go back if you got fed up because people didn't have the money to do so. So they had to make a go of it. And Caribbean people are always very resourceful.

And they had various schemes. They had what they call the partner scheme, where they'd pull their money together in order to buy properties, simply because they couldn't rent property. And in a sense, they used that to their advantage, because a lot of Caribbean people ended up with homes. British culture in many other ways, whether it was their contributions to music, whether some became artists. I mean, we tend to think of people in the silos of the NHS, transportation and all that sort of thing. But actually, there were loads of amazingly talented writers. You had people like V.S. Naipaul, who was from Trinidad, John Agard, who's now on the UK curriculum, who was a poet. And then there's the obvious kind of contributions in terms of ska, reggae, drum and bass, you know, dancehall music, all that kind of thing. So people got involved in a diverse range of jobs. And as part of the project, one of the things

that's really fascinated me is when I was working on this oral history project and looking at the people that had got caught up in the sort of long history of the Windrush scandal, I found that people had actually contributed in extraordinary ways. So, for example, there's one of the recordings was of a person called George who had served as a police officer back in British Guyana. But when he came to the UK, he was given a sort of military scholarship and he ended up joining the Royal Army Medical Corps. He then ended up giving service in Malaya between the end of 1959 and 1961 and I just think it's worth mentioning because we always think oh they served in the First and Second World War but there's other sort of conflicts going on that Caribbean people have contributed, have served in as well.

And he then completed his medical training, went on to work at Guy's Hospital as a gynecologist, and then in various capacities for the Commission for Racial Equality. And then he actually received his MBE in recognition of his service to the Independent Monitoring Board of Her Majesty's Prison Board in London. I mean, he just had a really wide ranging career. And it's those kinds of careers that we seem to be less aware of. They're not stories, I guess, that the media are as interested in. Listen to Dan Snow's history hit. More on the Windrush, its people, and the scandal coming up. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors from History Hit,

I try to make sense of everything that baffled our early modern ancestors. Like, what do you do with your waste? If you put your dunghill up against your neighbour's wall, you're going to cause rising damp. Would Henry VIII ever consider executing his wife, the Queen of England, Anne Boleyn? I'm not even sure if the Boleyns took it seriously, because why would they have any reason to suspect Henry VIII would really get rid of his queen? And why do men grow beards?

During puberty, the male body heats up and a smoke rises in the body, pushes out the hair in the face. So the beard is actually a form of excrement. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Twice a week, every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. What's very striking to me now is that many of the doomsday predictions made by people that were worried about somehow diluting the whiteness of Britain or changing that whiteness, those predictions have not come to pass. Things obviously are imperfect, but we have a society in which we have politicians of colour, we have some of our best footballers, we have cultural and national icons who are people of colour, we have an enormous amount of mixed-race marriages and relationships, particularly, I think, compared to other countries in the world. None of those more pessimistic predictions seem to have come to pass.

They haven't, and in any case, they were ridiculous ideas in the first place. I mean, I think one of the things that Brits forget is that while they worry about immigration, there's been a huge amount of emigration. The British have gone out and basically they've conquered the world wherever they've gone. They're in Australia. They're in New Zealand. They're in America, they're in South Africa, they're in Canada. When the British moved there, they've exterminated pretty much the local people. And we've seen here that in the UK, of course, these weren't things to worry about in terms of miscegenation. At the end of the day, what people from the Caribbean had wanted when

they came here was to earn enough money to look after their families. And most who came here only came here with a five year plan anyway, because why leave the Caribbean? I mean, if the wealth hadn't been extracted from there, it's actually a really lovely place to be. As most people who go on holiday to the Caribbean will know, there are fears in Britain that still remain over the idea of Britain not remaining a white country. But I think as it currently stands, at least 80% white, if not more. There was a scandal, we can now call it the Windrush scandal. Can you talk about the history of that? Just briefly describe what it was is and talk to me about how it is a product of this history of this wave of migration. So, you know, you had the 1948 Nationality Act that kind of reconfirmed the status

of people within the Caribbean as British subjects. But what you then have are situations where there is, within the individual colonies, and because the colonies have been treated badly, there is a movement towards independence and demands for independence. And because the colonies have been treated badly, there is a movement towards independence and demands for independence. And at the point of independence, those people who are living in Britain didn't realise that then their citizenship status was at risk. Because although they were here, had come here, travelled here on British passports, the independence of their territory meant that by default they would suddenly revert to the identity of their independent island. So, for example, Jamaica became independent in 1962, as did Trinidad. So many of the people who were resident here in Britain at the time,

their citizenship status then defaulted to being Jamaican or Trinidadian. But they didn't realise that that was the case. And I should clarify that actually slightly because it wasn't immediate because anybody who came from the Commonwealth, who was a member of the Commonwealth, also had the rights to enter and settle in Britain freely. So yes, on the one hand, you may have become Jamaican, but still you were a Commonwealth citizen. And therefore, you still had the right to be in Britain. And what happens is a whole series of really complex immigration laws start emerging that affect the islands in different ways. So that anybody who'd arrived in Britain prior to the 1971 Act, even though they may have arrived as British, if they then didn't have a citizenship papers that said they were British, it was going to be difficult for them to prove that Britishness.

And it infuriated those who knew about it. Many people didn't know about it because there wasn't any sort of widespread campaign or attempt by the British government to let the community become aware of this requirement. And in fact, most of the people who registered as British did so because they had then wanted to go on holiday with their passport. And it was at that point that they realised, or they were told by immigration officers, oh, your passport isn't valid. And I've got a clip actually by somebody called Ruby.

When I set about applying for a passport, age 22, and age 22, there was a problem that, oh, you're not British anymore. And this was quite shocking. You can't have a British passport because you're not British anymore. You're now Grenadian because Grenada has become independent. She actually worked for a law firm at the time, and they helped her regularise her status. But as I say, most of the people who did regularise their status did so by chance, for the very reason that they had left the country. And how did the scandal that swept people like Ruby up really erupt in recent years?

I guess when we think of the Windrush scandal today, we really think of that period when Theresa May was in government in 2018, when the scandal was kind of forced onto the political agenda during the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in the UK. And the reason it sort of occurred is because whilst Theresa May was Home Secretary, she had said she was going to turn Britain into a really hostile environment. And the idea was that people who were in Britain illegally weren't going to be able to access any of the kind of in-house services. You know, whether it was the NHS, they weren't going to be able to have bank accounts. If you were stopped by the traffic police and they found out that you didn't have documentation, they would lose their car or they would lose

their right to be here. And when the government brought this in, the other thing that they did was bring in an act in 2012 that took away the right to legal aid for any immigration issues. So previously in the past, if people who had been part of this Windrush generation had had issues with their citizenship, all they needed to do was get legal aid. The solicitor would go, oh, yes, we can see what's happened here. And they would then have their British status acknowledged and sorted out without any problems. However, because this came into play, people who then had problems with their citizenship status weren't able to get the legal aid that they needed. The other thing she did was in 2013, she introduced these go home vans. And I don't know if you remember them. around predominantly black areas in London, the outskirts of London, warning people that if they didn't have documented proof of their citizenship, that they could be detained, denied citizenship,

or deported. And on top of that, not only were these vans going around, letters were being sent to individuals. So you can imagine the horror. I mean, you can imagine you're an elderly member of the Windrush generation who, say, had worked in the NHS for 50 years of your life. You're now retired and you get a letter in the post saying, we believe you're here as an undocumented migrant. And, you know, unless you can prove you're British, you're going to be subject to detention and deportation. However, what you can do is if you don't want the humiliation of that, you can choose to voluntarily repatriate. And so some people were so terrified and didn't want the

shame of that, that they did actually voluntarily leave the country. But the other thing the government did was to actually bring in legislation in 2014 and 2016, again, kind of internalising Britain's border control system. So that, you know, if you wanted a job, as you know, now all of us have to prove that you're British, whether it's through your passport or whatever means. And so it meant that people who had jobs were in jobs, then lost those jobs, because they then didn't have proof of their status. And just one final point I'd like to make is that the Home Office actually then expected that people should provide three or four pieces of documentary proof for every single year they'd been in Britain. So obviously, if you arrived as a three-year-old,

how were you going to amass documentation from the period you know, the period that you were in school? I mean, certainly you wouldn't have had any bills or statements or anything like that to show that you'd. It was just an impossible request. It was an absolutely impossible request. Theresa May, the former Prime Minister, has apologised for the Windrush scandal. The Home Secretary at the time, one of our Home Secretaries, Sajid Javid, has apologised as well. He was committed to righting the wrong that was done. So it caused an absolute outcry and it caused the government to completely back down. Yes, that's what it appeared at the time. There's certainly, I would say, concerns about the way that the Windrush Task Force has been managed. So we had

the Wendy Williams report and Wendy Williams made 30 recommendations that Priti Patel then went on to say would all be put in place and would be taken on board. But, you know, we've seen Soella Braverman backtrack on some of those promises. But I think the main thing that concerns me is that when Amber Rudd said that they were going to right the wrongs of the Windrush scandal, because these people were British in all but legal status, it seemed that they were all going to be given British citizenship or have their British citizenship made official. But that hasn't really been the case. I mean, if you look at the figures that are provided by the Home Office, they waver between 40 to 50% being issued with British citizenship, the remainder still being given indefinite leave to remain. And that's the sort of different hierarchies of citizenship.

You know, if you have indefinite leave to remain, it means that your children, if you have children, that they are not then automatically British by being born in this country. It also affects if you say if you committed even a minor offence, you can be deported if you're on indefinite leave to remain. So there seems to be this weird scenario going on whereby some people who have applied to the scheme aren't actually being given the citizenship status that they rightfully deserve. And in fact, I think it's worth going back to the beginning, in a sense, because there's a recording I have by somebody called George who came to Britain. I believe he arrived in 1959. And he points out that actually, you could kind of sense right from the beginning that the British saw British subjects from the colonies as slightly different from those within the mother country. He relates to me in this interview that they had a thing called police clearance and that you had to have it to come to Britain. You had a picture and a thumbprint and everything you had to put on this thing and you brought that in with you with your passport. We had to have vaccination certificates,

yellow fever, smallpox, everything you understand you had to have all that done, the sun you had to have all that done. You had typhoid, you had all that done. And then it was always recommended that you get a letter of reference about your character. And because I came from a family that had lots

of influences and things and we were mixed people, I got mine from a doctor and a lawyer and various people, a judge wrote mine. So we had that, but they never asked us to see it when we arrived here, but we told them that you must have it to come to England. I think it was a way of trying to tell people, if you misbehave when you're younger, don't bother to go, you know, that sort of thing.

That sort of thing. That's how I think now. I never thought with them. There's always been this sense that the black community have, right from the beginning, have always been seen as a potentially problematic community and that the government needs to apply what they call good conduct

criteria in order for people to get British citizenship. But the other thing that's really bonkers is we have to remember there's eight million Brits today, white Brits, who don't have passports. So if white British people don't have to have passports, don't have citizenship paperwork. Why should black Brits have to go through that process and also pay huge amounts of money for the privilege? Juanita Cox, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and answering questions and even finishing with asking a few yourself. That was fantastic. Tell us where people can get hold of your oral history project, learn more about it. So if you just do a Google search for the Institute of Historical Research and put in the tag Windrush, you'll be able to find information about the project.

So if anybody's interested, do look us up. Thank you very much. Thank you.