The Rest Is History - 401. Windrush: The Story of Black Britain

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

On the 8th of June 1948, the HMT Windrush sailed from Kingston with almost 500 migrants on board, destined for England. The ship docked at Tilbury on the 22nd of June, and history was made. Since that day the legend of Windrush has gradually come to characterise an increasingly broad and more diverse group of British citizens, and the event stands as a sacred moment in the history of British multiculturalism, race relations and immigration, laden though it is with moral and political baggage. In today’s episode Tom and Dominic are joined by acclaimed journalist and author Trevor Phillips, to discuss this seminal moment in the history of Black Britain. During the course of the episode they dismantle some of the myths that have since developed, explore the people who came over, and the emergence of the communities that settled in Britain in the wake of 1948. They also consider the complicated wider context of the Windrush story, and the long term significance of this foundational moment. 📱Protect your tech valuables with our exclusive 20% off discount at http://uk.mous.co/RestHistory🎒 Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Learn more at LandRover.ca A shipload of worry for Mr. George Isaacs, Minister of Labour, will arrive at Tilbury on Saturday week. 500 West Indians, all seeking jobs in Britain. Mr Isaacs confessed his worry to MPs yesterday. He said he does not know who sent the men. All I know, he added, is that they are in a ship and are coming here. They are British citizens and we shall do our best for them when they arrive. But MPs did not allow the mystery of 500 British citizens to rest there. Mr Dryberg, Malden Essex, asked, Will you instruct your officials to meet the ship and

help them find work in undermanned industries in the interests of production and welfare? Mr Isaacs answered, They will be met at the ship and told how to register for unemployment. The arrival of these substantial numbers of men under no organised arrangements is bound to result in difficulty and disappointment. I have no knowledge of their qualifications or capacity and can give no assurance that they can be found suitable work. I hope no encouragement will be given to others to follow them. So that, Dominic, was from the Daily Express on the 8th of June, 1948, reporting on the response

in the House of Commons to the arrival at Tilbury of the Empire Windrush, a ship that now is probably as famous in British history as the Mary Rose or HMS Victory. And it's become a kind of foundational moment, hasn't it, in 20th and 21st century British history? It absolutely has, Tom. First of all, I should say to all our listeners, it's lovely to finally discover how Daily Express journalists in the late 1940s spoke, courtesy of that wonderful, wonderful impersonation. Okay. Well, it's kind of a Pathé-Daily Express crossover.

It was. But you're absolutely right, Tom. So the Windrush has become, dare I say, to use one of your favourite words, it's become kind of sacralised, hasn't it? It is this sacred moment in the history of British multiculturalism, immigration, race relations, and so on and so forth. But the story behind the Windrush is itself a very complicated and fascinating story. And then actually the wider story is more variegated i would say more complicated and multi-layered than most people i think now recognize so the trouble is now this story of multiculturalism and immigration which are not the same thing of course but this story has become freighted hasn't it with so much kind of political and moral you know, that it's very hard to talk about it as a historian. Do you not think?

Well, we are about to find out because we have the perfect guest to hold our hands and lead us through some of the 75 years that have passed since the Windrush arrived. And that is Trevor Phillips, of course, founder of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and columnist and author with his brother, Mike, of a book called Windrush, which Trevor, I think came out in the 90s, didn't it? But it's been reissued now and updated. Brilliant account, not just of Windrush itself, but of the history of West Indian settlement in Britain and the years that have followed that. And also, I think, really importantly, what you were talking about, Dominic, the kind of the mythic

character that the whole story has come to take on. So Trevor, thanks so much for coming on The Rest Is History. Would you recognise what Dominic said, that it's become a sacralised story? Yes. Thank you, Dominic. Thank you, Tom, for having me on. As far as I understand, the use of the word cyclised here, I think that's right. It's probably worth starting by saying that your use of word myth here is correct. As we say, I think in the introduction to the book, the original introduction to the book, we could have chosen several other boats that brought people from the Caribbean, because the Windrush wasn't the only one. It was probably one of the larger groups,

nearly 500 men and women, but it wasn't alone. What I think was striking about it, to be honest, is that, this is a kind of meta story, I suppose, it was one of the first of these kinds of events to be immortalised on film and to have that sort of Alva Liddell voice crystallising it for history, historians to pour over and to analyse and so on. So we chose the Windrush when we decided to do this,

not just because of the fact that it was mentioned in Parliament and so on, but because, frankly, there's a lot of evidence. We could tell who the people were, and we could talk to some of them. When we wrote the book in 1998, it was still possible to meet these men and women and to talk to them and interview them directly. Now there are only two of them who survive so the origins of this book which is in itself an origin story are a mixture I suppose of my own desire to tell a story about who my family is because I think at that time we were still sort of slightly two-dimensional characters you know basically people who smoked dope and got into trouble with the police and that was it at that time, we were still sort of slightly two-dimensional characters, you know, basically people who smoked dope and got into trouble with the police and that was it. And with no history

whatsoever, I think if I'm honest, part of my motivation for promoting what was originally thought of as a documentary for television, but became a book as well, was irritation at the fact that every time I walked into a room or anytime I met somebody, they would see me as a person with no story of my own, no narrative, other than what other people had done to me and my community. And the important thing for me about Windrush was that we wanted to tell a story that explained some of who we are. By the way, Tom, I mean, you could do this for a living, that impersonation. Thanks very much.

The striking thing I think about that moment was, in a way, it's part of these islands' history, isn't it? Boats always being trouble. Whether it's Vikings or more latterly, people coming across the channel. The English are always worried about boats turning up. But they also bring new beginnings. So whether it's Julius Caesar landing or actually more germainly, the Anglo-Saxons, you know, Hengist and Horsa landing at Thanet. I mean, it is a narrative of invasion, but it's also a narrative of new beginnings and new opportunities. So, I mean, that is such a fascinating point. I think we should kind of look at that perhaps towards the end of the show when we're looking at how the resonance that the Windrush has.

But you said that you experienced kind of feelings of irritation, but in your introduction, you also say that you experienced nostalgia when you see the pictures of the people descending the gangplanks from the Windrush at Tilbury. Again, I'm sure you're absolutely right that it's the iconic quality of the look, isn't it? It's an immediate kind of visual signifier. Because I live off Brixton Hill, and in the anniversary of the Windrush actually arising, there was a big street party at the top of our street. And there were lots of people who had come dressed in the dresses and the sharp suits of the people who came. And you just had to look at them to know what they were doing. You know, it was an immediate kind of visual spark. You knew exactly what the reference point was. And of course, that wouldn't work if we didn't

have the video footage. The way that people were dressed as they come off the boat in those pictures is significant, particularly if you come from this tradition, because what they are dressed in is what people used to call Sunday best. The women wear gloves, they wear hats. The men wear suits and ties with tie pins, and they also wear hats. The background that I come from, that's what you do if you're going to church. And if you're wearing these clothes, it's because it's an important moment and you're going to share something valuable, something significant in your life. It's not like we do these days, you know, get on a plane in your T-shirt and jeans. And if you're going somewhere important, you'll dress when you get there. I remember actually I was born in London, but as a child, shuffled a bit back and forth. I remember on one occasion

when my parents sent me back to what was then British Guyana, I was on a plane and I was dressed in a tweed jacket and tie and shirt just for the journey. And so how old were you then? On that occasion, I would have been 12. So you're like Prince George. A bit, a bit, yes. Going to a football match. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

But the point is really that we recognise what that meant to those people, partly by the way they are dressed. You know, it is partly a thing that West Indians, as we would have called them at the time, and still Caribbean people, take a pride in the way we look. We are bothered about the way we dress in spite of the way I might look today. We think about these things. It's part of the culture. But I think it's more than that. It isn't just that because we've seen that style of dress in the movies and we see it in

you know the pictures of the dance halls and so on they dressed like that because this was an important journey an important moment and they were encountering the future in a way in a parallel way to the way that we might encounter the Almighty on a Sunday morning. And if you're going to encounter the Almighty, you show some respect. So Trevor, for those of our listeners who are not super familiar with this story, especially our international listeners, could you tell us a bit about the historical background to all this? So the boat, the SS Empire Windrush, left Kingston on the 8th of June 1948, it docked at Tilbury on the 22nd. As you said, there's almost 500 migrants from the Caribbean. So first of all, maybe tell us a bit

about who these people are and why they're coming, because that in itself is a much debated story, isn't it, about whether it's push or pull and what is drawing people to the United Kingdom. Look, the first thing I think that everybody has to remember is that this was the British Empire. And what those words have come to mean, I think in recent times have been rather narrow. They've become essentially code for cruelty and repression and domination by the centre. I think what is important to understand is that for people at the time, there was that. And of course, there was the anti-colonial movement, people in islands or in countries like my own family, British Guiana, had got to a place where they wanted people who

were local, not purely a racial thing, people who lived on the soil to be in charge of their own destiny, not to have to wait for instructions or legislation from people 5,000 miles away in a parliament who had never been and experienced our lives. But I think that my parents and grandparents would have seen themselves as part of what in those days they might have called a global brotherhood. Remember that the anti-colonial movement stretched across the Caribbean to Africa. Men and women who became leaders in the third world met here in England, and they didn't just spend their time thinking about what white people do to them. They'd be thinking about each other.

So when war broke out, I think it's worth remembering that lots of people, like my own father who was in the army, saw themselves as part of this worldwide empire fighting against fascism. So Dudley Thompson, who later became the foreign minister of Jamaica, says he went into a dentist. I don't know how this happened. But anyway, he said that there's a copy of Mein Kampf on the dentist table. He picked it up, read it, started to see references to black people like himself as semi-anthropoidal is the word he uses. And he said, I'm insulted by this. I'm going to go to Europe and I'm going to kick Hitler's ass and I'm going to come home, which is exactly what he did. He flew dozens of missions as a flight lieutenant, as did many Caribbean men who volunteered for the RAF. And that's important background to Windrush. One of the other reasons we chose that boat is that many of the men on that boat were people who had served in the war in England, had gone home, to be honest, had found home a bit boring

and wanted to come back to England because they'd had, you know, it had been terrible. I mean, I still find it moving when I read back, They talk about the fact that they had come with their classmate from Trinidad and Jamaica. They went up in these planes or they were engineers. And Thompson does talk about seeing one of his classmates flying into a hill and dying. I mean, these men lived and died the war. And maybe there was a little bit of the adrenaline junkie, I don't know, but they wanted to come back. It wasn't just a story of people who were poor wanting to come and be in a rich place. They wanted a different life. One of the things that I think we still get wrong about immigrants of all kinds is to think that

you mentioned push and pull, that what they're doing is basically escaping something terrible. Actually, what is more true about most immigrants who turn up in this country and the United States is that they are the adventurous ones. They are the ones in the village who don't want to put up with what their parents did. They want more. They're the ambitious ones. You know, they're the ones who want to do something special. And that's what the Windrush Voyages represented to me. So Trevor, you quote a man called Euton Christian, who comes over on the Windrush, and he has an astonishing biography. So like several of the men that you've mentioned, he joins the RAF in 1944, and then he takes part in the Battle of Manchester, Dominic. It was one of

those clashes between white American army authorities trying to impose segregation. And there's this kind of battle in Manchester to ensure that the pubs are open to black American servicemen. African American servicemen are taking part, West Indian servicemen, and white British Mancunians are taking part. So that's kind of complicating the story already, isn't it? And then he returns in the Windrush and in due course, he goes on to become a town councillor in Manchester, becomes the city's first black magistrate, dies in 2010. So extraordinary story. But you quote him saying, as a young man growing up in school, we always regarded England as the mother country. And for that reason, she was

regarded as a parent who never often sees the children, but the children think of the parents abroad. So you were describing yourself being put in a suit to go back to Guyana. But in a sense, are they wearing the suits because they're coming to see the mother country and you dress up if you're going to see your parents? Is there some aspect of that for some of them? I mean, I don't want to make it sound servile. It's not quite like that.

We have in the Caribbean a tradition of respect rather than deference. The fact that you dress up for somebody doesn't necessarily mean that you think they're better than you, though there might be some of that for some people. So just on the the people on the windrush the majority are young men on their own and do you think trevor by and large people are thinking i'm going to make a new life and settle permanently or a lot of people thinking i don't know who knows let's just see how it goes or some people thinking

listen it's just going to be for two or three years, make a bit of money, see the world, then I'll come back home. Absolutely the latter. For most of them, absolutely the latter. The idea was that what you do, you would come, you would spend some time, particularly for the young men, you'd have some fun, some adventure, you'd save up some money, you'd send some money home. And when you got enough, you'd go home, you would build a new house, and you'd be a king in your village. Right.

That's basically the idea. And that, by the way, was true for at least almost a generation. You know, my own parents, they came in 1950, they always had in their minds, they'd return home. I had nine siblings. I was the last and I was the only one born here. So there was always a sort of active exchange. Me and my siblings would go and spend time back home. In fact, I spent most of my childhood in British Guyana and then what became Guyana. I was only here for four or five years in the middle of my childhood. So the intention was always really that we would go home. What happened in our family's case is that my parents in the late 60s, 1967, decided they had enough. They were going back home. They went via the United States where we'd always have a branch of the family. Most West Indians

have always had a branch of the family in the United States because people would go cotton picking seasonally and so on, and they got stuck. And actually what's now happened is half my family is now an American family. So the point to your point, I don't think the intention was ever to come and stay. And again, you have to remember, you're talking about people for whom being in one place and putting down roots is an unfamiliar thing. You know, my own family had only been in Guyana for a century. They had previously been in Barbados. And we know why, because at that time, anybody could pick us up and move us wherever they wanted. So the idea of sort of coming and staying wouldn't really have been part of their universe. As things turned out for many of them,

actually, that is what they did. And Trevor, can I ask you in 1948, when Windrush arrived, the attitudes of the British authorities, because I kind of rather inchoately had two contradictory assumptions about it. One was that the British government had issued invitations that there were gaps in the labour force to be filled. You called and we came is the famous line. And the other one is that they're kind of crippled with, I think you say, stricken with racist anxiety and doing everything in their power to stop the migrants. And you point out that these are kind of contradictory and that basically neither of them really are true. And as we saw in that passage that I read at the start, basically the anxiety is a kind of civil service anxiety that people

are doing what they shouldn't be doing. And this is a reflection of the kind of desire of the war period to make sure that everyone knows what they're doing. For listeners, one of the things you've got to remember is that at that point, there was no barrier between Georgetown and London. There was no legal or citizenship barrier. My parents had the same blue passport that everybody here had. There was no immigration bar. They didn't have to have visas or anything like that. They basically just got on the boat and could come here because we were all part of this British Empire. We were all subjects of the then king. I think that the attitude of the authorities derives from two things. First of all, you've got to remember the

British Empire was, amongst other things, a great labour market machine. And the civil service in London were used to moving people from one part of the world to another part of the world to fix problems, economic problems. So, for example, Guyana and Trinidad are the only countries outside of the Indian Ocean where the majority of the population is of Indian origin. And the reason for that is because after slavery, I mean, you know, our people, my ancestors, decided had enough of going into the cane fields and dying because the life expectancy of a slave in a Jamaican plantation, for example, was about eight years after you'd entered the fields. So the British colonial authorities shipped a lot of people from India, Bihar particularly, to the Caribbean to work in the cane fields. And I think the colonial authorities were still of that mentality. If people were moving from one part of the empire, it had to be motivated by London. So the idea that

some people could take it upon themselves just to get on a boat and move from one part of the empire to another was really shocking. The other aspect of it was that there was a kind of moral panic about these strange, dark people turning up. I think we don't really talk about this in the book. I think it's an important question to which I'm not sure I have any answer. But my hypothesis would be that the point that you mentioned, if you like, example, disturbances between white officers and black GIs thought, we don't want any of that here, and this might become a problem. And you also have to remember, this was also against a background where there were all sorts of disturbances breaking out across the empire in Africa and so on, because of the anti-colonial movements there. I think against that background, you could see why

people would be going, hmm. I mean, it was hysterical. They sent a warship to shadow the Windrush. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, it's bizarre, isn't it? A destroyer to shadow a boat which has some blokes in it who are just coming to go to work and find work and go to nightclubs. Right. I think we should take a break at that point. And Trevor, maybe when we come back, we could look at the years that follow the arrival of the Windrush

and look at the kind of the broader context of it. So we'll be back after a break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our

q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com cricket lovely cricket at lords where i saw it yardley did his best but goddard won the test with those little pals of mine ramadin and valentine that was lord beginner celebrating the victory of west indies at lords over england in 1950 dominic do you remember in the world cup episode we did and we talked about england losing to the united states in the world cup in 1950. Dominic, do you remember in the World Cup episode we did and we talked about England losing to the United States in the World Cup? In 1950.

And how nobody in England really paid any attention to it because of the shock. Yes, I do remember that. Of this defeat at Lord's that the West Indies had won. So for the internationalists, by the way, Tom was talking about cricket. Sorry. Tom, you didn't bother to mention what sport you were talking about. Most people won't know what it will be. I thought it was obvious.

So England lost to brilliant spin bowling of Valentine and Sonny Ramadin, who Trevor was one of, I think, the first Indian players to play for the West Indies. You were talking about before the break. And it's a kind of symbolic moment, isn't it? But justifiable for me to mention it. Oh, yes. I mean, it was a major psychological thing. Bear in mind, cricket was England's game. And historically, the senior rivalry, if I can put it that way, would have always thought to

have been between England and Australia. These were the serious teams. The West Indies played cricket, but it was a sort of gentleman's game. And I think until that point, symbolically, the captain of the West Indies team had team was becoming the property of all West Indians, not just the colonial masters, as we would have used the phrase at that time. So when that team came to England and won, and Ramadan and Valentine, who were spinmeisters, I think we'd say today, took vast numbers of wickets between them, 50-something, I think, which for those who don't follow cricket is a lot. I mean, that is historic. It was a psychological shock because suddenly there was something

that people who had always been second division could beat the English at. The English didn't mind being beaten by the Australians because that's, you know, we're the same sort of people. But being beaten by these people said something important. And of course, again, it was against a political background where there was agitation for independence. We were three, four years after the independence of India, which had also been a major psychological event for the British. So when a few years later, Harold Macmillan talked about winds of change, he was talking about South Africa at that time, they were already blowing through this country. It achieved what today people in politics would call cut through. And it comes against the background of,

you mentioned in the first half that probably the large majority of the people on the Windrush when it docks in 1948 are anticipating going back home after a few years. But obviously the story in the next, what is it, 12 years effectively, is one of more and more people arriving and staying, such that by the end of the 1960s, so jumping ahead, there are about a quarter of a million people, I think, who have arrived from the Caribbean in Britain. And if you include India and Pakistan, which is obviously a different story, but if you include that, you have a black and South Asian population in Britain, which is now 650,000 strong. So what has changed from 1948 onwards to mean that this has now become a story of permanent settlement? Well, one thing is that you said volume. Again, in today's context, it's hard to imagine,

but net migration, I think absolute migration from the Caribbean for the first part of the 50s wouldn't have broken 4,000 or 5,000 individuals a year. Now we're talking about net migration of half a million. It's surprising to think of the panic that that engendered. But of course, part of that was because of conflicts, because of unfamiliarity, and so on. You've asked, though, what actually changed and when. I would say that the big change took place in the first half of the 1960s. And the thing that happened in that period was children. The first cohorts were mostly male. But of course, what you then had were groups of women coming. For example, the reason that my own family came was because,

amongst other things, my sister wanted to be a nurse. And at that time, the opportunities were limited in the Caribbean. So she came and she became a nurse. She trained in London, in Glasgow, in fact, even had a period in Sorbonne in Paris. And so more women came. Now, there is a story that is told that, you know, you called, we came. That was not true at the beginning there was none of that it then became true later in the mid 50s late 50s yeah what then followed was romance and children and what i think most of those families would have had to make a decision about is what do you then do now in some cases like my own family because we were already such a big family by the time I was born my older sister was an adult you could do a variety of things you could send the younger

ones home and so on but I think for younger people they just had to make a decision are we going to try and bring up our children here or are we going to go back home and you can see that for people who had made this big leap into the unknown going going back before the adventure was complete, i.e. before you had raised and saved enough money to go home as a serious person with enough money to build your house and buy a farm, for example, that would have been humiliating. You're not going to do that. So people stayed and they said, said okay we'll do a few more years we'll get to the place where we wanted to and bit by bit what then happens is they got stuck and you know you have a child who's five or you have a child who's 10 do you then uproot them no and that's what happened i think in the 1960s we had children and they became largely english

children well that's a key question isn't it so i mean clearly those children were english children in the 1960s, we had children, and they became largely English children. Well, that's a key question, isn't it? So, I mean, clearly, those children were English children. But that first generation of children born in Britain, obviously, they are growing up in a society that some people today would look often extremely racist. You know, they are abused in the street. Sometimes they're abused in the street sometimes. They're abused in the school playground. They're harassed by the police in the 1970s infamously, which lies behind a lot of the resentments that you then get exploding into rage on the streets and so on and so forth. So against that background, and I know this is inviting you to give a series of massive

generalizations, but against that background, do those people who are the first generation to be born in Britain, I mean, I'm guessing they don't see themselves in an uncomplicated way English because they're caught between two worlds, presumably. Well, you know, I'm the earliest part of that generation. And I think you've got to think about how people see themselves and what they actually think about. First of all, I don't think anybody ever really sort of sits down and writes themselves an essay. Am I English or am I not English? People only really think about that when they're asked the question, when somebody else says, what are you?

And the answer might vary according to circumstances even now for example if i go to countries where people assume because i'm black and i speak english that i'm probably american i'll say i'm english or british whereas if i talk to a black person here and they say where are you from i know what they mean is, where's your family from? So I think we first got to understand in what circumstances people think they need to answer that question about their identity. For that first generation, I think the questions that you asked mattered when you felt that you were being treated differently to those around you. And I think rather than thinking I've got to make a choice between, you know, being Caribbean, being English, I don't think that's the

way certainly anybody in my generation would have thought about it. I think it would have started from the premise, why don't you accept that I'm a Londoner? What's wrong with you? I don't think there's a sort of philosophical choice here. It would present itself more as, why is this person not recognising who and what I am? So I think that the answer is that most of that generation would think of themselves as English. You know, there's a lot of writing and there's a lot of music and so on, which presents it differently. But in truth, most of the people who are born here, unlike me, weren't thinking of themselves as people with two different homes.

They would be thinking, this is my home, this is who I am. And the rage that you mentioned would come from being treated as though that was not the case by other people. So i don't think it was ever really yeah a question yeah so trevor your book windrush and the documentary you made came out in 1998 yeah so that was to mark the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the windrush and 1998 is you know the black government is in power and very, they will open the gates to a very large wave of immigration from Europe. So it's often forgotten that there were 60 Polish women, I think, on the Windrush as well when it came. Some of them come from Siberia, kind of incredible

journey via India and Palestine. And do you think that the fact that immigration to Britain over the past decades has not kind of been from the traditional Commonwealth countries? Has that complicated the narrative, do you think, since you wrote the first version of the book in 1998? By complicating it, I mean the sense of the wind rush as the foundational myth at the start of what Britain has become over the past decades. Yes, complicated in two different ways, one of which is incorrect, and one of which I think is an important way. The incorrect way is for people who think of all immigration as a sort of uniform wave. The truth is that the Caribbean wave of immigration was very different from that that

came a little bit later from the Punjab and from Pakistan. And again, the wave that came 2004, 2005 from Eastern Europe. And these are all quite different phenomena. And I think for people who don't recognize that, it's all a bit confusing. But I think smart people do recognize that. The wave that makes the Windrush story different, actually, is something slightly different. When we wrote Windrush, we were writing an origin story about people like myself and Mike, whose parents would have come in that post-war period, whose parents would largely have been people from the Caribbean who were Black, spoke English, were Christians. And that was what we, I suppose, wrote as an origin story of what we would now call Black Britain.

The thing is that since 1998, two dramatic things have happened. First of all, has been the emergence of a different black wave, as it were, from Africa. I'd sometimes refer to the way we came as the cruise route, cruising from West Africa to the Caribbean and then the Caribbean here. But those who came directly from Africa now outnumber us quite significantly. There are probably about 600,000 or 700,000 people like me in this country, Caribbean heritage, two black parents and so on. There are a million and a half people who've come direct from Africa. And they are a very different proposition. Their backgrounds are different, their expectations are different,

and their trajectories in the society are very different. So, for example, a lot of those who came from West Africa, I think, would be people who had a higher education background, middle-class professionals, and their expectations of their own fortunes would be much higher than ours. The other thing, which I personally think is even more significant and more interesting, both domestically and globally, is the emergence of a very sizable mixed race population. They're probably now getting on for a million people who, like my own children and

grandchildren, have at least one grandparent who is white and at least one grandparent who is black. So Trevor, just to quote you in your book, you say that this is the most significant dual heritage population born since the war anywhere in the developed world, which I found such a striking phrase. When I first thought about this, I thought, oh, I've got to be wrong. There's got to be some other group. For the last four or five years, I've actually tried to study this. If you look in Europe, there's a significant minority population. But by and large, it hasn't, as far as I know, until very recently, the numbers don't tell me that that group has intermarried. It is still very separate. It's still very North

African. People speak Arabic at home and so on. Where there are big mixed race populations in the world, black, white, they are South Africa, Brazil, and the United States. And in each of those cases, those populations came about prior to the war, and frankly, during a period where the mixing wasn't always entirely voluntary. This is the only country where you've got a sizable mixed race population that identifies as mixed race, compared with the United States, by the way, where most black people are actually in some senses mixed race, but the one drop rule still applies socially, if not legally. If you've got an African ancestor in the United States, you're black. It doesn't matter how many generations back. Whereas here, we have a dual

heritage population that identifies as such, and which has arisen in the last couple of generations, and it has arisen voluntarily through romance rather than coercion. And that, I think, is such an unusual phenomenon that we ought not to take it for granted and treat it casually. And it kind of passes under the radar, doesn't it? In a lot of discussion. It's a sort of rather British thing, isn't it? We're rather casual about these things. Oh, it just, it happens.

And I've got a theory that all of this comes from the Elizabethan doctrine of toleration, which essentially says, well, leave people to get on with what they do, as long as they don't interfere with the central authority and throw their difference in our faces. And stuff happens. We all adjust a little bit when things change. And things just happen naturally by some kind of osmosis. And a century later, we look back and go, oh, oh, that's interesting. That happened. Let's get on with it. That's our way. And I think we treat this phenomenon that way. I think that's a mistake.

I think it is very unusual in this world to be a person who can claim more than one cultural and ethnic tradition completely as your own. And I don't know how that feels. Most of us don't know how that feels. And most people in the world do not know how that feels. And I think that's a fantastic thing. I think it's a huge advantage. It's like being bilingual only on steroids. And I think these are very, very special people. But how we deal with it and how they deal with it, we don't know yet. And it's still to be seen. I would love to see more writing, more history about this phenomenon than there currently is, because it's special, and we need to understand

it if we are going to get the best of it, if I can put it that way. Trevor, we're running out of time. And since you mentioned wanting more history, I want to take you back to the place of the Windrush in history. So you talked about when you wrote the book, the idea of it being an origin story, a kind of foundational moment. And you said there's an origin story for Black Britain. I think it's so interesting because, of course, right now, and this has been the case for, let's say, the last 10, 12 years or so, there have been a lot of publications.

There's been a lot of kind of cultural effort put into weaving a narrative which basically says the origin story of Black Britain is actually the origin story of Britain per se. There were Black legionaries on Hadrian's Wall. Henry VIII had a Black trumpeter. There were slaves in Georgian England, and so on and so forth. So if the Windrush is a transformative moment, if it's a shorthand for a transformative moment, which is the advent of so many people from the Caribbean in the late 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. And that this is an unusual moment. And of course, one of the things your book brings out is the range of reactions in Britain from people who say, oh, gosh, I've never seen a black person before and all this sort of thing.

Those two things kind of jar with each other a little bit, don't they? Because either the Windrush is the transformative foundational moment or it isn't. And if there have always been lots of black people in Britain, then its significance is kind of diminished. How do you make sense of all that? I would say it's a transformative moment rather than the transformative moment. Let me go back to the reason that I originally tried to get the Windrush story off the ground as a piece of television. I was in my 40s and you know I'd written a lot. I'd been a journalist for a long time and I'd written a lot about black communities but I'd always been asked to write about black communities purely in relation to

what the white people would think or do about us. There was very, very little said by anybody about who we actually were. And maybe this is a kind of arrogance, or more likely because I'd grown up in the Caribbean and I come from a big family that has a very strong sense of itself. I just got fed up of being treated as though what happens is I wake up every morning and I think, what are my white neighbors going to think about me? Actually, I don't think about that from one day to another, unless somebody makes it an issue. That's not who I am. So the point about Windrush was that I wanted to say, first of all, we are people in our own right with our own narrative.

And some of that narrative has nothing to do with how you guys treat us. Listen to us, look at us and look at us rather than as instruments of your rage or admiration for our creativity or whatever it is. Just look at us for what we think about ourselves. So for example, just a very small example, if you look at all the journalism or television and so on about Caribbean people, even now, the one thing that almost never figures is the one thing that we all generally have in common that is very powerful in our world, the church. We go to church on Sundays, you know, more than half of us, as opposed to one tenthtenth of the population as a whole.

But you never see that. And that's a time when actually, by and large, we are outside what they call the white gaze. And that's who we really are. But nobody's interested in that. Well, you have shocking stories about the one black woman going to the Anglican church and being told not to come back.

I was appalled by that. I had no idea. Of course. I was appalled by that. I had no idea. Of course. I mean, terrible stories. Trevor, just one last question, just on the thing of why Windrush has been in the news so recently, the kind of the scandal about people not having their identity papers and so on and being denied citizenship. You cite in this context, a very, very interesting interview that Sajid Javid who was community secretary at the time went on to become home secretary in the wake of Amber Rudd who was

home secretary resigning over the Windrush scandal he said about the whole scandal that my parents came to this country just like the Windrush generation when I heard about the Windrush issue I thought that could be my mum it could be my dad it could be my uncle it could be me and you write about this and I think this is just the last point I want to dwell on the show, that ownership of the legend had begun to escape the grasp of the Caribbean. It was beginning to characterise a broader and diverse group of British citizens. I mean, do you think that that is the future of the role of the Windrush as a myth? And I use myth not in a pejorative sense, in a positive sense, that perhaps in the long run, the Windrush will stand as a moment in history that people like

Sajid Javid can lay claim to, and maybe Poles and all kinds of people who've come. I hope not. Right, because I was wondering how you felt about that. I hope not, because I think they have their own stories. I'm waiting for somebody to tell the Sajid Javid story, which is very different to mine, but it's very important. Do you think it lacks the kind of what the Windrush has? It has the iconic image of people coming off a ship. I mean that story. And it's a particular story, which, for example, will have its own iconic image, which is East African nations arriving by plane, having been persecuted by black Africans. Whole different story, but a really important story, which is yet to be told. But actually, and here's the important thing.

I don't want to miss Dominic's earlier point, but let me come back to that. The important thing is Rishi Sunak is who he is and does what he does, I think, largely because of who his family was. When he produces policies which are to promote numeracy, studiousness, high levels of education, self-discipline. Where's that coming from? It's coming from the traditions with which he has been brought up. He hasn't become that kind of conservative for no reason at all. It is because these are the values that he believes in. And by the way, we're going to see some very serious implications of this. So for example, for that group of people, social care, which is our biggest issue as a country, is baffling because for them, putting your parents in the hands of strangers in homes somewhere isn't just expensive, it's immoral. And they are puzzled by the dilemma? I bet you at some point, Sunak will want to ask that question if he remains prime minister. The point I'm really making is all of these different groups have their own origins stories, which are interesting, but also they're significant because they will have an

impact on the way the whole country works. And if we say Windrush is the template for everybody else, we're doing what people always do, and which is why I'm banging about it, which is to say everybody who's not white is basically sort of the same. And the only reason they're basically sort of the same is because the story is about white people, not about them. We're defining them entirely in terms of how they're treated and their relationship to white people. My point on your point, Dominic, about Windrush, essentially what people say is, oh, don't get too fussed about Windrush. Don't get too fussed about this particular thing because there were always black people and we should recognize that. And if we don't recognize it, that's the explanation for why people are racist.

I think this is all nonsense. Of course, there were people who were not white in this country. But it's just silly to say there was a servant that somebody brought from India, and there was a slave that somebody might have brought from West Africa, and that that became a significant issue. I mean, the point is, there weren't a million of those people who were living next to peasants in Nottingham or miners in Cornwall. We're in a whole different world. I mean, the reason I'm getting worked up about it, I find it so disrespectful that we are constantly treated as symbols for something else, as pawns in an argument about somebody else. Instead of, as sociologists and historians do with everybody else, gather the evidence, look at who these people are, understand what they did and why they did it, and work out what that means for the society as a whole. They're always coming to us as though we're simply a reason to tell somebody else's story. Well, Trevor, your book Windrush, 75 Years of Modern

Britain is a brilliant corrective to all that. Absolutely wonderful account, both of Windrush and of, as the subtitle suggests, the 75 years that have followed, written by you and by your brother, Mike. Absolutely wonderful. Thanks so much for coming on and joining us. And thank you so much for listening to us. Great pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. See you next time. Goodbye.

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