Colin Grant On The Windrush Generation

Colin Grant On The Windrush Generation | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"In 1947 or 48, or even before, I think people had a real sense that they were British. There was no Jamaican passport in the 40s. There was no Trinidadian passport, there were British passports and everything revolved around Britain.

If you can imagine, my mother, born in 1932, when she went to school, all the books were imported from Britain. My mother knows how to fold the Union Flag. She knows how to recite verbatim Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth. I remember as a child being transfixed by her on a Saturday morning, she'd be cleaning the house, reciting Gunga Din by Kipling. Verbatim. She knew every single word.

When they went to the cinema, and the Realto cinema in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1940s, at the beginning of a screening the audience would stand up to sing the British National Anthem. At the end of the screening, the audience would stand up to sing the British National Anthem.

When I interviewed a man... from British Guiana, and now Guyana, he talked about the fact that when he came to this country, and he went to the cinema, and at the end of the film he stood up as the credits rolled, he looked around and everybody was seated. He couldn't believe it, he thought what’s wrong with these people? So they were actually very, very patriotic…

They were Anglophiles, or Afro-Saxons. And so then the notion of coming to England was very, very attractive, very, very exciting, because they’d read about Oxford Circus. They'd read about Trafalgar Square, just imagine the romance of those names. There's a man in the book called Wallace Collins came from Jamaica in the 50s. And what often happened when people arrived, they were so excited to say: we have reached, as we say in Jamaica, they would send photographs back home to the folks who were already very excited about what news would be coming forth from the motherland and send postcards. And this man Wallace Collins went to Trafalgar Square… a pigeon perched on his head and dropped something on his head. And he wrote back home really excitedly: I am making history…

Because nobody from their family maybe would have been there before. They were going on with this amazing adventure. They were going to the seat of Empire to the heart of the metropolis, and they were going to be rewarded in terms of the possibilities that opened up before them…

This phrase that was written in little cards and windows as people looked for a combination, that phrase was no dogs, no blacks, no Irish, no gypsies... a lovely woman from Guyana. She's 92 now, she's a teacher. Was a teacher, and one of the first educational psychologists, black psychologists in this country. And she said that she would send word in advance. If she saw an advert, she would send word in advance to the landlord that she was black, so that she wouldn't waste her or their time, because she would be refused so often...

I really loved the Caribbean approach to hardship and to slights. So, for instance, there are many, many slights shown to them when they were trying to find employment. But they would repel the slights... [Mr Johnson] talks about going to find employment and to get there, the potential post. Oh, sorry, Mr. Johnson. Oh, you just a minute too late. I'm so sorry. And Mr. Johnson said: boy the Englishman is the kindest man in the world when he's telling you no. So they had kind of humor which they used to protect themselves from these slights, from these injuries.

And we talk a lot these days about so called micro aggressions. These people were suffering macro aggressions on a daily basis, but they worked out strategies about how to get round it. They took things on the chin. They pulled up their collar, Charlotte and they walked on. And good for them…

After the Second World War, Britain was bombed out, there were mounds of rubble everywhere. In 1947 Winston Churchill pleaded, with the half a million people had put in applications to emigrate to Canada, to Australia, to New Zealand, to South Africa. These young white British people were leaving. Half a million of them left in the two years up, in the 10 years after 1948. And in a way they were replaced by West Indians, Irish, Indians, Pakistan, displaced Europeans, so they were needed...

In Guyana, he was a former policeman, he says in Guyana the only people who run are the people who are criminals running away from the scene of a crime, or running out of the rain. So when he gets Liverpool Street at five o'clock in the hour, he sees all these people running, running, running. He’d think oh my God, there’re so many criminals here…

They were also very surprised by things like outside toilets. I mean, the notion that these were uncivilized people coming into the civilized Motherland was turned on its head when they realized that the combination was drafty, dirty, grimy. They had to share a toilets and the toilets outside, you had to do your cooking on the landing on a parrafin heater. They met and were  surprised by the levels of privation… Derek Walcott said that many people were surprised by the sight of whites hands doing nigger work. That's his poem"


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