June 22 each year is celebrated as “Windrush Day” in Britain. In the late 1950s the UK was recovering from WWII and faced a workforce shortage. As it had during the war, the country called on its Empire to help the mother country. In particular recruiters were sent to the Caribbean from, for example, London Transport and the nascent NHS. The first group arrived on the “Empire Windrush” on June 22, 1948. On Wednesday, a statue celebrating those pioneers was unveiled in Waterloo Station, London.
Typical of the experience of many, Floella Benjamin saw her father go to England while she and her mother and siblings stayed behind. In two groups they joined her father. Floella was to write the story of her travelling to Southampton and then by train to Waterloo and on to her new home in Beckenham, SE of London. She would tell of her emigration from Trinidad and early experience of racism in her book “Coming to England” It is now a standard reader in schools with an edition for very young children.
Floella has a distinguished acting and writing career and was indeed to meet the Queen, as Chancellor of the University of Exeter.
She also supports charity and has been a significant figure in TV in front and behind the cameras. In 2010 she was appointed a life peer and sits in the House of Lords as Baroness Benjamin of Beckenham in the London Borough of Bromley. Peers have a naming convention of using a place to identify them from another with a similar surname. She chose Beckenham to honour her parents’ “hometown” in England. She campaigned for the day to be recognised and chaired the committee selecting the statue design.
Having her whole family cramped into a single room was not an uncommon experience for the Windruss generation. After arriving the first were housed in wartime air raid shelters in Clapham, S London that were in Underground tunnels for a part-built line. They found their own “home” in some of the most run-down parts of the capital at a time when it was common to have signs saying “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs”. The intial moves were to nearby Brixton and to Notting Hill where they often became victims of a landlord whose exploitation coined a new word “Rachmanism”.
Sadly they were to later become the victims of Teresa May’s “Hostile Environment” to tackle illegal immigration. When they had arrived they were British Citizens and all Commonwealth citizens had the right of abode in Britain. Subsequent legislation changed this and, in effect made them illegal if they had not registered their status. Of course nobody bothered to tell them this.
Because many of the Windrush generation arrived as children on their parents’ passports, and the Home Office destroyed thousands of landing cards and other records, many lacked the documentation to prove their right to remain in the UK. The Home Office also placed the burden of proof on individuals to prove their residency predated 1973. The Home Office demanded at least one official document from every year they had lived here. Attempting to find documents from decades ago created a huge, and in many cases, impossible burden on people who had done nothing wrong.
Falsely deemed as ‘illegal immigrants’ / ‘undocumented migrants’ they began to lose their access to housing, healthcare, bank accounts and driving licenses. Many were placed in immigration detention, prevented from travelling abroad and threatened with forcible removal, while others were deported to countries they hadn’t seen since they were children.
Their harmful and unjust treatment provoked widespread condemnation of government’s failings on the matter, with calls being made for radical reform of the Home Office and the UK’s immigration policy. In response to these demands, then Home Secretary, Sajid Javid announced in May 2018 that the Home Office would commission a ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’.
While Windrush Day is a time to remember the privations of the Windrush Generation, it is primarily a time to celebrate the rich contribution they have made to British society and culture from the time the calypso singer “Lord Kitchener” arrived on that first sailing and sang this song for the newreel cameras.
Without the monarch’s restrainsts on political comment, her grandson was free to address the old and continuing injustices the Windrush community face.
Prince William also talked about how the "past weighs heavily" on the people of the Caribbean and the Windrush generation.
He said members of the Windrush generation had been victims of racism when they arrived and said "discrimination remains an all too familiar experience for black men and women in Britain in 2022".
The duke referred to the Windrush scandal, which broke in April 2018, and said it still "rightly reverberates through the Caribbean community here in the UK".