HMT Empire Windrush

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So on June 22nd, 1948, right around the same time that Peter Rockman was demobilized and became a civilian, a boat named the HMT Empire Windrush brought the first large group of Caribbean immigrants to England's shores.

This had been precipitated by the British Nationality Act of 1948, which quite reasonably made the people who lived in the empire's remaining colonies British citizens.

This spurred a shitload of people from the West Indies to move to the UK looking for a better life.

Things are rough there.

And so when these people get off the boat to the UK, they are not going to have a – I mean, not that immigrants in the US had an easy time of it, but it's going to be even harder, right? Because shit's just harder in England at this point in time.

These immigrants from what's called the West Indies, right, the Caribbean, become known as the Windrush Generation.

And these are the people who are going to make Peter Rockman a rich man.

Shocking in New Jersey, I know.

And Andrew Joyce, whose article I read on the Windrush, the SS Windrush, did an article addressing some concerns that were made by someone named Dania Rutenberg.

This article is from November 16th, 2018.

Now...

After the war, some found new uses.

In 1948, the Clapham South Shelter provided temporary accommodation for some of the people who had arrived on the Empire Windrush.

Think about that arrival across an ocean into a new country and your first accommodation is down below its streets.

A wartime refuge becoming a first foothold.

July 12th, 2015 by Andrew Joyce, PhD.

And basically he's talking about the Windrush generation.

And anybody who knows anything about what happened to Britain after World War II, sure, they had Indians there.

Well, why did they have Indians in Great Britain? Well, because they were an empire and they controlled India and Indians were going to be there.

But Basically, a whole crop of people from...

Blacks from the West Indies showed up.

Especially on a ship called the SS Empire Windrush.

And...

We don't have to look very far.

Sam King arrived in Britain aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948.

He had already served in the RAF.

He settled here in Southwark, worked for the Royal Mail for decades, became a councillor, and in 1983 became Southwark's first black mayor.

Piers said that London had always been that, that diverse, and, and Tucker says, "No, it hasn't." He says, "Well, in my lifetime it has." He said, "Yeah, from the 1960s maybe, but it hasn't." Well, you see, that's totally and utterly incorrect.

That's going over to the old system whereby one talks about the Windrush and people turning up in the 1940s.

But people always forget, when the BBC goes to Tilbury Docks to speak to the people coming off the Windrush, they never choose to t- to state what the BBC reporter said, 'cause the BBC reporter said it very loud and clear, and I can play you the tape, and in fact, if you go back to one of my previous, um, uh, um, uh, podcasts about, uh, basically Black history, I've p- I play you the BBC, um, uh, b- basically the Pathé News recording the Windrush coming in.

And what the first thing the reporter says is, "You're all ex-servicemen, aren't you?" So in other words, what he's saying is, "All of you guys have served in the Second World War." This is 1948.

"You've all served in the Second World War." So they've been serving, like my father served in the Second World War from 1939 onwards, they've been serving in the s- in, in the Second World War.

To rebuild, the government passes the British Nationality Act, which essentially invites colonial citizens to settle in the mother country.

And sitting in the harbor in Jamaica is a troop ship called the HMT Empire Windrush.

Such a famous name now.

It really is.

We followed him to the Calypso tents of Port of Spain, where he subverted the rigid British colonial hierarchy by crowning himself Lord Kitchener.

We watched him build the infrastructure of the genre by mentoring rivals like Lord Melody.

We sailed with him across the Atlantic on the Empire Windrush in 1948, watching him step off the gangplank in a sharpsuit to sing London is the Place for Me.

We explored how he functioned as a journalist for the diaspora, writing one version of a song to placate the British public and another version to archive the painful reality of the color bar for his own people.