FEATURE WINDRUSH TALES
JAMAICAN IMMIGRANTS WELCOMED BY RAF OFFICIALS FROM THE COLONIAL OFFICE AFTER THE EX-TROOPSHIP HMT 'EMPIRE WINDRUSH' LANDED THEM AT TILBURY CREDIT: ALAMY
THE WORLD THE WINDRUSH FOUND
“The past is another country”, they say. A traveller from 2021 who stepped down the gangplank and found themselves in 1948 – the year Empire Windrush and its contingent of Caribbean passengers arrived - is unlikely to share calypsonian Lord Kitchener’s sentiment that “London is the place for me”.
T
WORDS | STEPHEN SPARK
he London experienced by Kitchener and his fellow travellers from the islands was a very different place from today’s city of steel and glass tower blocks, unaffordable ‘luxury’ flats, designer clothes stores, chic restaurants and boutique hotels. It was a city that had been merci-
lessly pummelled by German bombs and rockets and had the burnt-out ruins and bomb craters to prove it. Some of the scars were still to be seen 25 years later. Britain was all but bankrupt after the war, and everything was in short supply – food, clothes, money, heating, building materials, energy and style. SN JUN 2021 31
