The opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games, a vast, globally televised pageant that celebrated the British national story, and that revelled in the nation’s diversity, music and pop culture, included a mock-up, miniature Empire Windrush. This replica was made of a metal frame around which had been stretched fabric printed with the covers of hundreds of post-war British newspapers. She appeared in the Olympic stadium as one among a series of symbolic representations of the pivotal events in British history: the Industrial Revolution, the First World War, the campaigns of the Suffragettes, the Jarrow March of 1936 and the creation of the NHS in 1948 – the year the Windrush docked at Tilbury.
An average, unremarkable passenger ship, the Windrush had a short but remarkable life. She was built in 1930, in Hamburg, by the German firm Blohm & Voss. Her original name was the MV Monte Rosa. From 1933 until 1939 she carried working-class German families on cheap holiday cruises, arranged and subsidized by the Nazi Party’s Strength Through Joy organization.1 In 1939, the MV Monte Rosa went to war and was requisitioned as a troopship to carry German soldiers to battle in the invasion of Norway. Later, she transported Norwegian Jews from their homeland to Denmark. Most were later deported to Auschwitz, and there murdered. In 1944, the Monte Rosa was bombed by the RAF and had limpet mines attached to her hull by members of the Norwegian Resistance, but survived both attacks.2 She was captured by British forces in 1945, and seized as a prize of war.
In 1954, carrying the name we know her by today, the Windrush once again became a troopship. She was carrying British soldiers of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment home from action in the Korean War when an explosion in her engine room killed four of her crew and started a fire. All her passengers were saved but the Windrush sank and today lies under the waters of the Mediterranean. After so dramatic a life it is strange that what has made the Empire Windrush one of the icons of modern British history is a single, mundane Atlantic crossing she made during the summer of 1948.
The metal-framed, cloth-covered Windrush of the 2012 Olympics, replete with ersatz smoke billowing from her two funnels, was accompanied on her procession around the Olympic stadium by a group of twenty-first-century black Londoners. Dressed in baggy 1940s style suits and trilby hats, they carried leather suitcases of the sort their ancestors had arrived with sixty years earlier, and which can be seen stacked up on porter’s trolleys and on the platforms of English railway stations in many of the black-and-white photographs of the time.
The London of 1948, to which the Empire Windrush brought those early settlers, was busily preparing to host another Olympics. A month and a week after the Windrush docked at Tilbury, the 1948 games got under way in London’s old Wembley stadium, a relic of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition.3 The opening ceremony began with the traditional parade of the teams from each competing country. The athletes then were mainly male and the audience that cheered them on almost entirely white, as was case when Arthur Wint, the six-foot-four-inch black Jamaican sprinter, won the 400 metres. Wint took to the podium to receive Jamaica’s first ever Olympic gold medal to the strains of ‘God Save the King’, as Jamaica was then a British Crown Colony so had no anthem of her own. Like half of the men who arrived in London on the Empire Windrush, Arthur Wint had served in the Second World War. Having trained in Canada he became a Spitfire pilot for the RAF, rising to become Flight Lieutenant Wint. Fittingly, it was the band of the RAF that played the national anthem as the gold medal was hung around his neck.
Despite the military bands, the pageantry and the appearance of the royal family there are fleeting moments in the official colour film shot to record the 1948 Olympics that hint at the true state of post-war Britain. The Olympic marathon took the runners and the film cameras through a shattered, exhausted, bomb-ravaged London. The runners streaked past bombsites, long since colonized by weeds and saplings. These little background details reveal a country that had barely got back on its feet after the war; that was still counting the pennies and assessing the damage. The need to rebuild the nation and its industries was palpable, and lay behind the post-war labour crisis, which in turn had motivated the men on board Empire Windrush to embark upon their journey. Despite the bunting and the jubilant crowds it was clear that London in 1948 was a city in decline. By the 1980s she would have lost two million of her inhabitants. London did not return to her 1939 population peak of 8.6 million until the beginning of 2015, by which point 44 per cent of the Londoners would be officially classified as Black or Minority Ethnic, many of them immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. From among them came some of the dancers and musicians who performed in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. Many of them were grandchildren of the immigrants of the Windrush generation, others were the children of later immigrants from Africa and Asia.
Britain’s black population today stands at around 2 million, a little more than 3 per cent of the national total. Over a million black people had made their homes in London by the time of the 2012 Olympics. There had been, at most, a few thousand black Londoners in 1948. The history symbolized by the Empire Windrush has become a part of the British story, in a way that no one who attended the 1948 Olympic Games could have possibly imagined. The Empire Windrush herself has entered the folklore and vocabulary of the nation. There is a Windrush Square in Brixton, a heritage plaque in Tilbury marks the spot where the ship docked and the West Indian migrants came ashore, and a musical based on the lives and ambitions of the Windrush migrants enjoyed a successful run in London’s West End.
There is however a potential paradox in all this. The Windrush story has the capacity to obscure another deeper history. Those involved in black British history talk of the dangers of the ‘Windrush Myth’, the widespread misconception that black history began with the coming of that one ship. Yet this idea in turn perpetuates the notion that black British history is exclusively a history of black settlement in Britain, rather than a global story of Britain’s interaction with Africans on three continents. The ‘Windrush Myth’ raises the possibility that the story of post-war immigration might overshadow the black British history that the post-war migrants themselves were so eager to see exhumed and have celebrated.
As well as losing sight of the more distant past our focus on the post-war story has meant that, at times, we have been slow to recognize more recent changes. Since the start of the 1980s Britain has undergone a second great wave of black migration, one that has largely gone unnoticed. This new influx lacked a single iconic moment, comparable to the docking of the Windrush in 1948, and it took place in the far less romantic settings of Gatwick and Heathrow airports, but it was in those great hubs of modern air travel that thousands of Africans arrived – despite ever stricter immigration laws. At the turn of the century West Indians still made up the majority of the UK’s black population. But, as the 2011 census revealed, between 2001 and 2011 the British African population doubled, through both migration and natural increase. For the first time, probably, since the age of the Atlantic slave trade, the majority of black Britons or their parents have come to this country directly from Africa, rather than from somewhere in the Americas.
The migrants from West Africa were mostly Nigerians and Ghanaians, and tended to be a little wealthier than the West Indians who had come before them, but were certainly not wealthy by global standards. Some came initially to study but ended up staying. Others migrated to join family and set up home, or to take up employment in a Britain that was still hungry for skilled workers. Many of those who arrived from Somalia, Zimbabwe and Sudan came as refugees. The long queues at Britain’s airports of British Africans travelling to Accra, Freetown or Lagos, to attend family reunions, weddings or funerals, speak to the strengths of the new connections between Britain and Africa. The great post-war project to build an English-speaking multi-racial Commonwealth with London at its heart, a community of willing nations led by statesmen and businessmen, has, in a sense, been overtaken by globalization and unprecedented levels of world migration. In a form that the politicians of the 1940s did not envisage London remains at the centre of the former empire. The capital has become a node in a vast global network of family connections, remittances, investment and mobility. Despite the questionable attractions of nearer Dubai, millions of Africans still feel powerfully drawn to London.
While the British African population expands, the West Indian population – longer established and more fully integrated – has amalgamated and assimilated more successfully than perhaps any other immigrant group of modern times. The remarkable capacity of West Indian immigrant families to assimilate can be seen in the marriage statistics. Less than half of British West Indians have partners who are also West Indian. According to the Economist, ‘A child under ten who has a Caribbean parent is more than twice as likely as not to have a white parent.’4 While West Indians have drawn millions of white British people into their family networks, they and the African migrants have drawn the whole nation towards their cultures and music. Through sports, music, cinema, fashion and (only latterly) television, black Britons have become the standard-bearers of a new cultural and national identity, the globalized hybrid version of Britishness that was so successfully and confidently expressed in 2012. These successes and achievements have been remarkable and in many ways unexpected. The problem is that these good news stories can at times become window-dressing and inspire wishful thinking.
The reality is that disadvantages are still entrenched and discrimination remains rife. A report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission published in August 2016 showed that black graduates in Britain were paid an average 23.1 per cent less than similarly qualified white workers. It revealed that since 2010 there had been a 49 per cent increase in the number of ethnic-minority sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds who were long-term unemployed, while in the same period there had been a fall of 2 per cent in long-term unemployment among white people in the same age category. Black workers are also more than twice as likely to be in insecure forms of employment such as temporary contracts or working for an agency. Black people are far more often the victims of crime. ‘You are more than twice as likely to be murdered if you are Black in England and Wales’, said the report, starkly.5 When accused of crimes, black people are three times more likely to be prosecuted and sentenced than white people.
When, as a young man, I began to study history I came to see it as a way to understand the forces that had brought my parents together, shaping my own experiences. Like millions of others, I am a product of Britain’s long involvement with Africa: a history of slave-trading and colonization; but also of traders, missionaries and the Saro people who, having been liberated from slave ships, returned to Nigeria from Sierra Leone bringing to Lagos – the city of my birth – their Anglican faith and their hybrid Anglo-African identity. My parents were able to meet in the Britain of the 1960s due to links that had been established in the late nineteenth century between communities, schools and churches in Lagos, Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa and universities in the North of England. The racist attacks that, two decades later, led to me and my family being driven from our home by thugs inspired by the National Front were a feature of another inescapable aspect of that same history – the development and spread of British racism. The walls of disadvantage that today block the paths of young black Britons are a mutated product of the same racism. Knowing this history better, understanding the forces it has unleashed, and seeing oneself as part of a longer story, is one of the ways in which we can keep trying to move forward.