They paved the way, such that there is no longer surprise at seeing the offspring of immigrant families reach the peak of their profession
There is perhaps no word in common usage more likely to cause a collective eye-roll than diversity. But if you’ll indulge me for just a moment – as somebody who has skin in the game, so to speak – there is a salient point to be made.
For if we look beyond the current diversity arms race and its many foibles, there is a tale of extraordinary success and courage – and one that we as a nation should collectively be extremely proud of. Today marks the 75th Anniversary of the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush.
My own family didn’t arrive in the UK as one of the few hundred passengers, many of whom had served in the RAF during the war, to disembark in Tilbury, Essex on June 22 1948. My heritage is Ghanaian and my father came to the UK as a four-year-old a few years later in 1953, on the SS Apapa, but in many ways he, too, is a child of that pioneering generation. He endured many of the same challenges and, without the Windrush, he may never have come here at all.
The name Windrush is more than just the docking of that single ship, it is the lodestar for those in the vanguard of Britain’s shift toward a multiracial society. It wasn’t the first ship to arrive from the Caribbean – both the SS Ormonde and SS Almanzora docked in Liverpool and Southampton respectively in the year prior to its arrival – but it is the Windrush which captured the public’s imagination, for better or worse.
While the arrival of the ship was expected, hundreds of passengers with the status of citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies were not. The Labour government of the day had little appetite for its arrival, apparently prompting Arthur Creech Jones, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, to declare that the new arrivals would not last one winter in England anyway, so there was nothing to worry about. This is not an episode in Labour’s immediate post-war history that the Party is as keen to highlight as, say, the creation of the NHS.
Today, the name Windrush is almost synonymous with the Home Office scandal that also bears its name. The injustices suffered by those caught up in the dragnet of its byzantine bureaucracy are well-documented.
But we should not be tempted, as other media outlets have been, to use this as an excuse to dampen completely the celebrations this week – or to suggest that Windrush, as a project or pursuit, was a failure. This is a story of success and integration, not shame and indignation. Indeed, so much of that progress by the Windrush generation and their children has now been normalised to the point of being taken for granted.
My parents met in the late 1960s, shortly after Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech. As the product of that interracial relationship, and someone who is now in one myself, it is sobering to contemplate that my experience today once came so fraught with risk and prejudice. Such a relationship is now commonplace and, while not quite as ubiquitous as television advertising would have us believe, it no longer warrants the nudge and the whisper it did for my parents.
There is no longer surprise at seeing the offspring of immigrant families reach the peak of their profession. The Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary are merely the most prominent examples today. Before them there were other ministers in the great offices of state and on the front bench. The shadow front bench too, MPs on both sides of the House of Commons and numerous peers in the House of Lords all attest to a level of influence and success for non-white Britons that was unthinkable in their parents’ time.
Some of the most recognisable faces on British television over the past four decades can describe themselves as the children of Windrush. We can also see the successes in music, both performing and presenting, and on the silver screen as well (though James Bond would probably be a step too far). One of our greatest ever sportsmen is Sir Lewis Hamilton, the son of a Grenadian. And some of our greatest ever sporting moments have come from athletes whose parents chose to move here. Just watch the 2017 World Championships Men’s 4 x 100 metre Relay Final. If you’ve never seen it, it is well worth 37.47 seconds of your time.
This week we celebrate the arrival of the Empire Windrush, but more broadly we celebrate the lives and successes of all those that blazed the trail and worked so hard to create the platform and the confidence for the current generation of black and brown Britons to succeed.
We celebrate those that made being both British and black ordinary – and for me personally, ordinary is worth celebrating.
