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– WINDRUSH’S FORGOTTEN FORERUNNER – – NEXT GENERATION POET 2014 – L I M I T E D E D I T I O N S I G N E D COPY INTRODUCtion B Y M IK E P HILLipS Many people have heard of the Windrush, and many ORMONDE assume it was the first vessel to bring immigrants from Jamaica to the UK. Hannah Lowe’s Ormonde aims to address this error: by bringing together a cycle of poems and unique personal and historical BY HAnnAH LOWE documentary archives, Lowe tells the story of the 1947 journey of the Ormonde, which carried pioneering Jamaican immigrants over a year before the Windrush. On board was the author’s father, ready to start a new life in a new country. His daughter writes poignantly of his hopes and aspirations, of his fellow passengers, and the issues faced by immigrants arriving in Britain at the time. Lowe’s book reinstates this important and neglected chapter in our cultural memory. ................... This edition is limited to 300 signed & numbered copies, of which this is ................... No. of 300 ................... - 1 - – ContEntS – HAnnAH LoWE was born in Ilford, Essex, in 1976, to an English mother and a Chinese/Jamaican father. She has a BA in American Literature from the University of Sussex as well as a Masters degree in Refugee Studies, and is currently working towards a PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Her widely praised 5 ....................................... Introduction by Mike Phillips pamphlet The Hitcher was published by The Rialto in 2011. Chick, her first full collection, came out from Bloodaxe in 2013, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best 8 ............................ ‘The Other Ship’ by Hannah Lowe First Collection, the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and the Seamus Heaney Prize for First Collection. She has also published Rx (sine wave peak, 2013), a pamphlet of love poems. Her family memoir Long Time No See will be published by Periscope in Spring 2015. She is a teaching fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University. P O E M S DR MIKE PHILLipS, OBE, FRSL, FRSA, has worked as a journalist and broadcaster for 12 ..........................................................................Ormonde the BBC, as a lecturer in media studies at the University of Westminster, as Cross Cultural Curator at Tate Britain, and as Acting Director of Arts in Tilburg, Netherlands. He was 14 ...................................................................What I Know awarded the Arts Foundation Fellowship in 1996 for his crime fiction (featuring black journalist Sam Dean), and the OBE in 2007 for services to broadcasting. He is the co-author of Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1998), which accompanied a BBC 16 ..........................................................................Passieras television series, and the author of London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain (2001). 18 ......................................... Distressed British Seamen ‘What I know’ was originally published in the Morning Star, and ‘In’ in In magazine 20 ..................................................................................white THE AutHor And puBLISHERS WouLD LIKE to ACKnoWLEDGE: The National Archives, the British Newspaper Archive at the British Library, The Evening Standard, The Gleaner, and Crich Area Community News; Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: 24 .........................................................................Stowaway The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, HarperCollins, 1998; Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners, Little, Brown, 2004. We are grateful to Arts Council England for their support 26 THE AutHor WouLD LIKE to THANK: .........................................................................Schoolboy James Berry, Vici MacDonald, Mike Phillips, Richard Price, Tim Twist, Tamar Yoseloff 28 .....................................................................Dressmaker ImaGE CREDITS: p9, 27, 33: photos by Vici MacDonald p13: © The Gleaner Company Limited p11, 35: photos by and courtesy Tim Twist p17: The National Archives, ref. BT26/1223 p25: courtesy 29 .................................................................................Boxer The London Evening Standard p31: courtesy Hannah Lowe p33: The National Archives, ref. LAB 8/1499 QUOTE SOURCES (where not fully stated on the page): p14: ‘The Waking’, from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Anchor Books, 1975) p16: ‘Limbo’, from The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy by Edward 30 ........................................................................................ In Kamau Brathwaite (Oxford University Press, 1973) p19: The National Archives, ref. BT26/1223 p34: Stuart Hall, from ‘Reconstruction Work: Images of Postwar Black Settlement’ (1984), in Writing Black Britain 1948–1998, ed. James Proctor (Manchester University Press, 2000) p34 Crich Area Community News, www.cacn.org.uk 32 .................................................................................. Twist 34 ................................................................... Shipbreaking -2- -3- Introduction by M I K E P H I ll I P S This collection of poems about the Ormonde Hannah Lowe’s poems is prompted by Hannah Lowe’s memories of recover the individual her father, but equally, as you read them, this identity of the passengers act of remembering becomes something more who sailed on the Ormonde, than a memorial. Instead, the poems begin to but they do much more. thrust themselves into our understanding of our history, announcing and reconstructing since I was born, and who I would never the epic moments of our migration. see again, lining the narrow street of white Wind back the hours, the days and months, a year – marl and sea shells to wave me goodbye, and out of fog, Ormonde sails like a rumour, and I remember walking through the wharf, or a tale about how what’s too soon forgotten huge and gloomy, with the sickly perfume will rise again – light up, awaken engines, of sugar, so strong it almost choked me, swing her bow through half a century, and I remember the feel of the boat rocking, return a hundred drifters, lost-at-sea. prelude to sickness and oblivion. (from ‘Ormonde’) The process is one I also remember from Appropriately, these poems also bring back to the time when I began writing about the me many of the things I had forgotten about arrival of the Windrush over a year after that period. This was a time when everyone I the Ormonde. Individual reminiscences join knew from the Caribbean had come to England a multitude of others, and segue into the on one boat or the other – and I remember river of remembering from which history is a crowd of boys and girls, who I had known assembled. In some respects this is the point of the collection. It begins with a ‘rewind’ back to the Ormonde, and goes on to memorialise the individuals who sailed on her – seamen, Detail from a postcard of the Ormonde – known at various points in its history as stowaways, schoolboy, dressmaker, boxer – SS, RMS, HMS and HMT Ormonde. all of them rehearsing the byways that had - 5 - This is a journey which has become a symbol Postcard of the of Caribbean migration … the ‘Windrush Empire Windrush. generation’ is a reference to all those early pioneers who travelled by boat, before the sixties decade of big jets. brought them to this point. Later comes the departure, journey and arrival, the story has Ormonde, but they do much more. She’s not Your home, the ship you sailed, those miles of sea poem ‘In’, which describes the moments that taken on the quality of an epic myth, which bringing us memories, because the actual were locked inside. come after arrival: serves as a comprehensive account explaining memories, where they exist, are frozen in (from ‘Shipbreaking’) our origins, our presence, and the nature of time and subject to endless accretions, In the labour queue, ten men ahead the same as you This collection, however, reminds us that the our experience in Britain. additions, speculations, hints. As the poet – you’re in, you’re “old trunk” contains both a story of remarkable herself says: “All I can do is emphasise that in, no, no, some other fellow’s in, new worry rising Each generation of Caribbean writer has, potency, and a link to the experience and identity this is a work is work of fiction, with its like a wind therefore, been nourished and inspired by it, of migrants and movements in the present day: origins in fact.” In the glass, a thinner picture of your face building and rebuilding the story in line with and when, at last, the docks on England’s rim In your dreams, a yuka moth, a shell, the sea their own preoccupations and those of their Separated by almost seventy years from rose up, what choice had we but to jump and swim? contemporaries – George Lamming, Samuel the event, her task is less to do with This is soon followed by ‘Shipbreaking’ which (from ‘Stowaway’) Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey, Derek reconstructing memory, and more to do with centres on the breaking up of the Ormonde, Walcott, Louise Bennett, James Berry – the constructing a species of memorial. Compare History, as always, repeats itself. Migrants and the recovery of its memories: list could go on. In that sense, the ‘Windrush Lamming’s The Emigrants from 1954, a novel of today and tomorrow, from wherever … Now my mind replays generation’ is a reference to all those early which highlights language and customary they come, are currently going through an a fizzing cine-film: the young man on a gangway – pioneers who travelled by boat, before the behaviour in a kind of reportage about what experience very similar to that which Hannah his trilby tilted, pocket hankie, stride sixties decade of big jets. The story of the was going on around him. Unlike Lamming or Lowe’s dad understood to be inevitable. rehearsed – it says I’m here. Windrush ended and closed the circle, ended Salkey, Lowe writes from the other end of the They tore the Ormonde up in ’52 and closed the moment in which the boats experience they began to map. She knows the So far, so good. In the years since I began for scrap. I google what I can. If you sailed out of the mist and into the fog of future of her characters.