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Writing the Empire Windrush (Critical Thesis) and Chan (Poetry Collection) Hannah Lowe

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Writing the Empire Windrush (Critical Thesis) and Chan (Poetry Collection) Hannah Lowe Writing the Empire Windrush (critical thesis) and Chan (poetry collection) Hannah Lowe Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of English Literature, Languages and Linguistics March 2016 i ii Abstract This doctorate is comprised of a critical thesis (30%) and a creative submission of poetry (70%). The critical thesis examines representations of the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury on 22 June 1948, interrogating how it became symbolic shorthand for the beginnings of the post-war Caribbean diaspora to Britain, with a central place in the national historical imagination. Critics argue that the representation of the Windrush has undergone a dramatic transformation in its 65- year history, from its deployment in media discourses highlighting the problems of immigration, to its reclamation as a positive symbol of Black Britain at the turn of the century. The 1998 commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary were instrumental in this re-appropriation. This thesis examines depictions of the Windrush from the moment of its arrival to the present day, to argue that the ongoing centrality of the Windrush in the story of the Caribbean–British diaspora has obscured a longer, richer history of black presence in Britain while overlooking the imperial history which prompted the diasporic movements of Caribbean people to the imperial centre. The critical work of Chapters One and Two provides the context for my poetry collection Chan, which is discussed in Chapter Three. The Ormonde sequence of Chan responds to my interrogation of the Windrush creatively, by reconstructing the 1947 voyage of its predecessor, the Ormonde. The remaining sections are thematically linked by their engagement with suppressed or unknown histories, writing from personal and public archives and their exploration of migration, diaspora and mixed-race identities. iii Dedication for Richard and Rory iv Acknowledgements My thanks to Bill Herbert and James Procter, my supervisors; Newcastle University; the University of the West Indies and the Chinese Benevolent Association, Jamaica v vi Table of Contents List of Illustrations Viii Introduction……………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter One The Empire Windrush………………………………… 7 1.1 Windrush arrival: a “watershed” moment?.......................................................... 7 1.2 “Welcome Home!”: first reports of the Windrush………………………... 12 1.3 “Their prospects are not good”: government reception to the Windrush…. 19 1.4 Have you heard about the Windrush? 1948–1998………………………… 21 1.5 A very British story: the Windrush in 1998……………………………….. 24 1.6 All in the same boat? Beyond 1998……………………………………… 27 1.7 The Windrush now……………………………………………………….. 29 Chapter Two The Windrush in Literature…………………………... 33 2.1 Windrush in literary criticism……………………………………………... 33 2.2 Windrush narratives……………………………………………………… 35 2.2.1 Jackie Kay………………………………………………………………... 36 2.2.2 John Agard……………………………………………………………….. 41 2.2.3 Benjamin Zephaniah……………………………………………………….. 43 2.2.4 Andrea Levy……………………………………………………………… 46 2.2.5 Lorna Goodison…………………………………………………………… 50 2.2.6 James Berry……………………………………………………………….. 51 2.2.7 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….... 62 Chapter Three A Critical Reflection on Chan………………………… 65 3.1 Ormonde……………………………………………………………….. 68 3.2 What I Play Is Out the Window…………………………………………. 76 3.3 Borderliner……………………………………………………………… 80 Chan (poetry collection) vii Bibliography List of Illustrations Figure 1: Empire Windrush arriving at Tilbury 1948 (Credit: Daily Herald) Figure 2: Caribbean immigrants arrive at Victoria Station, from Southampton Docks 1956 (Credit: Haywood Magee) Figure 3: Front page of the Evening Standard 21 June 1948 (Credit: Victor Drees) Figure 4: Men aboard the Empire Windrush (Credit: Douglas Miller) Figure 5: Olympic opening ceremony (Credit: Mike King) Figure 6: The SS Ormonde Figure 7: Extract from the Ormonde passenger list showing the entry for Master D.Vaz, aged 9, Schoolboy. Figure 8: Returned postcard sent to 27 Bitten Street Figure 9: My father’s notebook viii Introduction The critical component of this submission examines the representation of the 1948 voyage of Empire Windrush, which carried close to five hundred Caribbean migrants to Britain and is commonly considered to be the inaugural voyage of mass migration after the Second World War. My submission examines how the ship has featured in a range of discourses since its arrival, including its depiction in newspapers and government correspondence as well as its treatment in literary fiction and poetry. It concludes with a critical reflection on my own creative submission Chan, a collection of poetry which is thematically engaged with issues of migration, diasporic identities and mixed race, and which offers an alternative narrative of arrival. My interest in the Empire Windrush has its genesis in the fact that my father, Ralph Lowe, was a member of what is now commonly called the “Windrush Generation”, a term which denotes those who migrated to Britain from the Caribbean at this time. While the Windrush is commonly believed to be the first boat to have brought migrants to Britain, my father had in fact sailed on a ship called Ormonde over a year before, in March 1947. This voyage is detailed in a personal notebook he wrote about his early life. The disjunction between private knowledge and the public “fact” of the Windrush’s primacy stimulated my critical investigation into the broader ways in which the Windrush has been constructed on the British historical stage. This study contextualises my creative work, which seeks in part to disrupt the Windrush and other historical narratives and give voice to a variety of supressed histories. 1998 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Windrush’s arrival, and is crucial to this discussion because it marked the transformation of the Windrush into a “multimedia event” (Pirker 9) and the initiation of a public discussion about the ship’s significance on an unprecedented scale. Mike and Trevor Phillips’ Windrush documentary aired on BBC2 that year and made post-war Caribbean arrival household knowledge. This was reinforced at the time, and since, through the frequent retelling of the Windrush narrative on multiple platforms. It is not only the moment of the ship’s arrival that has become publicly historicised, but what happened to the migrants on board and those that were to follow in subsequent decades, now commonly known as the “Windrush Years”. Although the dates of this period remain undefined, we might assume they encompass a period of time between the arrival of the first ships and up until 1962 when the doors to Commonwealth immigration were firmly shut by the 1 1962 Immigration Act.1 Thus, in manifestations of Windrush history since 1998, there is a common intersection or transference from the very specific to the general – while the particular arrival of the Windrush has frequently been retold in fastidious detail, discussions of its legacy embrace the experiences of all those who made the journey in the period afterwards (or before), on hundreds of different ships, taking many different routes, which now all fall under the Windrush umbrella. In terms of Black British history, a relatively new field of critical investigation dating back to the 1980s, the history of post-war Caribbean migration is arguably one of the first histories to have achieved such widespread and mainstream recognition, and has influenced the growth in representation of black history across national institutions in the intervening years.2 To examine the ways in which the Windrush has been constructed is not to undermine its value to this developing field of enquiry, or its role as a shared point of historical identification for black communities, but to transparently interrogate how its symbolic status has developed and the political climate that has fostered it. The Windrush and post-war migration For many on the Windrush, Ormonde and numerous other ships, the voyage from the Caribbean to Britain would have been perceived as a homeward journey; a number of the Caribbean islands claimed membership of the British Empire and were familiar with life in the imperial centre through the colonial education system and social practices which encouraged a strong allegiance to Britain. The Nationality Act of 1948, which conferred the status of British citizen onto colonial subjects, was further encouragement to see Britain as the “mother country” of an inclusive Empire which would welcome them. Poverty and lack of employment in the Caribbean at that time were parallel factors in making people want to leave. As well as the loss of many servicemen who fought on the side of the 1 The Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 severely restricted the movement of Commonwealth peoples to Britain. Before the Act was passed, citizens of these countries had extensive rights to migrate to the UK. In response to a perceived heavy influx of immigrants, the Conservative government tightened the regulations, allowing only those with government-issued employment vouchers to come. The leader of the Labour Party at the time, Hugh Gaitskell, called the Act "cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation" (“Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962”). 2 Pirker has surveyed these recent institutional interests in Black British history which include the National Portrait Gallery enlarging its collection to display portraits of important black figures; the Imperial War Museum’s 2009 hosting of From War to Windrush which stressed the colonial contribution of African
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