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The Windrush Thinkers and Artists Professor Richard Drayton 26 The Windrush Thinkers and Artists Professor Richard Drayton 26 October 2020 One year ago, in my last Gresham Lecture I spoke of Slavery and the City of London across the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Tonight, I speak of scholars, thinkers, novelists, artists, sculptors and poets in the Twentieth century. These immigrants were descendants of enslaved Africans, and of indentured Indians who had laboured on Caribbean plantations. In coming to Britain, they sought to challenge a spiritual regime of unequal personhood produced by the colonial order. To begin where I began last year, the slaves were coming to break through that wall which separated those who enjoyed the freedom and wealth of the city from those who suffered its despotism and poverty. * * * 21 June 1948 was cold and wet. In the dark midsummer afternoon, the House of Lords met to debate the committee stage of the Nationality Bill, which proposed to create a common British citizenship across the empire.1 The question of race, and of the place of the colonies surfaced quickly. Viscount Elibank declared that he knew the colonies well. 'The natives' he said, were happy as subjects of the Crown. He told a joke about a friend in a New York hotel who went up to bed one evening, and the elevator man was coloured "as black as your hat." When my friend reached his floor he left the elevator and the man looked at him and said: "Sah, we two are the only, darned Britishers in this hotel." The point of his 'joke' was to illustrate the danger of a new doctrine of British citizen undermining the old order of British subject, in which each knew his place, on either side of the wall. Jowett, the Lord Chancellor, in his reply sought to put such anxieties to rest, declaring "Most of the Colonial people will not read this Bill, and I do not think they would understand much about it if they did". As he spoke, thirty miles down the Thames at Tilbury, the Empire Windrush docked. Many of its 1,000 passengers, who had bought their tickets after the Bill's first reading in the Commons, would have had something to say to Jowett. They were confined onboard until the next day, and there is no record of their debates. But we might guess their tenor from the immediate response of Lord Kitchener, the Trinidadian calypsonian, when pressed the next morning by a reporter for a song. He declared: 'London is the place for me/London, this lovely city'. What is often missed about this song is that it is not a celebration of arrival, but return: 'You can go to France or America/ India, Asia or Australia/ but you must come back to London city'. For many of the passengers it was a return. In First Class, in a cabin near Nancy Cunard's suite, there 1 BRITISH NATIONALITY BILL. [H.L.] HL Deb 21 June 1948 vol 156 cc 992-1083. was Ellis Clark, the 30-year-old barrister, an alumnus of UCL and Grey's Inn, who in 1976 would become the first President of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Five levels below there was a regiment of Jamaican ex-servicemen, who had already shed blood, sweat and tears in Europe. But for Kitchener and many fellow passengers, as for many other generations of West Indians, it was a more complex kind of return. They confronted the enigma of arrival home to a strange place, where they were branded on the skin as strangers. The coming of West Indians to Britain in the Twentieth Century, long before and after Windrush, is quite unique in all the thousands of years of immigration to the British Isles. Unlike the religious exiles like the Sephardic Jews or French Huguenots in the seventeenth century, or political exiles like royalists from France, Marx from Germany or Herzen from Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or East European Jews in the Twentieth century, whether tailors in Bethnal Green or scholars in Oxford, we understood ourselves as coming home. West Indians shared this sense of coming home with immigrants from Canada or Australia, but what distinguished their situation is they understood they were journeying against the current of an ancient relationship of power, and across a global colour line. Unlike migrants from South Asia and Africa, West Indians came from societies which had been constituted in modern history, over three centuries, side by side with modern Britain, in the most intimate entanglement, but on terms of categorical inequality. In 1950, the West Indies cricket team defeated England for the first time in a Test series in Britain. The victory at Lords was watched by Lord Kitchener and his fellow calypsonian Lord Beginner, who had also arrived on the Windrush. They led a crowd of revelers to Piccadilly singing a victory song which would become famous for its lyric 'Cricket Lovely Cricket/at Lords where I saw it', and its chorus praising the guile of the bowlers the Indo-Trinidadian Ramadin and Afro-Jamaican Valentine. In April of that same year, a very different pair of spinners arrived in Plymouth from Port of Spain, the Barbadian George Lamming and the Trinidadian Sam Selvon. They had shared a cabin and a typewriter on the crossing. Selvon on his immigration declaration claimed his former profession of journalist, Lamming, more boldly, given that he had not yet published more than few poems, described himself defiantly as 'Writer'. Lamming would write in London, and publish in 1953 the classic In the Castle of My Skin, a glance back to a colonial childhood in Barbados, following it in 1954 with The Emigrants. Selvon followed a similar pattern, publishing in 1952 A Brighter Sun, a unique portrait of Indo-Caribbean experience, and in 1956 the Lonely Londoners, perhaps the greatest novel exploring the Windrush migrant experience. Lamming reflected in the 1980s: Migration was not a word I would have used to describe what I was doing when I sailed with other West Indians to England in 1950. We simply thought we were going to an England which had been planted in our childhood consciousness as a heritage and a place of welcome. It is a measure of our innocence that neither the claim of heritage nor the expectation of welcome would have been seriously doubted. England was not for us a country with classes and conflicts of interest like the islands we had left. It was the name of a responsibility whose origin may have coincided with the beginning of time. This lecture is dedicated to George, now in his 94th year, whose influence on me is only exceeded by my parents, whose voice I will always carry in my own. But West Indians also packed in their grips memories of colonial terror. In that same Windrush month of June 1948, many in British Guiana would have puzzled at Lord Elibank's faith in their happiness as subjects of the Crown. A strike of sugar workers, on whom Bookers was trying to force a cut in wages, 2 had a tragic culmination. On June 16th 1948, the police opened fire at the rear of the factory of Enmore Plantation, killing five and maiming 12 others. It was not the first, or the worst example, of the British colonial state killing Guianese workers. At Rose Hall plantation in 1913, police troops equipped with a machine gun had killed thirteen people and wounded forty others; at Riumveldt in 1924, thirteen sugar workers died; in 1939 at Leonora, four were shot and killed. In 1948 news spread fast through the colony, and on June 17th, a vast march carried the bodies of the Enmore martyrs for burial in the city. In Georgetown, my father and his step father joined thousands of others on Vlissingen Road for the journey to Le Repentir cemetery, where political speeches continued for hours. This history, three hundred years of confrontations of workers against the combined force of the planters and the colonial state, during and after Slavery and Indenture, is also part of the Windrush story. But much as the Russian peasants of the nineteenth century are said to have blessed the Czar while cursing local landlords and magistrates, so many West Indians, even as they struggled with the local planter class and colonial officials, imagined England as a pristine theatre of liberties and justice. There were two Britains in West Indians' minds. One was the Britain which was the mistress of a violent system of colonial domination and inequality, the Britain which had betrayed Abyssinia in 1934-35. But the other Britain was an idea synonymous with high culture and democratic rights. That higher England gave a freedom of thought and action which the Sedition Laws passed in the colonies after the Russian Revolution denied, there their talents would find opportunities denied at home, battles might be won which were not winnable in their native islands, from which a new order of justice might reach the colonies. Britain was the sign under which they participated in the cosmopolitan. Their journey to the putative 'mother country' should be seen as an attempt to resolve that contradiction. Their quiet disappointment would be to find that the realities of Britain at home, on the other side of the wall, never quite matched that heroic colonial myth. Every Windrush migrant travelled to Britain with memories of the violent social struggles of the 1930s, and the wave of strikes and riots which spread from Belize in 1934, through to Barbados, British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica in 1937 and1938.
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