Head Master's Assembly Monday, June 15 in 2018 the Windrush

Head Master’s Assembly Monday, June 15 In 2018 the Windrush Scandal rocked the UK Government when it emerged that many of those who travelled by sea to the UK from the West Indies on Her Majesty’s Transport (HMT) Empire Windrush at the invitation of the British government to help Britain rebuild after years of war were, in later years, and up until very recently, either wrongly deported, wrongly detained, denied re-entry, denied benefits or access to the NHS. Many lost their jobs and their homes because the permanent leave to remain in the country that was automatically granted to them as Commonwealth migrants when they arrived in Britain, was not, in subsequent years, recognised by the Home Office. This left many people, some of whom had been in the UK for decades, without formal paperwork to prove their legitimate entitlement to reside in the UK. The Scandal was investigated by several parliamentary committees, including the Human Rights Committee, and yet, in spite of measures such as redress and hardship schemes designed to assist those many whose lives were so badly affected by the injustice, the effects of the Government’s actions remain for many and provide an uncomfortable reminder of what the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales referred to in their statement on the killing of George Floyd as the ‘systemic racism embedded in our own society.’ *** Andrea Levy’s prize-winning 2004 novel, Small Island, (now both a play and a TV series) is in many ways the story of the Windrush experience. Levy, who died of breast cancer last year at the age of 62, spoke about her intentions for the novel in an interview with Caribbean Beat in 2004 When I started Small Island I didn’t intend to write about the war. I wanted to start in 1948 with two women, one white, one black, in a house in Earls Court, but when I asked myself, 'Who are these people and how did they get here?' I realised that 1948 was so very close to the war that nothing made sense without it. If every writer in Britain were to write about the war years there would still be stories to be told, and none of us would have come close to what really happened. It was such an amazing schism in the middle of a century. And Caribbean people got left out of the telling of that story, so I am attempting to put them back into it. But I am not telling it from only a Jamaican point of view. I want to tell stories from the black and white experience. It is a shared history. If you haven’t read Small Island, I recommend you do – it has lost none of its power in the sixteen years since it was published and raises many of the pressing questions that have dominated the post-colonial period and which have come into sharp focus in recent weeks. As it happens, the National Theatre is streaming the acclaimed theatre production of Small Island live for a week from this coming Thursday, June 18, at 7pm – you can join the audience by using this link . Many of you will have seen the video of protesters toppling the statue of Edward Colston, an eighteenth- century slave owner, in Bristol last weekend. There has been a lot of debate about this event, and now more generally about other statues in cities around the world. Colston’s statue has been a matter of controversy in Bristol for many years, and the Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, has been an important voice in the debate. Rees was elected Mayor in 2016 – the first directly elected black mayor in Europe. Asked by The Times for his thoughts about Colston’s statue being torn down he said: It is a piece of historical poetry. Torn down, dragged through the streets . When you think about some of the punishments that would have been meted out on his slaves, Africans . Thrown off the quayside where Colston’s ships would undoubtedly have docked, next to a bridge called Pero’s Bridge named after a Bristol slave. And you think about all the Africans that were thrown overboard and finished their lives underwater. I mean the historical poetry of that should not be lost on anyone. The controversy about statues in other parts of the UK has raged over the course of the last two weeks – opinion is starkly divided, and there have been clashes on the streets of London and other cities. The historian, Simon Schama, wrote a thought provoking article in this weekend’s Financial Times in which he says that we should: Let them disappear, then, but not into canals, ponds or rubbish dumps, since arbitrary acts of destruction shut down debate quite as much as uncritical reverence. Better, surely, to relocate them to museums where, properly curated, they can trigger genuine debate and historical education. One thing that the pandemic caesura has wrought is a confrontation with big historical matters: who are we as a nation, what we have been, and where we are going? If the Men in Stone (and they are overwhelmingly men) can deepen that understanding they will have served their purpose better than ever they did up on their pigeon-stained plinths. I find myself agreeing with the writer and journalist, Matthew Syed, who wrote in yesterday’s Sunday Times that: the crucial point is that we should resist the temptation for British history to be exploited by the political extremes, something that will exacerbate polarisation. When MPs wrote to the government last week arguing that we need more black history in our schools, I found myself nodding. All youngsters would benefit from learning about the achievements of ethnic minority Britons, along with the injustices they faced. Likewise, I think most reasonable people will empathise with those offended by statues that memorialise slavers, and that a debate on this topic was long overdue (albeit one that should be decided through democracy rather than vandalism). Although I didn’t shed any tears at the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue, change doesn’t always come from just tearing things down. Surely positive change must also be about putting new things up. *** At Worth over the last two years we have been conducting a review of our History and English curriculums in order that all Worth pupils will have the benefit of a broader and more inclusive curriculum as part of their formation for life in society beyond school. That review will continue with new purpose in the light of recent events, but there have been some significant changes over the last two years, including modules on slavery and civil rights, the British Empire and its role in slavery and independence in Colonial countries in Year 8; the origins of slavery in the USA, and the American Civil War and the causes and outcome in Year 12 and civil rights in the USA from 1865 – 1992 involving Native Americans, African Americans, Women and Workers in Year 13. There has been a similar shift of emphasis and focus in the English curriculum. There is more work for us to do here, and across other areas, but we have made a start. And for any who might say ‘about time Worth did this’, I am inclined to agree with you. If you have any specific suggestions we will be pleased to hear them. I think we can expect further change from examination boards, too, which will broaden the modules on offer, though of course we recognise that as an independent school we have a lot of scope outside exam curriculums to learn how to approach important questions of history responsibly and with intellectual sensitivity, rigour and balance. *** I was interested to read more about HMT Empire Windrush over the weekend. The ship was originally a German vessel, launched in 1930, which in the course of the Second World War became at various times a Nazi cruise ship, a troop carrier and transporter of Norwegian Jews from Norway to Denmark, many of whom then died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The MV Monte Rosa, as it was originally named, became a prize of war in 1945 and then entered service, now as HMT Empire Windrush, in the name of a new ‘Britishness’ that marked the early years after the war. Which brings me back to where I started: the great migration from the West Indies to Britain from 1948 to help rebuild Great Britain, and all the injustice and discrimination that went along with it. HMT Empire Windrush sank off Gibraltar in 1954 and now sits on the bottom of the Mediterranean, nearly three kilometres under the waves. For its 24 years as a working ship, and now its 66 years on the sea floor, Windrush has been something of a symbol of humanity’s capacity for cruelty, hatred and discrimination. For many of those caught up in what would become the Windrush Scandal it was a vessel of false hope. *** One of things I read over the weekend was about a mission led by two British men to recover the stern anchor from the wreck of the Windrush – here is a photo of it taken when the Windrush was still a working ship. One of the leaders of the expedition is Max Holloway, 62, a white Briton, who wanted to create a tribute to his late wife, Alice, whose parents arrived from the Caribbean in 1967. “I had seen the Windrush so many times but had not clocked that the anchor was there, and it occurred to me that anchors are a universal sign of hope,” he said.

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