Windrush

A Ship Through Time

Paul Arnott

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780750991209
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Marine Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Hamburg, 1930. German shipbuilders Blohm & Voss build a transatlantic ocean cruiser and christen her Monte Rosa.

Norway, 1940. The Monte Rosa is sent to assist the dreaded Tirpitz as she bombards British ships.

Auschwitz, 1942. Forty-six Jews wait at the gates, after the Monte Rosa had transported them from Oslo.

Kiel, 1945. The Monte Rosa is captured by the British and given a new name: Empire Windrush.

London, 1948. The Empire Windrush docks in England, carrying 600 migrants from the Caribbean.

In Windrush: A Ship Through Time, Paul Arnott explores the epic story of a vessel that played a part in some of the most momentous events of the twentieth century, and whose fateful 1948 voyage continues to have consequences – both personal and political – today.

1

AN EQUIVOCAL NAME

Thus, in 2018, the name ‘Windrush’ acquired a new and unwelcome meaning. How had everything soured so badly since 1998, just twenty years earlier, when Prince Charles joined celebrations to recognise the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival at Tilbury Docks on 22 June 1948 of 600 migrants from the Caribbean, paying tribute to all they had contributed to the life of the nation ever since? A superb book was written at the time to coincide with this celebration by Mike and Trevor Phillips,¹ and the former Brixton Oval open area near the Ritzy Cinema was renamed ‘Windrush Square’, adjacent to which now sits the Black Cultural Archives.

In the new millennium, what the Windrush now healthily symbolised was presented by a proud nation to the global television audience in director Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics. A Times editorial lavishly praised the event and said that ‘the depiction of immigrants from the Caribbean arriving off the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948 was affecting and profound’.² The Times also took a steady aim at the ‘foolish and inflammatory comment’ from ‘Adrian Burley, a Conservative MP, [who] coarsely derided its purposefully “leftie multicultural nature”’.

However, just six years after the wonderful Olympic summer – and, in reality, tardily following up on many years of neglected coverage already run in the UK’s black press – The Guardian newspaper picked up on rumbling concerns of what had been happening to the Windrush generation. It began to take up the stories of people like Vernon Vandiel.

Vernon Vandiel had come from Jamaica as a 5-year-old in 1962 and grown up to become a well-regarded welterweight boxer, once topping the bill at the Royal Albert Hall. He retired with a final victory in October 1982 witnessed by a ‘loyal army of fans’.³ It’s not as if nobody knew who he was: he had been feted in the press many times, a contemporary of well-known British boxers like Lloyd Honeyghan and Charlie Magri.

In 2005, Vernon travelled to see a son in Jamaica and out of the blue was told during his stay that he would only be permitted to return to the country which was his home on a temporary visa. When Harold Macmillan was still Prime Minister, Vernon had arrived on his mother’s passport with a brother and three sisters. Now he was another Briton of Caribbean origin rendered stateless.

Vernon eked out an existence in Jamaica until in 2018, thirteen years later, a guilty Home Office arranged for him to be flown home to Tottenham. ‘I love the United Kingdom, this is my country,’ Vernon said, ‘but I feel unwanted really, and uncared for, unloved …’⁴

It is still unclear how many others have been affected in this way. It is known to be at least hundreds, perhaps thousands, and that many of these British people died in exile.

Thus, the Windrush name, made in 1998 and 2012 into something of which the entire country could feel proud and positive – a beacon for the potential of a nation belatedly learning about its own conflicted history – became a by-word in 2018 for one of the greatest injustices enacted against its own people by any British government. Theresa May was not alone in culpability, of course, but she was consistently at the wheel throughout the worst of it all.

The legitimate question arises: how could a Windrush victim not now wonder if there was, after all, real racism in play? Because elsewhere in May’s in-tray, marked ‘Brexit’, was the more recent issue of how much a person whose origin was within the European Union would have to pay to establish their settled status in the United Kingdom after the UK’s departure. This amount was set at £65, with half that for a child. Faced with anger in the context of Parliamentary battles over ‘Brexit’, in 2019 May even cancelled that £65.

Yet British members of the Windrush generation, missing some paperwork through no fault of their own, were forced to apply for a biometric card costing £1,300, which many of them have found genuinely unaffordable. May had been Home Secretary and Prime Minister across all of this.

Leaving the injustice of it to one side, a person of black origin might be forgiven for wondering ‘would a white person be treated like this?’ This was no longer an academic question. No, they wouldn’t, and they weren’t.

One aim of this book is, by telling the story of the life and soul of a single ship, to equip the Windrush generation with some more ammunition for their cause. This may prove necessary. Unfortunately, as their own drama continues to play out and much-delayed compensation is awarded, it is inevitable that they will be ghettoised by certain sections of the press, made out to be whingers and depicted as an ungrateful few. It is just a matter of time before the victim-blaming begins in our often bigoted and intolerant public discourse.

In truth, other BAME people know how this script goes already. Stephen Lawrence’s mother, Lady Doreen, can tell the Windrush victims how the British government likes to work in such matters when it comes to victim-blaming. In June 2013 she had met Theresa May, then Home Secretary, to complain of a smear campaign against her and others that had come to light. It had allegedly been coordinated by undercover police officers who’d infiltrated the Lawrence campaign group over many years gathering details about both her and her ex-husband, Neville. Police resources, rather than trawling for evidence to convict Stephen’s alleged murderers, were allegedly spent instead on spying on his grieving family. In July 2015, after much soft soap, May announced an inquiry.

In February 2019, Lady Lawrence lamented to a Parliamentary committee both that this inquiry had neither reported yet and was still clearly years from doing so, and that it had not yet taken any evidence at all, either from the alleged police spies or their innocent targets. She delivered a stinging rebuke. The inquiry had cost £13 million so far, £8 million of it on staffing and legal fees. ‘For me 25 years, coming up to 26 years, and this to be still going on!’ she commented.

It may yet prove important, then, for those for whom the word ‘Windrush’ is part of their personal identity, that they may claim ownership of a much greater story than just those of 1948, 1998 and 2018. Certainly, without their involvement at all these times, the name Windrush would have no currency whatsoever. Instead it is now up there, with the Mayflower and the Titanic, as a name which stands for both a period of time and a social phenomenon.

So guilty was the British government when caught out in 2018 persecuting these people that it finally recognised this deep significance. On 22 June 2019, the nation first celebrated an officially endorsed annual Windrush Day. This is welcome, but, to tabloid columnists emboldened in the era of Trump, this annual celebration will also present an opportunity for reflex disdain. Now the Windrush is to be a ‘brand’ for the foreseeable future, and the price of maintaining its integrity will be eternal vigilance.

Perhaps, then, those whose lives and suffering have given one ship’s name its potency might feel further empowered by the potent undercurrents in the entire tale of the Windrush ship herself – something of an epic adventure from her creation as a German transatlantic liner in 1931 to her controversial explosion and sinking twenty-three years later off the coast of Algeria. In all of this story there is a great deal of related hard truth to be divined – almost none of it uttered by the powers that be.

This wider story shows that the 1948, 1998 and 2018 generations were not the first, or even the most unfortunate, to have cause to look back in anger at their relationship to the Windrush. In June 1948, a generation of migrants voluntarily arrived, but a mere four years earlier, stepping down the very same gangplanks at gunpoint on to the quayside at Hamburg, were hundreds of Norwegian Jews. They had been forcibly transported from Oslo.

These innocent Jewish people were then herded inhumanely on to a wagon train bound for Auschwitz, from which none of them returned. They were victim-blamed too, by the most evil regime ever to emerge in Europe, which, deploying the ‘Big Lie’ principle, blamed it on someone else.

In the words of Hitler, adapted by Joseph Goebbels: ‘The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.’⁵ The repellent Goebbels, who also had a personal connection to the Windrush, may or may not have been right in his analysis of history; he did believe, though, that he had learned the toxic lesson of the ‘Big Lie’ from the master practitioners.

The question arises of what to call the Windrush for the purposes of the voyage ahead, and in this context it is worth thinking of one of the many superstitions affecting seafaring people. Whistling on board, for example, brings bad luck. A dolphin swimming alongside is thought highly propitious. In days gone by, some crewmen were so persecuted when a ship was marooned in the doldrums that they were called albatrosses and forced overboard for the common good.

Another of these well-recorded superstitions is to do with a ship’s name, and it first appears in nautical literature when overheard by young Jim Hawkins hiding in an apple barrel on board the Hispaniola as it approached Treasure Island.⁶ Jim had jumped into the barrel to try to scrump one of the few remaining apples when Long John Silver himself hobbled over and, leaning his weight on the seasoned wood, began to talk conspiratorially about ‘gentlemen of fortune’ such as him. It did not take long for young Jim to realise that his erstwhile chum and protector was using the phrase to describe what the old fraud and half the crew truly were – pirates.

‘Now, what a ship is christened, so let her stay, I says,’ said Long John Silver, a few inches from the cowering Jim, before reeling off a list of ships that had changed their names only to come to sticky ends, mostly at the hands of his fellow pirates. He plainly had his own plans for the Hispaniola, but was too wise to the superstitions of the sea for anything as crass as a mere name change once it fell under his command.

So, it must be declared at this point that SS Empire Windrush was not born with that name at all, and was not even the first British ship to bear it. One of the least-known stories of the D-Day invasion in June 1944 concerns her predecessor, HMS Windrush, a troop carrier carrying hundreds of men towards the beaches of Normandy. Floating alongside her that day just off Omaha beach was the US troop carrier Thomas Jefferson, and in between the two much larger ships was a landing craft already filled with American troops waiting for the signal to proceed.

Getting ready for the off, this small command group boat for the 1st Battalion, 116th Regiment, became wedged beneath Windrush’s ‘head’ (toilet outlet), where it remained stuck for thirty minutes, unable to move forward or aft.

Executive Officer Major Thomas Dallas remembered:

During this half hour, the bowels of the Windrush’s company made the most of an opportunity which Englishmen had sought since 1776. Streams, colored everything from canary yellow to sienna brown and olive green continued to flush into the command group, decorating every man on the boat. We cursed, we cried and we laughed, but it kept coming. When we started for the shore, we were covered in shit.⁷

The decommissioning of this muck sprayer of a ship after the Second World War left the name available for the subject of this book. But even then she was not a new ship when she was given the name. When she became the Windrush in 1946, she was actually MV Monte Rosa – a German ship put to sea in Hamburg in 1931 and not then re-christened until a year after her capture by the British at Kiel as a war prize in 1945, when she became SS Empire Windrush.

To break her name into component parts, her SS prefix stood for ‘Single-screw Ship (or Steamship)’. The designation of Empire at the time was optimistic as the British Empire referred to was shrinking by the month. There was a scintilla of the British class system at work here too. To be designated HMS like her namesake she would have to have been part of the senior service, the Royal Navy. This Windrush was a mere merchant ship, but an important one. So, she had to settle for Empire.

Windrush itself is a 35-mile-long river that rises in the Cotswolds and jo...