Empire Windrush: The cultural memory of an imaginary arrival

Abstract

The arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 is understood as metonymic of the post‐war boom in immigration into Britain. However, the cultural memory of this episode is unsettled by the documentary evidence of the historical record. Nevertheless, these discrepancies do not serve to reveal some truer version of the event but instead assert the potency of the Windrush as a culturally imagined moment of arrival.

Keywords:

• Empire Windrush
• cultural memory
• national narrative
• immigration

Notes

1. According to Fryer, “In October 1948 the Orbita brought 180 to Liverpool, and three months later 39 Jamaicans [ … ] arrived at Liverpool in the Reina del Pacifico”. Clearly, those vessels docking at Liverpool – or Southampton – would not have had a literal encounter with the white cliffs of Dover. The Georgic arrived in the summer of 1949, bringing “253 West Indians to Britain” (Staying Power 372).

2. For other, almost identical, versions of this statement, see Anwar (274), Donnell and Welsh (127) and Ball (4).

3. This is confirmed by the Ministry of Labour typescript “Disembarkation of Jamaicans from s. s. Windrush at Tilbury on 22nd June, 1948” (Ministry of Labour).

4. I am indebted to Mark Stein's Black British Literature for initially opening up some discrepancies between the received history of the Windrush and the details of the passenger log (202).

5. A bizarre joke of history, according to an earlier passenger log, when the Windrush docked at Tilbury on 8 April 1948 – before its Caribbean voyage – it was carrying 492 migrants. Most of the passengers were British subjects “returning” from Bombay, the year after India had regained its independence (Board of Trade 26 1236 207).