“Remember the ship”: Narrating the Empire Windrush

Abstract

Despite the ubiquity of the SS Empire Windrush as a symbol of post-war Caribbean migration to Britain, there are few literary evocations of its journey and arrival, and, of those, the majority are literary commissions from 1998, the year in which the ship was to become legendary. The synthetic nature of the literary engagement with the ship confirms its own construction as an historical event made retrospectively famous. This article describes and interrogates the 1998 rise to prominence of the Windrush, before examining the relationship of the actual ship to literary/cultural criticism and literary works. It contends that the small body of poetic and fictional narratives about the Windrush both problematizes elements of a dominant Windrush narrative while simultaneously confirming the ship’s primacy.

Keywords:

• Windrush
• Caribbean migration
• James Berry
• Jackie Kay
• Benjamin Zephaniah
• John Agard

Notes

1. For example, The Windrush documentary focuses extensively on interracial relationships, a key source of racial anxiety in the years following the Windrush arrival. But these are framed in hindsight, with couples discussing the discrimination they faced “back then”, as evidence of their endurance and survival – in the words of Stuart Hall ([1984] 2000), speaking of post-war imagery, “black and white people together, making love, finding their sexuality with each other and having children as the living proof that, against God and Nature, It Worked” (89; original emphasis).

2. Although the dates of this period are undefined, I assume they encompass a period of time between 1947 (when the Ormonde and Almanzora arrived) to 1962 when the doors to Commonwealth immigration were brought to an end by the 1962 Immigration Act.

3. See also “the black ship of state” used by Stephens (2005) as a metaphor for the ways of 20th-century black Americans intellectuals attempted to imagine African Americans as part of a transnational political community.

4. The lack of reaction to the Almanzora’s arrival at Southampton was bemoaned retrospectively by one of its passengers, Alan Wilmot, who stated that his arrival “wasn’t like the Windrush: there was no publicity for us. It was a case of every man for himself” (Metro, July 24, 2008).

5. Some writers came earlier – such as C.L.R. James, who arrived in 1932.

6. Factual accounts include Francis (1998), Sewell (1998) and M. Phillips and T. Phillips (1998).

7. The welcoming tone was echoed by the Evening Standard’s “Welcome Home: Evening Standard’s Plane Greets the 400 Sons of Empire” (June 21, 1948) and the Daily Mail’s “Cheers For The Men From Jamaica” (June 22, 1948).

8. See Gilroy (2004, 95–132) for a fuller discussion of the contested histories and the policing of remembrance.

9. The first official effort to memorialize the Windrush was in 1988, when the pamphlet Forty Winters On was published by a combined initiative between Lambeth Council, The Voice newspaper and the South London Press.

10. Winder gives a version of this anecdote: “Out at sea, a couple of Jamaican wireless operators set up their game of dominoes right outside the radio shack, so they could monitor the news. They heard that the Windrush was being shadowed by a warship, HMS Sheffield, which was under instructions to turn them back if they made any trouble” (2004, 338).