Author: roots1937

Bill Hern writes: History is all around us and sometimes becomes apparent in the most unlikely of places and circumstances.

The Madeira Story Centre in Funchal tells the story of Madeira from its formation to the present day. It is an excellent museum and one I would recommend highly should you ever visit the island.

As you move between displays showing Madeira’s volcanic origins, its superb flora and fauna, sugar and rum production, explorers and warfare the last thing you expect to stumble across is a piece of iconic British Black History.

Madeira has long been a destination for those seeking a healthy and temperate climate. In the 19th century it was common for wealthy Britons suffering from health problems such as Tuberculosis to move to the island in order to recover. This was the case for Sarah Bonetta Forbes-Davies the African Princess who was ‘given’ to Queen Victoria who treated her like a goddaughter. Sadly the healthier climate didn’t help Sarah who died in 1880 and is buried in Funchal’s beautiful British Cemetery.

But Sarah is not represented in the museum. The unexpected piece of history is however, related to Madeira’s climate and attraction as a tourist resort.

Wrapped around a large pole in a dark corner of the museum is a poster from 1931 advertising cruises from Germany to many exotic places including Madeira. The cruise ships were called Monte Pascoal and Monte Rosa. Both had been launched the previous year and both would in years to come be captured by the British during World War 2. The Pascoal was loaded with chemical weapons and deliberately sunk off the coast of Scandinavia. The Monte Rosa however, survived the War although by 1945 she had been renamed the Empire Windrush.

The ship on the poster that had enticed wealthy Germans to spend their hard earned money on luxury cruises in the early 1930s had, less than twenty years later, become one of the most famous ships in history.

Surely no one in Britain can be unaware of the Windrush name whether it be the ship or the scandal. Many will know that the Windrush started life as a German cruise ship. Very few will know that a poster advertising cruises on the ship that would become the Empire Windrush is on display at a beautiful museum in Funchal, Madeira.

Keep your eyes open, history is everywhere and pops up in the most unexpected places!

We have long been fascinated, some might say obsessed, by the subject of the Windrush stowaways. The official passenger list shows there were 1027 passengers on board when the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury on 22nd June 1948. This is the view that would have greeted them:

The passenger list shows two ‘stowaways’ (passengers 1026 and 1027) whose names have been handwritten on the last page of the typed list. Passenger 1026 was Evelyn Wauchope who we have discussed elsewhere on this site; 1027 was Samuel Johnson, 30 years old, who boarded at Kingston, Jamaica, but gave his ‘last place of permanent residence’ as Trinidad.

The fact that Evelyn is listed as a stowaway is a little harsh as, although she did board the ship by nefarious means at Kingston, she had, thanks to the support and generosity of her fellow passengers, paid her £48 fare in full. Samuel was not so fortunate and he was duly arrested and charged with having stowed away. There were fourteen other stowaways who were not named on the passenger list but who nevertheless were found on board without a ticket and they too were charged.

We strongly suspect there were others who escaped detection. Aldwyn Roberts (the calypsonian, Lord Kitchener) told of people jumping overboard and swimming ashore:

‘And the boat reached Tilbury, the water was brown and red. Well it’s the time I really realised that people are really brave. All those stowaways jumped from the ship into the water and started swimming. And I was wondering if those fellas were not afraid of alligators, because that water it seemed to me must have some kind of reptile in it. Anyway they went ashore … About a week after, I went to a place called the Paramount, where they could dance, there was a lot of dancing there. To my surprise, many of the stowaways were in the Paramount jiving, dancing and what have you. I had to laugh, I couldn’t believe it. A man just stowaway and, after a couple of days, he was in a dance hall jiving and dancing around.’

Perhaps we should take this account with a pinch of salt, Roberts was, after all, a storyteller by profession. Would anyone really have tried to swim across the river to Gravesend in Kent, or even up or downstream on the Essex side of the river?

But there is other evidence, Alford Gardner has hinted at all sorts of subterfuge to enable passengers to travel without paying their fare, including in a television documentary when he commented about ‘four lads who wanted to come and didn’t have the money, so we arranged to get them on and we got them off.’ We are also aware of at least a dozen men who claim to have been on board but whose names are not on the passenger list.

So, in the unlikely event you are asked in a pub quiz ‘how many passengers were on the Empire Windrush?’ the only correct answer is ‘no one knows’!

Little research has been done on what happened to the fifteen known stowaways, indeed, until now, they have never been named. But thanks to original research by Bill Hern in the court archives, we are in a position to rectify this omission and, in a series of articles we will attempt to piece together their stories.

Before discussing individuals, we will start by summarising what happened to them in the hours and days following their arrest.

It is easy to imagine that the fifteen did what they could to avoid being caught. Perhaps they lacked the courage to jump overboard or maybe they simply couldn’t swim?!

A report in the London Evening Standard of 22nd June said that they were taken of the ship handcuffed in pairs: ‘Six were put into a police van and driven away and four were marched up the road.’ A Police Inspector explained that the handcuffs were only: ‘because of the difficulty of bringing them from the ship through more than 400 other coloured people.’ All the papers got the numbers wrong so the fact that the Standard reports ten is not too much of a surprise.

They were swiftly taken to the Court at Orsett in Tilbury where a special session was arranged from 5.30 to 6.30 pm on 22 June – the day of arrival!

All fifteen were charged with the same two offences. All that differed was the date on which they began their journey i.e. the date of offence and the place they started from.

First to appear was Ulite Chin, aged twenty four, who had boarded at Kingston, Jamaica. In Ulite’s case the charges were:

Offence 1 – On 27 May 1948 at Kingston, Jamaica did travel on the British Steamship “Empire Windrush” without first paying his fare and with intent to avoid payment thereof contrary to Section 287 Merchant Shipping Act 1894.

Offence 2 – On 27 May 1948 at Kingston, Jamaica did secrete himself on board the British Steamship “Empire Windrush” and proceed to sea without the consent of the owner, master, consignee or any other person entitled to give such consent. Section 237 Merchant Shipping Act 1894.

Ulite pleaded guilty to both offences. Indeed all fifteen did likewise. The penalties were identical with one exception, that of Ernest Arthur Rochester who had no identity papers so suffered a harsher sentence.

For the offence of non-payment, Ulite was given the choice of a £1 fine or 7 days in jail. Like most of his fellow travellers he opted to pay the fine.

Given that the cost of a ticket would have been £28 and 10 shillings some of the stowaways may have regarded a mere £1 fine as a good piece of business. The Court would seem to have regarded the offence as none too serious. To give an idea of similar sentences for other offences, on 25 June one Oliver Frederick Payton was fined £1 for driving a motor van on a footpath. On 2 July Harry Henry Mumford was also fined £1 for stealing tea towels to the value of 1 shilling and 8 pence (about 18 pence in decimal currency).

The offence of being at sea without consent resulted in Ulite being imprisoned for ten days. He also had to pay 4 shillings in penalties and costs.

The Court records show that the imposition of prison sentences for the types of offences usually heard in Orsett was rare, so clearly the Magistrate and the prosecuting officer, a Mr Spreckley, felt the second offence was by far the more serious.

The Court managed to rush through ten of the stowaways on 22 June before resuming at 10.15 the following morning. This time the prosecuting officer was Edward A Jackson. By 11.15am the final five offenders had been dealt with and all were either in, or on their way to, jail.

The ages of the offenders ranged from nineteen to thirty years old. Ten boarded the Windrush in Kingston, three in Trinidad and two in Bermuda.

The results of our research into what happened to each of the fifteen will be reported in future articles.

There is a fantastic exhibition on display at Leeds Central Library at the moment but do hurry if you want to see it as it is due to close on 8 September 2019.

Eulogy is based around the lives of 76 first generation Jamaicans who settled in Leeds between the 1940s and 1960s. These 76 pioneers spent a combined total of 3,469 years living in Leeds, contributing to the ongoing success of the city and paving the way for their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

There is an element of sadness that all 76 have passed away but the overriding feeling is one of inspiration and celebration for all that they achieved.

There are stories of nurses, transport workers, RAF personnel and increasing recognition in the local community. The exhibition is well constructed, spacious and welcoming. It  is based around funeral programmes, other keepsakes, photographs and short accompanying narratives.

The Jamaica Society Leeds is responsible for the exhibition and they have certainly done a great job.

A very professionally produced newspaper called Eulogy has been produced and can be collected at the exhibition. It provides an excellent souvenir of a truly inspiring event.

The exhibition is possibly best summed up by this entry taken from the newspaper:

“Eulogy goes beyond media narratives of the Windrush generation as victims. Trailblazing community stalwarts and RAF servicemen sit alongside stories of triumph and heartbreak, and imagery of young couples in love, families and people making a living. These are human stories that everyone can relate to.”

It would be nice to think Eulogy will be so successful that its run will be extended but don’t take that chance, do visit it at Leeds Central Library before it closes on 8 September. You will not regret it!

The original passenger list for the journey of the MV Empire Windrush from the Caribbean to Tilbury in May/June 1948 is held at the National Archives at Kew in south west London. You might think that would make it pretty easy to get the basic facts about who was on board right. Sadly, you would be wrong. Many untruths persist – at various times it has been said that the passengers were all male, all Jamaican and all black. None of these statements is correct but they still crop up regularly on the internet. Even the number of passengers has been widely misquoted – the number 492 is constantly repeated, even by reputable historians, even though the official list records the names of 1027.

One of the challenges we set ourselves in 2018 was to transcribe the list into a searchable database. This sounded like a relatively straightforward task, albeit a tedious one. However there were various problems. The original list is typed rather than handwritten as some were, so far so good, but unfortunately the entries are very unclear in places, so much so that some of the names are very difficult to decipher. On some pages the typist failed to put a new ribbon in their typewriter when it was clearly needed! Even after very careful scrutiny, some of the names can only be guessed at.

While doing our own transcription we identified another problem, anyone relying on the details transcribed from that list onto sites like Ancestry.co.uk may be disappointed as, in many cases, where a name was hard to read, whoever did the transcription work for Ancestry simply gave up and moved onto the next legible entry. This matters if someone is trying to trace the history of a particular individual, an ancestor may have been on the Windrush but the fact is not easily found because their record was one of those that was not transcribed.

As with any typed list there will be cases where the typist simply made a mistake. Mona Baptiste is number seven on the list and her entry is beautifully clear, clear enough to see that her name was typed up as ‘Baptisite’. That extra ‘i’ is enough to throw search engines looking for ‘Baptiste’ off the scent.  Our own transcription will inevitably contain typing errors no matter how careful we were.

The transcription work took us three months but we have been able to use the database to check ‘at the touch of a button’ whether someone was on board. Interestingly, we know of at least a dozen men who claim to have been on the voyage whose names do not appear on the passenger list.  Our view, one that for obvious reasons we cannot prove, is that these men were among the many stowaways known to have been on the ship.

It was always our intention to make the database available to anyone who wanted to use it but, recently, we discovered that we don’t need to. Unknown to us, at much the same time we were transcribing the list, Goldsmiths University in south London had set up a project to do exactly the same thing. They have made their work freely available and you can access it here: https://www.gold.ac.uk/windrush/passenger-list/. This is a brilliant resource for anyone with an interest in the Windrush, well done to Goldsmiths for making it available free of charge.

No excuse now for getting basic facts about the Windrush passengers wrong!

The university put on an exhibition about the project. We visited before it finished in February and it was an impressive display.

Entirely by chance we bumped into Margaret Collins the daughter of passenger number 589, Rudolph Collins, she was visiting at the same time as us. Margaret was thrilled when she found her father’s card.

She mentioned that she thought her uncle had also been on the Windrush and we used our own database to confirm that there were only two other men called Collins on the ship, passenger number 588, Claud, and 608, Melvin. Margaret was puzzled by this as she had never known her uncle by either of those names. But her father is sometimes referred to as ‘Nick’ and that was not a name he ever used to her knowledge so names can be a bit flexible! Neither Claud or Rudolph had an address to go to so they both spent their first nights in England at the Clapham South Deep Shelter. The fact that the two young men had consecutive numbers and both went to Clapham can’t be entirely accidental surely? However, the case for Claud and Rudolph being brothers is weakened somewhat when we discover that the younger of the two, Rudolph, who was seventeen according to the passenger list,  left the shelter after only a few days and moved to West London, leaving Claud, 23, behind. Surely if they were brothers they might have stuck together? For now, the jury is out.

If you think you may have had a relative on the Windrush, why not use the Goldsmiths’ database to check?

We have been promising ourselves a visit to Tilbury, where the Empire Windrush docked on 22nd June 1948, for at least three years. We finally made it on 20th July and are so glad we did.

It was the day of the Thurrock Carnival. Thurrock Council had secured a little over £20,000 from the fund the government established for Windrush celebrations this year. The money had been used to support a series of community events culminating in the carnival.

It was money well spent, there was a good turn out from the local community and there was a variety of Windrush themed displays for them to enjoy.

The view that greeted the new arrivals probably hasn’t changed much in the intervening 71 years:

The view across the river hasn’t changed much either. The unnamed passenger who, looking out across the water, was quoted as saying ‘if this is England, I like it’ perhaps had better eyesight than me!

To disembark they would have gone up a gangplank like the one pictured below and into the baggage hall. On the 22nd June 1948 the hall would have looked very different, in the words of our guide, it would have been ‘mayhem’ as people looked through the piles of luggage for their grip:

One of the displays featured what various people might have had in their grip. There was a display for Mona Baptiste which gave a few hints about the success she was to have as a recording artist but probably bore little resemblance to what she actually brought with her (nevertheless it was good to see that she featured):

There were a number of very informative displays about the Windrush and we were very pleased to meet Mike Oslter who, along with his team, had put the displays together. Mike was our informative guide, he was very much in demand and we were very grateful for the time he devoted to showing us round.

Another display had been produced by the Essex Cultural Diversity Project who actually interviewed Mrs Historycal Roots as part of their record of the event:

Mike told us that there were hopes the event would be an annual affair and, if it is repeated next year, we can thoroughly recommend a visit.

Finally, we know there is talk of raising the anchor of the Windrush from the seabed where she sank, what better place to display it than Tilbury?