Over the years a lot of misconceptions have arisen concerning the journey of the Empire Windrush to England from the Caribbean in June 1948, I suppose you might call it ‘fake history’. How many passengers were on board, where were they from, who were they? You can find incorrect answers to all of these questions in books, magazine articles and on the pages of the internet.
One oft repeated ‘fact’ is that all the passengers were Jamaican. This was absolutely not the case and we will highlight here Mona Baptiste, just one example of a non-Jamaican passenger. Mona was born on 21st June 1926 on Trinidad.
It would be easy, but incorrect, to assume that the 493 passengers in ‘A’ Class were White and those (510 of them) in ‘C’ Class were Black, but Mona’s name can be found among the passengers who travelled in ‘A’ Class on the Windrush. So, as is evident from the photo above, there were Black passengers in ‘A’ Class too. Her fare would have been £48 (over £1500 today after allowing for inflation) and that money entitled her to the privilege of having a cabin, the passengers in ‘C’ Class had paid £28 10 shillings (even this was a lot of money in those days) for a much more communal experience on the old troop deck of the converted war time troopship. Mona’s father is described on her 1951 marriage certificate as an ‘accountant’ so he may well have been in a position to help with her fare to England.
Mona had already made something of a name for herself on Trinidad as a singer and no doubt she set off for England with high hopes of building a career, hopes that were to prove well founded. She set sail as a 21 year old and disembarked on 22nd June the day after her 22nd birthday (her age on the passenger list is given as 21). As far as we know she travelled alone, a brave thing for a young woman to have done but she probably knew some of the 194 passengers who boarded the ship in Trinidad, 74 of whom cited the island as their last place of permanent residence. Among the passengers on the trip to England there’s a fair chance she already knew Trinidadian calypsonians like Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts) and Lord Beginner (Egbert Moore) both of whom joined the ship at Kingston where they had been performing (both were natives of Trinidad but the passenger list gives ‘Jamaica’ as their ‘last place of permanent residence’, evidence of how unwise it is to take what the passenger list says too literally).
When she disembarked, she said she was going to an address in Lewisham but it seems most likely that she went to Penywern Road in Earls Court. She declared her occupation as ‘clerk’ but her musical ambitions were not very well concealed as a Daily Mirror article of 23rd June referred to her as a ‘singer and saxophonist’. There is a famous photo of her posing at Tilbury with a saxophone and a group of RAF servicemen, some have suggested that the instrument was merely a prop. The jury is out on whether she ever actually played the saxophone. Her son has told us that she did, her second husband has told us she had never played the instrument!
There is a story on the internet that she found work for a while as an assistant in a jewellery shop and it was in the shop that she caught the eye of the manager of a band. Perhaps that is true but there is evidence that she didn’t take very long at all to launch her musical career in England.
On 9th August, barely six weeks after disembarking at Tilbury, she and Lord Beginner appeared on the BBC’s Light Programme with Stanley Black and his Dance Orchestra. During March and April 1949 she was in Nottingham with Cab Kaye (‘the sepia angel of song’ – Nottingham Evening Post, 17th March 1949‘ or the ‘sensational coloured vocalist, Mona Baptiste’ – the same paper’s 25th March edition). The Leamington Spa Courier of 15th July 1949 reported: ‘making one of her rare appearances outside London is guest artiste Mona Baptiste, the coloured singing star from Trinidad, who is currently playing at the Saville Theatre and with Stephane Grappelli.’At the end of August she was at the Hasting Pier Theatre (‘the Trinidad singing star, Mona Baptiste’ – Hastings & St.Leonards Observer, 27th August 1949) while in September she performed in Yarmouth.
The Birmingham Daily Gazette of 16th March 1949 made a revealing mistake when it described Mona as a ‘lovely Jamaican’ vocalist. The Eastbourne Gazette of 5th October 1949 didn’t make the same mistake when it reported ‘strong support comes from the brilliant West Indian songstress. Mona Baptiste.’ We will conclude this round up with a comment in The Stage, 10th November 1949: ‘Vocal honours go chiefly to Mona Baptiste,’ for her ‘treatment of well-chosen songs, plus a pleasing stage presence.’
On 27th June 1951 the Daily Mirror found another way of describing her skin tone when it reported: ‘Mona Baptiste, coffee-hued song girl, secures her first acting role in the New Lindsey play Tiger Bay.‘
She was a regular on the radio as well and, as a busy year drew to a close and a new one opened, on 1st January 1950 she featured on the radio show ‘Variety Bandbox’. As its name suggests, this show featured a variety of acts and was where many aspiring performers cut their teeth, she appeared on the same bill as a young Tony Hancock. She was also on television appearing in ‘Coloured Follies’ and, over the coming years, she: sang with some of the best known bandleaders of the day (such as Ted Heath and Cab Kaye); appeared in top London clubs (Quaglino’s, founded in 1929 and still in business today); and toured extensively in Europe.
She sang on many records, singing in English, French, German and Spanish, she played the saxophone too and was to appear in films as well (the IMDb site credits her with appearances in a total of 15). IMDb also lists a whole string of appearances on TV – although ‘Coloured Follies’ isn’t mentioned, her TV appearances included: ‘Six Five Special’ (in 1958), ‘Oh Boy’ (1959) and even ‘The Ken Dodd Show’ (1961) – by now she was billed as ‘the international singing star who appears in the Ken Dodd Show at 7.15 on BBC.’
She was definitely a very talented woman!
Originally a Nat King Cole song, Mona recorded her version of ‘Calypso Blues’ in the 1950s, possibly 1957:
Although we aren’t certain which year ‘Calypso Blues’ was recorded, 1951 was certainly the year she married for the first time but, beyond that, there is a fair amount of ‘fake history’ on the internet about her private life. The man she married was called Michael Carle but original research by Bill Hern of Historycal Roots has identified Carle as what we might politely call a ‘man with a past’.
Mona’s marriage certificate shows that her husband had in fact changed his name by deed poll, previously he had been Robert Paul Harley. Harley had been one of four young playboys involved in a notorious and violent jewellery theft in London in 1937, a case that attracted massive media interest (it has been the subject of a book ‘Playboys and Mayfair Men’ by Angus McLaren), the more so when two of the men were sentenced to be lashed as well as to imprisonment. Official records show Harley as an inmate of Maidstone Prison in 1939 where he is described as an ex-soldier. Although we have traced no evidence that he ever served in the British Army it seems, citing McLaren’s book, that he had spent time in Canada and had served in the Canadian Army for three years from October 1929 with the intriguingly named Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry.
Harley returned to England in 1935 and he married Freda Margaret Whitewick in 1936 but they divorced, messily, after Freda discovered he had been having an affair. The fact that Harley (now Carle) is a divorcee is mentioned on his marriage certificate to Mona – the ceremony took place in Westminster, London, in March 1951. A witness at the wedding was Frank Weir, a bandleader who had been born in Liverpool in January 1911 (Weir would go on to have a big hit with ‘The Happy Wanderer’ in 1954) and who would have known Mona from the concert circuit.
How much Mona knew about her husband’s shady past we may never know.
Mona and her husband lived together in Germany for many years and had one son, Marcel. The move to Germany did nothing to hinder Mona’s career and she appeared in many films from 1953 (‘Spiel mit dem Gluck‘ [‘Play with Luck’]) through to 1981 (‘So shon wie heut, so muht es bleiben’ [‘As beautiful as it is today, it must stay that way’]). Her concert career continued unabated too, in December 1957 ‘The Stage’ reports an appearance at the Rheinhalle in Dusseldorf (among others, the Tiller Girls, a well known troupe of dancers at the time, were also on the bill).
Michael Carle died in a car accident (skidding on an icy road) in 1958 and Mona later re-married a Liam Morrison who was described in her obituary in The Stage as ‘Irish tourist chief’. Contrary to what you will find on the internet, she actually died in Dublin (not Germany) on 25th June 1993 (‘I was present during her performances until her death in 1993 in Dublin, Ireland’ -Marcel Baptiste). The place of death is confirmed as Dublin ‘where she had lived for a number of years’ according to the obituary in The Stage.
Her Wikipedia entry has now been corrected and, thanks to the efforts of Margaret Busby, we can confirm that Mona was buried in Deansgrange Cemetery, Dublin, under the name Mona Baptiste Morrison. She shares a grave with her in-laws, Thomas and Margaret Morrison. The inscription reads: ‘On whose sweet soul Jesus have mercy’.
We would hazard a guess that Mona was the only passenger on the Empire Windrush to have such a successful career in music, film and TV. Hers is a remarkable story.