More passengers than the Windrush – The Story of the SS Jamaica Producer

By David Gleave

Introduction

When the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury on 21^st June 1948 a small piece of British post-War history was made. The following day, the 1,027 men women and children named on the passenger list disembarked (as did an unknowable number of stowaways). Among them were people who would help to transform Britain in the decades to come.  The Empire Windrush has become an icon, emblematic of a whole generation, and has assumed almost mythic proportions.

Certainly this was the first time migrants from the Caribbean had arrived in such large numbers on a single day, but perhaps, by focusing so much attention on the Windrush, we overlook the contribution of other ships? The Windrush was, after all, just one ship, a ship that made just one voyage from the Caribbean.

There were others, many others, indeed ships have crossed the Atlantic for centuries and have brought with them many people, those who travelled willingly and those who had less say in the matter. The ships brought people who worked and, in some cases, settled, married and raised families in Britain long before 1948. You can read some of their stories on the pages of this site.

The Jamaica Producer

In this article we want to consider another, hitherto largely overlooked, ship.

The Jamaica Producer^[1]This article focuses on the years 1934 to 1960. There were ships of the same name before and after those years but they were different ships. was what is colloquially and somewhat disparagingly known as ‘a banana boat’ but, over the course of her long service she brought more passengers to these shores than the Windrush.

The Jamaica Producer was built in 1934 by Lithgows Ltd, at Port Glasgow. Founded in 1874, Lithgows was one of the major shipyards on the River Clyde during the 1930s. When the keel was laid down she was given the name Jamaica Perseverance, but the name had been changed by the time of her launch in June of that year.

Pre-War crossings

Trans-Atlantic crossings from the Caribbean appear to have started almost immediately, the earliest we have identified dates from July 1934. The ship was owned by the Jamaica Banana Producers Steamship Company Ltd, but evidently she brought more than bananas, as an examination of passenger lists held by the National Archives shows.

To begin with only a few passengers were carried. Naturally their ethnicity was never recorded and so it is impossible to comment on this with any certainty. Judgements made on the basis of occupation, for instance, are inevitably subjective but the evidence suggests that the majority of passengers in the pre-War years were likely to have been White, the balance subsequently appears to have shifted.

The first arrival in England (London) was on 17^th July 1934 (given that she was launched in June of that year there are unlikely to have been any earlier voyages). The Jamaica Producer made at least five crossings in 1934 and carried a total of 51 passengers. In the following year there were at least 10 crossings and a total of 87 passengers were named on the lists. She docked in London most months in that year (with only February and August missing from the lists). Essentially she shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic, making the round trip in about five weeks.

Among the early passengers was Sir Robert Lyall Grant, on board with his wife when the ship arrived on 15^th May 1936, Sir Robert had been the Chief Justice of Jamaica since 1932 but he retired in 1936 and was returning home. Sixty one year old Audrey Stevens must have had a lonely voyage as she was the only passenger on board the ship when it reached London on 27^th October 1936. On other pre-War lists, in addition to Sir Robert Lyall Grant, we find another Chief Justice, a Jamaica Supreme Court Judge, a Rear Admiral and several ‘planters’, bankers and civil servants. Scattered amongst them were three nurses.

Sometimes the passengers (almost all travelled in designated 1^st class), shared the voyage with stowaways, some of whom are named on the passenger lists. There were eight named stowaways (seven if you allow for the fact that George Francis stowed away twice). You have to admire George’s persistence as he is named as a stowaway on lists dated 13^th April and 16^th May 1937.

No single passenger list is necessarily ‘typical’, but the list of passengers who disembarked on 22^nd March 1938 is by no means unrepresentative:  Lord and Lady Abinger were heading home to their castle at Inverlocky, Fort William, his Lordship’s occupation is listed as ‘Peer of the Realm’. Eight of their fellow passengers had ‘none’ in the ‘occupation’ column (although, to be fair, two were a child of three and the child’s mother). Of the other two, one was a Captain in the 10^th Hussars and the other, aged 32, simply described himself as a ‘traveller’. Not much sign of any ‘horny-handed sons of the soil’ there!

In the period July 1934 to August 1939 the Jamaica Producer brought, we believe, 503 passengers to England from Jamaica. As we said earlier, the vast majority of these would have been White.

World War Two

In September 1939 World War Two started and the Jamaica Producer and ships like her were pressed into service to support the war effort. German U-Boat activity took a heavy toll of the merchant ships that offered Britain a vital lifeline during the War and the Jamaica Producer’s  sister ship, the Jamaica Pioneer, was lost at sea as a result of enemy action on 25^th August 1940. The two seamen who lost their lives are commemorated on the memorial at Tower Hill, London. Over the course of the War about 4,700 British-flagged ships were sunk and more than 29,000 merchant seamen lost their lives.^[2]https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/a-short-history-of-the-merchant-navy#:~:text=By%20the%20end%20of%20the,than%2029%2C000%20merchant%20seamen%20died.

During the War news was embargoed, but a glowing account of her service appeared in the Daily Gleaner on 22^nd December 1945 when she was described as ‘the last of her line, the only survivor among five sister ships from the cataclysm of war.’ Until 1941 she had continued to transport bananas and other perishables between Jamaica and the UK. She made the last such voyage in June 1941 when she also had a contingent of munitions workers on board. After that she was on full war service plying the hazardous route between Halifax, Canada and various British ports. The report states that, in total, she transported 143,297 tons of general cargo, 12,000 tons of mail, 3,105 priority passengers, 22 invasion barges and 55 Hurricane planes. In January 1943 she transported 20 million dollars worth of gold bullion from New York to Cardiff.

The report continues that she was attacked five times by U-Boats but never hit. This is at odds with another report of U-Boat activity which states that on 11^th March 1943 she was part of convoy HX-228 from Halifax, Nova Scotia bound for Belfast and Cardiff. She had reached a position of 51^o 14 North  and 29^o 18 West (for the uninitiated that meant she was almost exactly mid-Atlantic) when, at 02.15, she was struck by two torpedoes fired by U-590. The U-Boat Commander, Heinrich Muller-Edzards, was on his fourth mission of the war and this was the first ship he had hit. He reported that the ship he hit sank within one minute. He was mistaken. The Jamaica Producer was damaged but was able to continue her voyage. She was repaired and back in service by May.^[3]https://uboat.net/allies/merchants/ship/2767.html

Another incident in the Gleaner‘s account which does appear elsewhere is that on 11^th March 1941 she was attacked by German aircraft. The Gleaner tells us that ‘Gun crews on deck put up a sturdy defensive fire  while the bomber raked the ship with armour piercing machine gun bullets. An accurately released bomb screamed down towards the ship, passed through the funnel, passed low over the bridge to fall into the sea and exploded. The Heinkel, which had come down low to machine gun the decks fouled its tail on the kite of the fore top-mast and left it behind on the mast, to plunge to its death in the sea. Another Heinkel came in to the attack, but faced by concentrated fire from the Producer and other ships in the convoy, made one run and veered off.’ Apart from a hole in its funnel and a peppering of bullet holes the Producer was unscathed and there were no casualties.

The Producer was also directly responsible for various rescues, most notably on 10^th August 1945 when she rescued the entire crew of seven of a stricken Catalina Flying boat in thick fog in the north Atlantic.

On top of all this the Gleaner adds that ‘it may well be that the contribution of this vessel and her sister ship in helping to feed beleaguered Britain tipped the balance between starvation and survival in England.’

The Captain, P D Allen, was awarded the MBE in 1944 ‘for successful action against enemy air attacks and for meritorious services in the North Atlantic.’

A humble ‘banana boat’? We don’t think so!

The Post-War Years

After the War the Jamaica Producer resumed her service as a merchant ship bringing merchandise (and passengers) to England. The number of passengers increased sharply, pre-War there were rarely more than a dozen of them on any single crossing, after the War four times that number became the norm. With increased numbers came increased diversity, certainly in terms of the occupations listed and, we can be reasonably sure, in terms of ethnicity. The number of stowaways increased too. One was Horace Halliburton, he was on board when the ship docked on 9^th April 1948 and you can read about him on the Historycal Roots website.^[4]https://www.historycalroots.com/?s=halliburton

The list for 26^th December 1950 is reasonably representative of the post-War years. The 48 passengers who had spent Christmas day at sea included: 11 carpenters, 7 dressmakers, 4 tailors, 4 mechanics, 3 shoemakers, 2 each of cabinet makers, teachers and nurses.

We hear a lot about the contribution of nurses from the Caribbean to the NHS (rightly so) and we can find a regular smattering of them among the passengers of the Jamaica Producer. We hear less about dressmakers, but, goodness, a lot of passengers gave that as their occupation! On 18^th March 1953 alone, no fewer than thirteen dressmakers disembarked.

This voyage also brought West Indian test cricketer Richard Livingston Fuller back to England, his third appearance in these passenger lists, this time heading for Seaham. On this voyage he was joined by another West Indian test cricketer, Ken Rickards, heading for Darwen in Lancashire. Ken made a huge impression playing for Darwen and then Farnsworth in the Bolton League.^[6]https://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/news/6203467.calypso-king-set-league-alight/  retrieved 2^nd January 2024

The number of paying passengers dropped sharply in 1954, although the number of stowaways increased. On 18^th August 1954, 15 stowaways accounted for over 50% of those who disembarked. Passenger numbers remained low for the remainder of her service. We don’t know the reason for this fall in numbers but it seems reasonable to assume that the ship’s accommodation was reconfigured to its pre-War design, maybe cargo was more profitable than carrying passengers?

The Jamaica Producer made her final journey in November 1960 and was broken up for scrap at Barrow-in-Furness in May 1962. Fittingly, two of the five passengers on that final voyage were 40 year-old Muriel  E Hylton and Herma Hopolyn Lowe, both dressmakers. They shared the voyage with Mary Isabelle Antoye, a nurse.

In the post-War years 3,483 passengers are named on extant passenger lists for the Jamaica Producer. Adding the 503 pre-War passengers gives a total of 3,986, almost four times as many as the Empire Windrush.

Of course, flying would soon become an increasingly popular option.  Charles Lindburgh had completed the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic on 21^st May 1927 after a flight of 33 ¹/₂ hours, but it was three decades before the possibility of flying direct to London from the Caribbean became a viable option for a significant number of people. In 1958 BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) brought the Comet 4 aircraft into service. This signalled a huge change but, effectively, for all but a tiny minority, affordable flights still lay in the future by the time the Jamaica Producer was sent to the scrapyard. Flying became more feasible when, according to an advert in the Gleaner on 15^th August 1960, BOAC ‘slashed’ its fares, with a ‘sky coach return’ ticket  available for £176 8s (£117 18s for students aged 12 to 26), you could pay by instalments spread over 24 months too. On the same page, another advert was for ‘special flights to England, only £85’ (about £1,600 in today’s prices).  In her final year the fare on the Producer was £92^[7]Kingston Gleaner, 30^th January 1960.

This fresh wave of airborne arrivals is harder to document at an individual level as it has been rendered invisible by the Home Office’s decision, in an act of wanton vandalism, to destroy BOAC landing cards.  My wife’s arrival is among those lost, she was a relatively early pioneer of the airborne option offered by commercial flights.

Jamaica Producer in the news

The Empire Windrush will for ever be associated with Lord Kitchener and his calypso,  ‘London is the Place for Me’, maybe the Jamaica Producer should lay claim to ‘The Banana Boat Song’ by Harry Belafonte (it was also recorded by many others but Belafonte’s version is the one we particularly recall)?

Unlike the Windrush, the Jamaica Producer was never headline news but the presence of stowaways occasionally made it into the local press in east London. The 5^th May 1950 edition of the East End News and Shipping Chronicle reported the court appearance of two of them. It was described as a ‘bad case’. The men were sentenced to three weeks in prison.

In February of that year an officer of the ship had found himself in court charged with ‘receiving five bottles of rum, value £8 19s, knowing them to have been stolen.’ Two other men appeared alongside him. All three pleaded guilty and were each fined £10.

Of course, as any sailor will know, the weather is capable of disrupting any voyage in unexpected ways. Sailing through the hurricane season could be especially hazardous. On 22^nd August 1951 the Paisley Daily Express reported that the Jamaica Producer was one of five ships driven aground by a hurricane (this was hurricane ‘Charlie’, one of eight recorded that year). ‘Charlie’ caused the worst hurricane disaster of the century on Jamaica. Property and crop damage was estimated at $50 million, 152 died on the island and 2,000 others injured.^[8]https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/mwreview/1951.pdf On board the Producer the ‘skipper and crew … made a great fight for it and saved their ship. They clung to the decks in the height of the storm, handled the ship past obstructions in the harbour and, narrowly missing a stone wharf, beached her safely.’^[9]Belfast Newsletter 20^th August 1951  The report in the Paisley Daily Express ended with the news that ‘The Jamaica Producer was later re-floated.’

On 29^th August 1952 the Belfast Newsletter carried a brief item from the news agency, Reuters, reporting that ‘the banana ship, Jamaica Producer is on its way to England from Jamaica with 130,000 stems on board.’ It isn’t clear why this was considered particularly newsworthy but it does give an insight into the scale of the banana trade. We get another insight in July 1957 when strike action delayed the transit of ‘100,000 stems of bananas, and 11,000 cases of pineapples and lemons.’^[10]Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 29^th July 1957

The routine of a voyage in May 1956 was disturbed when the crew spotted a German sailor floating in a life jacket off Beachy Head. He was rescued but spoke no English and was unable to explain how he came to be in the water. A boat came out from Newhaven to take him ashore. He survived the ordeal. Several newspapers reported the story.

1956 was obviously an unusually eventful year because on 11^th September 1956 the Edinburgh Evening News reported that twelve London dockers stopped work for three hours when three stowaways were discovered in the hold (they are named on the passenger list of 10^th September). ‘Three coloured West Indians had hidden away for 36 hours in a hold of the British banana boat Jamaica Producer which arrived yesterday.’ The dockers stopped work ‘when they saw the condition of the hold’ and refused to resume work, demanding to be paid for the time lost during the stoppage. ‘The stowaways were in jail after a magistrate ordered them to be sent back to Jamaica on the same boat.’ There is no sign of them in outbound passenger lists so the magistrate may not have got his wish.

People moving out, people moving in

It is often forgotten that migration is not a one sided coin, a ‘heads’ with no ‘tails’. In fact, of course, as ships brought people to Britain other ships, often the same ships, took people in the opposite direction. Before the Windrush disembarked 1,027 passengers at Tilbury, she had taken 68 named passengers when she left Southampton on 7^th May bound for Trinidad, Jamaica and Bermuda. Similarly, the Jamaica Producer did not make the return journey to the Caribbean empty.

On 1^st January 1959 the Harrow Observer reported that on 28^th January the local Vicar would be travelling to Jamaica on the Producer to visit his brother. This was going to be his first visit and he would be away for three months. He and his wife were among the 12 passengers on board when the Producer left on 28^th January. His brother was Sir Kenneth Blackburne, Governor of Jamaica. This was one of ten return trips the ship made that year.

1953 was the peak year for incoming passengers, there were 444 of them. A lower number, 257, made the journey in the opposite direction. One of those who did was the cricketer Richard Livingston Fuller, returning home at the end of the season. The table below gives an idea of the Producer‘s itinerary that year:

Date 0f arrival	Passengers	Date of departure	Passengers
2nd February 1953	42	11th February 1953	39
18th March 1953	50	23rd March 1953	20
21st April 1953	48	1st May 1953	18
3rd June 1953	53	8th June 1953	22
8th July 1953	49	18th July 1953	29
18th August 1953	53	28th August 1953	45
28th September 1953	52	9th October 1953	43
9th November 1953	50	19th November 1953	41
21st December 1953	47
Total arrivals	444	Total departures	257

The Jamaican perspective

We have already seen what the Gleaner had to say about the Producer‘s part in the Second World War, but it should come as no surprise that the Jamaica Producer featured frequently in the pages of the newspaper throughout its long service.  The Gleaner made a point of recording the arrival and departure of ships from the island, the Producer was no exception and so there are many references, but most are of limited interest. There are a some exceptions.

Initially the Producer sailed out of Kingston but in 1937 Port Antonio became its base.

This prompted a big spread in the Daily Gleaner on the 22^nd September. The report welcomed the arrival of the Jamaica Producer to Port Antonio in fulsome terms, it had given the place ‘a new lease of life,’ as ‘after an absence of some years a steamer of the Jamaica Banana Producers Association Ltd steamed into the port and took bananas. It was an occasion for rejoicing, not only for the stevedores and other banana loading gangs, but also for the residents and traders of the town,’ – 115 stevedores and around 400 labourers had been employed to load 22,721 stems of bananas onto the ship. A new hotel was being built in anticipation of increased tourist business so the Jamaica Producer‘s significance is not limited to the UK.

Thanks to The Gleaner we have  a detailed description of the passenger accommodation on board for those pre-War crossings, it ‘is modern in every respect and provides comfort of every description that the travelling public within reason could wish for. There are 6 double rooms on the promenade deck forward and 4 single rooms on the deck below. All rooms are fitted with baths, hot and cold water, electric fans and fresh and hot air circulation as required. Spacious accommodation is provided in a large lounge forward on the promenade and in a large smoking room.'^[11]Daily Gleaner, 26^th June 1934 A ‘banana boat’ perhaps, but hardly slumming it!

The bigger picture

The Jamaica Producer played a significant part in the story of post-War migration from the Caribbean to Britain but there were literally dozens of ships bringing passengers to all the major British ports. Passenger lists can be found for ships arriving at London, Liverpool, Southampton, Plymouth, Glasgow and others.

My own father-in-law was one of 39 passengers who disembarked from the SS Cottica in 1952 at Plymouth, just one of several trips the Cottica made to England. In September 1951 the same ship had brought his cousin, Carmen Steele (now known as Carmen Munroe, the actress) from Georgetown, Guyana to England, along with 23 other passengers. Both of them had been preceded by Carmen’s sister, Daphne, who would become the first Black matron in the NHS in 1964. Just one family that contributed so much.

Looking specifically at 1947 we see that in February the SS Carthage brought 138 passengers to Southampton from Trinidad, Jamaica, Belize and Bermuda; while in March the Ormonde brought 241 to Liverpool from Trinidad, Jamaica and Bermuda; in the same month the Strategist brought 56 from Demerara to London. In September the Ariguani brought 131 to Bristol from Trinidad, and in the same month the Johann de Witt delivered 171 passengers to Plymouth  (many were returning soldiers). The Ariguani was an Elders and Fyffes ship and various ships of that line brought a further 130 to Liverpool and Bristol over the course of 1947. In December Allan Wilmot was one of 282 passengers brought to Southampton by the Almanzorah (he would go on to be a founding member of the Southlanders group). In total at least 1,528 passengers are named on passenger lists for ships arriving in England from the Caribbean in 1947 alone, very nearly 50 per cent more than would arrive on the Windrush in the following June.

Conclusion

What all this demonstrates is that the story of migration to the UK from the Caribbean is a long and complex one. In addition to giving the Jamaica Producer some long overdue recognition, this article represents a very partial and incomplete start on telling the full story, partial, but enough to demonstrate that the role of the Empire Windrush needs to be seen as part of a much bigger picture, a picture that, as yet, has only partially been drawn.

 

Addendum

You can see dates and passenger numbers for all incoming voyages of the Jamaica Producer here: THE JAMAICA PRODUCER VOYAGES