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?