By Dr Jo Stanley
Nancy Cunard (on the left) and Freya Stark
The original passenger list for the journey of the Empire Windrush from the Caribbean to Tilbury is held in the National Archives at Kew. Of the 1,027 passengers listed as being on board, two were stowaways. In spite of the existence of this raw data, myths and misconceptions about who was on board have proliferated. At various times it has been said that the passengers were all male, all Jamaican and all black. None of these statements is correct, even the number of passengers has been widely misquoted (the number 492 is constantly repeated, even by reputable historians).
The following article by Dr Jo Stanley gives a fascinating and unique account of the journey as experienced by two white women with very different temperaments and outlooks on life. The story is told through the eyes of Nancy Cunard, scion of the Cunard shipping dynasty, and Freya Stark, renowned travel writer. Other passengers in First Class with them included the singer Mona Baptiste, Ellis Clarke who 14 years later would become the first President of the newly independent Trinidad and Tobago and McDonald Bailey on his way to the London Olympics to watch his son run for Great Britain. Nancy and Freya describe what life was like on board; the musicians, the discovery of the female stowaway Evelyn Wauchope, racism in Bermuda and an eight-day diversion to pick up 66 Polish passengers in Tampico, Mexico. They evidently didn’t much enjoy the journey, commenting on the rigours of the trip from the vantage point of white privilege.
The story of the voyage is complex and multi-layered, Dr Stanley’s beautifully written article approaches it from an unfamiliar angle and casts fresh light on what it was like on board.
The article is reproduced by kind permission of Dr Jo Stanley and Marine Quarterly where it first appeared in 2018.
MARINE QUARTERLY
A JOURNAL OF THE SEA
AUTUMN 2018
Homeward Bound
Jo Stanley
Voyage stories can be told from many vantage points. So let me offer you this unusual version.
Two footloose white women are the focus. Their voyages began separately, in Barbados, in late April three years after the end of the Second World War. On an island nicknamed `Bimshire’ and `Little England’ ennui was inevitable for these new sojourners, whose lives usually involved voracious discovering. After three months Freya Stark, the famous travel writer, had exhausted her capacity to play the diplomat’s wife, and wanted to escape to her home in Asolo [46 miles north west of Venice]. Her cabinmate, the scandalous writer-publisher and black rights activist Nancy Cunard, was similarly bored with the bridge-playing world at her cousin Edward’s beachside house in Glitter Bay. She had been recovering there for two months after a horrible holiday in Mexico, where a cactus had pierced her cornea and her latest lover had careered away.
Around Easter 1948 Caribbean newspapers offered a batch of one-way cheap passages to Britain, the shipping company wanting to avoid loss by filling up berths. The women each booked a ticket that cost as much as five cows, or forty weeks’ wages for a banana loader — £43, because females were all by definition ladies, and must therefore travel A class, in cabins. By contrast, men prepared to rough it in the C class dormitories paid only £28.1os.
In May Freya told Jock Murray, her London publisher, that she was leaving, and that all the frangipani were in flower and the Caribbean Sea was ’emerald green because of the Orinoco waters’. As she started the 251 nautical miles crossing to Trinidad, the embarkation port, it was strange to see Bimshire ‘vanishing back into the waves and clouds from which I saw it emerge so few months ago’.
According to Nancy’s biographer, Daphne Fielding, Nancy waited for ‘three suffocating days . . . in evil-smelling Port-of-Spain, after which she felt she really knew what it was like to be a poor Negro living in one of those wretched wooden shacks in Cock-Crow Alley or Barking-Dog Lane.’ The passengers were joining the ship for the last two legs of its outward voyage from Southampton: Jamaica, then Bermuda, before the ship headed northeast, home to the UK.
Just after 20 May, Captain John Almond’s less-than-full ship bore them away from Trinidad. To coop up two grand and headstrong public figures, one radical, one conservative, in the same cabin, might have been a recipe for ructions. Impeccable manners and busyness helped prevent them. Nancy was writing about Mexico. Freya was writing her autobiographical Traveller’s Prelude. Maybe they shared personal stories, as both were struggling with failing relationships with younger bisexual partners. Nancy, then 52, had been ditched by the wealthy wanderer William Le Page Finley. Freya, three years older, had recently married the Hon Stewart Perowne, Colonial Secretary to Barbados, who had metamorphosed into ‘the perfect civil servant’.
When they got to the Royal Mail Lines pier at Kingston they found that, like hungry newspapers in any small port, the Gleaner detailed all arrivals and departures. Miss Cunard, ‘whose affinity for the cause of the coloured peoples of the world caused such a furore in the middle 193os’ was mentioned as one of the celebrity arrivals: ‘During her [two-and-a-half-day] stay, short though it is, she hopes to see as much of the island as possible. She is particularly keen to observe at close hand the mental and political changes which have taken place in Jamaica [since her 1932 visit]’.
Nancy noted the quotidian, thinking about what could happen, including West Indies federation, and Mrs Perowne gazed upon evidence of old colonial glories. A brigadier whisked her off to use the official residence of the Governor, Sir John Huggins. She visited Port Royal — no longer swashbuckling, but near derelict — with a Nelson-revering naval guide. Determined to make the most of every opportunity, Freya obtained passes for a jaunt on an ordnance boat. Out in the waters round the Palisadoes it was bliss, admiring the accompanying pelicans and dreaming of walks and wayside inns in those distant Blue Mountains.
Then, bump, it was back to the ship’s ‘desolating efficiency’.
By the evening of 24 or 26 May 1948 (the accounts vary) tentative newcomers were finding their feet with the established communities in cabin and deck class. The ship was now full, and the atmosphere was more militarised. The public address system `blares’, Freya haughtily complained. ‘One’s time and thought taken up forcibly in listening to things one doesn’t want to hear.’ Soon gossip revealed that one of the six stowaways at Kingston was — gasp — a female! She was dressmaker Evelyn Wauchope, aged 27. Enter gallant rescuers who collectively paid the fare for what the Gleaner calls ‘this adventurous woman [who would otherwise] be imprisoned on arrival in England’. Jamaican musicians, including Delroy Stephens, gave a benefit concert for her. ‘From then on nothing very exciting happened.’
Detouring to Tampico to pick up Poles made Freya chafe: ‘It seems wildly extravagant to send a huge ship, 2,000 on board, eight days out of its way for sixty passengers who could have been flown or taken by schooner to Bermuda.’ Throughout the war she had coped at long range with distant Whitehall bureaucracy. Now she believed ‘it is just that someone in London was unable to realise the difference made by looking at a small-scale map, and thought this was all on our way.’
For four days and nearly fifteen hundred nautical miles there was confinement, ‘chugging through the Mexique Bay, cutting its dark flat waters in swelter of heat and noise’. She told her husband `I hope I may never have to travel in a troopship again; regimented from morning to night … It really is sordid.’
Privation intensified upper-crust solidarity. ‘It is a godsend to have Nancy Cunard. We omit breakfast and lie with very little on in our cabin till lunch, and then sit in hot shade with typewriter or Russian. Heat really exhausting.’ At night the ship was ‘as bad as Delhi’ (where she had enjoyed Viceroy’s House’s elaborate hospitality). With not so much as a punkah now she found ‘the sheets scorching; and poor miserable people are down below in decks that descend to E without a breath of outside air’.
In Tampico, the ‘New Orleans of Mexico’, they were dismayed at not being allowed ashore. The sixty Poles joined the ship by boat. Fresh water supplies were low. The ship’s desalination system was not adequate, and currency problems meant that none could be bought in Mexico. So over the next few days they headed east, past the tip of the Yucatan peninsula, then across to Havana on 3 June. Four years before the revolution, the city gave a glimpse of opulence: ‘wide, straight streets; porticoes and shops; shiny rich cars: the waterfront finished off with a low parapet of stone and backed with gardens … one has a feeling of a metropolis standing on its own feet.’ But they were not allowed ashore in this city either: ‘just frying like the Ancient Mariner on a painted ocean … how maddening not to be able to land,’ Freya told her husband.
Water obtained, they could start heading northeast. Bermuda was a scheduled stop. Here they had to wait two days because of engine failure, which was handled at the dockyard and again in Hamilton. The Royal Gazette reported that ‘Bermudians went all out to show hospitality to passengers and crew. . . A major social event, with plenty to eat and drink, was a dance on the old Unity Patio in Happy Valley.’ The ship’s calypsonians provide extra music. Passengers were, however, shocked at the apartheid here, especially in education.
As in Jamaica, Freya managed a brief respite ashore thanks to her connections. Vice-Admiral William Tennant, briefly Commander-in-Chief of the America and West Indies Station, hosted her overnight. She enjoyed ‘a bathe before breakfast . . . slipping down barefoot over the wet grass and finding the little cove all pure and quiet from the night and swimming out among the white birds in an almost waveless sea.’
On 11th June she calculated: ‘This depressing boat, eleven more days to go.’
Two days out from Bermuda they had rough weather for the first time. On 21 June, after a thirty-two-day trip, the two women arrived at Gravesend [Tilbury], and discovered that their ship was a floating political problem called the Empire Windrush, filled with people who, like them, were recognised then and now as bona fide British subjects.