As the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush approaches, the Historycal Roots team have been busying themselves revisiting the ship’s arrival at Tilbury on 21st June 1948 (the passengers actually stepped ashore on 22nd).
There was a really good TV series that aired 20 years ago that still makes for fascinating viewing today. The first two parts are available on YouTube, you can watch Part 1 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGTm_Gsvyzw
A book was produced based on the series and we were lucky enough to meet one of the authors, Mike Phillips, recently. As he commented when he signed our copy: ‘twenty years and still relevant’.
It’s all too easy to forget what it was actually like for the pioneers who arrived in 1948. One quote in the above programme comes from Vincent Reid, at 13, one of the youngest passengers to disembark:
‘Growing up, I could go for days without seeing another Black person and as for White friends, I couldn’t really say I had White friends because no one ever invited me to their home. Never. So, basically, in a sense, I was friendless.’
It’s so hard to imagine what his childhood must have been like.
One of the things we have done at Historycal Roots is construct a searchable database of the information that was recorded by the authorities at the time the ship docked. The raw data is available at Ancestry.co.uk (if you have a paid subscription) or free at the National Archives at Kew. Ancestry have transcribed the data themselves but, as we discovered as we did our own transcription, Ancestry’s data is incomplete and not easily searched.
The HR database suggests that a number of the ‘facts’ that are in circulation about the Windrush passengers are plain wrong and we will be returning to this over the coming weeks and months.