by Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips
Mudlark, 2023, 432pp, £12.99, paperback
It is often forgotten that when Mike and Trevor Phillips began work on Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain in the mid-1990s, ‘Windrush was not yet seen to be a symbol of origins and identity.’ Despite the Phillips’ stature in the world of broadcasting, they had to ‘persuade TV executives that there was more to the story of these extraordinary voyagers than merely a summons by post-war colonial authorities to come and serve as nurses, transport workers and the like’(p ix). This dramatically changed after the book and the eponymous corresponding BBC documentary. In 1998, Queen Elizabeth honoured Windrush survivors in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace and since then there have been a number of physical monuments, murals, street name changes, and other forms of iconography paying tribute. During the 2012 London Olympic Games, millions of people around the world saw Windrush featured in the opening ceremonies. The state joined in this effort by introducing Windrush Day in 2018, a national holiday to celebrate and preserve the history of the contributions of the so-called Windrush generation. On 22 June 2023 the recently formed ‘Windrush Anchor Foundation’ announced a fundraising campaign to recover the anchor of the Empire Windrush. Foundation trustee Patrick Vernon explained that ‘The Windrush ship is part of British history. It is part and parcel of the DNA of British history.’1Mabel Banfield-Nwachi, ‘“We call it a touchstone”: the mission to find the Windrush anchor,’ The Guardian, 2 August 2023. It appears then that many are convinced that Windrush was Britain’s ‘Mayflower’ pilgrimage into a multicultural society.
Recently, however, Windrush has been most closely associated with the vicious racism of the British state. The 2018 ‘Windrush Scandal’ saw the Home Office detain, deport and strip NHS, welfare, and pension rights of Britons of mostly African descent, many of whom had been born as British colonial subjects. Political developments predating the scandal, from Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ policies to Brexit and the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire, illustrated a furious backlash against multiculturalism. Since this time, there has been a cottage industry of books featuring Windrush in the title; Windrush: 75 Years of Modern Britain has been renamed and updated to coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary celebrations of the Empire Windrush’s arrival. This begs the question: does the book still offer valuable insights into the histories of racism, immigration, and multiculturalism in Britain in 2023?
There are a few notable additions in this reprinted version. These include a forward recounting the Phillips’ challenges to establish Windrush as the definitive origin story of multicultural Britain, and an afterward examining other migrant groups in Britain — notably those from the Indian Subcontinent and, more recently, Eastern Europeans. The footnotes about the interviewees, many of whom have passed away since 1998, have also been updated and provide more meticulous biographical details. Minus these key additions, the contents of the book are identical to the 1998 version. Windrush: 75 Years of Modern Britain’s twenty-nine core chapters are largely driven by interviews with relatively well-known multi-generational politicians, activists, musicians, athletes, broadcasters, and actors of Caribbean descent, along with occasional historical commentaries from the Phillips brothers. It begins with a brief summary of the impact of British colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade on the Caribbean, and pivots quickly to instances of emigration, highlighting in particular the presence of Caribbean servicemen in Britain during the Second World War. Subsequent oral histories highlight the passenger experience aboard Windrush and explore how migrants navigated racism in housing, social spaces, workplaces, the state, and day-to-day life in general. The remainder of the book captures the forms of racism and resistance experienced by second generation people of Caribbean descent, who came of age in late 1960s and 1970s Britain, and concludes by looking at the prevalence of Windrush descendants in contemporary British society.
In 2023 the book most notably shines as a social history of the ways Black Britons experienced social inequalities in their daily lives. While there was no legalised colour bar in Britain (unlike in America), segregation was enforced in a de facto manner, and often justified through microaggressions. This is captured clearly in Reverend Carmel Jones’ interview, whose presence in British Anglican churches was often met with comments like, ‘Thank you for coming, but I would be delighted if you didn’t come back’ because ‘My congregation is uncomfortable in the company of black people’ (p 145). Following this experience, Jones would go on to establish various Black Pentecostal churches and Black credit unions. Jones’ story is one of many examples throughout the book of Black Britons resisting racism through creating their own spaces of sociability. While largely a ‘history of the greats,’ the book is nonetheless an impressive collection of interviews, and an important archive to preserve these voices.However, I remain largely sceptical of the utility of this reprint for several reasons. In chapter one, the Phillips’ provide a concise overview of how British colonialism and transatlantic slavery shaped the conditions leading to Caribbean emigration to the United Kingdom. Yet this appears as a minor chapter in the story of what they called ‘the irresistible rise of multi-racial Britain.’ This, as the work of historian and Black studies scholar Kennetta Hammond Perry reminds us, obfuscates the full impact of the ways in which colonialism and slavery informed migration routes, racial formations, citizenship, national belonging, and in general the contours of Britishness.2Kennetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Furthermore, Windrush: 75 Years of Modern Britain is the story of immigration from a Caribbean perspective, which as the radical educator activist Gus John explained in his 2023 work, Don’t Salvage the Empire Windrush, ignores the histories of Africans and Asians in Britain.3Gus John, Don’t Salvage the Empire Windrush (London: New Beacon Books, 2023). Before the Phillips’ had published their book, writers like Edward Scobie, James Walvin, Folarin Olawale Shyllon, Peter Fryer, Ron Ramdin, and Gretchen Gerzina recovered histories of people of African descent in Britain, going as far back as the Roman period and through the age of the transatlantic slave trade. This work has continued in more recent times in the research of David Olusoga, Miranda Kauffman, Olivette Otele, and Hakim Adi. Studies on Black internationalism by Adi, Marika Sherwood, Susan Pennybacker, Minkah Makalani, Marc Matera, and Imaobong Umoren highlight that Britain had been a hotbed for African and Caribbean activists and Pan Africanist activity years before Windrush. In regards to the Asian experience, even the Phillips’ admitted that by the early 1990s the United Kingdom’s Asian population reached ‘the point where their numbers exceeded those of the British black communities by almost two to one’ (p 403). Yet, the Asian presence in Britain far predates the twentieth century. For instance, studies by Rozina Vishram, Antoinette Burton, Susheila Nasta, Sumita Mukherjee, Rehana Ahmed, and Arup Chatterjee have recovered the histories of Asians in Britain going as far back as their time as seafarers and lascars in the early modern period to their encounters in the late imperial metropole. These works illustrate that ‘multiculturalism, or the presence of African, Asian, and Caribbean people in the United Kingdom did not begin with Windrush and in the so-called post-colonial era, but rather it must be understood in concert with larger histories of imperialism and colonialism.
Footnotes
- 1Mabel Banfield-Nwachi, ‘“We call it a touchstone”: the mission to find the Windrush anchor,’ The Guardian, 2 August 2023. ↩︎
- 2Kennetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). ↩︎
- 3Gus John, Don’t Salvage the Empire Windrush (London: New Beacon Books, 2023). ↩︎
