For any journalist the danger with great stories is that can they get away from you, acquire a life of their own and start to mean something quite different to the one you tried to get across.
Thus, it was with the arrival of the Empire Windrush, carrying 500 of the first wave of post-war Caribbean immigrants in June 1948, a story that was first brought to light 50 years later in a book and a film by my brother Mike and I, both children of that first wave.
Boats bringing migrants to our islands – the Danes over a thousand years ago, the Normans in 1066, the Spanish Armada in 1588, and more recently small boats in the Channel – have always seemed to spell trouble.
The Windrush was no different.
Labour and Conservative MPs alike warned of strife if the voyagers were allowed to land.
The Ministry of Defence despatched a warship to shadow the boat, as though it were an enemy invader, despite the fact that virtually everyone on board was a subject of the British Empire.
Today many people think they know the bones of the tale.
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West Indian immigrants, many of them poor and unemployed answered the call from the mother country to rebuild after the war.
They populated the NHS and transport industries and faced discrimination.
Latterly some of the first wave have been subject to cruel and humiliating treatment by the Home Office.
They were then and are now mostly at the bottom of society’s pile, and whilst some of the Windrush descendants shine in the worlds of music and entertainment, they are, by and large, excluded from the elite.
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Most of this is true, but it’s far from the whole story, and in our documentary “Windrush and Us” we’ve filled in some of the gaps.
To start with, the Windrush voyagers arrived long before the government in London sought out talent in the colonies; hundreds had made their way here in the war years as willing volunteers to fight Hitler.
Many had died in combat, but others who returned home itched for the taste of adventure, so were ready to beg and borrow the £28 10s (over £1,300 in today’s money) it took to buy a passage back to the bright lights.
‘We brought music, we brought colour, we brought life’
Most of the Windrush descendants faced hardship and hostility. But they were also resilient and shared much with the natives.
They changed Britain.
As one veteran told me back in 1998: “We brought music, we brought colour, we brought life.”
Some of that is reflected in DJ Trevor Nelson’s picks for the Windrush 75 concert – ska, rock steady, lovers rock, Britfunk and garage all feature topped off with a moving tribute to the past by Craig David.
But the Windrush tale has changed more than music, food and sport.
Read more:
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It has created a mixed-race population, proportionately larger than in any other developed nation.
That hasn’t come about without pain.
Carrie and David Grant best known as voice coaches to TV stars had to endure opposition to their marriage from her family; not many people have the courage to tell their own mother, as she did – “You’re a racist”.
The good news is that attitudes change, and today few would give a second thought to such a union.
Britain as a radically different society
Windrush is in part an origins story for a part of Britain.
But that part of our society is now radically different than it was back in 1998 when Windrush became a story.
Back then, it was being the descendants of two Caribbean parents that defined what it meant to be Black and British.
Today, they – we – are less numerous than those who also have a white parent or grandparent.
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Even more important, the Windrush descendants are outnumbered by those who have arrived direct from Africa by two to one. They bring a very different set of aspirations and experiences.
In some of the young people, we hear a voice that is more confident, even assertive, determined to make prejudice the problem of those who practise it rather than those who face it.
I think that we’re in for an exciting time ahead as the new Britain emerges from this mixture of the Caribbean, Africa and the UK – a mashup of Kingston, Kano, and Kentish Town is already producing a culture found nowhere else but Britain.
I don’t know exactly what it will look like in 2048, a century after Windrush, but I really want to be around to tell you about it… (I’ll only be 95).
Watch the full Windrush and Us documentary on Tuesday 20 June on Sky Docs & Sky Showcase at 8pm, and Wednesday 21 June on Sky News at 8pm.
