‘Windrush in Reverse’

JAMAICA’S TOURISM Minister Edmund Bartlett has tagged his latest vision for attracting more tourist from the UK diaspora into the island as ‘Windrush in Reverse’. His Windrush reference points to the Empire Windrush ship, best remembered today for bringing one of the first large groups of post-war Caribbean immigrants to the United Kingdom. It carried 492 passengers and one stowaway on a voyage from Jamaica to London in 1948.

English-speaking Caribbean people who arrived in the UK in the period after World War II are generally referred to as the Windrush generation.

“It is our hope that with our renewed marketing effort and the constant improvements we are making to the local tourism product, we will produce much better results in terms of visitor arrivals and earning from that sector,” explained the minister.

He is anticipating that the Jamaica Tourist Board’s efforts to secure an increase in arrivals from the UK market will be bolstered next summer as the diaspora acknowledges the 70th anniversary of the MV Empire Windrush ship.

“Today, that migration has spawned a population of several hundreds of thousands of Britons with very strong Jamaican heritage, and many are more than willing to travel to Jamaica. We will work with our many travel partners to make that easier for them to do” said Bartlett in a media release.