Windrush precious stories documented in new book

THE childhood memories of a university professor are full of familiar objects – photos, souvenirs, sewing machines and radiograms.

Dr Shawn Sobers has lost both parents but can cherish their stories, which feature in his new book, dedicated to the Windrush generation.

But the 51-year-old’s passion for documenting the lives of his parents and their generation was sparked in his early 20s when the family were driving home to Bath from London.

Shawn decided to find out as much as he could about his parents in that hour-and-a-half journey.

“A lot of Windrush are in their 80s so my generation are starting to inherit a lot of their stuff but do we really know what we’re inheriting? My mum, who hadn’t been well for 18 months, recently passed. It’s very raw in terms of he potency of this book,” explained Shawn, who wrote much of his new book, Black Everyday Lives, Material Culture and Narrative: Tings in de House while caring for his mother.

In the 1990s Shawn became involved in a project called ‘Origins’ which documented the migration stories of people living in Bristol. He decided to interview his own parents, who had migrated to Britain from Barbados in the early 1960s. His mother, a nurse, and father who was a factory worker, didn’t always have the time to talk at length about their personal histories.

So Shawn took the opportunity to get out his dictaphone during the car journey from London.

“I sat in the backseat with a dictaphone and interviewed them in the car. It was the most fascinating hour and a half.

In that time I found out more about my parents than in the previous 25 years,” he said.

After starting university in his early 20s, Shawn went on to study a masters and PhD and now works as a lecturer at UWE. He said the most fascinating stories were in the objects hanging on the walls and gathering dust on the mantelpieces of the homes he frequented growing up.

He discovered hidden secrets about the Jamaican Dutch pot, commonly used in Caribbean cooking. Each chapter of the book explores a different household object, including some less familiar with younger generations, like the radiogram.

An insight into the personal life of Haile Selassie, who moved to

Bath after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, can be found in the Radiogram chapter.

The emperor had spent hours in his home in Bath in floods of tears, while listening to the sound of bombs dropping on Ethiopia from his radiogram.

Although Shawn has spent decades in the university environment, he left school at 16 with few GCSEs and said he had never thought about university until a fellow college student showed him a prospectus.

❝ I do work hard but I also know it’s not beyond the realm of anyone else

Shawn said: “I was allergic to school when I was younger. Even going to university was an accident.

“If he had never asked me I might have never thought about it because it was not on my radar.

“I’ve got the attitude that if I can be a professor or complete a PhD then really anyone can do it because I didn’t have that in my upbringing.

“I do work hard but I also know it’s not beyond the realm of anyone else.

“I’m very passionate about working with people. There’s no difference between me and my parents who didn’t go to university, just because I have certain titles in my name, it doesn’t make me an expert.

“My first job at a spray-painting garage for cars was a really racist environment and I was the only Black person working there.

“National Front graffiti on the wall just stayed there because the management wouldn’t even rub it off.

“After two years of work I went back to college. Creativity was definitely part of my inspiration because by then I had more of a connection with my Black identity.

“Growing up as a teenager, I would go to Bristol to see the Wild Bunch who used to have a hip-hop all-dayer at Bedminster skatepark and when I was older I went to Malcolm X for blues and reggae concerts. The creative culture in Bristol just wasn’t anywhere else.

“When I came to the Kuumba Centre for work experience, I came across the Black writers group and I remember thinking, ‘wow this is where I belong.’ The era we are in now is very different from the era I grew up in in the 1970s.

“In the early days if there was a Black person on TV, the phone would ring and my parents’ friends would say, ‘there’s a Black person on TV, quick turn to BBC2,’ it was a real thing. When Steve McQueen released the Small Axe series in 2020, there was a similar vibe on social media, there was this real expectation that because it was a Black filmmaker, it was something for the community to get behind and get excited by, so some of those threads still exist today.”

» Black Everyday Lives, Material Culture and Narrative: Tings in de House by Shawn-Naphtali Sobers is available to purchase from several retailers including Routledge, Amazon and Blackwells.