Sam King

West Indian migrant and celebrated campaigner who set up the Windrush Foundation

SAM KING, who has died aged 90, served in the RAF during the Second World War and returned to Britain aged 22 as a West Indian migrant on the in 1948; he and his nearly 500 fellow passengers were not made entirely welcome, yet they helped to forge a new kind of society and King helped to lead that change. About a fortnight before the

arrived in Kingston, Jamaica, King responded to an advert in the local paper for a troopship going back to Britain with about 300 passage berths, for £28.10s a berth. His family sold three cows to buy him a ticket and he set sail, hoping for the chance of a better life in what was still seen as “the mother country”.

But, as he recalled, the Windrush migrants arrived at Tilbury on June 21 1948 to a chilly welcome: “Flight Lieutenant Smythe, an RAF officer for the Minister of the Colonies, was on board. He put a leaflet out that we will have difficulty in England and encouraging us to go back. One man asked me what to do about the paper. I said, put it in the dustbin. Smythe is an African, he’s not a Jamaican, so how he can tell me? … There was great consternation in Westminster, and the Right Honourable Creech-Jones stated, ‘Don’t worry about it; these people are only adventurers, they will not last one winter in Britain.’ … They did not want us.”

It was grey and raining when the immigrants arrived, but King felt it was a good omen when, a few hours later, the sun came out.

In the years that followed, however, his optimism would be sorely tested. While early immigrants were economically welcome because of labour shortages, their arrival triggered racial tensions and King and his fellow migrants faced hostility.

He rejoined the RAF, but found it difficult to find somewhere to live, with many landlords putting up signs reading “No Coloureds, No Dogs”. When he did find digs in south London, there was no bath, so he had to rely on the local public baths. King left the RAF to become a policeman. He passed the entrance exam, but when he appeared before the selection panel, he was accused of wanting “easy money” and rejected. Instead he became a postman.

With the money he saved from his job and a loan from the RAF, he put King never bore a grudge against those who had obstructed him: ‘People said we wouldn’t last more than one winter, but we stayed’ down the deposit for a house in Camberwell (his local bank manager having refused him a mortgage and told him to “go back to the colonies”). He became only the second West Indian in London to buy his own home. Later he would set up a “partner” house-buying scheme in south London, influenced by a similar scheme he had seen in Jamaica.

King kept in touch with his fellow passengers and became the “go-to” man for newer immigrants looking to find their feet in Britain. He became a great friend of Claudia Jones, the founder of what was to be the Notting Hill Carnival, whom he helped with her Brixton-based Britain’s first major black newspaper.

He also became a member of the Labour group on Southwark council and in 1983 was elected the borough’s first black mayor. Although his appointment brought death threats from Right-wing extremists, King’s old-fashioned courtly manners won him friends and admirers across the political and racial spectrum. It was, he felt, a measure of how much had changed when a local police commissioner came to ask his advice on how to persuade more black people to apply to join the police.

In 1996, King co-founded the Windrush Foundation, a charity which plays the leading role in preserving the history of the first post-war wave of Caribbean settlers and he gave hundreds of talks in schools about his own experience, becoming known as “Mr Windrush”.

King never bore a grudge against those who had put obstacles in his way: “People didn’t want us coming here, but in the end everything reasonable was done. People said we wouldn’t last more than one winter, but we stayed. I didn’t go back to Jamaica for 25 years.”

Samuel Beaver King was born at Portland, Jamaica, on February 20 1926, one of 10 children of a banana farmer. In 1944 he applied to join the RAF after spotting an appeal for recruits in newspaper. After passing tests in general knowledge, arithmetic and English, he did a month of intensive training in Kingston, the Jamaican capital, before setting sail for Greenock, on the Clyde, in November 1944. After further training he was posted as an engineer to RAF Hawking near Folkestone.

King was demobbed and repatriated to Jamaica in 1947. But life on the family farm was a struggle and when the opportunity came to return to Britain, he took it.

In 1998, he published his autobiography, Climbing up the Rough Side of the Mountain, and was appointed MBE the same year. In 2009 he was honoured by Southwark council with a blue plaque at his former home in Herne Hill. Last month the council gave him the Freedom of the Borough.

Sam King’s first wife, Mae, died in 1983. He is survived by his second wife, Myrtle, and by a son and daughter of his first marriage.