Windrush in their own words
ALDWYN ‘LORD KITCHENER’ ROBERTS
“We took the train from Tilbury to London and about a week after I went to a place called the Paramount where there was a lot of dancing,” said the singer in Windrush:
The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain by Mike and Trevor Phillips. “To my surprise, many of the stowaways were in the Paramount jiving, dancing and what-have-you. I had to laugh, I couldn’t believe it. A man just stowaway and, after a couple of days, he was in a dance hall jiving and dancing around. But entering England, when the boat had about four days to land in England, I get this wonderful feeling that I’m going to land on the Mother Country, the soil of the Mother Country. And I started to compose this song, ‘London is the Place for Me’.”
OSWALD DENNISON
“I got a job the first night in Britain. Everything was rationed. I was given a job handing out the rations. I don’t know why they gave me a job but it happened when I went to America too. And because I had a job I wasn’t too worried about finding somewhere to live” Oswald Dennison told the BBC in 1998. “I had had a business at home then when I got work straight away there was no time to brood. All I had to do was go forward. I was disappointed to find prejudice here. Being snubbed – it affects some people badly. Some people, they never get over it until this day. But there are people like me who shrug their shoulders and say ‘life goes on’.”
JOHN RICHARDS
“I know a lot about Britain from school days, but it was a different picture from that one when you came to face with the facts,” John Richards told the BBC in 2014. Richards appeared the iconic shot of Windrush arrivals above, on the right. “They tell you it is the ‘mother country’, you’re all welcome, you’re all British. When you come here you realise you’re a foreigner and that’s all there is to it. The average person knows you as a colonial and that’s all. You cut cane or carry bananas and that’s it. Anyone wants to diddle you, they say I just come off the banana boat and things like that.”