WOMEN OF THE WINDRUSH
Amelia Gentleman tells the stories of the people who built their lives in Britain from childhood, only for them to be unjustly torn apart five decades later
Amelia Gentleman tells of the heart-rending true stories behind the headlines of the scandal
I was checking my work emails at the kitchen table in October 2017 when I noticed a disturbing message from a small refugee charity in Wolverhampton, marked ‘Urgent – imminent deportation of a lady who has been in the UK for 49 years’. The organisation, which I’d visited a few years earlier, was concerned that a woman it had been helping for some months – Paulette Wilson, a 61-year-old cook – had been arrested and detained in Yarl’s Wood, a notoriously unpleasant immigration-removal centre. Paulette had lived in England since arriving in 1968 aged 11 or 12, had been at school, been employed and paid taxes here for decades (she’d even spent time working in the House of Commons canteen), and had never left the country. Yet somehow she had been classified as an illegal immigrant, and was facing deportation back to Jamaica, a place she hadn’t visited for almost half a century, where she had no remaining relatives. It seemed shocking and peculiar that the Home Office should be taking such drastic steps against a law-abiding grandmother who had spent a lifetime here. I called the charity and asked if I could meet Paulette.
I didn’t realise this would be the beginning of an investigation that would stretch over months and would ultimately unleash an international scandal, force the Home Secretary to resign and make the British government promise to pay out hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation.
Paulette had been released by the time I met her, but she was expecting to be rearrested at any time. I spent several hours sitting with her in her daughter’s flat, drinking tea, trying to understand what had happened. Eighteen months earlier, she had been sent a letter from the Home Office telling her she was in the UK illegally. She had tried repeatedly to explain that this was a mistake, but staff refused to listen. Instead, they arrested her.
The Guardian published a long article that I’d written about Paulette. I assumed that Home Office employees had made a terrible one-off mistake, until over the next few days I began to get calls and emails from other people caught in the same trap. Most had arrived as children from the Caribbean, and had lived here for about 50 years before they started receiving alarming letters, phone calls and sometimes even text messages from the Home Office, instructing them to leave the country or face arrest. Many had never had enough money for a foreign holiday, so had not applied for a passport. Now, in the newly created ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants, launched by Theresa May, they were having to prove their Britishness, and had no way of doing so. They were both furious and terrified.
It took weeks of often frustrating reporting, calling lawyers, charities and politicians before I fully understood the scale of the problem. People were being made homeless, jobless, destitute, facing imprisonment or being threatened with deportation, and no one seemed to want to pay attention. For months, my desk was piled high with lawyers’ letters and endless lists of contacts who might be able to help.
Women were frightened about coming forward; if you’ve been told you’re an illegal immigrant facing deportation, you’re going to feel nervous about having your name and picture in a newspaper. Some of the emails asking for help were sent at two or three in the morning. It seemed as though many were spending their nights in anxiety-induced insomnia, contacting me as a desperate last resort. I found it very stressful, worrying about whether publishing these articles would make their lives more difficult, but there was also a satisfaction in ensuring their untold stories were heard.
In the weeks that followed, I met Judy Griffith, who had come to London from Barbados at the age of nine in 1963 (she remembers the woolly slippers her mother bought to help her feel at home in the bitter cold). For 52 years, she had studied and worked here, employed by the police and in London hospitals, before being told she was an illegal immigrant. Now she was unable to work or get a passport, which meant she couldn’t travel to see her mother, who had returned to Barbados for her retirement, before she died. ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be snatched from my bed in the night,’ she told me.
I also interviewed Sarah O’Connor, who, since arriving from Jamaica in 1967 at the age of six, had attended primary and secondary school, worked continuously, married someone British, had four children, all with British passports, and had been devastated to be told a few months earlier that she too was here illegally. She was no longer allowed to work, and was nervous about opening the door to her east-London home in case the visitor was an immigration-enforcement officer coming to arrest her.
Positive things began to come from the Guardian articles. Again and again, the Home Office responded by mysteriously deciding to fix people’s cases within days of publication. Government ministers tried to ignore the issue, until it became clear that thousands were affected. A huge political crisis followed.
A year later, more than 6,000 people have been given documents confirming their right to be here. I’m still getting emails from people telling me they’ve got their jobs back, or have been able to travel to see relatives. I feel so happy when I read their news. But for some, the change came too late. Sarah O’Connor died last year, still struggling for justice, before the compensation scheme was announced. I’ve dedicated the book I’ve written about the scandal to her.
‘The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment’ by Amelia Gentleman (£18.99, Guardian Faber) is published on 3 October.