Chasing the Windrush
from ‘Arrival' Portfolio, London, 1962 © Howard Grey
Jun 22, 2020
On Monday June 22, Britain celebrates Windrush Day, honoring a generation of Caribbean immigrants who moved to the UK in the late 1940s at the invitation of the British government. The people who became known as the Windrush generation were invited to Britain to lay roads, drive buses, clean hospitals and nurse the sick, helping to rebuild the country after the devastation of World War II. They first arrived aboard the Empire Windrush in June 1948, landing at Tilbury Docks, about 20 miles from London. These voyagers, many of them from Jamaica, were the first large group of Caribbean migrants to arrive in the UK.
When Howard Grey heard reports one overcast day in May that passengers from apparently the last ship of West Indians were arriving on the boat train from Southampton to Waterloo, the 20-year-old assistant photographer grabbed two cameras and headed straight to the station. Howard was a commercial photographer and saw the masses of people entering the country not as an outrage but as an opportunity to capture a unique moment in time. When he entered the station he found a building filled with people in their Sunday best. Afterwards, he would note an air of desperation, a mixture between anxiety and excitement.
© Howard Grey
Howard Grey felt obligated to document this event more so because he felt sympathy for those caught within it – his grandparents were immigrants themselves. Grey belonged to a family of Jewish immigrants in their third generation. They migrated from Ukraine in order to escape the terror caused by the Russian and Ukrainian government. Grey imagined how he would feel if his immigrant family were deported and decided that he would capture that feeling he shared with the Caribbean people stepping off the train that day.Grey hated flash photography so was reluctant to use a flash gun. He shot quickly and instinctively, going through three rolls of film in 20 minutes. “There wasn’t much forethought. I wasn’t framing a narrative. I just took pictures believing every one was a possible jewel.” Traipsing home in the rain, Grey was pessimistic, and in the darkroom his fears were realized. “Even when I pushed it, doubling the development time to work on the shadow areas of the negative, there was nothing printable there.”
Howard packed away the images for almost 50 years.
Becoming Britons, 1948 - 1973
During that time, however, tensions between the new immigrants and the British population were growing and by 1948, the government decided the rate of immigration to the UK was too high. An increasing amount of racism in England led to riots and even deaths. Despite many of the new arrivals being deported, people kept coming and in that, people kept fighting.
Alongside the constant abuse, the Caribbean settlers were banned from bars, churches and were even stopped from buying homes. Although they had arrived legally, it was not until 1973 that immigration law plainly stated that Commonwealth citizens and their children had the automatic right to live and work in the UK. Many did so, without any need for additional documentation.
The Windrush Scandal
In late 2017, a rash of cases were reported in which individuals who had arrived in the UK from Commonwealth countries before 1973, and sometimes their descendants, were struggling to prove their citizenship status under tough new immigration laws billed as a "hostile environment" policy. Many did not have the required documentation because they had never been required to have it before. Some said they had been refused medical care, denied housing and deported or threatened with deportation. In many cases, people were not informed the rules had changed until they received a letter telling them to leave the country.
In 2018, the government confirmed at least 11 people who had been wrongly deported had since died. Others were denied potentially life-saving medical treatment because they could not provide the right documents. An independent parliament-commissioned enquiry into the Windrush scandal found in March 2020 that the Home Office, which is responsible for immigration and border security, acted with an “institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation” in the years leading up to 2018, “which are consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism.” The Home Secretary at the time, Amber Rudd, resigned in 2018 at the height of the scandal. However then-Prime Minister Theresa May, who originally designed the “hostile environment” policy as Home Secretary, stayed in her post.In 2019 the government announced it would make up to £500,000 ($622,000) per year available to community groups for celebrations and educational resources.However despite government support, many organizers say the government is still failing to tackle structural racism or atone for its mistakes.
Finding the light
It took 50 years for Howard Grey to return to the photos of those new arrivals. Only then was he able to coax those fine details from the photos he took so spontaneously that day. The fear, the promise, the unknowing, the excitement...it was still all there. As Britain and the world acknowledges its generation of pioneers, not fearless, but courageous still, Grey's photos are a reflection on hope, on identity and on the winds of change.
Howard Grey’s images from that final arrival of Caribbeans are now housed at the Autograph gallery in east London and can be seen online at the gallery’s website. They were shown at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton in 2018 to mark the 70th anniversary of the first Windrush migrant.