The Empire Strikes Back
The Myth of the Empire Windrush

2,724 words

True myth may be defined as the reduction to narrative shorthand of ritual mime performed on public festivals . . . — Robert Graves, Greek Myths

The word “narrative” has had something of a gain of function in recent years. Its Latin root is narrare, meaning “to tell a story,” and English-speaking children of a certain age grew up with TV programs which were “narrated by” a presenter or actor. Now, in an age of intensive and extensive media and its influence, narrative has a new meaning.

“The narrative” is now the version or interpretation of events which the media wish to be accepted as true by their viewers and readers. This confection is closely monitored by and in agreement with those ultimately in power. This official sanction does not, of course, guarantee its veracity — as with any story — but the transaction between mainstream media producer and consumer is one of storytelling, of the narration of a tale which is comfortable and familiar. It is thus told by one who has been granted the role of storyteller, an important status in primitive societies. (Not for nothing is the BBC nicknamed “Auntie.”) And the most important stories in a society went on to become myths, binding the tribe with an ethnically-shared memory. This development did not stop as societies lifted themselves out of the primitive.

This is also about a narrative, a story, and a myth, and as such it needs a beginning. I’ll take the example set by an immigrant to England, Joseph Conrad (who famously constructed novels containing narratives within narratives), and start with a ship.

HMT (Her Majesty’s Transport) Empire Windrush did not always have that name, and superstitious sailors are still uneasy about this. “What a ship was christened,” says Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, “so let her stay.” But the British cast aside superstition when they renamed the German-built Monte Rosa. The vessel had been a cruise ship taking German tourists to Europe and South America, the latter a journey other Germans would be replicating after the Second World War. In the years of the Third Reich, Germans leaving the country on vacation had to have their departure approved by the government.

The Germans weren’t done with the Monte Rosa. When Germany invaded Norway, she was requisitioned as a troopship, and when she left port for the last time her passengers were not German middle-class tourists off to visit Paris or Rome, but Norwegian Jews off to visit Auschwitz. So, the ship was already infamous before the British captured her as maritime spoils of war and rechristened her Empire Windrush in 1946. “Empire” was a standard prefix for British merchant ships, while the Windrush is a river in the beautiful English district of the Cotswolds.

The ship’s reappearance in history’s narrative came with a very different passenger list. In 1948, the Empire Windrush was returning from collecting troops from Australia when she put in to port in Jamaica, where she was to pick up more troops who were on leave before returning to England. Even with the extra soldiers, the Empire Windrush was still half empty, and the company decided to boost their profit by advertising passage at a reasonable rate. They placed an advertisement offering transit to England in Jamaican newspaper The Daily Gleaner, and there were plenty of takers. The ship docked at Tilbury in Essex on June 21, 1948.

Let us leave the high seas and return to the present day. Readers will be aware of the modern institution of Black History Month (BHM), the near-compulsory celebration of which takes place in February in the United Kingdom and October in the United States. Unless you have a chronic aversion to the media, you will see that recognition and approval of this revisionist program is all but mandated. On the BHM website, there is an introductory piece by Social History lecturer Dr. Vivienne Connell-Hall, PhD, a lady clearly so proud of her doctorate that she uses both appellations. (I also have a PhD, but one diminutive is enough, and I only ever use “PhD.” If you call yourself a doctor, people start asking you to have a look at a rash on their elbow or whether you can get acupuncture through the National Health Service.) This is Dr. Connell-Hall (PhD)’s summation of the purpose of Empire Windrush’s voyage:

The truth is what the symbolism of the Empire Windrush presents, is that Black [sic] people came here at the invitation of a Conservative government as much needed vital labour to rebuild this country from the devastation and ravages from WW2.

One sentence, two factual errors, and some rather mangled grammar. Firstly, the British government of 1948 was Labour, and secondly there was no invitation to sail to England from them or anyone else outside the shipping company. They simply issued an “invitation to treat,” which is what a proffered retail price is called in British legal terms. So no government “brought blacks to Britain,” and were not exactly overjoyed when they did arrive on the Windrush.

Exactly three months after the Empire Windrush docked, the matter of the new arrivals was debated in the Houses of Parliament. The following is an exchange between David Gammans, Conservative Member of Parliament for Hornsey in London, and George Isaacs, the Minister for Labour under Clement Attlee’s Labour government. The transcription is from Hansard, the official record of Parliamentary proceedings:

David Gammans (DG): [H]ow many of the Jamaicans who came to this country on the Empire Windrush are still registered as unemployed?

George Isaacs (GI): Of the 242 Jamaicans who were accommodated at Clapham, 23 left of their own accord and the remaining 219 were placed in employment.

DG: Can the Minister say what is the policy of the Government regarding labour from the West Indies? Do they encourage it or discourage it?

GI: With respect, I think that does not arise out of the Question, but I can tell the hon. Member that provided we are notified of the arrival of any of these people, we will do our very best to place them, as we did in this instance.

DG: Is my right hon. Friend aware that in the East End of London there are 300 to 400 coloured people unemployed?

GI: I was not aware of that.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.

Not only was no official invitation extended to anyone in the Caribbean, the government were not even aware of the shipping company’s new booking initiative concerning what was actually intended as a troopship, and were not particularly keen on the resultant influx. West Indians were not brought to this country, but came of their own volition, a capacity often denied to blacks by liberals.

There was a subsequent black recruitment drive in the 1950s, and many Barbadians came to England specifically to work, particularly on London Transport, where impeccable black bus conductors were a common sight when I was a little boy in the 1960s. Outside London, some regional health authorities recruited nurses from the Caribbean, although not in great numbers. Again, hospitals were the first place in which I saw a number of blacks, and the National Health Service is and always has been the most diverse employer this side of English football’s Premier League.

So, the founding myth of black immigration to England — none of the arrivistes yearned to live in Glasgow or Cardiff — is based on credible untruths, as myths so often are. A few hundred migrants from the Caribbean wished to improve their quality of life. They took advantage of the workings of imperialist capitalism and bought cheap transit. On arrival, unannounced, the British Labour government rather reluctantly found them work and housing. Nowadays, with the rising tide of Muslim immigration to the UK, the government simply finds the housing wherever it can, usually in high-end hotels. There is no great rush to find anyone any work, however The ummah takes care of all that. But, like the ancient Greeks, the British black caucus required something more from its founding myth, particularly if its claims to be a reliable narrative could be seen as doubtful. And so, like producers making a sequel to a movie, we had “the Empire Windrush scandal.”

This drummed-up piece of melodrama begins with the myth of the purpose of the Empire Windrush’s voyage. Last year’s 75th anniversary of the ship’s arrival, during which the British public were groundlessly informed ad nauseam of the “economic and cultural benefits” black people had supposedly brought with them from the islands, accepted the myth as truth. Coverage of the anniversary by Channel 4, the BBC, and London’s Evening Standard all conflate the passengers on the Windrush with the employment drive in the 1950s and ‘60s, as noted above.

The truth of this manufactured scandal was that half a million people had come to the UK from Commonwealth countries. They had the choice as to whether or not to apply for British passports and thus become citizens of the United Kingdom. Some 50,000 chose not to do so, and thus became undocumented. The British Conservative government under Theresa May began taking action that it was now obliged to take. But the myth only grew stronger.

The problem is the overwhelming black need to be at the center of attention, and if this can be achieved by forcing contrition onto weak whites, so much the better. The truth is that a colonial country which had already improved the standard of living among the Caribbean islanders took in some of its economically less well-off people and gave them work they could not find in their own failed, post-imperial states. Cypriots and Canadians were also affected in this so-called scandal, the difference being that they didn’t whine about it for half a century.

And what happened to the “Windrush generation”? The smartly-dressed, respectable, eager blacks who disembarked the ship at Tilbury do not look in photographs as though they might knife you, steal your phone, or start rapping about sexually aggressive acts. In the 1980s, I drank in a pub in Vauxhall, south London, now situated — if it still exists — on what is quaintly termed the “murder mile.” It was one of those nice, chatty boozers: cubes of cheese on the bar, little sausages on cocktail sticks, crisps. There were some first-generation blacks who drank there: neat suits and ties, pork-pie hats. Again, they didn’t strike me as the breed of man who would shiv someone from a different postcode for their training shoes, or recruit ten-year-olds as drug runners. They were just twinkly old men who had found a much better life in the country of the old colonizer.

As a matter of fact, the Jamaicans who did opt for a better life in Britain chose well. When Jamaica was granted independence in 1962, the murder rate in the country was 3.9 per 100,000 people. That’s only a shade more than Switzerland now. By 2022, at the height of Black Lives Matter activism in the UK, that figure had leapt to 53.34 murders per 100,000 people, making it one of the world’s most dangerous nations.

Over the decades since the Empire Windrush put into port, black urban violence in Britain, and London in particular, has incubated wherever black people congregate and live. The toxic effects of the black influx are not confined to acts of crime, either, but extends to cultural influence at street level. Many impressionable white and Muslim youths speak, dress, and act like feral blacks. Incoming young Muslim men have become far more violent and disruptive for being in a country under black cultural influence than anything to do with the Islamic mores they bring into the UK with them.

You can buy Mark Gullick’s novel Cherub Valley here.

So, what happened? Why are the descendants of the decent men and women who made their way down the gangplank of the Empire Windrush egregiously more likely to commit violent crime today in London than any other ethnic group? This suggests the question (not “begs the question,” please; “suggests the question” doesn’t mean that) as to whether there was something about England that caused this ethnic dysfunction, to white cost. Alas, Blighty is not to blame. Unfortunately, and genetically speaking, the Empire Windrush was carrying very unstable cargo.

It is instructive to compare the arrivals on the Empire Windrush with their descendants. Perhaps you never really know what the hold of a ship contains, and you can’t always trust what you see. Perhaps the Empire Windrush contained something, someone else entirely from what seemed to be the case, like Dracula’s arrival in Whitby, of which it is noted that “[he]e can transform himself to wolf . . . he can come in mist which he create . . .” When Dracula did come ashore on his ghastly mission, in was in the shape of a black dog.

Myth and poetry, mythos and poesis, were inextricably linked in the ancient Greek mind, and the myth of the Empire Windrush inspired poesy of its own. Transport For London (TFL), which is responsible for the tube system, has for some time run an initiative called Poems on the Underground. This was a genuinely good idea when it started, and I recall sitting in my tube seat and reading little snippets of Auden, Eliot, and Shelley to brighten the day and help me forget that I was on a London tube train. Nowadays, however, the poetry is more in keeping with the times. Most black poetry is just graffiti that happens to have been typeset and bound instead of sprayed across a wall, and one of London’s examples of pro-immigration propaganda was a poem on the underground entitled “Colonisation in Reverse.” The opening two stanzas give the flavor of this piece of doggerel:

Wat a joyful news, miss Mattie,
I feel like me heart gwine burs.
Jamaica people colonizing
Englan in reverse.
By de hundred, by de tousan
From country and from town,
By de ship-load, by de plane-load,
Jamaica is Englan boun.

This is not the place for poetry criticism, but as a poem per se, “Colonisation in Reverse” is unimportant. As cultural affirmative action, however, it is a powerful symbol in support of a powerful myth.

The poem was written by Louise Bennett in 1966, and featured prominently in the anniversary celebrations for the Empire Windrush’s 1948 arrival. This voyage marked the beginning of the major black presence in the UK, particularly England and particularly London. The ship’s role has also been crafted and remade to suit the new founding myth of British blackness. As noted, this thoroughly modern mythos holds that blacks were brought to England to do the jobs the English were too lazy to do. This was in 1948, however, and the native and heavily-bombed English weren’t feeling terribly lazy.

This myth of “necessitarianism,” which states that blacks were essential to Britain’s post-war recovery, has been extended to include claims of a black presence throughout history, a cultural dominance (at least visually) attended by the usual undercurrent of demands for reparations as some sort of payback for work blacks did not do. This is all taking place in the country which, more than any other, ended slavery with great loss of life to its Royal Navy.

The proponents of this cultural and historical conquista may be playing a longer game, and may also have been inspired by a recent event elsewhere in the Commonwealth. If blacks can drum into the white elite class the “fact” that British history is and always was black, and whites — or those that rule them — acquiesce to this piece of chicanery, it is not out of the question that this might evolve into an Australian-style “Voice” vote, a national referendum on whether an ethnic minority should have its own constitution. The Australian Voice campaign lost their vote, but success would have granted Aborigines a micro-constitution enabling them to enact legislation relevant to their people. In effect, this would have elected a co-axial government, a government within a government. Imagine blacks with that type of constitutional and legislative reach in Britain.

But to finish with poesy, an English tradition. Poetry requires an effect upon the reader, a response from the poet’s audience. Miss Bennett may have ended her poem light-heartedly, in her mind, but it was not reprised by TFL for its poetic value, but rather to show who are the masters now:

What a devilment a Englan!
Dem face war and brave de worse,
But me wondering how dem gwine stan
Colonizin in reverse.

How, indeed.