Windrush Generations

What is the historical background to Windrush Generations?

Late in the evening on 21 June 1948, the MV Empire Windrush sailed up the River Thames and docked at the Port of Tilbury just to the east of London. Its previous port of call had been Kingston in Jamaica, but it had also collected passengers from Bermuda, from Trinidad, and from Tampico in Mexico. The following morning, 22 June 1948, the 1027 passengers (men, women and children) began to disembark from the ship.

British media attention at the time predominantly focussed on the ‘500 Jamaican men, all of whom were eager to work in Britain’ while largely overlooking the other 527 passengers. Since then, there has been a tendency to depict the arrival of the Empire Windrush as the origin of settled Black communities in Britain and to exemplify it as a seminal moment in Black British history and identity. As a result, the long and varied histories of persons of African origin and descent in Britain can become overshadowed, overlooked, and marginalised by this single event.

Although it is a significant historical moment, the arrival of the Empire Windrush needs to be situated and considered within a longer and more complex narrative of migration and settlement.

It is estimated that between 1948 and 1970, around half a million people migrated from the West Indies to live in Britain. Members of this wave of migration have become known as the ‘Windrush Generation’, and their valuable contributions, to every facet of British life, in the face of unparalleled challenges, have indelibly shaped Britain’s society and culture.

Despite their impact, much remains unknown about those pioneering individuals who left behind all they knew and set out to make a new life in a new country. In some cases, even their arrival in the country is disputed, leading to the Windrush Scandal and the persecution of British citizens with every right to remain in Britain. For the majority, their arrival in Britain marked the beginning of a new phase in their life and the beginning of a new phase in British History. It is vital that we understand that as fully as we can.

What are we aiming to do?

A great many of those who came to Britain from the West Indies in the period 1948-1960 travelled by ship from the Caribbean and arrived via a British port.

The aim of the Windrush Generations project is to transcribe the passenger lists of people arriving in Britain on ships from the West Indies.

The passenger list documents were created by the Board of Trade's Statistics Division and are currently held by The National Archives in series BT26. The passenger information provided in the lists includes the age, occupation, forwarding address in the United Kingdom, and the date of entering the country.

Why are we interested in these passengers?

This project is an extension of our Windrush: Arrival 1948 project, in which we transcribed the passenger list for the Empire Windrush. Building a fuller and clearer picture of the passengers allowed us to gain a better understanding of the onward journeys they took, and the experiences they had, when they embarked upon their new life in Britain.

Our projects can be broadly defined as People’s History, this being the examination of the everyday lives of otherwise ordinary individuals in order to learn about the past.

One of the challenges with People’s History is that historical evidence about the everyday lives of otherwise ordinary individuals can be difficult to find. Other than the simple bureaucratic accounting of births, marriages and deaths, regular people tend to only appear in historical records when they do something of note. It is at those moments, often very brief in nature, that ordinary people become ‘visible’ to the historian. Migration and settlement are examples of those moments, hence the importance of the information contained in the passenger lists.

The information contained in the passenger lists also has further value in helping us to understand broader patterns associated with migration and settlement. Having transcribed the Empire Windrush passenger list, we partnered with Layers of London to map the onward journeys taken by the passengers. Mapping the onward journeys stimulated many questions about, for example, the establishment of networks and communities, the clusters of particular occupations, the reasons why people went to particular places or regions, and what life might have been like for them when they reached and settled in those places.

It became clear that in order really begin to address and tackle these questions, we would need to extend our research well beyond just the Empire Windrush and examine the wider Windrush generation as well. Building a dataset of information about individuals who arrived in Britain from the West Indies in the period 1946 to 1960, will provide us with a far more detailed picture of post-war migration from the Caribbean. It will allow us to identify patterns of migration and settlement over a prolonged and crucial period of time. It will allow us to investigate themes including: community development; occupational influences and clusters; kinship groups; and trends and patterns in the volume and nature of migration.

How will we use the data?

Once the full transcript has been completed and checked, it will be made freely available via a searchable online database.

The nature of the dataset means that it will be possible to use it to investigate a wide and varied range of different topics. In addition to academic researchers, the database will be of use and value to educational and not-for-profit organisations including charities, schools, colleges, community groups, and other interest groups.

Data protection rules mean that we need to act carefully and responsibly with any personal information we collect and share publicly about the passengers, particularly those who are still living. The quantity of data we are collecting means it will not be possible to ascertain which passengers are still living and which are not.

Consequently, we have chosen to adopt some general principles that will ensure that any living individuals cannot easily be identified from our online database.

In the online database:

• The address of the individual will have the house number and/or house identifier redacted.
• The exact date of birth will be redacted and replaced, instead, with the age of the passenger.

The project will also retain a full version of the database that can be made available, on request, to researchers who can demonstrate that have a specific need to access the full database and who will only use it in compliance with data protection rules.