Gus John | Windrush through different eyes

The official narrative of the ill-defined Windrush generation, their reasons for coming to Britain and their interface with, and experience of British society and economy tells one story. Essentially, it is a story of patriotic citizens of Britain and its colonies leaving those colonies to come and rebuild the Mother country after two devastating world wars in 30 years.

There are iconic images of sharp-suited Caribbean men disembarking the Empire Windrush on June 22, 1948, arriving like an army on a mission with a common purpose. Little is said about who and what they left behind and how reciprocal Britain was in attending to their needs and circumstances.

The Windrush narrative largely sanitises the black Caribbean post-war experience of life with Britain in British colonies in the Caribbean before and after those two world wars, with life in Britain itself after the Windrush and other carriers by sea and air brought hundreds of thousands of British citizens to Britain.

It is right and fitting, therefore, that there is at this time in Britain a convergence of three movements involving Caribbean people demanding compensation from the British state. One is the demand for compensation for the barbarism of Theresa May’s pogrom, popularly known as the Windrush scandal; the second is the growing movement for compensation for victims of the historic ESN scandal that involved the state shunting thousands of Caribbean children into schools for the ‘educationally subnormal’, and the third is the wider movement for reparatory justice and reparations for chattel enslavement.

One major intervention that links those three movements is the award-winning film, Barrel Children: The Families Windrush Left Behind, by Nadine White, the multi-award-winning journalist, filmmaker and cultural archivist.

THE WINDRUSH ‘CONTRIBUTION’

Migration for work has been a well-known phenomenon across the Caribbean for well over a century. Sending remittances ‘back home’ took the form not only of cash transfers, but the shipping of barrels, typically containing foodstuffs, clothes, household goods and farming equipment. Barrels arrived from Cuba, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, Curacao, the USA, Panama, i.e., places to which people migrated for work for varying periods.

With migration to Britain and North America after the Second World War, however, most ports across the Caribbean created the infrastructure to process the clearance of hundreds of barrels weekly. The barrel trade contributed massively not only to the exchequer in those countries, but to supporting the local economy more broadly, e.g., local entrepreneurs such as truck and van owners, boat owners and casual labourers.

So, while migration to Britain was a right which many welcomed, especially given the prevailing economic conditions across the Caribbean in the decade before the start of the Second World War and the economic hardships that were accentuated by that war, most of those emigrating on the Empire Windrush and after envisaged spending no more than five, or at most ten, years in Britain. This is a factor that is seldom explored in all the discourse on Windrush and its ‘contribution’ to building Britain.

Migration was not an unqualified gain for newcomers from the Caribbean, whether they arrived on the Windrush or subsequently. It left a great deal of trauma in its wake and generated even more trauma when those who were in the process of settling and building a new life in Britain sought to unite their fragmented families by ‘sending for’ children they had left behind.

OPPRESSIVE ENVIRONMENT

My own work as a research social worker for Manchester City Council (1971-1973) gave me a deep insight into the layers of trauma generated by migration. I worked with 26 Caribbean families in Moss Side, all with a common set of presenting problems requiring social work intervention. That was a time when Caribbean families saw involvement with the police, or with social services, for any reason not only as stigmatising, but as bringing ‘shame’ on the family.

The presenting problems were typically: children coming to join family units which to them were both alien and hostile; where they had no bond with biological parents, let alone siblings born in Britain; where step parents treated them horribly and discriminated between them and their siblings; where there were various levels of sexual abuse, especially by older siblings and not infrequently by stepfathers; where the newcomers were made to do disproportionate amounts of chores…and more.

Many of those children told me stories of how they were treated by those relatives, godparents, etc. with whom they had been left; stories of neglect, overwork, denial of clothes, toys, etc. sent for them in those barrels, as well as physical punishment when they dared to challenge those practices. ‘Barrel children’ therefore suffered layers of trauma on both sides of the Atlantic. Even today, there are adults in the Caribbean who have not forgiven, and still feel they cannot forgive their parents, mostly long dead, for leaving them behind and worse yet, for sending for their siblings and not for them, especially if they did not share the same mother and father.

Children were leaving that oppressive environment in Manchester, as elsewhere in the country, to go to school and encounter an equally hostile and invariably racist environment that took no account of the problems they might be experiencing at home.

Children’s reticence to share those problems, not least for fear of being punished for getting their parents/carers into trouble, simply accentuated the trauma and was judged as evidence of psychological maladjustment, or learning difficulties. As a result, many children were given assessment tests for which they were neither mentally or emotionally prepared, in addition to the fact that those tests were biased on the axis of race and of class. They led inexorably to a disproportionate number of children being labelled as ‘educational subnormal’ (ESN).

LAYERS OF TRAUMA

As a consequence of all that, children were repeatedly running away from home or asking to be taken into care and away from the emotional and physical violence they were suffering at home. The fact that there was widespread condemnation of the child rearing practices of Caribbean parents who were regarded as being strict disciplinarians with a love of physical punishment (Don’t spare the rod and spoil the child), led to even more conflict within children.

While wanting the physical punishment to stop, those children were also full of anxiety about the consequences of complaining, especially knowing that that could result in police action being taken against parents.

An entire generation of black children was traumatised by those experiences over many years, a trauma which was amplified by the experience of being judged to be ESN, or/and sent to ESN residential schools. These layers of trauma impacted their adolescence, their vulnerability as adults, their ability to form and sustain meaningful relationships, their confidence in the workplace, their parenting of their own children … and much else besides.

Those who consider that being invited to Downing Street to celebrate the Windrush generation’s ‘contribution’ with the likes of Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper is like going to heaven without dying, have a moral obligation to bear in mind the fact that, very much like the Windrush scandal, there are people carrying those layers of trauma to this day.

Many are still living with mental illness as a consequence of it all. Many have gone to their grave earlier than they might have done as a consequence of it all. Barrel Children is a graphic story, not just of the past. It is a story of trauma passed down through the generations, trauma that the Caribbean diaspora in Britain did not own up to and confront then, any more than we do now.

This is unavoidably a part of the self-repair we must undertake in our struggle for self-emancipation and for reparatory Justice.

Professor Augustine John is a human rights campaigner and honorary Fellow at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.