20 March 1956 – 23 July 2020
The cultural historian pays tribute to the modest but powerful woman who, having been threatened with deportation herself, became a prominent Windrush campaigner
I originally met Paulette when the scandal was first exposed in 2017. We were on the radio together talking about the campaign. She had been wrongly detained by the British government and endured two distressing spells at Yarl’s Wood detention centre. An ordinary, working-class black woman, she had been in Britain from the age of 10, worked, raised a family and should have been enjoying her retirement, but she’d had her liberty taken away and been threatened with deportation back to Jamaica – a country she hardly knew.
After the show, we exchanged details. When she discovered I was also from Wolverhampton and that we were both of Jamaican heritage, we realised we had a double bond. She was proud of her Jamaican and Black Country roots – I am as well. We kept in regular contact. My parents still live in Wolverhampton and whenever I went there to see them, I’d give her and her daughter Natalie a call and we’d go and have a drink at the heritage centre which is run by the African-Caribbean community and used to be the constituency headquarters of the Conservative party. It was allegedly in that same building that Enoch Powell wrote his “rivers of blood” speech. And it was in the year that he delivered his speech, 1968, that Paulette arrived in Wolverhampton. So many ironies.
