The anniversary is a cause for celebration, but events past and present mean there is anger and bitterness too
It should have been a week of sheer festivity, to mark the contributions to life in Britain of people from the Caribbean. Seventy-five years after the HMT Empire Windrush docked in Essex, there is much for their descendants and communities to be proud of. Interviewed in advance of Thursday’s anniversary, Alford Gardner, one of the few remaining survivors of the hundreds who boarded the ship in the Caribbean in 1948, said he “wouldn’t change a damn thing” about his life. Having served with the RAF in the second world war, he left Jamaica aged 22, got married in Leeds and had eight children.
Because 75 is a special anniversary – the National Health Service will reach the same milestone next month – and thanks to dedicated funding for projects celebrating the Windrush generation, there will be a slew of commemorative events this summer. One of these, in Wolverhampton, will explore the entwined histories of the health service and the Caribbean migrants who worked for it. But National Windrush Day, as 22 June has been officially known since 2018, is a day of mixed emotions for many of those whose life stories it recognises. Pleasure in being the focus of attention, and in the fact that immigration is for once being celebrated, is mixed with bitterness at what it took to get this date on the national calendar.
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