‘We had not lost knowledge of our African heritage. We emerged the richer.’
The life and soul of the party: Joyce Trotman celebrates the Windrush generation
‘It was almost sacramental.’
by Joyce Trotman
13th October 2023
Seventy five years ago – 21 June, 1948 – about a thousand passengers stepped off HMT Empire Windrush onto Tilbury Docks. The majority, 802 people, were from the Caribbean, most of those (539) from Jamaica specifically. They had come at the invitation of the British government to help in the regeneration of the country after the disasters of the second world war. They were not immigrants as we might understand the term today, but British citizens, holding valid British passports and entitled to the rights and privileges of the new British Nationality Act. As loyal subjects they had come to the assistance of the ‘mother country’.
