Growing up in Jamaica, Alford Gardner had no interest in learning British history. Today, the 97-year-old has ironically become the face of it as a pioneering member of the generation of Caribbean migrants who marked the symbolic beginning of a multicultural Britain.
In May 1948, Gardner and his brother were among 492 West Indians onboard the Empire Windrush, a postwar generation that helped rebuild the country and paved the way for others to follow.
He recalls feeling his return to the UK, where he had served with the Royal Air Force as a ground engineer during the second world war, as though he were moving from one home to the next.
“I find it really funny,” Gardner said with a deep belly laugh from his home in Leeds. “It isn’t me at all, it’s history. I didn’t expect to be a part of it, but here I am.”
Seventy-five years on – and 16 grandchildren, 25 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild later – his memories are as vivid as ever.
The journey to England came after his sister learned of the ship’s arrival from Australia before it was advertised in the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper.
The £29 ticket was costly to Gardner, who had returned to Jamaica with few job opportunities. Unbeknown to him, and after receiving £50 from his father, Gardner’s place onboard had already been secured.
“Oh, I wasn’t happy about leaving mama, but I had to go,” he said. “I just felt if I could come and find a place, find my birds, I would soon have things done my way.”
A decade before Empire Windrush arrived, the vessel was used as a Nazi cruise ship, deployed as part of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda programme. Years later, the name has become shorthand to describe the scandal the generation of West Indian Britons faced caused by Theresa May’s 2012 policy, which wrongly classified legal British residents as illegal immigrants.
For Gardner, it was a happy crossing. From morning until night, passengers gambled with cigarettes and the little money they had. There was music, with calypsonians Lord Kitchener and Lord Beginner onboard. And Gardner was reunited with other ex-servicemen from Trinidad and Barbados he had not anticipated seeing again after the war ended.
“It was brilliant,” he recalled with a wide smile. “Really brilliant.”
The ship stopped in Havana and Mexico before docking in Bermuda for five days, where they encountered segregation for the first time. While the colour bar and signs for whites and coloureds were new to Gardner, his brother and his friends, they were ignored as they picnicked in a forbidden area.
“They had signs, but once we got there, good luck to them. We just did our own thing,” said Gardner, who was 22 at the time. “As I said, I don’t let these things bother me.”
As the ship made its way to England, the prime minister at the time, Clement Attlee, had entertained the possibility of preventing passengers from embarking, or diverting the ship to east Africa. Gardner recalls seeing men jump ship and swim ashore as they approached Tilbury in Essex. After the ship’s arrival, it is said that the colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, reassured colleagues “they won’t last one winter in England”.
The “damn cold” is the first, and only thing Gardner said bothered him. As a proclaimed country boy, he was not impressed by London and returned to Leeds. He’s lived there ever since.
In 1944, Caribbean RAF recruits had been greeted warmly by the secretary of state for the colonies and an RAF band at the Liverpool docks. But following the war, the shift in immigration perspectives was notable.
Gardner returned to find “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs” signs in windows. Accommodation had become difficult to find, leaving him to sleep in a chair or on the floor at times. Finding work was equally challenging. And when visiting his white partner’s parents to ask for her hand in marriage, her father took one look at Gardner and said: “What’s he doing here, get him out of here.”
For all the progress Britain has made, this cannot be said for those caught up in the Windrush scandal in 2018 when thousands of legal UK residents were mistakenly labelled as immigration offenders. People are still struggling to receive documentation and compensation, five years after the government first apologised.
“It was disgusting. That shouldn’t be happening these days,” said Gardner. Had he not made a trip to London in the 1980s to apply for a passport after a friend warned they would be thrown out of the country, he may have been caught in the net too.
“This is England, things could change how governments change,” said Gardner, reflecting on the last 75 years. “It’s hopeful how things are going, things have gotten a lot better than they were in the very early times.”
“Every little thing is going to be all right,” he says, laughing again.
It was not until the 50th anniversary that his now-71-year-old son, Howard, learned of his father’s journey on Empire Windrush.
Together, they have co-authored Gardner’s memoir, Finding Home: A Windrush Story, due to be published on 22 June. Through helping his father write the book, Howard said he learned more about Jamaica, a place he understood little of growing up in.
“I still feel English,” said Howard, recalling being greeted as a native the first time he visited the island. “But that Jamaican side is more prominent than it was before.”
While Howard believes the generation that helped rebuild postwar Britain and influenced its way of life culturally was taken for granted at first, he said understanding had increased in recent years – and he hoped it would continue to grow.
“They came to do a job and they were happy to do it. It wasn’t like in the days of slavery when they were forced to go to a place to do a job. They wanted to come and they wanted to help the mother country in their hour of need,” said Howard.
“I’m so proud, the whole family is so proud of him,” he added, recalling their visits to Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament. “For ordinary, working-class people, it’s been a real experience.”
For Gardner, the experience is one he would live all over, unchanged, if given the chance.
“As the song goes, I did what I had to do and I did it my way,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, live and let live. I don’t let things bother me these days.”
• Photography by Chris Thomond
