{"id":6361,"date":"2021-10-15T11:40:32","date_gmt":"2021-10-15T09:40:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historyextra.com\/?p=189130"},"modified":"2021-10-15T11:58:10","modified_gmt":"2021-10-15T09:58:10","slug":"a-west-indian-immigrant-in-1960s-britain-a-real-lonely-londoner","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/rss_feed\/a-west-indian-immigrant-in-1960s-britain-a-real-lonely-londoner\/","title":{"rendered":"A West Indian immigrant in 1960s Britain: A real lonely Londoner"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Elinor Evans\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Friday, 15 October 2021 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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\u201cOne grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in a blur as if it is not London at all but some strange place on another planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

With these haunting words, Samuel Selvon\u2019s iconic work of fiction, The Lonely Londoners<\/em>, begins. Written in Creolese and first published in 1956, it chronicles the experience of the working-class West Indian as Selvon\u2019s rich cast of characters arriving from the \u201cboat train\u201d hustle for jobs and accommodation in an alien and sometimes hostile city.<\/p>\n

The experience of those in The Lonely Londoners<\/em> is familiar to my Guyanese father, Eddie Singh, and many of his generation; a generation that is now, sadly, dying out.<\/p>\n

Now 80, my father remembers leaving a balmy Trinidad on a clear night in November 1961 aboard the SS Ascania<\/em>, watching from the deck as the island\u2019s rainbow-coloured lights receded into the distance. Three months later, he arrived in a frosty Southampton in the brutal and unforgiving winter of January 1962. (The boat\u2019s propeller had broken down and what should have been a two-week journey ended up taking three months as the voyage went via the Caribbean island of Martinique and Funchal, Madeira.)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

It was minus four degrees Celsius and he remembers his fingers sticking to the metal guardrail on deck. \u201cIt was extraordinary cold, like the inside of a freezer. Your breath misting and making shapes,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen we disembarked, people were so cold, they were covering their face with towel and using anything they had to wrap around their head to ward off the chill. We had no scarf. One elderly West Indian lady was walking around cussing us. \u2018Take that off your ears,\u2019 she was saying. \u2018They will photograph you and it will appear in Trinidad and Guyana about how y\u2019all behave.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The press attention around the new arrivals was largely hostile, with articles describing \u201cthe flood of migrants\u201d threatening scarce housing and jobs all-too common. At the time my father was travelling, the mood in Britain had shifted largely against the \u2018open-door policy\u2019 of the 1948 British Nationality Act, which had heralded the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush<\/em><\/a> and subsequently a large wave of migration from Britain\u2019s colonies in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n

\""The\"<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>
The HMT Empire Windrush often marks the beginning of a large wave of migration from Britain\u2019s colonies in the Caribbean. (Photo by Daily Herald Archive\/SSPL\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n

Many of those who travelled were citizens of the UK and colonies, held British passports and equal rights of residence. But as numbers grew, from 46,850 in 1956 to around 140,000 in 1961, the reception that greeted them became less than friendly. Ugly race riots erupted in London\u2019s Notting Hill and Robin Hood Chase in Nottingham in 1958, and in 1960 an increasingly jittery Conservative government sought to restrict entry.<\/p>\n

The same month my father departed Trinidad, a Commonwealth Immigrants bill had started making its way through the House of Commons, becoming law on 1 July 1962, and ending the automatic right of people in the British Commonwealth and Colonies to settle in the UK.<\/p>\n