The ship Empire Windrush brought 492 immigrants to Tilbury, near London, on 22 June 1948.

The ship was en route from Australia to England via the Atlantic, docking in Kingston, Jamaica to collect a small number of the thousands of Caribbean men and women who had been recruited into the RAF during the war, who were keen to move to Britain and rejoin the service. At the same time, an advert had appeared in a Jamaican newspaper offering cheap transport on the ship for anybody who wanted to come and work in the UK, as at the time there were no restrictions on citizens of one part of the British Empire moving to another. The arrival of the boat, which carried among its passengers the calypso musicians Lord Kitchener and Lord Beginner and sixty Polish women displaced by the Second World War, immediately prompted complaints from Members of Parliament.

The arrivals were temporarily housed in the Clapham South deep shelter in southwest London, less than a mile away from the Coldharbour Lane Employment Exchange in Brixton, where many of the new arrivals sought to find work. Many only intended to stay in Britain for a few years, but although a number returned to the Caribbean, the majority remained to settle permanently. The arrival of the passengers was an extremely important landmark in the history of modern Britain, and the famous images of West Indians filing off the gangplank of the Empire Windrush has come to symbolise the beginning of the modern British multicultural society.

There was plenty of work available in post-war Britain, and industries such as British Rail, the National Health Service and public transport recruited almost exclusively from Jamaica and Barbados. However, housing was in short supply following the wartime bombing and the shortage led to some of the first clashes with the established white community, as both housing and employment in the private sector was denied to early Afro-Caribbean immigrants on the grounds of race.
Although campaigns created by successive British governments had encouraged immigration, many new arrivals were to endure intolerance and extreme racism from certain sectors of the indigenous British society. Excluded from much of the social and economic life around them, they began to expand the institutions they had brought with them – the churches, the co-operative method of saving called ‘pardner’ – and influence the existing institutions to which they were allowed access: trade unions, local councils, and professional associations.

The clashes continued and worsened into the 1950s, with riots erupting in cities including London, Birmingham and Nottingham. In 1958, attacks by white youths in the London area of Notting Hill marred relations with West Indian residents, leading to the creation of the annual Notting Hill Carnival, which was initiated in 1959 as a positive response by the Caribbean community.

In 1962, responding to the perceived influx of immigration into Britain, and to relentless pressure from a variety of political groups, most notably their own Monday Club, the Conservative government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. This greatly restricted entry into the country, and by 1972 only holders of work permits, or people with parents or grandparents born in the UK could gain entry – effectively stemming Caribbean immigration.

However, despite the restrictive measures an entire generation of Britons with African-Caribbean heritage now existed, contributing to British society in virtually every field. The number of British persons born in the West Indies had increased from 15,000 in 1951 to over 172,000 in 1961. The total population of persons of West Indian heritage by 1981 was between 500,000 and 550,000, depending upon the official source used.

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