Windrush generation: ‘If people had information on you, you never knew what they might do’

Amelia Gentleman: The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (Guardian Faber, £18.99)

Colin Grant: Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)

“The Englishman can be the nicest man out when he is telling you no,” one interviewee, referred to as Mr Johnson, tells author Colin Grant in Homecoming, a compelling oral history of the West Indian migrant experience in post-war Britain. Mr Johnson had come to England from British Guiana, and was looking for a job, but found himself greeted with polite and unyielding refusal by potential employers.

Another man, who moved to Leeds from St Kitts and Nevis, tells Grant “with the Americans you know where you stand, with the English you don’t”. Others encountered the full force of explicit hatred: racial slurs shouted at them in the streets or in the workplace, or physical violence. One woman attended a church service, and noticed she was the only black person there. Afterwards she was told by the minister to never come back.

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One of Grant’s challenges in writing the book was to get the people he interviewed to open up about their experiences. Grant’s own parents came to Luton from Jamaica in the late 1950s. “Children of my generation grew up in ignorance, scratching around in the dark, picking up, and being grateful for, crumbs of information about the lives of parents back in the cinnamon-scented past,” he writes.

This silence was frequently a tactical response to the hostility immigrants to England faced, and a fear of what might happen if they gave too much away. Grant notes the “suspicion and brittleness around sharing personal information” that his father demonstrated. It was born of “superstition and self-protection. If people had information about you, you never knew what they might do with it”.

Such fears seem prescient when you read Amelia Gentleman’s The Windrush Betrayal, based on, and significantly expanded from, her award-winning series of investigative articles for the Guardian about the stripping of legal immigration status from migrants from the Commonwealth unable to prove exactly when they arrived in Britain. Often this was simply because a fifty-year-old passport had been lost somewhere along the way, one that bore a right to remain stamp showing the date of entry to the country.

In most situations the loss of such a document would perhaps be an inconvenience. In the case of the Windrush generation it was catastrophic. Many West Indians who had travelled to Britain as children in the fifties and sixties hadn’t renewed their passports in the ensuing years, generally because they couldn’t afford to holiday abroad. When they did apply for a new passport – perhaps to return to their home island to see a dying parent – they triggered an unforeseen chain of events that resulted in having to prove their British citizenship. (There was another way of proving entry to the country: registration slips that the Home Office kept in a basement in an office building in Croydon, until they were destroyed in 2009 to clear space before the property was sold.)

Their British identity is a point of pride to the Windrush generation. Grant writes that his father “had an uncomplicated attachment to his moral right” to be in Britain. The British Nationality Act of 1948 conferred British citizen status on colonial subjects, effectively making the trip from Jamaica to London an internal journey. A series of immigration acts from the 1960s onwards restricted migration from the former colonies. The 1971 Immigration Act required documentary evidence of a migrant’s presence in the UK before the cut-off date of January 1st, 1973.

The Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government, elected in 2010, introduced their so-called “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants in a deeply stupid, costly and ultimately doomed attempt to bring down annual immigration figures from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands. This was accompanied by the imposition of austerity on public services. For the members of the Windrush generation snagged by hostile environment policies, austerity had immediate implications: legal aid for immigration cases was removed, making appeals prohibitively expensive.

Cruelty, racism, even deportation: this can't have been what migrants pictured when they originally left their islands

Although immigration enforcement officials were employed in ever greater numbers by the government it was impossible for them to check everyone’s status, so the responsibility was passed to civilians. The procedure of checking passports was tacked onto everyday transactions, with employers and landlords (and, briefly, banks) expected to confirm immigration status or else face an increasingly hefty fine. In effect, this outsourced immigration checks “to a whole new range of people who would be required to work as amateur, unpaid immigration officers,” Gentleman writes.

The logic of surveillance infiltrated daily existence. You could report suspicions of your neighbour’s immigration status to a helpline. The Home Office even wanted schools to check the status of students’ parents. Many of the people interviewed by Gentleman tell a similar tale: they lost their jobs and were evicted by their landlords soon after being designated illegal immigrants by the Home Office. Even if their status was later normalised – and in some cases it has taken years – they had run up huge debts. Others were taken to detention centres and some sent back to the country of their birth. Gentleman covers each of these stories in detail.

Cruelty, racism, even deportation: this can’t have been what migrants pictured when they originally left their islands to travel to Britain. One of the major themes of Grant’s Homecoming is the disparity between the image of Britain projected culturally from the motherland into the classrooms and cinemas of the West Indies – Romantic poetry, bowler hats, Ealing comedies – and the reality migrants experienced when they arrived: industrial towns, cramped accommodation, cold weather. One woman who moved from British Guiana to Newcastle spent the big freeze of 1955 sheltering from the snow at a showing of Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes in a Tyneside cinema, staying for further showings until she felt psychologically ready to face the cold again.

Ultimately, West Indians in Britain asserted their own culture, making themselves at home when faced by indifference, hostility or violence. Memorable chapters of Homecoming address the Notting Hill and Nottingham riots of 1958, and the beginnings of the carnival tradition in London and Leeds – a reaction to the riots and an assertive statement of, simultaneously, cultural difference and belonging. There are accounts of the voyage from people who sailed on the Windrush itself. There’s also a wonderful chapter about the front rooms of West Indian-owned houses which were invariably decorated with floral wallpaper and furnished with a Blue Spot radiogram and a drinks cabinet, becoming social venues for blues parties at which reggae records were played late into the night. One woman shares her childhood memories of her parents’ house and wonders if the parties and attention to detail in decorating the front room represented “an unspoken decision […]to stick and stay in this country”.

Reading both books together is sobering. Grant’s book is ultimately a joyful, polyphonic account that resists feelgood platitudes – he’s not afraid to explore the more troubling aspects of immigrants’ experiences in Britain. People’s voices are rendered so skilfully that you feel like you’re sitting in the room with them. Gentleman’s book, meanwhile, leaves you shaking with anger, and with the fear – no, certainty – that incidents such as the Windrush scandal will happen again. She makes it clear that, despite their claims of lessons having been learned, it’s difficult to have much trust in the Home Office. Many of the policies that led to the scandal remain in place. Lately, Gentleman’s attention has turned to the registration of EU citizens in the UK. What could go wrong? The Windrush Betrayal provides some harrowing clues.