The coronation of the young queen was, if anything, more panoplied and pearled than that of her father. For those with ears to hear it, however, a new and sombre note had been struck. The new monarch of Great Britain was not the Empress of India; she was proclaimed simply as ‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith’. Her declared devotion to ‘our great Imperial family’ was celebrated, but she understood her new place.
The preceding year had been marked by the Festival of Britain. If it could not match the opulence of its Victorian model, then that was its glory. The times were quieter, pockets shallower and the people less inclined to triumphalism, but the bunting fluttered and the beer flowed. The Festival inaugurated, too, the establishment of the ‘South Bank’ as one of London’s cultural centres. There were jarring moments, of course. One of the exhibits was a collection of printed rayon cloths, and the king was invited to inspect them but had no notion of their purpose. When enlightened, he was heard to mutter: ‘Thank God we don’t have to wear those.’ Despite all outward gestures to popular sentiment, the royal family could not fully share the shared experience. Their role during the war years was revealed as an anomaly.
The empire was in fact on the brink, though few cared to recognize the fact. India had gone in 1947, lost, according to political legend, by the condescension of the middle-class English rulers. In truth, the efforts of Gandhi, Congress and the Muslim League had done much to convince the British that they had outstayed their day. The government was presented with a choice: the nation could afford an empire or a welfare state, but not both. The princes of the subcontinent were warned by Lord Mountbatten that if they resisted integration into the successor states of India and Pakistan they would be cut adrift, with neither dominion status nor a place in the Commonwealth. Independence came at midnight on 15 August 1947, and with it partition. Although none had foreseen this, some 14 million people were displaced as a consequence and countless lives lost. The line dividing India from Pakistan was drawn by the British, with scant regard for local realities or feelings.
Without India, what value the empire? To be sure, people admired the blaze of imperial pink on the map, but the empire had been a faint glimmer of gaslight in the minds of most. The paradox of an imperial and industrial superpower that allowed so much poverty in its midst was precisely what had inspired Marx and Engels. Cyril Radcliffe, on many occasions a defender of the empire, and the man who was tasked with dividing India from Pakistan, found himself agonizing over the question for the rest of his life: ‘The gifts we brought … were Roman: peace, order, justice and the fruits that those things bring … Such benefits were admirable.’ But he also felt obliged to issue a caveat: ‘It may be that the government of one people by another can never be the best government in the long run, since benevolence and fairness are no substitute for national inspiration.’ Though he was speaking of India, his remarks may serve for the empire as a whole, which was to undergo osmosis on a vast and humbling scale.
It began quietly enough. When the Empire Windrush docked in the summer of 1948, it brought less than a thousand people from the Caribbean. Some had paid their way and some had hitched a lift, while others were soldiers. They had heard of the ‘mother country’, as it was still known, but few had visited it. At first, they and other groups were met with placards bearing the legend, ‘Welcome to Britain’. But what welcome lay behind the placards and the smiles? As the settlers settled, the legends changed and ‘No Coloureds’ became a common sight on boarding-house windows. In its own hideous way, it was inclusive. Any skin pigmentation darker than pink was refused. Who knew what might happen to the sheets?
The experience for the immigrants was dislocating in many senses. You arrived, and then you moved and, more often than not, moved again. The migration did not stop at Southampton. A soldier recalled:
When we arrived at Tilbury, a few people, political people, mostly Communists, you know, tried to befriend us … But all it needed at the time was who hadn’t got any place to go to, wants somewhere to go, and that was uppermost in our minds … you’ve got to go around and look, because in those days, it’s either two or three of you in a room, in those days, as a black man, it’s very hard to get a room, you wouldn’t get one. They always put on the board, ‘Black – niggers not wanted here’, on the board you know, these boards out there, ‘No Niggers’ or ‘No Colour’, things like that.
Vince Reid, the only teenager on the boat, highlighted a fact that many in England had chosen to forget: the Windrush generation represented only the latest chapter in the long tale of a Black England. ‘I was a boy. And I wasn’t expecting anything. But how I was received was when I went to school, first of all, I was a subject of curiosity, which is quite surprising when you think that you had black soldiers in England. And, you know, people would come up and rub your skin and see if it would rub off the black, and rub your hair and, you know, it’s really insulting.’
War films of the time, and later, show little of black men and women contributing to the country in any way. But for the immigrants, visibility could prove a curse. Tryphena Anderson recalled: ‘You’re not thinking of your skin, but you feel other people are thinking of it. And every little thing you do reflects on your reaction … if you get on the bus, and there’s an empty seat, you sit down … But when the bus fills up and you find you’re the last one to have somebody beside you, then you know something is wrong.’
Then there was the cold, which could steal through the thickest clothing, let alone the light but formal dress favoured by the new arrivals. Theirs was not solely, however, a tale of dislocation and prejudice. Warmth and friendliness could be found, often in the most surprising places. One immigrant recalls a visit to a butcher: ‘I got a mixture of genuine affection and a lot of curiosity. I always remember going into my first Dewhurst butcher’s shop, when I was about seven, and this big, large lady looked at me. She kept looking at me and then she turned to the butcher, and said, ‘Ooh, I could eat him.’ I’ll always remember Dewhurst butcher’s shops.’
The England to which they had come was hag-ridden and worn. The proud imperial nation of rumour or propaganda could be discerned with difficulty in a small, cramped island, still gasping from the blows of a war it had nearly lost. The promise of ‘diamond streets’ was belied by ones that seemed paved with lead, gashed by bomb sites, beside grey houses interchangeable in size and shape and a population which seemed so old. Along with anxiety, fear and relief, the immigrants sometimes felt a certain pity for the nation that had adopted them:
But what was most striking, I think, was the age of the people. At that time there were old men working on the stations, and on the buses there were old men or old women. There weren’t very many young people. And then we began to realise that the war had taken its toll of the young people between eighteen and probably thirty-five … and people were living in prefabs, and that was quite strange. You couldn’t understand why they were living in what we saw as huts.
Other customs also attracted bewilderment. There was a vast and varied network of child support, but many Caribbeans found it at once invasive and remote – the deeper support of family appeared to be lacking. Another novelty for many of the Windrush generation was being addressed as ‘sir’, which seemed bizarre rather than respectful. Some of the customs they encountered provoked fear and dislike among the immigrants, and for many it was difficult to determine which was harsher, the coldness of the climate or the coldness of the people.