Barbados TODAY’s Sheria Brathwaite was one of three journalists selected for a trip to London organised by the British High Commission last month. This is the last in a series of articles from that trip.
There’s a ‘Little Barbados’ in England – the largest settlement of Barbadians and people of Barbadian descent outside of the Caribbean, according to the BBC.
Nestled in the county of Berkshire lies Reading, just west of London. Putting the accent on interconnectedness with Barbados is the town’s official twinning with Little Bristol – Speightstown.
We dine at a small pub here and meet Jefferson Jones and Norma Parris, members of a long-standing group, Barbados and Friends Association. It organises fundraising activities for charity, be it a noteworthy cause in Barbados, a school or the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. They also assist Bajans living in or visiting the UK with any challenges they may encounter.
The twinning dates back to 2003 when members of the association’s executive collaborated with the Reading Borough Council, Jones explains. “The two towns work together exchanging ideas and students. It was to create a deeper link between the two towns,” he says.
The story of Barbadian migration to Britain is deeply linked to the history of postwar Britain – Windrush, the shorthand label for the influx of Caribbean people to Britain, borrowed from the name of the ship, Empire Windrush, that brought first ex-servicemen, then their families and others to London’s Tilbury docks in June 1948.
This led to the massive contribution of Barbadians among other Caribbean people working on British Rail, London Transport and the National Health Service in the rebuilding of a war-torn nation in the 1950s and 1960s, even amid racialised, often violently expressed, resentment and discrimination. Many others were recruited for skilled and unskilled labour from factories to tea shops. Many fanned out from Brixton and Peckham to further north and south of London’s Thames River divide, as far as Liverpool and Birmingham, Manchester and Leicester — or as near as the one-hour drive west from London to Reading.
Jones moved to the UK with his parents in 1966 while Parris followed four years later.
Although they were not affected by the scandal that plagued the Windrush generation during Theresa May’s premiership in 2018, they recalled what life was like for numerous people who experienced hardship.
A policy to combat illegal immigration turned into a concerted attack by the UK Home Office on people of Caribbean heritage who were wrongfully deported or threatened with deportation, detained and denied the legal rights they were entitled to. Under the 1948 British Nationality Act that treated the then-colonial people as British subjects, the West Indians were entitled to the fruits of full citizenship.
Although a compensation scheme was developed, only a few victims have benefited from the programme as several of them died before they could receive a settlement.
Having a legal ‘right to remain’ in the UK, many did not seek the immigration documentation usually required.
In 2012, the UK introduced the Hostile Environment Policy, a series of legislative and administrative measures to make it extremely difficult for presumed undocumented immigrants to live in Britain.
Under the policy, employers, landlords, healthcare workers and public servants had to check immigration status before offering jobs, housing, medical treatment and other benefits.
But by 2018, news reports emerged that the Home Office did not keep proper records of those granted leave to remain and did not issue the paperwork needed to confirm their status.
Parris recalls what it was like seeing people deprived of their rights.
“When Guy Hewitt was the Commissioner to Barbados in the UK, one of the first discussions was about Windrush after the story broke. He came to us as an organisation and we had one of those first discussions here in Reading. I was the chair of the national association at that time, and since then I went on to speak about it on BBC South. I was also on a few Oxford radio shows and gave a few statements about Windrush and how it had impacted people.
“I remember people, who went on holiday and then came back, were not let back into the country by the Immigration Department because all of a sudden their passport didn’t
have the right stamp to say that they could reside here indefinitely.
“All of a sudden people no longer had a job because they couldn’t prove that they were here legally. So all the time people were being asked to prove that they were here legally, like you had to produce records from school, you had to produce the papers that you came over here with your passport and immigration documents and things like that. Because they could not prove that, they were then denied access to homes, to pensions, different things like that. It was challenging and soul-breaking for the people who are affected. In some cases, people were put into camps and detention centres.”
While Parris did not meet anyone who was later detained, she says she helped a schoolmate acquire their documents.
“The King’s Counsel who helped put together the compensation package used to come and give talks to us about what was happening because you had to encourage people to not give up. And at the end, the government had to back down because in less than two weeks, the whole diaspora, not just Barbadians, came together and got over 100 000 signatures [for an appeal document], which then forced the whole Windrush debacle to be discussed in British Parliament. They had to put it on the table, whereas before they were resisting talking about it.”
That fight is still ongoing and there is legal aid provided for people still being affected by the policy.
