22/06/2020
Celebrating Those Who Came Before Us.🖤
Monday 22 June marks the third Windrush Day, the 72nd anniversary of the SS Empire Windrush arriving at Tilbury Docks in Essex carrying the first Caribbean migrants.
Many of those who left sunnier climes were ex-servicemen who fought with the UK in the Second World War and had been invited to a bomb-damaged Britain to fill labour shortages.
Windrush Day was established as a celebration to honour the enormous contribution those who made that journey - and others who followed from elsewhere - have made to Britain.
The annual event was established in 2018 in the wake the Windrush scandal when many of those invited to Britain suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of immigration laws that, unbeknown to them, had changed around them.
Two years on from the inaugural Windrush Day, their fight for justice continues.
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Who are the Windrush generation?
HMT Windrush brought the first post-war migrants from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean islands, then British colonies, to the UK in 1948.
There were just over 1,000 passengers on board that first sailing.
Over a 23-year period, an estimated half a million people made the 8,000 mile journey from Caribbean islands, encouraged to the UK to help rebuild a Britain battered by war.
Many arrived as children, travelling on their parents’ passports and with no documents of their own.
Few intended to stay for long.
But many did settle in the UK, establishing communities, raising families, paying taxes, even serving in the British armed forces - contributing to what the 1940s adverts had referred to as ‘the Mother country’ economically, socially and culturally.
Then, decades later, many found themselves unable to prove they had the right to work, or in some cases even live, in the country they had called home for 50 years.
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