Before the Windrush

How do we explain the widespread ignorance of the presence of people of African and Caribbean origin in British history? Black men and women appear, for example, in Pepys’s diaries; in eighteenth-century portaits; sailing with Captain Cook on the Endeavour; not to mention the stories of Thackeray, Trollope, Dornford Yates, W.S. Gilbert, Laurie Lee and Evelyn Waugh. Yet there is a general misapprehension that people of African descent were absent from Britain until very recently. This misconception has been nurtured by a belief that apparent exceptions can be ignored.

There is a further mistaken belief that those black people who do appear were temporary residents – and often worked in unskilled occupations – and this added to the notion that they made little contribution to British society. In 1998 celebrations were held of the half-century anniversary of the arrival in England of the immigrant ship Empire Windrush from Jamaica, but these often merely re-confirmed the prejudice that the black presence in Britain was recent, alien and working-class.