Musicians on the Windrush

 Via the National Archives site.

26-year-old Aldwyn Roberts from Trinidad was onboard and listed his occupation as ‘Artist’. He was a calypso singer and is better known by his stage name, ‘Lord Kitchener’. During the journey, he wrote the song ‘London is the Place for Me’, which he performed on the ship’s arrival to Tilbury.

Mona Baptiste was similarly from Trinidad and was 21 when she travelled on the ship. Although her occupation was listed as ‘Clerk’ in the passenger list, she was a blues singer and went on to have a successful career in the music and broadcasting industries.

Free Windrush Resources

Visit the Windrush Foundation website for a whole range of free resources for educational use. These are going to be rolled out over the next year.

A free event will take place to launch these.

SUNDAY 21 JANUARY 2024, 7pm to 9pm

This free online event launches a year-long rollout that will offer opportunities to schools in Britain, and elsewhere, first-hand knowledge of the late Sam King’s seminal work. The suite of seven resources will show Windrush as just one, among many other chapters, of British post-WWII history. The resources include more than 500 pages of materials, and feature stories also of the lived experiences of Windrush passengers. Further research and publications will follow.


Members of the Windrush Generation are those who arrived on June 22, 1948, at Tilbury Docks, on the Empire Windrush, but excludes passengers who arrived after June 1948 on other ships or by BOAC (BA). 

The Empire Windrush made only one return journey to the West Indies in 1948.

Windrush Foundation’s seminal education resources will help educators to teach the facts about Windrush and will explain its true meaning. Numerous distortions of the late Sam King’s idea have been publicised over the years and it is hoped that this suite of resources will debunk those falsehoods and conflations.

Get your Eventbrite tickets from this link. I have downloaded the free eBooks.

Thanks to Arthur Torrington for the information.

Windrush food stories

We are now underway on the 3rd read through of Benjamin Zephaniah's 'Windrush Child'. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Empire Windrush's arrival at Tilbury Docks in London.

I noticed these meals in my local Tesco earlier in the week and wondered about their origins.

I was interested in whether this was cultural appropriation of the flavours of the Caribbean with the Windrush marketing. We have previously discussed the story of Jamie Oliver's Jollof Rice, as featured in Dipo Faloyin's 'Africa is not a Country'.

They were actually created by Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones for Black History Month. They are a tribute to the Windrush Generation.

They feature some traditional Caribbean flavours.

There is a very personal story here too.

Anyone tried the meals?