The West Indian Gazette: Reporting Black Britain and a Changing World

A newspaper with a wide horizon

Launched in March 1958 with Claudia Jones as editor, the West Indian Gazette addressed people whose lives connected Britain and the Caribbean. It campaigned against racial discrimination while supporting Caribbean self-government. Its readers were people with concerns about work, education and political rights, and with an interest in what was happening beyond Britain’s shores. ¹

The paper entered an existing tradition of Black publishing. Billy Strachan had founded Caribbean News in 1952, reporting on Britain, the Caribbean and other British colonies. It supported Black workers and advertised cultural gatherings. Those earlier efforts matter because the Gazette did not create political communication between Caribbean people in Britain from nothing. It developed practices already used to circulate information, organise support and make readers’ concerns public. The history of the Black press is richer when the Gazette is placed among these connected ventures, rather than treated as an isolated beginning. ²

Explaining the need for a paper

The March 1958 front page asked, ‘Why a paper for West Indians?’ Its answer described needs that large newspapers could overlook: employment, housing, education and the difficulties facing newcomers. Beside the opening argument stood a substantial report on education in Jamaica. The combination established a relationship between everyday life in Britain and developments across the Atlantic. The same issue invited small advertisements for jobs, houses, rooms and other needs. Readers were being asked to contribute information as well as buy news. A paper could connect people who had something to offer with people looking for help. ¹

Reporting the possibility of a united Caribbean

The West Indies Federation was central to this outlook. Established in 1958, it represented an attempt to bring several British Caribbean territories into a political union. Historian Elanor Kramer-Taylor’s research shows that enthusiasm for federation helped shape the Gazette’s creation. Caribbean activists in Britain were participating in debates about the region’s future, even while dealing with discrimination in the country where they lived. The newspaper’s concern with Caribbean politics was therefore part of its immediate purpose, rather than a separate foreign-news interest. ³

The Gazette explained federal institutions, reported elections and marked the Federation’s anniversary. Such coverage supplied readers with information needed to follow constitutional change. It also offered a shared political vocabulary across island identities. Federation ultimately failed, but that outcome should not erase the hopes invested in it. For readers following these developments as they happened, the future was undecided. The newspaper’s pages preserve the arguments and ambitions of people who believed Caribbean unity could strengthen self-government and improve their region’s position in the world. ³

The people who made the newsroom work

Jones brought experience of journalism and communist organising in the United States to the enterprise. In London, she worked with Abhimanyu Manchanda, who took a leading editorial and managerial role. The Gazette’s address at 250 Brixton Road placed it within the growing Caribbean community of south London. Its offices were associated with a wider world of political meetings, visitors and personal contacts. Producing a paper meant gathering material through those relationships and turning it into something readers could use. ⁴

The office sat above Theo Campbell’s record shop. The contributors included Amy Ashwood Garvey and the novelist Jan Carew, while Ken Kelly supplied features and Donald Hinds worked as city reporter. The paper’s geographical reach also depended on distribution. Copies could be bought at places such as the Paddington Travel Bureau and shops in south, north and west London. Its circulation was therefore built through particular outlets and personal networks. A newspaper aimed at scattered readers needed routes through which it could physically reach them. Publication was only one part of the work. ⁵

Reporting around a bus conductor’s shifts

Hinds’s account of joining the paper captures its openness to new talent. In a 2008 interview with Angela Cobbinah, he recalled buying a copy from a passenger while working as a bus conductor. He said that he wanted to write, visited the office and brought Jones an article based on interviews with migrants along Brixton Road. She accepted his ability and gave him work. His reporting began with the people around him, rather than with entry through a well-funded professional training scheme. ⁶

Because the paper could not pay him, Hinds fitted assignments around his transport shifts. The range could be startling: news of a Brixton butcher stocking goat meat for Caribbean customers might be followed by a Nigerian independence conference. Jones also edited him firmly, insisting that copy meet the length she had requested. His recollections show both opportunity and discipline. The Gazette offered a route into journalism, but a story still had to be reported, shaped and fitted into the available space. ⁶

Photography and the record of a community

Photographers helped give this journalism its visible form. Len Garrison worked for the Gazette as a freelance photographer alongside his employment in medical photography. His later career would include education, community history and the co-founding of the Black Cultural Archives. The connection matters because making a contemporary record and preserving a historical record were related activities. Photographing Black people at work, in public life or at community events could create material that later generations would need when trying to understand their predecessors. ⁷

Garrison’s own explanation of collecting emphasised the value of keeping positive images of Black life, alongside programmes and other material that people might otherwise discard. His contribution to the Gazette belongs within that longer commitment to documentation. A newspaper records events for immediate readers, but it also produces evidence whose importance may become clearer much later. The survival of such material depends partly on people recognising its value before it has become an accepted subject of historical study. ⁷

Questioning the treatment of Caribbean workers

The July 1962 front page demonstrates how the Gazette questioned public figures. One report examined objections raised by Liverpool MP Bessie Braddock to London Transport’s recruitment of workers from Barbados. The paper asked her about the position of West Indians already in Britain and pursued her comments about the treatment of her constituents. It also obtained an explanation from London Transport’s press office. Its reporting presented positions that readers could compare, while examining the practical arrangements through which Caribbean workers were recruited. ⁸

On the same page, a large headline announced Trinidad and Tobago’s approaching independence. A report of Eric Williams’s remarks discussed what independence should mean for ordinary people, including economic policy and employment. Britain’s recruitment needs and Caribbean self-government thus appeared together. The masthead promised ‘All the news you want from here and home’. That phrase described the page’s actual structure: people living in London could follow a dispute affecting migrant labour without losing sight of the political transformation taking place in the Caribbean. ⁸

Reporting also reached beyond London. Henry Gunter contributed material about Birmingham, including its housing problems. As Tionne Parris’s research into the paper shows, the Gazette carried accounts of poor accommodation and challenged attempts to blame immigrants for housing shortages. Such reporting brought individual experiences into a larger discussion of responsibility. A tenant’s complaint could become evidence about the conditions in which people were being expected to live, rather than remaining an isolated dispute behind a landlord’s door. ⁹

Africa and the politics of independence

African developments received sustained attention. The November 1960 issue celebrated Nigerian independence, while Jones’s September analysis of the Congo argued that foreign intervention threatened a newly independent country’s ability to determine its future. These reports were political interpretations as well as accounts of events. They encouraged readers to see colonial rule and racial hierarchy as systems that could be challenged, and to follow what happened after formal independence. Freedom required more than a change of flag if external powers continued to determine a country’s choices. ⁵

The April 1963 front page reveals another part of the paper’s international outlook. Its leading story concerned proposals for an Eastern Caribbean union. A photograph showed African, Asian and Latin American students working in a phonetics laboratory at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Other reports concerned Soviet purchases of rice from British Guiana and an honorary degree awarded in Ghana to W. E. B. Du Bois. The page placed education, trade and political recognition within the same field of attention. ¹⁰

This selection also makes the Gazette’s political sympathies visible. Moscow appeared as a place of educational opportunity, while Ghana honoured a major Black intellectual. Nearby, a report anticipated the West Indies cricket team’s tour of England under Frank Worrell. Readers encountered international politics beside a sporting event around which Caribbean pride could gather. The subjects were varied, but they shared an interest in Black achievement, cooperation across national borders and the changing possibilities available to formerly colonised peoples. ¹⁰

History, culture and readers’ lives

The Gazette also made room for material that was neither a political editorial nor a breaking-news report. Its pages included readers’ letters, hair and beauty features, sport and a short-lived early history feature. Subjects included the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. Parris identifies these choices as part of a wider effort to make historical knowledge available to readers. Alongside reporting what was happening now, the paper offered ways to think about the past and about the everyday culture of the people it addressed. ⁹

The January 1960 issue, described in the Institute of Race Relations’ teaching collection, featured preparations for a Caribbean carnival, including photographs of beauty-pageant entrants and news of television coverage. This was one way the paper helped assemble a public around cultural activity. People could recognise performers, follow preparations and see Black faces given prominence. Entertainment and social news also offered reasons to pick up a paper to readers who might not begin with its political arguments. ¹¹

Such coverage widened the meaning of community reporting. A publication concerned with discrimination could also record pleasure, style and celebration. The people in its pages were entitled to a social and cultural life, as well as to protection from injustice. The Gazette’s mixture of subjects made that fuller view available in the same publication. Its cultural pages helped make visible aspects of Black life that were easily obscured when public discussion concentrated only on immigration or racial conflict. ¹¹

Selling copies and paying the printer

Ambition did not remove the problem of money. In his account for Race & Class, Hinds recalled that neither contributors nor Jones herself received a regular salary from the Gazette. Sam King helped sell the first hundred copies without taking commission. James Fairweather, responsible for advertising, approached furniture businesses that sold to Black households and persuaded them to advertise. These were essential contributions to the paper’s existence. Reporting needed the support of people prepared to sell copies and collect revenue. ¹²

Hinds also remembered the difficulty of finding the money to pay the printer and the resulting irregularity of publication. A nominally monthly paper could struggle to maintain its schedule. Its cultural ambition nevertheless remained broad: it reviewed novels by writers including George Lamming and Andrew Salkey, discussed visual art and published stories and poems. The contrast between this range and its insecure finances is central to its history. The Gazette had access to writers, political contacts and worthwhile stories, but those resources did not automatically provide enough cash to keep the presses running. ¹²

The paper closes and the writing continues

Jones died in December 1964. The Gazette continued briefly before closing in 1965. Its financial difficulties had existed for years, and losing its editor removed a central organiser as well as a journalist. The paper’s dependence on personal effort had helped make it possible, but that dependence also left it vulnerable. It had created an institution without securing the resources that would guarantee its continuation. ⁴

The experience of working there continued to shape its contributors. In a later interview, Hinds described how an article for the Observer about West Indian schoolchildren led to a literary agent asking whether he had enough material for a book. Journey to an Illusion appeared in 1966, built around interviews with ordinary people and their experiences of migration. He also joined Magnet, a newspaper associated with Jan Carew. The Gazette’s closure therefore did not bring an end to the skills, contacts or habits of attention that its newsroom had encouraged. ¹³

Hinds’s work is a particularly clear example of that continuing influence. Listening carefully to people whose experiences received little public attention could produce a newspaper report, a book or later fiction. The Gazette had made room for such work while he was still earning his living on the buses. Its legacy includes that practical opening: a place where a new writer could begin reporting, be edited, and learn to treat the everyday lives of Caribbean people as a subject deserving serious attention. ¹³

Sources

[1] Senate House Library, University of London, In the Grip of Change exhibition. West Indian Gazette, March 1958, front page and federation page; March 1958.

[2] University of London. Argula Rublack, The view from the Motherland: Billy Strachan’s fight for the Windrush generation; Updated 7 November 2023.

[3] Modern British History, Oxford University Press. Elanor Kramer-Taylor, Forging the West Indian Nation: Federation and Caribbean Activism in Post-war Britain, 1945–60; 31 May 2024.

[4] Vauxhall History. Sean Creighton, Claudia Jones’s Vauxhall years and the genesis of the West Indian Gazette; 6 April 2021.

[5] History at Manchester, University of Manchester. Tariq Chastanet-Hird, The West Indian Gazette: A symbiotic dialogue between the local and the global; 30 September 2019.

[6] Angela Cobbinah. Angela Cobbinah, Once Upon a Bus: interview with Donald Hinds; 30 July 2008.

[7] New Ruskin Archives public history project. Nigel Carter, Garrison, Lenford Kwesi; 3 February 2014.

[8] West Indian Gazette; preserved by Lambeth Archives, Landmark. West Indian Gazette, cover of the July issue, Vol. 5, No. 2; IV 267/1/5ii; July 1962.

[9] American Communist History; manuscript in University of Hertfordshire Research Archive. Tionne Alliyah Parris, Claudia Jones and Black Power: A Close Reading of The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News; 2024.

[10] West Indian Gazette; preserved by Lambeth Archives, Landmark. West Indian Gazette, Vol. 5, No. 9, front page; IV 267/1/7; April 1963.

[11] Institute of Race Relations. Struggles for Justice: Community and Identity, teachers’ notes, document 1; Undated; describes January 1960 Gazette issue.

[12] Race & Class, Institute of Race Relations; transcription by Paul Saba and Sam Richards, Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line. Donald Hinds, Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette; July 2008.

[13] Camden Review; republished by Angela Cobbinah. Angela Cobbinah, Donald Hinds’s long journey; 10 October 2013; republished 25 October 2013.

Sources checked on 23 October 2026.