Windrush Children: Separation, Reunion and Growing Up in Britain

A childhood measured in waiting

Linton Kwesi Johnson was eleven when he arrived at Tilbury from Jamaica in November 1963. Remembering the journey for the British Library, he struggled to reconcile the calendar with the experience of missing his mother. Their separation had probably lasted no more than two years, he explained, but it had felt much longer. A child’s measure of absence was different from an adult’s. Two years could contain a substantial part of the life that child remembered. Johnson’s recollection brings the history of Caribbean migration into a smaller, more intimate frame: the distance between a parent and a child, and the expectation that a voyage would close it. ¹

The journeys took place within changing imperial and immigration arrangements. British subjects had possessed a right to enter and reside in the United Kingdom; the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 restricted entry for many Commonwealth citizens and citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. Later legislation altered the framework again. Family decisions therefore unfolded across a changing legal landscape, rather than a single unchanging period of welcome. A child’s journey might follow a parent’s by several years, under different rules. ²

Families moving in stages

For Sonia Winifred’s family, money shaped the sequence. Her father left St Lucia in 1957. Her mother followed about five years later, while the children remained with their grandparents. Their parents then sent for them as they could afford the fares. Remembering the process, Winifred described siblings arriving in pairs. She travelled with an older brother and reached Southampton in September 1965, after four weeks at sea. She was about eleven; her brother was only twelve or thirteen, yet he was responsible for her on board. ³

This was family reunion carried out through a child’s labour as well as a parent’s earnings. An older brother had to become a carer during an ocean crossing. Nor was the family’s migration completed by the first departure. It stretched across years, with different members waiting in different places. Winifred’s account locates the journey in those practical arrangements: grandparents providing a home, parents raising money and siblings travelling together. The phrase ‘coming to Britain’ can conceal that long sequence of departures. ³

The people who stayed

Grandparents, aunts, other relatives and family friends made these arrangements possible. Their care was more than an interval before a child reached a supposedly real home elsewhere. They were the adults with whom everyday relationships developed. In her research on parental migration, with particular reference to Trinidad, University of the West Indies researcher Mala Jokhan distinguishes several patterns: parents leaving with an intention to send for children, temporary departures and moves that did not lead to reunion abroad. She also cautions against assuming identical outcomes. Some children experienced neglect or insecurity; others received dependable care and maintained strong relationships. ⁴

That distinction matters when describing children as ‘left behind’. The phrase identifies a geographical separation, but it does not tell us whether a child was lonely, contented, mistreated or well supported. A loving relationship with a grandmother could make childhood secure while also making departure painful. Care could be shared across a family without making the absence of a mother or father insignificant. Both relationships deserve attention. ⁴

Parents, too, could find separation difficult to explain. Reading Museum’s migration exhibition records Roy Campbell’s difficulty in speaking about separation. He and his wife had left their two children in Barbados when they returned to England. It also describes women who initially brought children to Britain but later sent them to Caribbean relatives because combining paid work and childcare proved difficult. Migration did not always proceed in one direction. The availability of someone trustworthy to look after a child could determine where that child lived. ⁵

Decisions made by adults

Children and teenagers did not necessarily share their parents’ plans. Jerome Chee-A-Tow was working in British Guiana when his mother decided that he should use a passage originally bought for his elder brother. His brother did not want to leave, and neither did he. The ticket had cost 120 dollars, however, and his mother did not want it wasted. In his oral history, held by the University of London, he described the move as accidental from his own point of view. He travelled in 1955 and subsequently attended Brixton School of Building. ⁶

Chee-A-Tow later became an architect. That successful career does not erase his remembered reluctance. His account preserves a distinction between what an adult believed would benefit a young person and what the young person wanted at the time. It also complicates the familiar picture of every migrant setting out with a settled ambition to live in Britain. A teenager could build a future from a decision made by somebody else, without having chosen the departure that began it. ⁶

Letters money and barrels

Correspondence helped families continue relationships across the Atlantic. The British Library’s James Berry archive contains long letters sent from Jamaica after the writer moved to London. Relatives shared news, encouraged his work and responded to his writing. These were continuing conversations, preserving intimacy through the detail of ordinary life. The archive offers evidence of the effort involved in keeping absent family members informed and included. A letter could carry practical information and affection together; it could also become an object to keep, reread and eventually pass into an archive. ⁷

The same archive includes a letter sent to Berry by his son Roger in 1964. The Library later used it alongside Johnson’s recorded memories to explore separation with schoolchildren. Its survival gives a child’s correspondence a place beside the adult accounts of migration. ¹

Money and parcels travelled too. Black Cultural Archives’ exhibition Over A Barrel brought together memories of remittances, letters and goods sent home, including fabric and soap. The later expression ‘barrel children’, associated with Jamaican researcher Claudette Crawford-Brown, refers to children whose migrant parents supported them from abroad, often through supplies shipped in barrels. Such objects could demonstrate care and the results of a parent’s work. They could not make every relationship uncomplicated. The exhibition placed material provision alongside memories of both loving care and serious distress, refusing to make the barrel stand for one uniform childhood. ⁸

The reunion children had imagined

Floella Benjamin’s first-person account describes a reunion she had urgently wanted. Her father went ahead to Britain, and her mother later followed with two of the younger children. Benjamin and three siblings remained in Trinidad. She recalled fifteen months of harsh treatment by their carers before a letter announced that they could join their parents. Four children then made the Atlantic journey without a parent accompanying them. Their mother was waiting at Southampton with warm clothes when they arrived in 1960. Benjamin was ten. ⁹

The reunion did not deliver the comfortable surroundings the children had imagined. At their new home in Chiswick, the family of eight shared one room in a house with other tenants. Benjamin remembered both the distress of those early months and the unexpected delight of her first snowfall. These contrasting memories belong together. Relief at being with parents again could coexist with disappointment in housing and fear of an unfamiliar environment. Even within one childhood, arrival had more than one meaning. ⁹

Learning to live together again

Other reunions followed much longer separations. In a study published in 2006, Elaine Arnold examined the accounts of twenty Caribbean-born women whose mothers had migrated to Britain, leaving them with grandmothers or other relatives. In this group, reunion commonly came during adolescence after more than a decade apart. The women described difficulties trusting others, longing for their mothers’ affection and feeling less wanted than siblings born in Britain. They also identified memories of their earlier carers as a source of strength. Arnold’s small study cannot establish how every Windrush child felt; it gives sustained attention to experiences that public celebrations can miss. ¹⁰

Living in the same house did not automatically restore years of everyday familiarity. The study invites a practical question about reunion: who had become familiar to the child during the absence? Remembering a grandmother’s care and wanting a mother’s affection were not necessarily competing loyalties. Both could remain part of the same person’s emotional life. Understanding that complexity avoids treating either the migrating parent or the Caribbean carer as dispensable. ¹⁰

Reading Museum also records children encountering parents they could scarcely remember and British-born siblings they had never met. Joining an established household could require learning relationships as well as routines. ‘Reunited’ described where the family now lived; it did not tell the whole story of how its members came to know one another. ⁵

Growing up in British classrooms

Outside the home, children had to negotiate institutions that could misunderstand or demean them. Photographer Vanley Burke recalled his two years at Gower Street Boys School in Birmingham in an interview recorded for the British Library. He remembered lessons labelled English for immigrants and a teacher’s racist comment during an inspection of children’s hands. Such recollections concern ordinary school routines, where an adult’s authority could turn a small encounter into a lesson about exclusion. ¹¹

The Library presents Burke’s account alongside recordings of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Andrea Levy, allowing different childhood experiences to be heard together. Its curators also stress that a short extract is only part of a longer life story. That is a useful discipline for understanding this generation. Experiences of racism require clear recognition, while a child’s education, friendships, interests and ambitions cannot be reconstructed from a single painful incident. School was one setting in a life that continued at home and across a wider community. ¹¹

Making a life through family culture

The oral histories collected by Brighton and Hove Museums include Edi J Mandala’s recollections of visiting friends and relatives, shared food, conversation, laughter and dancing. He remembered visitors connected with Tanzania, Kenya and Jamaica, and the importance of fruits carried from overseas. His grandmother made coconut candy with syrup. In his account, taste and smell could reconnect him with family experiences many years later. He also remembered dancing with her when she was eighty. ¹²

These are records of pleasure, affection and cultural knowledge passed between generations. They show how a sense of belonging could be made in company, through a recipe or a remembered movement, without needing a formal lesson about heritage. The household was connected to places beyond Britain while forming part of British life. Children encountered those connections through people they knew. Food and music mattered because someone shared them, and because repeated family practices became their own memories. ¹²

Finding words for childhood

Writer and artist Michael McMillan, whose parents came from St Vincent and the Grenadines in 1960, has argued for giving children greater space in migration history. In a 2016 talk, he described how some experienced a second loss when they left the people who had raised them. He also placed family silence within a wider generational expectation that children should be obedient and undemanding. Providing food and clothing could be treated as an adequate answer to questions about feelings. ¹³

McMillan’s intervention helps explain why family achievement and family hurt can be difficult to discuss together. Recognising the work required to provide a home does not answer every question a child might later ask about separation. Equally, an adult’s painful recollection need not turn an entire family history into a verdict on a parent’s character. Making room for the child’s account allows different members of a family to remember the same period differently. The people who waited deserve a voice alongside those who earned, organised and travelled. ¹³

Belonging and the demand for proof

For some who arrived as children, the question of belonging returned decades later through the Windrush scandal. The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee reported in 2018 that lawful long-term residents had lost jobs and homes, been refused services and faced immigration enforcement because their status had not been adequately documented. The affected group included people who had travelled on a parent’s passport. Childhood arrival, followed by decades of ordinary life, did not necessarily leave an easily assembled personal file. ¹⁴

The committee also explained that the Immigration Act 1971 had confirmed indefinite residence for people already settled without restrictions when it came into force on 1 January 1973. A right could therefore exist even when its holder lacked the documents later demanded to demonstrate it. The distinction carried devastating practical consequences. Remembering Windrush children means attending to that adult history too: people whose journeys were arranged for them could eventually be asked to prove, with paperwork they had never controlled, the legitimacy of a life built in Britain. ¹⁴

Sources

[1] British Library, Debbie Bogard. Engaging children with testimonies of Caribbean migration part 1; 1 October 2024.

[2] Home Office. Historical background information on nationality; Undated historical guidance.

[3] University of London, In the Grip of Change. Interview with Sonia Winifred; Undated oral history excerpt.

[4] Mala Jokhan, University of the West Indies. Parental Absence as a Consequence of Migration Exploring its Origins and Perpetuation with Special Reference to Trinidad; January 2007.

[5] Reading Museum, The Enigma of Arrival. Generational Experience.

[6] University of London, In the Grip of Change. Interview with Jerome Chee A Tow; Undated oral history excerpt.

[7] British Library, Callum McKean. Cataloguing James Berry; 11 July 2018.

[8] Black Cultural Archives. Over A Barrel Windrush Children Tragedy and Triumph; Exhibition 22 June to 10 September 2023.

[9] Black History Month, Floella Benjamin. Baroness Floella Benjamin A Windrush Story; 20 June 2019.

[10] Elaine Arnold, Attachment and Human Development 8 issue 2 pages 159 to 174; abstract reproduced by An Najah research portal. Separation and loss through immigration of African Caribbean women to the UK; June 2006.

[11] British Library, Debbie Bogard. Engaging children with testimonies of Caribbean migration part 2; 22 April 2025.

[12] Brighton and Hove Museums, Edi J Mandala. Windrush Era and Beyond Edi J Mandala.

[13] Michael McMillan, Journey to Justice. To be seen and not heard Caribbean Migrant Children; March 2016.

[14] House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. The Windrush generation Sixth Report of Session 2017 to 2019 HC 990; 3 July 2018.

Sources checked on 22 October 2026.