Ros Martin is a Bristol-based writer, artist and author of “BEFORE I AM RENDERED INVISIBLE: Resistance from the Margins”. In this blog, she reflects on what Windrush75 means for her.
Ros and her family, 1970, Southend-on-Sea
‘I am here, because you were there’
I do not yet know the name of the ship that my late St Lucian, seamstress mother, Leome Martin 1923-2021 travelled on alone. I know she arrived May 1958. She would have been about the same age as me, 34/35 years leaving one city for another. In my case, with my three small children and children’s father, from Tottenham, London to Bristol in 1995. In my mother’s case, across the Atlantic, from Castries, St. Lucia to London UK, leaving my eight-year-old brother, behind.
My mother was a great raconteur. Nothing delighted her more than an attentive ear to regale her many stories from her long life. At the time of her passing, Jessie Stephens, founder member of the St. Lucian Association, my mother had attended, recalls, how my mother being one of those early arrivals, would lead a group of St. Lucian elders in a rowdy rendition of disapproved, patois songs from their primary school days!(1)
My mother remembers how, growing up in colonial St. Lucia, the school day would start with all the children, solemnly standing to attention, facing the British Empire flag, next to a big portrait of the then King of England, to salute and chant their allegiance, in words she could still remember.
‘I salute the Empire flag o’er which unfurls
I pledge loyalty to my King, I pledge loyalty to my country!’
How in 1936, the year of the Three Kings, this portrait would change twice.
My mother responded to an invitation by the U.K government to work in the U.K, She would join her married younger sister, Aunty Ruth. My mother had wished like Aunty Ruth, to embark on a nursing career. Only this ends abruptly for Aunty Ruth, when as a student nurse, at a large London hospital, Aunty Ruth catches TB from a patient she is deliberately made to treat without any precaution. My aunt and her architect husband would return to Trinidad and my mother would be forbidden by her mother to go into nursing. She would be a cleaner, a hospital auxiliary, and what she loved most, a night residential care assistant for the elderly.
My mother recalls an important social aspect of those early London days: attending the Prince of Wales Road, Washhouse and Bathhouse, Kentish Town, every Monday with her girlfriends; bathing, washing, wringing, drying the family clothes on a heated drying horse, then pressing and folding them, gossiping, and having a laugh all the while. When, in the early 90’s, my mother already retired, lived in Armthorpe, an ex-mining Yorkshire village, my mother had recreated from her early years, her Monday social meet up camaraderie as a regular liming event(2) with older local women at Doncaster, St James Turkish baths!
My mother met my father in London, a Nigerian Economics student who introduced her to newsreels from home in the cinema. I did not realise; my father had already been in the U.K some 10 years earlier studying, first Medicine at Edinburgh University, then Economics at Glasgow University. My father does not complete either course. He works for British Rail in parcels, as a Senior Railwayman.
Some 31 years before my father’s arrival in London, my uncle Orlando Martins had arrived in the U.K a stowaway in 1917, aged 18, having embarked on a ship in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Uncle Orlando now 60 years old, returns home to Lagos the year after my mother arrives,
Uncle was one among many 1930’s London black activists from Africa, the Caribbean and, U.S. Artists, scholars and allies coming together and working together to inform the anti-colonial class struggle. Working alongside Robeson, Adams and Davis in the CLR James play TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE 1936(3) and again with Robeson, Adams and Davis in STEVEDORE 1935 a play promoting working class solidarity instead of the conflict over jobs and wages in seaports(4).
Uncle performs in a Scottsboro boys play by Sartre in 1954(5). He has links with Kenyatta, Zik and West African Students Union(6). Back in Nigeria, he would take on small roles in a Wole Soyinka film with Ossie Davis(7) and a German production based on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart(8). Like Robeson, Martins sang spirituals.
A photo of Ros’ Uncle Orlando from his biography “Orlando the Legend" by Takiu Folami.
Fondly remembered in Nigerian as Pa Orlando, among those still alive who knew him, Uncle was a seaman before becoming a pioneering African actor and performer in early 20th century in Britain. A British colonial subject by birth, his personal mission was to fight in the first world war, to avenge cruelty to his grandmother, taken prisoner of war by the Germans. His petty trader grandmother had found herself on the Cameroon border in ’German enemy territory’ at the outbreak of the Great war. Uncle, a mere teenager, has his heart set on joining the British Navy, but is turned down. He works as a stoker in the fire room of ss Mauretania, collier ship, shovelling coal in high temperature furnace fires; work that is dirty, gruelling, and dangerous. Uncle would experience near death and street destitution before his rise to fame.
Uncle recalls as a child, his grandfather, a wood cutter, who lives to 120 years, regaling him with tales of his enslavement days, on a Bahia sugar plantation.
And I recall from family folklore two, 19th century returnees to Nigeria: a woman and child, travelling by ship, from Brazil to Nigeria. And two brothers who spend time in prison for selling their own African people to the Portuguese after the transatlantic slave trade has ended.
Back and forth back like waves, thoughts come and go.
Traversing the Atlantic Ocean are goods, people, ideas. African ancestors permanently separated.
I think of African maidservant of the Georgian House, Bristol, Fanny Coker and enslaved manservant, Pero Jones crossing the Atlantic on the ‘Jonge Von Charlotte’ ship from Nevis in 1783 to the U.K leaving loved ones behind. She adapts. She survives; Pero loses the will to live.
I am that second generation raised without grandparents, a grandparent now. reflecting on the movement of black and brown bodies across the Atlantic over the centuries.
How class and racial oppression continue, evidenced in the racist immigration policies and practices devastatingly impacting black and brown lives. The Windrush scandal(9) is a reminder of the tenuous nature of our inclusion and acceptance in this society. Disproportionate and adverse are outcomes for black, brown and working-class lives in contact with public services, there supposedly to protect and improve opportunities and lives.
Rich varied and complex is the tapestry of our African and diaspora lives in this world enriching the cultural landscapes we find ourselves in: Britain, Europe and the Americas in creativity: arts, Carnival, music and dance, food, literature, ideas, business and international networks.
We take inspiration at this time of remembrance from the resilience, creativity and sacrifices of our forebears. It is on your shoulders we stand. We honour you,
Pre Windrush, post Windrush, is a continuum of our struggle for freedom from plantation slavery, from colonisation’s legacies. Resisting dehumanisation, our second-class citizenship, lack of dignity, respect, equality, arbitrary infringements on our freedoms, is the struggle we continue in your name.
1 Patois, a broken French, had been forbidden in the small Castries Anglican school run by Canon Lowry
2 liming a Caribbean expression to idle time away in the company of others
3 Westminster theatre 1936 2 performances Paul Robeson U.S, Robert Adams Guyana, Katheen Davis from Trinidad
4 Embassy theatre three weeks with the four as above directed by Andre Van Gysegham written by Paul Peters and George Sklar
5 The Respectable Prostitute 1947 play, directed by Peter Brook
6 Doris, Orlando’s wife was the 1st wife of founder member of Pan-African Julius Ojo-Cole of the West African Students Union, this included a publication WASU. Doris was the secretary. Jomo Kenyatta was the 1st president of independent Kenya, Nnamdi Azikiwe, the 1st president of Nigeria during the 1st Nigerian Republic
7 Kongi’s Harvest a film directed by Ossie Davis in Nigeria 1970
8 German film based on ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe 1970
9 Removing citizenship rights of long settled citizens from the Caribbean making them destitute, detaining them and deporting them illegally.