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She sits in the first class waiting hall of the Ocean Terminal at Southampton docks, an impressive Art Deco structure, now sadly lost. She is a young woman, it is difficult to place an exact age. She is nameless. At her feet is her luggage, including a bag with the words Jamaica emblazoned on it along with an ocean scene with palm trees. She has just entered a new world; from a small island in the Caribbean she has come to the centre of the greatest empire the world has ever known. It is also the Mother Country, at least that is how it is portrayed. It is however an exhausted country, it has fought the last of two great wars, and came out of it a dying empire. She, though she might not realise, is a symbol of change. If she stays she will see the country face economic decline, retreat from empire, race riots and social division. But out of it will become a society where eventually those children of empire come to govern Britain.
The country she has come to is the one of the Post War Consensus, this would last until the age of Thatcher and neoliberalism. It is the New Jerusalem of the Welfare State, with its battle against Beverage’s Five Giants: idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want.
Her jobs choices will be restricted. There is nursing, and if she chose this then it is a harsh fact that she will have to work twice as hard as her contemporary white workers.
Housing will be difficult. Many landlords refuse to accept black people, and if they do often overcharge compared to whites. But despite the hardship almost all immigrants had some address waiting for them, the early West Indian immigrants stuck together and helped each other.
She is however equal under the laws of the land. She has the same rights as white people, however it was sometimes difficult to put this into practice.
She appears in several photographs taken by the photographer Haywood Magee for an unsympathetic article in the Picture Post dated June 1956 entitled the Thirty Thousand Colour Problems, and seems singled out, suggesting there is something about her that attracts the photographers eye.
I will deal with much of the above in greater detail in future posts.
I am white, but we are, in the end, all immigrants. Some of my ancestors were Huguenots, Protestants fleeing prosecution in what is now southern Belgium. One was born on a boat on the way here.
I first became interested after seeing a photo of this young lady in a book of 1950s photographs, with brief explanatory text. It seemed to me there was an entire story there. When I looked up the photographer he had produced many photos of West Indian arrivals in 1956. The specific day of arrival is 27th May 1956 (they disembarked the following day, the 28th), the ship the SS Irpinia. She is one of 700 to have braved the journey. The lady appears in at least four photographs. Her name is unknown, and unlikely to be known. She would also if alive be in her late eighties or nineties. An entire lifetime has gone by since they were taken, the generation she belonged to has almost passed away. She, like the other women in the photographs, is smartly dressed in her Sunday best. And why not, for she has just crossed a mighty ocean and arrived in the greatest city of the greatest of all empires in history. An empire that she is a citizen of. She has come to the mother country and the mother city. It is an alien thought to someone of our age.
Our error is to think that people in the past had world views and thoughts like our own. She might well have regarded herself as British, and she was, her passport proved it. But the country she came to would not be the one she imagined; cold, damp, bomb damaged, worn out it could be often prejudiced or ignorant, but it offered enough that many stayed and prospered.
This site will regularly update with information on the world the young lady encounters in Britain on her arrival, as well as the story of the Jamaica, and the West Indies, she left behind. We will also voyage into the future she will encounter if she stayed. I hope you will join me on this adventure. Sources will be provided that will allow you to read about the period too. A comment page will allow feedback and the sharing of memories of your own or relatives.
Come See Jerusalem!
Helping with Come See Jerusalem
If you find this site interesting, and want to help with my future research consider sponsoring me on Patreon. I do not have the funding to access the sources I need and any help would be appreciated. The first aim is to buy royalty-free rights to the multiple images of the young lady, which aren’t cheap, for not for profit use on this page and social media. The final aim is to produce a book using my research. Thank you for your help.