Book Review - Before Windrush - West Indians in Britain

Before Windrush 

Asher & Martin Hoyles 

Hansib publications 2020 

156 pp ISBN 978-1912662296 

Black and Ethnic Minority people have been part of the British population since before the country was Britain (1707) yet traditional histories of the ‘our island story’ genre completely overlooked the point. Boris Johnson may not be quite on that page but he certainly is not keen on recognising the imperial and colonial framework that has made Britain what it is today. 

In recent times a good deal of work has been done to make sure that British histories are more inclusive, Peter Fryer’s Staying Power being one of the landmark volumes. It is though a work in perpetual progress. Black British history is there but it often requires significant research in the archives to review sources that others have looked at and never asked the question as to whether BAME people feature. 

This new book by Asher and Martin Hoyles adds to the history we do now have, and does so in interesting and innovative ways. Labour and socialist historians, aware that those who organised and represented working people are also often hidden from history, have in the post - 1945 period carried out significant research, a good deal of which can be found in successive volumes of the Dictionary of Labour Biography. No such resource for BAME people yet exists but the Hoyles’s book may be seen as a contribution towards it. 

Before Windrush focuses on immigrants of Caribbean origin to the UK reaching back to the eighteenth century - in other words the beginnings of modern society. It’s divided into various sections: slaves and servants, doctors and nurses, political activists, sportsmen and so on. Each section is proceeded by some lines of poetry from Asher and then gives succinct details of a range of people, some perhaps quite well known now, others less so. There are also pictures and photographs of some of those featured. This I think works well in bringing some of those covered to a more-than-one-dimensional existence on the written page, and of course such pictorial representations are very rarely seen. A figure who appears across the various sections of the book is the political activist, historian and cricketer CLR James, someone who made a major contribution to British life in the twentieth century, yet aside from a library named after him in Dalston remains comparatively unheralded. That in itself tells us why a book like Before Windrush is necessary and worth reading. 

Keith Flett

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 72 Spring 2021]