Evadney Campbell relished receiving barrels of gifts from her parents in England as a tiny child in Jamaica. She was overjoyed when she received the dolls, English crinoline dresses with ribbons, gorgeous white socks, and gleaming patent shoes.
Campbell didn’t realize the deliveries were bittersweet until years later.
For many youngsters growing up in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s, those barrels were their only link to their parents, who had moved thousands of miles to Britain in quest of better job opportunities.
Campbell was not nearly a year old when her parents departed, and she did not see her parents again until she was 11 years old, in England.
“The concept of a mother and father was just an idea.” “I had no idea who they were or what they looked like,” Campbell, now 63, explained. “You just knew they were in England, while you were in Jamaica.”
Campbell’s family tale is part of a new exhibition at London’s Black Cultural Archives that opens Thursday to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the ship Empire Windrush docking in Essex, near London, on June 22, 1948.
The ship has subsequently become a symbol of a major migration movement that saw many Caribbeans take up positions as railway and factory workers, nurses, and miners in the United Kingdom when the British government invited them to help rebuild the country following World War II.
Hundreds of thousands of people arrived in the United Kingdom and were known as the “Windrush generation.”
While much has been written about the trailblazing pioneers who left the Caribbean to contribute to British life, curator Nadine White believes that the experiences of their children who were left behind are largely forgotten.
Her show focuses on the pain experienced by thousands of “barrel children,” so termed after the shipping containers used by the Caribbean diaspora to send money and gifts back home.
In many cases, parents left their children at home in the care of relatives because they assumed they would only be gone for a few years and would return after earning a good living abroad. Most, though, quickly began to make a new life in Britain. While many of the children were subsequently reunited with their parents, some did not.
“We are really talking about the fragmentation of Black families – and I feel like that consequence of serial migration isn’t in the national conversation about Windrush,” White explained.
In addition to being uprooted from their familiar surroundings and attempting to form ties with unknown parents and siblings, the newly arrived youngsters struggled to adjust into a “hostile society that was far more overtly racist than any of them had experienced or envisioned,” according to White.
Protests and gloomy memories of the Windrush scandal will coexist with events honoring the Windrush generation on Thursday. They include recent discoveries that a substantial number of Caribbean migrants were wrongfully targeted in an immigration crackdown that resulted in long-term residents losing their right to work and public health care. People were imprisoned or deported in the worst-case scenarios.
While the British government has apologized and promised compensation, many believe the procedure is cumbersome and time-consuming. Some victims are still seeking for fair compensation.
According to White, the hostility and prejudice experienced by Windrush generation children were more subtle.
Instead of receiving educational support from British authorities, she claims that many Black migrant children were labeled as “educationally subnormal” – implying that they were mentally inferior – and sent to special schools.
“They were labeled and discarded,” White explained. “The plight of Black children in UK schools during the 1970s and 1980s was real as a result of institutional racism.” And the consequences are still being felt.”
Campbell, a former broadcast journalist who now works in public relations, admitted that she “hated every moment” of her new life in England when she first arrived. She was assigned to one of her neighborhood’s poorest schools “because that’s where the local authority said I had to go,” she explained.
“If you ask my mother now, she’ll tell you she knew it wasn’t right. But what could they possibly have done? How could they possibly have fought it? “And I had no idea I was being treated differently,” she explained.
Campbell expressed her hope that the show would raise awareness and debate about a period of history that far too few people discuss. In contrast to her happy memories of getting the barrels as a child, she claimed she can’t remember what it was like to travel alone on a plane in London as an 11-year-old. She speculated that this was because her mind had blocked it out.
“People have experienced so many different tentacles and traumas that no one has spoken about.” “We’ve all forgotten what it was like to be uprooted from one country to another, living with essentially strangers,” she remarked. “No one has looked at the impact on these thousands of children.”
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“Over the Barrel: Windrush Children, Tragedy and Triumph” is on display at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, south London, through September 10.
