Sam King

IN June 1968, 20 years after dropping anchor at Tilbury Docks with several hundred West Indians on board, the Empire Windrush’s arrival was first heralded as a historic moment in British history with a spread in the Sunday Times’ new colour supplement.

Titled “Voyage to the Promised Land”, reporter Dick Adler interviewed 30 former passengers to find out what had happened to the “first of the Commonwealth immigrants who arrived in Britain”. He managed to locate them, he said, with the help of World War Two RAF veteran Sam King, who’d travelled on the boat from Jamaica.

Describing his shipmates as “pioneers on the second Mayflower” as they journeyed to England in search of a better life, King had made it his business to keep in touch with as many of them as possible, methodically jotting down names and keeping notes of his time on board.

In 1967, he also placed an advert in the Jamaica Gleaner for more passengers to come forward, instructing them to contact him at his Camberwell address. The three-page feature described the dramas on board the ship during the voyage, all elaborated upon by King in his 1998 memoir Climbing up the Rough Side of the Mountain. If it was Adler who first recorded the ­story in print of those he described as “Windrush” people, it was King who made it happen.

Published just weeks after Enoch Powell’s incendiary “Rivers of Blood” speech, Adler wrote that his interviewees “seemed genuinely sorry for England because she had not treated them better. They had been brought up to expect too much; the England of 1948 was a long way from the Victorian glories painted by schoolmasters and missionaries.”

The ship arrives on UK shores

But amid the disappointments there were several success stories, including Flying Officer Vidal Dezonie “the first coloured RAF officer to have worked his way up through the ranks”, and King himself, a 42-year-old Post Office sorter and married father-of-two “who owns a comfortable house” in Herne Hill, south London.

Genial, forthright and imbued with a strong sense of public service buttressed by his RAF years, King would go on to become the first black mayor of Southwark in 1983. But alongside his political career he continued with his mission to keep the memory of the Empire Windrush alive, and to champion those who sailed on her.

Without his efforts, it might have been remembered as just another one of those boats that arrived from the West Indies after the war.

As if aligning itself with the pioneering sentiments King first felt when he boarded the ship at Kingston, the Empire Windrush hit the headlines as soon as she landed on June 22, 1948.

“This was more or less a consequence of what the government was saying at the time,” explains Arthur Torrington, who joined forces with King in 1995 to launch the Windrush Foundation. “The government started to make big noises about what it called coloured immigration when the SS Ormonde landed in Liverpool in the spring of 1947, with about 110 West Indians on board. In December 1947, the SS Almanzora also caused a little bit of a stir, it had 200 West Indians on it.

“So hundreds more passengers coming on the Empire Windrush was significant. MPs wrote to the prime minister Clement Attlee saying you shouldn’t allow this to happen, and the concerns that were expressed filtered through to the media.”

Recognition in the Sunday Times

On the day of the Empire Windrush’s arrival, the BBC’s Home Service news bulletin announced that “questions had been asked in the Commons about the wisdom of allowing them to travel”.

On the other hand, Britain faced a serious labour shortage following six years of war and other sections of the press were far more accommodating.

“Welcome Home” shouted the Evening Standard, while the Daily Worker, today’s Morning Star, settled for “Five Hundred Pairs of Willing Hands”.

The resulting press attention meant that the Empire Windrush, alone of all the passenger ships from the West Indies, had its own instant archive, which included Pathé film footage and images of the disembarking passengers looking impossibly smart in their trilby hats and zoot suits despite the rigours of the 30-day journey across the Atlantic.

Memorably, there was also the clip of calypso star Lord Kitchener’s impromptu performance of his song London is the Place For Me.

Adler’s Sunday Times feature opened with the now classic image of passengers crowded around the boat as it docked.

Six years later, in 1974, King made the first of many TV appearances on the BBC’s Yesterday’s ­Witness, hosted by veteran broadcaster James Cameron, alongside Post Office manager Euton Christian and Vidal Dezonie, the three reminiscing about coming to England on the Windrush.

In 1988, to mark the 40th anniversary, they were featured together again, this time in another Times spread.

That year, King also launched the first ever commemorative event, at Lambeth Town Hall, as well as appearing on Wogan alongside college lecturer Vince Reid, who’d been one of the child passengers.

But it was the Empire Windrush’s 50th anniversary in 1998 that created the biggest impact, featuring a series of nationwide events, and a reception at St James’s Palace to meet Prince Charles, with the larger than life King very much in the thick of it.

He died in 2016 aged 90 and did not live to see the 70th anniversary, which culminated in a thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey to recognise the contribution of West Indians to British society.

But by this time he had already achieved the mission he embarked upon in 1948, earning himself the sobriquet “Mr Windrush”.