This chapter stands a little apart from those that follow. It provides the historical context for the case studies that comprise the bulk of the study and a narrative of Caribbean migration and settlement in England from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. It provides a sense of how this experience influenced the profiles, professional strategies, and cultural politics of the artists and institutions I examine in subsequent chapters. The description below is not intended to be comprehensive; certainly, it cannot address the myriad individual experiences that make up the collective memory of today's Caribbean-descended Londoners. But it points to some of the attitudes, motivations, and challenges that many émigrés and London settlers shared. It also explores the beliefs and prejudices that informed the official and unofficial reactions of native English people to the arrival of West Indians in this period.

Many of the West Indians who migrated to London between 1945 and the early 1960s came with a feeling of imperial affinity to Great Britain and optimism about their prospects. They were perhaps the last generation of settlers that could be so described—they were certainly the last to migrate before the independence of Jamaica and Trinidad, not to mention numerous African colonies as well. However, their official and popular reception was decidedly ambivalent. Initially, the loudest official claims invested in the phenomenon of Caribbean migration the vibrancy of the new British Empire and Commonwealth, as well as the triumph of British liberalism, especially regarding race. But by the late 1950s, newsreels, parliamentary debate, and many members of the public regarded the arrival of West Indians with foreboding, if not outright opposition. Thus was West Indian optimism gradually—and reluctantly—replaced with disillusionment and alienation. The fortunes of the artists whom I examine in later chapters reflect this shift in attitude, to which the present chapter provides the social and political background.

Conditions of Emigration

Contemporary commentators, and historians, tend to cite the arrival of the Empire Windrush in June 1948, carrying 430 Caribbean migrants, as the definitive “moment” of the birth of a multiracial Britain.