to work, the sight of this number of people deciding themselves to make journey to the UK alarmed some politicians. While some people welcomed new arrivals, who were able to carve out a life for themselves in the UK, these MPs demanded ‘control’: ‘we venture to suggest that the British government should, like foreign countries, the dominions and even some of the colonies, by legislation if necessary, control immigration in the political, social, economic and fiscal interests of our people.’33
One of the reasons ‘controls’ weren’t introduced in these years was that politicians and different parts of government were divided over the best policy to adopt. Some, like those in the Colonial Office, worried controls would undermine the idea of the multiracial Commonwealth and the remnants of Britain’s imperial power along with it. But there were other parts of government, such as the Ministry of Labour, that kept advocating for overtly controlling immigration. Conservative MP Cyril Osborne was one of the most vehement in his opposition, claiming that people of colour coming into the country had a ‘different standard of civilisation’.34
The Second World War had left the UK in economic decline; it lost one quarter of its wealth and plummeted from being the world’s largest creditor to its largest debtor. Post-war reconstruction required workers, and the official line was that the country at the centre of the Commonwealth would take anyone willing and able to work, regardless of colour. This wasn’t how it played out. Industrial giants like Ford, Vickers, Napiers and Tate and Lyle, in large part supported by the trade unions, implemented a colour bar.35 But at the end of the 1940s, through the European Volunteer Workers (EVW) scheme, the government brought in Eastern Europeans, and though they were met with hostility, not least from some trade unions, they were thought to be racially suitable in a way that Jewish people, who were intentionally excluded, weren’t.36 An independent research institute declared in a 1948 population report ‘the absorption of large numbers of non-white immigrants would be extremely difficult.’37 Empire might have been caving in on itself, but its organising principles – race and its hierarchy of humanity – stubbornly persisted.
But as Windrush showed, people of colour who lived in colonies and former colonies decided to make the journey to the metropole anyway – and although most other Britons were not and might still not be aware, these new arrivals to UK shores came as citizens, not migrants. Some made the choice to take a chance and move with no definite job waiting for them; others came as part of certain company’s recruitment drives, like the kind that existed in the NHS.38
Prior to the war, nurses and hospital workers from the Caribbean were recruited to work in the health service, and this policy continued when the NHS was established in 1948. Even Enoch Powell – Tory health minister from 1960 until 1963, who would become notorious for his virulently racist views – appealed to doctors in India and Pakistan to come to the UK as part of a plan to expand the NHS.
The catch was, they weren’t necessarily expected to stay long. ‘They thought we would come in, run the buses … do the nursing and all the other things that we did and we would go home at night,’ former nurse Maria Layne-Springer, who came from Barbados, remembered. ‘And somehow miraculously wherever we came from we would fly back in the following morning to continue our shifts … How we lived in the interim was of no concern to them.’
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