 Hello and welcome to another special event from the British Library. My name is Jonah Albert and I am one of the library's cultural events producers. It is a pleasure for me to welcome you to Windrush Children with Dr Benjamin Zephaniah and historian Dr Aisha Johnson. Our chair for today is Kieran Yates and the event is brought to you in association with the Black Cultural Archives for Windrush Day. Before we get started here's some housekeeping for you. Below the video you will find social media links to enable you to continue the conversation. You'll also find more information about our speakers for today and resources about Windrush. Above the video you will find a bookshop tab where you will have an opportunity to buy a copy of Benjamin Zephaniah's latest book Windrush Child. You'll also find a tab for to provide us with feedback. Your feedback is important to us and it enables us to continue programming the kinds of events that you would like to see. There's also an opportunity there for you to donate to the British Library. The British Library is a charity. I'd like to introduce you to Kieran Yates, our chair for the event. Kieran is a journalist, broadcaster and editor who writes about current affairs, culture and politics. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Vice Magazine, The Independent and Beyond. She regularly hosts events including South Bank's WoW Festival and the London Literature Festival. She has written a book, Generation Vext, where she interviews young people from SBTV. She works frequently as a broadcaster for BBC and Channel Four News. Please welcome Kieran Yates. It's my absolute pleasure to be joining you, the audience, on Windrush Day to celebrate and commemorate stories of the Windrush generation and really make the point on how richly they have contributed to Britain's past, present and future. My name is Kieran Yates. I'm a journalist and writer and sometimes teacher. Please let me take this opportunity to extend very warm love to primary school teachers and students who I know are also in the audience today. Please feel empowered to ask questions in particular and you can do that by just going into the question field which will pop up underneath the video and we'll pick some questions later. Now I'm joined this afternoon by Dr Aisha Johnston who is the Learning and Engagement Manager at the Mighty Black Cultural Archives in Brixton. Aisha's work does lots of things but mostly deals with memorialising and accurately reporting the nuances of Black British history across everything from the mangrove nine to this year's 40th anniversary of the Brixton uprisings through things like talks, events, panels and preservation of a very special archive. The BCA have also collaborated with Scholastic to publish a children's book which is a collection of stories of Windrush and it's titled The Place for Me Stories of the Windrush Generation. I'm also joined by Dr Benjamin Zephaniah who is an artist, a British literary hero and pioneer who's written for young people and novels and radio and plays and stage and poetry and his activism has provided the foundation knowledge of anti-racism for lots of young people including myself and is internationally and intergenerationally renowned as a result so thank you, thank you for all of this intergenerational learning and work that you've done and it's a real pleasure to be here to be discussing Windrush Child which I have nearly read and really enjoyed so thank you so much both of you for being here. Now I think a good place to start is to just get straight into your books and then to lead us to chat to other things so Dr Benjamin it would be great to kind of tell us a little bit about the character of Leonard who we are reading alongside in your book Windrush Child who makes the journey from maroon town in Jamaica to Manchester, the exotic plains of Manchester. Could you tell us a little bit about your relationship with Leonard as a character? Well like all fictional characters there's a lot of truth in him. I said when I wrote this book that I like my fiction to be true and it's and I really do mean it but I like to write things that are kind of unbelievable. I've got nothing against things like talking dogs or horses or whatever but it's you know it's not my thing. I really want to keep my fiction as real as possible. So Leonard is a boy growing up in Jamaica and he thinks he's in paradise. I mean he looks at the left he can block a mango, he looks at the right he can block an orange, he's got this place to play, he sits on the veranda, he talks to his mother and the wise man from the mountains and all this and he just thinks he's happy. His father is in England, he came on the empire Windrush and his father said he's going to come back to Jamaica but then one day Leonard is told that actually he's going to join his dad in Manchester. So he goes with his mother, he goes to the docks in Kingston in Jamaica. Leonard can't understand why his mother has a passport and he doesn't. His mother tells him don't worry, you're guaranteed passage, the queen promises us because we are British and so you know you get a bit upset but then he realises that you know Britain's promised him so this must be true and he goes to Manchester and he can't understand why he left paradise and came to Manchester for a bit of life and I'm nothing against Manchester but he's in a bedside you know free people in a bedside and he's just left this paradise island and he doesn't understand, of course he doesn't understand pension, he doesn't understand the security of a job and all that kind of thing so really it's a book about him growing up. When I started this book I knew the end more than I knew the beginning, I knew exactly what the end was going to be and we can't talk about the end because it comes as such a turnaround so it's difficult to talk about it but generally speaking it's about Leonard's journey from Jamaica to England and what it was like for a young black boy growing up in England then going to school, simply going to the park and playing as a young black boy, I mean I was born in England but as a young black kid I remember you know walking through the park and seeing a gang of white kids playing football and thinking can I ask them if I can join in and sometimes they'd welcome me but sometimes I would get such racist abuse and then seeing the racism that my mother experienced a lot of that is in the book almost word for word some of the experiences so that's what it's about really, it's kind of there's a lot of talk about the Windrush generation but you must remember if you're talking about the Windrush generation now lots of them were children when they came over and I just wanted me to write a story from a child through a child's eye through a child's mind you know one of the things I also really loved in terms of universal storytelling was how you also dealt with all the sort of messiness of domestic life and so it felt it feels like it's a story that does justice beyond just the idea of arriving which can be a really one-dimensional way of viewing a very rich and nuanced generation of people and there are so many like stories I hear about families I mean I was a teenager or something when my mum would turn around and told me that I've got another sister and I've heard so many stories of people like this where there's some surprise back in the Caribbean or there's something a big family issue that they didn't know about and even to do with our health now this may seem kind of completely random but my father and my uncle were very kind of stiff up a lip and I remember I lost a couple of uncles and I said to my mum about you know what's happened to them and she said oh you know it's a problem with them water works it's them water works you know and that was it I didn't know that it was prostate cancer one of the biggest killers of black men you know but men didn't talk about it you know so little thing like that that happened in the family that I realize now and were really important issues but they just didn't talk about it because they felt that they had to talk about the successful side of coming here which is why you get these photographs of them I've got one in the next room of my mum standing in front of a grand you know a record player saying that we have arrived I remember doing again it may sound like I'm going off piece here but I remember doing a TV program once about why black and Asian people in Britain don't live on water there's lots of communities in Britain but they live on boats all around the country and we found one raster guy that did it and he did it for a financial reason but a lot of the black and Asian people came back and they said I can't write to my family in Jamaica or Barbados or Bangladesh and tell them that I'm living on a boat you can't come all the way from from home and go to England and then right back I say we only bought a boat you know you know you have to put on this idea that you're moving up the social ladder yeah I show I mean obviously this is something that was you know a concern with with your book and your collection of the 12 stories as well can you give us some insight into how important it was for you to also take these stories beyond just arriving and that's the end of it and and give us a sort of an insight into some of the story tell so most of the of the 12 stories they give us snapshots of life back in the Caribbean before people came in particularly you get this sense of the close knit families particularly very intergenerational people being very close to their grandparents of that love they have for the grandparents I mean quite often families in the Caribbean because people have often I mean I'm talking mostly from Jamaica just my experience is that they if they migrate from the countryside to the towns and cities for work they they may leave their children with their parents and so grandparents were you know very important in child raising and also because people tended to have very large families as well so you know one couple would not necessarily be raising 10 12 14 children completely on their own without their relatives so all of the stories in the book give that sense of of that wrench of people being you know separated from those they're very close to I mean Kevin George's story called The Light at the end of the tunnel also talks about active recruitment in post-war building and I think this is a really important story so you know it really gives the journeys a sense of connection rather than people just randomly deciding to come to England you can see that the recruiters they're already trying to encourage people to come to take part in the post-war rebuilding but also there's another story by Selena Godden called Halon Hardy which takes it back before the wind rush to World War II so the recruiters were there already encouraging people to enlist in the British Army and then Kate Mass's story called Making Friends of British Way her character Lucille is actually a medical secretary with the British Army but in Jamaica so I think that the books really join up the history and I know that when when I was a child we we learned about World War II it wasn't in this way there was no sense of of empire or of of Britain's former colonies being involved in any way so I think it's great the way the story does that and so then the wind rush moment is no longer a moment but it's just a stitch you could say a stitch in a long piece of sewing I don't know where that that I came from yeah I think that kind of describes it really yes and of course a lot of that work is done because you are you're keenly involved in the archive and you know I suspect actually Benjamin is also makes up part of that archive so you know I'm interested in asking you Benjamin if there are particularly stories from the historical archive of Black history which you particularly love and find yourself returning to um gosh there are so many stories there's there's one story and in fact I've just finished talking to um is a man called Alan Wilmot um who's um nephew I think it is is the famous comedian but he came on the ship before the MPO Windrush I mean there's two things that strike me about Windrush is that a lot of people who are not like us and interested in the history associated with a scandal um we're asking for for years we've been celebrating it and now a lot of people are associated with a scandal but that's another thing and the other thing is of course I mean I usually just allude to it it's not just one moment there that there was a ship the year before which was the one that Alan was on actually and he was the next military man and um what was the ship called? Alan Mazura and um he he was on that ship and there's a lot of ex-service people on that but then also when we say Windrush there's ships after Windrush obviously it's about a generational thing the thing with the Windrush it was when that when that ship arrived there was lots of cameras there and that's why we remember the name the Empire Windrush there's lots of water ships that arrived but there were no cameras um anyway but Alan's story is fascinating because he was the next military person he came over um and then he was in a band at one point and this band was really popular um and he played with Shirley Bassey and and um other American stars when they came over um and um it just it you know he's still alive and I think he's 97 or something like that and his house is actually like a museum when you go into his house it's like a museum and you can see him meeting you know friends on Archer and all his people um and his life kind of fascinates me because um when you speak to him there is success but there is also failure at one point of sleeping on the streets you know um at one point me and my mother we didn't actually sleep on the streets but we were very close to it and that was to do with domestic violence more than anything but um when I sat down and listened to his story it really really moved me but there are lots of individual stories like that it's very difficult to kind of pick one out and the the the other one that fascinates me which I'm just looking into is the stowaway now I don't know much about that story but I'm fascinated by a woman who's in the dock at Jamaica sees all these people getting on the boat and says well I want to go there I've got my money but I'm getting on you know and she sneeps on the ship and hides and then when they find her they make a collection the pay for her fare I mean those stories are quite amazing yeah Archer I know you've done a lot of work in particular talking about what what what history refers to as barrel children could you give us a sort of a brief explainer because I love hearing you talk about that and and also the very particular soap smell which maybe you can tell us more about as well yeah so the term barrel children was coined by social workers and it refers to the phenomenon of children of of migrating parents being left behind it's actually there's a lady called Marla Joachim who's at University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago and she's doing a lot of research on this looking at the really sort of complex emotional and psychological implications of being left behind because quite often when parents travel they didn't know how long it was going to be before they could set themselves up and send for the child so it might be that they left a baby and then once once they've settled in England they may have had more children born in England and by the time they send for that sibling that sibling could be four five six years old even older the issue with the barrels is that that they would naturally send a barrel home for the people back in in the Caribbean because of course they're in England and that means they've got everything and they must send send back to the people but also there's a people looking after their child and for some reason soap was always one of the things that would figure quite highly in these barrels and people would say that everything else that was in the barrel would end up smelling of soap so even if it was food or clothing everything had this strong smell of soap I remember it happening the other way whenever because my family's quite spread out my grandmother was in the US and they they would come if they visited which is very rare because it was obviously very expensive or they sent us anything there would always be soap for some reason so it was always a particular blue bar and everything would smell of it but I think it is it is hard on on those children and I think you know some of them would have you know then have behavioral problems and maybe not not settled very easily and I think it probably resonates today with the issue of unaccompanied miners from places of conflict coming to the UK and how they're they're you know they're understood but I remember my auntie not my aunt my great aunt was here in the 40s so she probably came on the Manzor Manzor one of the ships that you mentioned there Benjamin and I know she left her son in Jamaica but he was causing so much trouble they eventually said no you've got to go to your mother so he finally came to England as well and he's still here now and I think he's in his 80s but um yeah and I think there's another thing actually if I could just jump in so Benjamin again I love the way that stories all all our stories interconnect and Benjamin you were talking about um Alan Wilmot and um back in the 80s and my brother was a reporter at The Voice newspaper that's when we discovered that my uncle in Yorkshire was in the RAF and knew Alan Wilmot and I think my brother organized a reunion between the three of them two and another gentleman his name I've forgotten and wrote an article in The Voice about it so it was just lovely to hear that that story Benjamin that you just just mentioned and he he was naughty he left as a 17 year old and pretended to be 18 so he could enlist in the RAF again but I think that's again because they have big families they were used to just being so separated people going they're different ways you know and I love how that really relates to what Benjamin's saying about you know your fiction being real you know you're writing you're writing real stories through I mean sometimes you just can't make you talk some of the stories I remember it's a it's a different twist than what we were just hearing but um my mother my family come from a place called St. Elizabeth in Jamaica and you know the saying it takes a village to raise a child it really did there and my mother's closest relative the person that raised her more than anybody was her uncle her mum they lived in the same house but my uncle spent most of the time raising my mother in fact he gave my mother her name anyway so my mother was saw part of that campaign she saw the poster on the streets of Jamaica saying come to England where the streets are paved with gold she says to her sister my auntie you aren't you aren't going to England trade out and my auntie said to them call me not going there and my mother said I'll give it a go so her uncle gave her 70 pounds and that paid for her to go to Kingston to stay in the hotel to get on the ship to come to Southampton no she was like a teenager I don't sorry I don't know exactly what age so my mother lived in England for life I as a teenager started going to and from Jamaica so I knew my mother better than her mother did and one day I said to my mother mother you want to I need to take you to Jamaica so I took my mother to Jamaica and I had to introduce my mom to her mom because she didn't really know her and it was really strange it was like they didn't really grab each other and hug they kind of shook hands and went how do you do but that was a very strange moment and you know they wrote every now and again but I knew my grandmother better than my mother because I hung out with her I went walking with her I talked with her in a way that my mother never did so I actually introduced my mother to her to her mother it's a very poignant story and very close to Leonard can you tell us a little bit I mean we'll talk a little bit about the sort of the process of of what you're writing but can you can you just let us into your writer's room a little bit and and tell us sort of how you write and what your what your soundtrack to recent work has been and you know how you how you approach that are we are we seeing your writer's room actually yeah Benjamin oh no well actually no this is my office this is where this is where I do my tax returns my writing room I wish I could show you this is the laptop I walk you out there and show you but when you look at the windows far as I can see there's nothing right just and it back in the back garden there's a family of deer living that's my interest I'm writing and these years come along and look at me and so and it's like a little library I'm fascinated with books I've got a massive collection of books fiction or kind of things I'm also fascinated with theology so I've got a massive collection of books on Islam Christianity Hinduism stuff like that which is really weird because I don't write about those things but if I could study if I had the opportunity to study I would be theology I'm fascinated fascinated with how religions come about but back to Inrus child this is the this is the book I've done most research on I don't normally I kind of write the story and then I think about research issues what I've got to get technically right with this book I mean when Leonard arrived in Southampton from Jamaica I looked at what the weather was like on that day I looked at the train time the train time timetables to get him to Manchester where would he change all that kind of stuff I literally check the weather on all the days if I had to mention it everything that just so thoroughly thoroughly research and probably for the first time ever I use my mother as a source of research because talking to her was really interesting there's a scene I wrote in the book that I had to change where you know Leonard is watching television in Jamaica and seeing what it's like in England and when I spoke to my mom my mom said no there was no television in Jamaica she never saw the television until she came to England right and that really blew me away there was little things like that that really helped me from my mother even the way that kids played in Jamaica and things like that it was very useful just sitting down and talking to my mother she was expensive she charges a fee but what's your what's your writing soundtrack or what what has it been recently you write maybe musically yes and I have to I have to be in silence really I have to listen to the birds outside if I'm doing something which is just kind of shifting things around then I can have um do not take me out on television on the background how do you begin this yeah seriously I can have just frivolous things nothing serious because then I'll engage with it I can't really have a lot of music on but if I do want music then it's got to be classical because I'm not going to get into beat I'm not going to engage with it in the same way but most of the time I like silence I like the sounds of birds and the sound of my mind working um what about you Asher is there a sort of there a soundtrack or a snack of of choice in the Black Cultural Archives when you're working I would I would say I agree with Benjamin if I could have in Black Cultural Archives we don't have silence we could have silence it would be great but I know if I want to be creative you've got to be silent otherwise if you hear words as he said then those words start to take you in a certain direction and insert themselves into the book whereas the classical music there's there's nothing to latch on to in that way so ditto okay um can we go back to the the barista because I guess you know like like you rightly mentioned you know post 2018 in the sort of British states failings of a generation of people I wonder how you metabolize that as a writer and as an archivist for you Asher you know I wonder how much of that period for you was about giving yourself a period of reflection or how much of that was sort of you know I think about Toni Morrison looking at an article and feeling like I have to write the story of this escaped slave that I've seen in the newspaper you know what what was the sort of relationship between like having a time of reflection and feeling like I wanted to write directly about this issue to Benjamin Benjamin yeah Benjamin and then oh sorry um that's interesting I mean I have uh I knew I wanted to write about this I just didn't know how it was going to come about in this case scholastic approached me and I think I alluded to before I knew exactly what the ending was going to be and at one point controversy it was suggested that I may think about changing the end the ending and I was like no this is the ending you know I was so strong about how we should end um but um I do I wanted to write about it but look I mean when the scandal happened I remember I was doing a tour and I most of my tour well naturally of course was in not in multicultural places there were in you know places that were rural and Devon and places like that places where there's not a big black community and even within some of the cities people were talking about the Windrush scandal and I would get on stage night after night and say that this has been happening for a long time you know a particular really good journalist at The Guardian picked up the story and and kind of gave it publicity but if you read the voice newspaper almost every week they were telling you about somebody that went on holiday to Jamaica wasn't being let back in the country or even went to France wasn't being let back in the country um and then a lot of people well people of a certain age may remember the extra distance squad I think they were set up by Margaret Thatcher whose job was to go around and get people who were deemed illegal immigrants and forcibly move them from the country then we had the death of Joy Gardner I think it was in July 1993 I'm happy to be corrected I think it was then you know and I do my I would then on stage perform my poem the death of Joy Gardner and people would be horrified by it you know she died in 13 feet of tape you know in front of her son so this is not new so I have been writing like this in one way or another but when the when the story broke as people started talking about Windrush I knew I wanted to come back to it again in a more kind of holistic way and probably a lot more personal way um that's our job as a writer it's um in the spirit of the Black Cultural Archives you know if if we don't do it we can't then complain when other people do it for us we've got to do it for ourselves we've got to kind of collect our history we've got to tell our own stories um otherwise people will do it for us I remember in the 70s reading a terrible report on mental health in the Black community and it was criticizing saying that Black people had mental health problems because of the way they walk when they walk with a lean and they walk with rhythm I mean they kissed their teeth and then on the front of the paper it actually said um report written by Professor so-and-so an expert in Black people you know so here's somebody who's taken the liberty of calling himself an expert in Black people and claiming that he can write and and these reports actually condemned a lot of people into mental health institutions I mean it's not like this right in the story and that it's a fictional story that's not quite right I mean this was a real kind of powerful stuff that really condemned people for a long time so we have to tell our own stories and we have to archive our own history um taking liberty is such a it's such a good way to describe that that's exactly right um I sure I guess that that leads me on to thinking how much does your role you know you're you're you know you're a real you know a site of much of the Caribbean diaspora and activism in Brixton so how does when a scandal like this breaks how much does your role become or move out of historical archivist and move into community activist who really has to provide things beyond just telling stories I mean the great thing about Black Country Archives is we get to tell our own story you know we were founded by members of the Windrush generation the materialist here I know Len Garrison did say when he got at one point in time that if nobody had gone out and collected this material it would have been lost and once your your history or the evidence of your history is lost in that way then people can say anything they want about you so the preservation of the archive material is key and I would say um I mean we've always done offered workshops on on Windrush primarily to school children but adults as well but since the scandal has has broken there's been a lot more engagements um I mean I don't want to talk about the scandal in a positive sense obviously everything it's terrible but sometimes something comes out of something terrible and what has come out of that is is the fact that we now have a national Windrush day is is a moment on which we can pin the story that we want to tell so on the one hand it can be a great celebration of the of the contributions and the struggles and the bravery of that pioneering generation but it's also an opportunity for us to to really explain what has happened and what people can do to get involved to to try to campaign or to try to anything to ensure that those people who have been affected can have their rights returned in some way or at the very least a recognition and an apology and and something to be done that to make sure this never happens again I mean we we then I mean we we we also this is not within my role to my role is more is with the learning but we do we did put on um surgeries so free advice surgeries from 2018 onwards for people affected by this first to try to help them to get their status established and secondly it was to try to get compensation and again this is where the community comes together so we had a lawyer who um Jacqueline Mackenzie you know donated her time for free supported by our volunteers and I think it means it's a drop in the ocean in a way I think we've helped around 400 people I don't know how many thousands have been affected but um yeah so it's like BCA is so much it's it's the archiving it's the learning and then it's the activism and we began with activism so we don't want to you know we want to stay close to our roots in that sense moving forward you know Benjamin how do you know how do you metabolize the rage I guess is the question you know how do you deal with the sort of the visceral response before you put pen to paper well I have to put pen to paper I have to do it creatively sorry I'm laughing because people say that when I do interviews I'm a lot of the time I'm too honest and I get too personal but I have to be you know to understand my work you've asked me a question but when I didn't express myself creatively I kept ending up in the police station and I ended up in prison you know when I see some people who are angry with society and the only way they can express themselves is sometimes by putting a brick through the police station window stuff like that because they've been stopped and searched night after night I'm sorry I've been there I know it's like I've been in the police station forward the foot on my neck saying I can't breathe it just happened that I happen to live I happen to escape it and you know I could have smashed a lot of windows I could have done a lot of dangerous things but I found art and I found a way of expressing myself I'm still angry there's so many things that anger me now especially after being a child of the after living through all the things I've lived through and seeing the kind of seeing everything come back you know the kind of racism and sexism and me fighting the same battles again there was a time in the 19th but I thought he was all over me going to sail into a great future and then it all came back and now it's back and it's on the internet it's bigger than ever and now you've got people who are kind of I hate to put the two words together because I don't think they should go together but you know they're they're almost racist intellectuals that's their living you know um so I use my art to express myself and if I can't do that again this is very personal to me but I have my martial arts and my meditation to go to otherwise I probably could still be out there on the streets doing all those things I used to do back in the 70s. Both of you sort of obviously work with young people and children some of whom have we have in the audience today and my question is um uh really about a passage in Windrush Child where Leonard's mum sort of talks about the surprise in her lifetime of you know first jumping aboard the Erosa star and taking a two-week journey from Jamaica to the UK and then you know just sort of 20 or so years later suddenly having an airplane and being able to do that in sort of you know a day or you know much much quicker and I was wondering you know about how you sort of make the point that this this technology change almost makes it feel like this is like you know the Victorian period in history this like this old time in history where people took ships how do you make the point for young people that this is actually very new in our history and this impacts the day-to-day life that many people live and black people in this country live today how do you do that Benjamin? If I could just jump in first because a couple of things come to mind I remember I used to go back to Jamaica to the little place where my family lived and um one day I said to them do you remember it's almost like a walkman I had that kind of cassette player it's a little bit bigger than a walkman and I put it down I said can you talk and send the message to the family in England so they they first of all they didn't know what to do and I said just speak and they went hello Valerie how are you and then I played it back and they literally jumped because I'd never heard a recording and that was the technology of the time and um I brought that back home and played it to my mother and my mother loved it and I've actually recently transferred it to CD but CDs are obsolete now I'm transferring it to you know saving it on a hard drive but that does kind of tell you how progress I think progressed not so long ago a young girl a student of mine at university said and I was talking to her and I said you know give me a ring sometime and she went um why do all you old people say give us a ring I had to explain to her that once upon a time all phones rang you know I mean for her ring was just one of the many tones on her phone I think you know we just tell them the stories about how difficult it was communicating um with family you know you had to write an email and they tell you how to put it in the post wait for it to arrive and then wait for somebody to do the same or give it and come back it's and we have to do this in a way of that we don't patronize them and say well you know you're better when we were younger or you know things were just different basically I mean I I I really don't like people that criticize young people's music because it's too loud or whatever I don't understand the words and those rappers are talking too fast well you know my parents said something like that when I started listening to dub him reggae you know and that's how you can tell somebody's getting old you must always remember that you were once young and so you tell people stories and you remind them I always remind young people when I'm speaking to them that the technology that they have now and the music that they're listening to now will seem really old to their children and the next generation that's just the way right but what's interesting about that is that there's this an idea that technology is sort of enabled a greater connection or global connection to the global world and we like to think that that will impact our politics or you know impact our feeling of global connection but of course that's not always the case and I share for you you know how do you how do you make that point for some of the younger people who come through your doors well what I do is I think it's really important when they come in for workshops that they're not just listening to me speaking or looking at pictures but I love to include objects so one of the things I do include is a paraffin heater this paraffin heater well if anyone's got grandparents in this country you know as soon as you go in through the door and you smell the paraffin it just reminds me it reminds me of my great aunt I think of fried fish and the smell of paraffin but I asked the children first to work out what it is because they would never have seen such a thing and when they work out this is how people heated their houses and that then gets them to have a stronger connection with how it would have felt to come from the Caribbean speak if he came from a warm place they're not everywhere in the Caribbean was warm as I always do add up in the hills could have been very very cold but generally if he came from a hot place to England and then you have this paraffin heater that only works in the room that you're sitting in so you go from one room to another and it's price cold or the toilets at the end of the garden I think all of those things really get them to really think about how life has changed and the thing they love is a typewriter I bring out a type writer because of we tell the story of Connie Mark who was a medical secretary in the British Army and then she came to England and did all kinds of great work with remembrance of women in war but again looking at typewriter and then they make those connections themselves whether between that and their laptops and why the design of it is the way it is so yes it's old-fashioned but it but it's kind of they can see the development over time the same with them those old those busty kit machines remember when you get on the bus and throw out the machine and now they just use an oyster card or kids don't use anything they don't pay at all but seeing that development in history and things which are within living memory and I think the good thing about that sort of thing is that it encourages that intergenerational dialogue because most of our pets don't really talk about unless you're going to ask them they're not going to talk about things that they did in their life which to them was just their life they don't they didn't see themselves as making history but the moment you put it before the children in the workshop when the adults were sitting at the back on their phones not paying attention suddenly come to life and want to speak and tell the children about these things and they just see that dynamism begin and it's just so nice I mean you don't have to do anything because they do it for you on that point before we open for questions you know what are some of the things that you both find come come up or you know what are some of the tired tropes or narratives about this this period of history that you often hear and you just feel like that's not true I need to debunk this. I'll jump in there. Everyone came for a better life because you say that it then presupposes that everyone came from something worse to something better the reality was often the opposite people had to start absolutely at the bottom when they came here but they a lot of people had a better standard of living where they came from a lot of the ex-service personnel were very very skilled but they weren't offered skilled jobs I remember the same uncle I mentioned who was an RAF engineer when he was demobbed and he sought a job they only offered him a job digging potatoes so nothing that would utilize his skills to think it's important to know that you know people came with a variety of skills and knowledge and also that there was a diversity of ethnicities as well so the Caribbean is obviously predominantly people of African descent but there are others as well I know when my mother came as a nurse and I see all the old photos she was surrounded by a lot of Chinese women and people wouldn't necessarily recognize that these Chinese women were Jamaican and they were part of the Windrush generation although and another thing is not everyone came on a ship because if I say Windrush generation to my parents they say but we never came on the Windrush so I also want to make it a point of saying people came by plane as well you know we did we have technology over there too and just finally that as I said earlier that that it's all that the Windrush isn't this a moment that's part of a longer migration ships came before and people came afterwards by plane and so on for because we were so again part of the British Empire and so integrated into that empire and I think I would like to see people look at the history more from an empire wide or global perspective yes and also that people you know they bought with them sort of you know great knowledge of organizing tactics of you know Jamaican sort of labor party tactics and you know union work and sort of labor understanding so people were also bringing activism and knowledge that they could then use for sort of you know the labor workforce that they would come and sort of in industrial organizing this idea that you know people really really came and shared the knowledge that they had used and tried and tested I think is always important but Benjamin yeah what are some of the things that you hear that are tired and you you'd like to debunk all your entry narratives it's kind of connect with what I should have said that this is the real type that everybody was kind of poor I mean and educated almost Alan Wilmott was a fighter pilot and an engineer you could strip a plane down and fly it but he found himself on the streets of London unimplied and almost living like a tramp and there was I know it again slightly up east and it relates to the Asian community but I think it's true also with the Caribbean community there was a figure once and it was in the 80s so I'm not sure how true it is now but something like 90 percent of Asian shopkeepers had a PhD some very highly educated people came from the Caribbean and they ended up you know giving tickets on the bus or sweeping the roads or you know all that all those kind of things so the idea that everybody was poor came here and uneducated and it's not really true some people especially when it comes to English history and almost respect and I say this as somebody who's not a monetist but respect for the monitoring thing like that you know well Jamaican history that what they were taught at school was more English than what they were getting in England my mother said when she came to England she couldn't understand why everybody wasn't quoting Shakespeare and why everybody didn't have a picture of the queen in their house but you know I'm just making at the moment a film I'm not plugging the film here but I'm just making a film about the Windrush generation and how they've impacted football and literally 20 minutes or so before we came on here are tweeted about it because it's going to come out in some in September and they almost immediately somebody tweeted about because there's some there's a blurb about how the Windrush generation helped the NHS and it helped the train services and so I'm going to talk about football and then somebody tweeted back and said yeah and you brought gun crime and muggins and things like this right trying to say that we were all criminals why does somebody say that it's because of the media because the way crime is reported in the black community because of the way poverty and all these things are reported in the black community you know not put into context you know when there's white people doing much more crime it's much more serious drugs that is not reported but you know a guy selling some splits in Brixton is reported I'm not saying one is better than the other it's just about the way they are reported um trust me when and this as I said earlier it's not just about George Floyd it happens here when a racist person be that a police officer or just a civilian has their foot on the neck of a black person or is trying to kill them or trying to shoot them or whatever they must have no sense of the history of black people they think that this person is uneducated not worthy of life and and um is either a criminal or doing something suspicious and I probably might really answer the question but that's what I'm thinking about now no you have thank you well I think it's so important that we're writing for children because before by the time people reach adulthood certain misinformation has become entrenched if we can teach these stories to children the next generation will rub with a much better understanding than our generation did and that should go in some small way to promote social cohesion and progress and combat some of these issues that we're facing today Benjamin that football project sounds amazing I could do another hour chatting about that but um I'm going to open up for some of the questions and we have one here saying kind of relates to what you were saying actually is there a sense of a reversal of Windrush where the descendants of the Windrush generation are sending their children to the Caribbean for a better life well I remember there was a trend for this in the 80s and 90s I don't know if it's still happening what was happening was um it was about education and a lot of Caribbean parents thought that the schools in the Caribbean were a lot more disciplined it's not to do with the level of education it's just to do with the discipline you know in Jamaica you you always when you refer to your teacher you do with respect Mr so and so on Mrs so and so you never shout back you very rarely argue with them or anything like this you know you can have a debate with them but discipline is really really tight and so there was a trend for that I don't know if it's still happening and and I do remember once again sorry I'm going up to another continent but I remember once being in India and talking about truancy in Britain and I said to these kids and I was in the school and I said is there any truancy here and they were just like we so appreciate school the idea of playing truant like somebody can just take our place so in the Caribbean I find again I find that in Asia people value education a lot more so there were these parents sending their children to the Caribbean for education and can you just can you just just because you've teased us a little bit of football knowledge can you just give us a little bit of sense of some of the some of the things that you've learned on sort of on the way to making your film and also what your what's your team who do you support Aston Villa of course I've got the pencil oh well it's about you see I'm the Empire Windrush there were no footballers actually many of the ships afterwards and the airplanes afterwards but their descendants were interested in football right and so you know who are those people those are Rio Ferdinand you know Anton Ferdinand um uh Hope Powell the England ladies captain we speak to her about you know history of her parents how did they how they came here I found out that she literally comes from down the road from where my family come from in Jamaica um and um and it's just stories about what their parents thought about them when they were going into football Andy Cole a lot of people don't realize this but Andy Cole's father was one of many black men I think it was all men that came here that went down into the coal mines I mean we know about the windrush generation with the buses and the NHS and I think but there was windrush generation coal miners the pits of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire so um yeah lots of those stories I could go on for a long time but uh what's your program like I said it's coming out in September and it's easy sports we like a commercial now we're happy to buy what you're selling um I'm gonna we're gonna close now but just some final thoughts it'd be great just hear just some sort of final notes of joy from both of you sort of what are some of the things to be optimistic about whether that is local actions that you guys have seen or you know some of the teaching work that you've done can you give us something to take away with us to make us smile I could say the book a lovely colorful book right um and as I mentioned before I think the activism and that's a wet we're reopening our windrush surgeries that's something positive but great but for my role at BCA it's it's got to be the the engagement with with schools and heritage organizations which I think um obviously there was a great impetus after the death of George Floyd um many organizations had a reevaluation of their position and we got a lot of you know a lot of people got in contact with us and so we're looking at developing some relationships and really expanding our learning program and I'm feeling quite optimistic from that point of view moving forward and and just as I say I believe in doing everything from the grassroots so we're not I'm not into sort of campaigning with government I'd rather just do what I can do here at Black Cultural Archives with the local support and then take it nationally and I can see that happening slowly but surely great thank you Benjamin can you give us a bit of spring in our step right through the start I remember doing a tour of libraries in London many years ago and there was a young boy who was playing truant and he was following me and in those days I mean Brixton Tottenham everywhere was burning there was you know uprisings and police stop and search and I just thought I'd rather him be with me than be on the streets and Adrian Mitchell his poet had just written a book and in the front of his book he wrote not to be taught in schools and I was doing this talk in Brixton and I said to the audience that I'm going to bring a book out and I'm going to be like Adrian Mitchell I'm going to write it not to be taught in schools and this 14 year old kid pulled me up and he said Benjamin he said if your books were in school I'd go to school wouldn't I you know and that really just changed my mind in a moment the great thing is now is that we have a growing body of literature of black British writers writing about the Caribbean experience and the African experience and the Asian experience we're kind of building a can of work and we have teachers who are inspired and fired up and want to do something about the kind of inequalities that we see in our country and so I think that is a major major change but for me one of the most inspiring things was I was on a Black Lives Matter march a few months ago and I first of all I noticed that unlike the ones I used to go to like three or four years previously there were so many white people you know and they were passionate and they were like angry than me I mean and I'll never forget this girl she had a banner and it said Black Lives Matter don't you understand dad I mean this is a message to her racist father so I think there is hope in the young people and I hope that young people through reading our literature through listening to our stories can understand that we work best of the country when we work together that is one of the strengths of Britain is its multiculturalism you know it shouldn't be the enemy of Britain it's not a negative it's not government sponsored multiculturalism this is when we play football together this is when we eat together when we make music together when we just play together when we share each other stories and when we fall in love together I needed that thank you so so much thank you I feel like you know completely uplifted and happy Windrush day and thank you for an opportunity to to hear from you guys in the sort of a moment of celebration and commemoration and thank you everybody that has joined us I know that we've had I think 500 people so thank you for taking time out thank you both of you for doing the work thank you especially to the British libraries living knowledge network of libraries who are across the country who have also made this event possible and I hope you feel inspired and and energised to continue the work wherever you guys are thank you very very much and goodbye thank you Kieran bye thank you very much to our special guests Benjamin Zephaniah Aisha Johnson and our chair Kieran Yates and of course a very special thank you to the to you our audience and our partners the Black Cultural Archives please remember to have a look at the bookshop to get your copy of Windrush Child go to our website to find out more about our cultural events program and for resources on Windrush thank you very much for being with us this afternoon