MARIA DUARTE reviews Desperate Journey, Blue Moon, Pillion, and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
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‘I cried like a baby the first week I was here’
PETER MASON is captivated by snapshots that build up a strong feel of what it was like to live and work in those now far-off times, when strong unionisation and an enlightened attitude from LT nurtured camaraderie
MEMORY LANE: (L to R) Bus conductor Agatha Claudette Hart, 1962; Food Production Croydon, 1971
[Images copyright TfL from London Transport Museum’s collection]
WILL STONE enjoys a set by an artist too eclectic to be pigeonholed
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
The book feels like a writer working within his limits and not breaking any new ground, believes KEN COCKBURN
PRAGYA AGARWAL recommends a collection of drawings that explore the relation of indigenous people to the land in south Asia, Africa and the Caribbean
CHRIS SEALE speaks to Palestinian sound artist BINT MBAREH
MARY CONWAY applauds a brave and timely two hander that explores the difference between intimacy and abuse
Legacies: London Transport’s Caribbean Workforce
London Transport Museum, Covent Garden
WHEN London Transport had a recruitment problem in the late 1950s and early ’60s, it turned to the Caribbean to find bus conductors, Tube station staff, maintenance workers and canteen assistants.
The initial target was Barbados, though recruiting sergeants were later sent to Jamaica and Trinidad, as well as some of the smaller islands such as Grenada and Dominica. Around 6,000 people were directly signed up from the Caribbean between 1956 and 1970, and many more came over on their own account, taking up work on the Tubes and buses once they arrived.
Now a new exhibition at the London Transport Museum is celebrating the contribution those willing hands made to London life – while also looking at the bittersweet impact of emigration on their own existence.
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