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Windrush 75: we want liberation not celebration
Don’t be nostalgic about the anniversary of the boat journey that brought my father to Britain — instead of statues and ceremonies, fight for migrant justice, writes MARC WADSWORTH

MY late father, Jamaican WWII veteran Simeon George Rowe, returned to Britain on the iconic former troop ship the Empire Windrush that docked at Tilbury on June 22 1948 after a 5,000-mile voyage.

Passenger number 830, he went to Birmingham, in the West Midlands, with four other friends who’d also been onboard, because an earlier Jamaican arrival had a place for them to live in Thornhill Road, Handsworth.

Responding to an advertisement in the Daily Gleaner, they had originally been recruited by the RAF in Jamaica during the war, to help the “mother country,” as they called Britain, fight Hitler’s Nazis at the time of its greatest need.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
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