Black History Month: compelling oral history videos by MDX students of Windrush elders’ stories given screening

Linette Wiliams and Ingrid Ramsay share tales of Caribbean culture, struggles with bureaucracy and resilience in post-war Barnet

First year Middlesex University Film students have interviewed two Barnet residents from the Windrush Generation, as part of an ongoing local oral history project to capture some of the extraordinary stories and life learnings of people in the borough.

MDX came on board a project between Barnet African & Caribbean Association (BACA) and Barnet Council for last year’s Windrush 75 anniversary, to commemorate the borough’s hidden black history, after Senior Lecturer in Film Production Dr Vesna Lukic met BACA’s Jeni Osbourne at a MDX event.

MDX students visited BACA’s premises at Barnet Multi-Cultural Centre near Hendon Thameslink station, to get to know BACA service users. Elders were then invited to MDX campus for a filming session last December, with 20 students working in different roles to record, edit and format the interviews.

Videos interviews with Linette Wiliams, who came to the UK from Guyana in the 1960s, and with Ingrid Ramsay, who grew up in Barbados, were screened in the Boardroom on Friday 18th October. They were also being played in a continuous loop to watch and listen to via headset in the Quad, from Tuesday October 22 until the end of the month.

The 'Windrush generation’ are those who arrived in the UK from Caribbean and other Commonwealth countries from the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush on June 22 1948 until 1973.

In the videos, Linette reveals how after leaving her original job in the NHS to take up agency work, she was chased up by police for her passport to be stamped and was urged to get British citizenship, at a cost to her of £700 at the time. As a result, she avoided the difficulties faced by some other pre-1973 migrants from Commonwealth countries under recent hostile environment policies. Reflecting on her work at Mount Vernon hospital in Northwood, Linette says: "My first wages were £14. I cried my eyes out, because in my country… my wage was triple that. But you get used to it."

In Hut H at the hospital, where all the Caribbean workers were accommodated, she recalls suffering badly from the cold and getting rashes from the rough blankets. “But then we came to a solution: we got all the mattresses and put them together, so we all used to bunk together in one room on the floor, so we had that body heat with each other."

Ingrid describes the strong influence of Englishness in Barbadian culture, the respect given to older generations and the strict discipline administered to misbehaving youngsters. She recounts the violent assault on her late husband, a British Telecom engineer, by a chain-wielding teddy boy (a youth gang sub-culture in the 50s and early 60s) leaving him with permanent scarring. Her husband used to continually get stopped by police as he enjoyed owning big cars. “Anything you have, it was too nice for you to have because you were black,” Ingrid says.

Aspiring cinematographer Jefferson Adolfo, who interviewed Linette, said he was aiming for a conversation with her rather than a formal Q&A. “I wanted to ask questions to allow her to tell her story in the way she wanted to tell it.

“I wanted to feel like I was with her when she first landed in Heathrow Airport."

It was Jefferson’s first time conducting an interview on film. Familiar with the history of Windrush “to an extent” – he wasn’t formally taught it at school – it was “an eye-opening experience,” he says. During filming, he says “the room was silent, gazing at Linette wanting to hear her story”.

Ed Fincham, the sound engineer for Linette’s interview, describes trial and error with the recording process, with sound picked up by a lapel mic felt to be unusable and in the end all the audio being taken from a Zoom H4N recorder resting on a stand.

“I really loved it,” Ed says about the project. “It’s rare you get to listen to someone for an hour and a bit." His only previous knowledge about Windrush came from watching Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series and films from the 1980s.

Videographer on the film with Ingrid, Taiki Maruyama, says the interview subjects were shot from multiple angles, with a challenge to keep them in sharp focus as they moved around a lot, and that it took a while to get the right level of warmth in the lighting. As part of the process, “everyone asked a question,” not just the interviewer, Taiki says, “to ice-break and ask deeper things… To try and get the truth, the important facts”.

The screening on October 18 was followed by a workshop where attendees including BACA service users, pupils from Holmewood School and Finchley Catholic High School and Colindale South Councillor Humayune Khalick reflected on the interviews and lessons from Windrush migrants’ experiences. One participant recalled the Pardners schemes through which Caribbean migrants clubbed together to get a mortgage. Julia McLarty from Willesden Seventh-day Adventist Church, the daughter of Windrush migrants, said she didn’t get a passport until she was 27.

Barbara Allen, who came to the UK from Jamaica in the early 1960s, said her hope is that in 25 years’ time, young black people born in the UK are “going into good jobs not menial jobs - aspiring to achieve,” and that black identity remains strong.

Jeni Osbourne said that “everyone can relate to Linette’s story – being in a warm place, and now it’s cold”. Other Windrush Generation BACA users had traumatic arrival experiences, she says: such as a 16 year old girl due to be met by a friend when she flew in, but the friend had got the date wrong and wasn’t there. An Italian family rescued her and took her in for the night.

“I do think it will be important to have a Black History Month in 2050. Racism hasn’t gone anywhere – it needs a whole community challenge, as well as a celebration of black communities with a minute’s silence. It’s interesting hearing people at the MDX event talking about the quality of black and ethnic minority political leaders. We need leaders who look at the interests of everyone in the community."

Jeni Osbourne.

Vesna, a firm believer in connecting students with grassroots community projects, feels it is “precious to capture these bits of living memory”. The aspiration is that further videos will be made this term ahead of an exhibition at MDX next February.

Other events at MDX for Black History Month include a free sustainable craft activity in the Quad on October 22, inspired by the work of the BarNET Zero team and involving the Student Union and the MDX Anti-Racism Network; and on October 29, the screening of a Channel 4 docudrama about Mary Seacole produced by former MDX academic Paul Kerr.