Black women in Britain – from the Romans to the Windrush

he zoot suits. The neatly pressed skirt suits with matching pillbox hats and sensible court shoes. The gloves, the handkerchiefs, the reinforced cardboard suitcases (also known as “grips”) and the fixed, toothy smiles.

More often than not, when people talk of the arrival of black people on British shores, the narrative includes some or indeed all of the above. They almost always mention the following, too: Tilbury docks, Essex, 22 June 1948; the Empire Windrush; the West Indies and calypso music. Sometimes, the storyteller might mention the fact that the ship’s passenger list held the names of 490 men and only two women (there was a stowaway, whose fare was paid for by a ship-wide whipround).


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