Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's

best selling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Corporn.

For today's podcast, we're bringing you an editor's pick, in which a member of our

team chooses one of their own personal highlights from our back catalogue. This episode was

chosen by the editor of BBC History Revealed magazine, Charlotte Hodgman. Charlotte nominated

a conversation she had at the very beginning of this year about the Windrush generation

with Colin Grant. She says, I wanted to share this episode again because it was a really

enjoyable podcast to record. Me and Colin were able to speak in person before lockdown hit.

And his own family links to the topic brought to life the experiences, both good and bad,

of West Indians in Britain in the 1950s and 60s in a really memorable way.

Colin, thank you for coming to chat to us in Bristol today. Probably the best way to

start might be to talk about why you wanted to write the book, you know, so where that

idea came from? My parents are Jamaican. They came here in 1959 from the capital Kingston.

And my father's emergency, my mother was a reasonably wealthy middle class lady in Jamaica

who didn't have to board an egg because you had servants who did such things. And they

had a very strange transformation. They both ended up working on the production line at

the Waxel Motors. And about seven or eight years ago, I read a book about them called Bagai

at the Wheel. And Bagai was my father's nickname. He had very baggy eyes. And it struck me

that when I was researching that book, I interviewed a lot of Caribbean people from that generation,

from the Windrush generation. And their stories hadn't really been told. And I knew when

I was growing up as a child in Luton where I'm from, that these people were so colourful,

...