'Gone to Foreign' from Jamaica

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.3 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2018

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When someone in Jamaica emigrates to the UK, it is said they have 'gone to foreign'. Over the past 70 years several hundred thousand Jamaicans have done this, following in the footsteps of the so-called 'Windrush generation' who first arrived in Britain in the late 1940s. But the spirit of adventure and optimism those early pioneers bought with them has changed over the years and a recent political scandal now finds some of them unwanted and rejected by Britain. Following changes to immigration law and failing to comply with citizenship requirements, they have been designated illegal immigrants. On returning from holiday in the Caribbean, some of the children of the Windrush generation (now in their 50s and 60s) have been refused entry back to Britain, and others have been deported from Britain back to the Caribbean. For Crossing Continents, Colin Grant travels to Jamaica to meet two men who, despite having lived in the UK for decades, working and paying taxes, find themselves in limbo, trapped and unable to return to the place they call home. What happens when you are stranded in a place you were never really familiar with, an island which you have little memory of, and may not have returned to for half a century? Grant hears of their endeavour to return to the UK and how they have struggled to keep up hope in the face of a very painful and public rejection.

Colin Grant reporting and producing.

(Image: West Indian mother keeps the rain off her child with an umbrella, as they depart the Spanish passenger vessel Montserrat at Southampton docks Oct 1961 / Credit: Press Association)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this edition of assignment from the BBC World Service.
0:04.5	I'm Colin Grant. Both my parents of Jamaican have migrated to Britain in the late 1950s
0:10.0	to join friends and relatives who done the same. In fact there used to be a joke about the huge number
0:15.3	who wanted to depart on this great adventure that the last one out of the island should turn off all the lights.
0:21.6	I was born here in Luton in the south of England. For many years
0:25.8	my parents dreamed of returning to Jamaica. They never did. In the 1960s, a xenophobic
0:32.1	time, we were encouraged by some to start packing our bags.
0:36.5	We resisted.
0:37.5	It's with some poignancy then that I now think of people of my age of Caribbean descent who've been classified as illegal
0:44.6	immigrants and stripped of their passports. This is their story.
0:50.3	I say over on the other side of the mung Back in the 1950s it used to be said that when someone left Jamaica to come to England they had
0:57.0	it used to be said that when someone left Jamaica to come to England, they had gone to foreign,
1:04.8	or as Jamaicans say, gantafaran.
1:08.8	Now it's said in the reverse about black Britons who were deported to Jamaica, a foreign land to many of them.
1:15.0	I'm Colin Grant and an assignment here on the BBC World Service.
1:19.0	I'm heading to Jamaica to meet two men in whose shoes I could easily have found myself, trapped on the island,
1:25.3	unable for a number of years to return to the place they call home.
1:31.0	The person who eventually spoke to me, he gave me the impression that he was England.
1:37.0	And he looked at me and he said, Mr. Morgan that was never a proper British passport.
1:42.0	It was chilling. was
1:42.8	chill.
1:43.8	Chilling.
	...

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