History books tell us that the first postwar migrants from the Caribbean came to Britain aboard the SS Empire Windrush. But the history books are sometimes mistaken. Some years after her father’s death, poet Hannah Lowe read a notebook he had written in the 1980s, and discovered that he had sailed to Liverpool with a small batch of migrants on the ex-troopship Ormonde in March 1947. Those on the “forgotten” Ormonde were actually the first postwar pioneers from the West Indies.

In her introduction to her eponymous poetry booklet, which contains 12 poems and a wealth of archive material, she says: “It took me a while to work out that Ormonde was actually the first ship to travel from the Caribbean to Britain in the postwar period – over a year before Empire Windrush … Ormonde had almost disappeared from history and memory.”

She decided to write poems about the Ormonde after seeing her father’s name on the passenger list at the National Archives in London. She also found there the names of two boxers he had befriended on the voyage, and learned of the existence of 11 stowaways who were arrested and sent to see the magistrate as soon as they arrived in England.

At the collection’s launch at Brixton East gallery in south London on Tuesday night, Lowe spoke of how her father had left for a new life in England to escape postwar poverty in Jamaica: “In 1947, for my father, England was the good dream. But I think that after he arrived, quite quickly, England became the bad dream – and home became the good dream. It is an experience, I think, that is quite common in migration.”  

She read three poems from the collection. ‘Ormonde’ describes the ship sailing “like a rumour”; its passengers step from it “through a coverlet of mist … slip like whispers into tenements and backstreets”. ‘Stowaway’ imagines how those illegal travellers felt, leaving behind the “hopeless day-long yawn of home”. ‘In’ describes what’s it like to be in a country, but never really at home there.

Lowe’s Jamaican-Chinese father lived on his wits as a professional gambler, and occasional barefist boxer. She has also written about him in Chick, which was shortlisted for the Forward, Aldeburgh and Seamus Heaney first collection prizes. She paid tribute to Mike Phillips, co-author of Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, a book which she said had helped her to assemble “the detail and the emotion that I wanted to occupy the poems”. Phillips, who was involved in the founding of the Black History Archive, spoke of his pleasure at reading Lowe’s poems, and said that at the time “it didn’t occur to us that at this late stage people would still be talking about all this”.

Ormonde is published by Hercules Editions, and its inclusion of archive documents and photographs is very much in the style of the small press publisher that poet Tamar Yoseloff and photographer Vici MacDonald set up in 2012, with the aim of combining visual elements with poetry.

In her foreword to the collection Lowe reflects that many of its poems are composed in iambic pentameters. “There are various reasons for this: one is my belief in the possibility of tight formal constraint to invoke creativity … certainly I needed help to write in other voices. I also wanted to both mimic and subvert the formal English metrical poetry that was taught in Caribbean classrooms under the colonial education system. As an old man, my father could still recite the Wordsworth and Kipling he’d been given at school – poems which had no relation to his life and experience.”   

Lowe’s final poem in the collection, ‘Shipbreaking’, includes these lines: “I google what I can. If you / were here, you’d ask me why I care so much. / I’d say it’s what we do these days Dad, clutch / at history.”  

Hannah Lowe will be reading the full sequence of poems at an event at Brixton’s Black Cultural Archive on 29 November, which will also involve a workshop, and a conversation with Mike Phillips about the first wave of Caribbean migration. More details 

Greg Freeman

 

See pictures