Ivor who? Precisely! Read on to find out more about an unsung hero of the Empire Windrush story.
Ivor Cummings was a Civil Servant working at the Colonial Office in London when news reached the Ministry in May 1948 that the Empire Windrush would soon be leaving Jamaica with several hundred men (and some women) bound for England in search of work.
It’s a widely held misconception that the men were coming at the invitation of the British Government to help rebuild the country’s shattered infrastructure. According to his obituary in The Independent newspaper (he died in 1992) ‘Cummings was one of the first waiting to greet the initial shipload of Jamaicans arriving to help rebuild war-torn Britain at the government’s behest’. As we shall see the last part of that sentence was far from accurate.
The authorities in Jamaica knew how unwelcome the news of the Windrush’s imminent departure for England would be: ‘Very sorry indeed that you and your staff will be put to all the trouble that the arrival of this large number … will involve … it is an appalling thing with which to be saddled‘ wrote H Lindo from the Colonial Secretary’s Office in Jamaica on 29th May. Elsewhere in files held at The National Archives at Kew the imminent arrival of the Windrush is described as ‘a formidable problem’ and ‘a first class problem’.[1]
The Windrush passengers were most definitely not coming at the ‘behest’ of the Government!
Why was their imminent arrival seen as so problematic?
To answer this you need to consider the context of the time. This was a Britain still reeling from the effort involved in winning the war against fascism. Everything was in short supply, the housing stock had been decimated and food was rationed. The arrival of over 400 people from the Caribbean posed very real logistical problems: where were they to be housed; how would they be fed; and what would they do?
Mike and Trevor Phillips in their outstanding book ‘Windrush – The Irresistible Rise Of Multi-Racial Britain’ (still available from Amazon), argue that the British authorities’ reaction was driven by ‘paroxysms of anxiety’ about these questions rather than racism. Close examination of the files at Kew confirms that there was no overtly racist language used in discussing the issues, but there is no doubt that the overall tone is often patronising and many of the civil servants of the time had low expectations of the people the Windrush would bring (Cummings himself is not immune to this criticism). It’s also worth pointing out that the same concerns did not seem to apply to the thousands of White European workers, mostly Poles, who were arriving at this time. An official at the Ministry of Labour, M A Bevan, commented:‘as regards the possible importation of West Indian labour, I suggest we must dismiss the idea from the start.’ Among the reasons the Ministry cited were that such workers: ‘would be unsuitable for outdoor work in winter owing to their susceptibility to colds’ and, in a nice example of heads we win, tails you lose, those working underground in coal mines would find conditions ‘too hot.’ [2] Phillips and Phillips were perhaps a little too forgiving in their assessment.
Civil Servants at the Colonial Office, Ivor Cummings prominent among them, fought hard against the apathy and even hostility of other Government departments. At one point Cummings wrote: ‘I consider the Ministry of Labour’s attitude unwarrantable, and a further example of their anti-colonialism.’
The general view at the Colonial Office was that the people rapidly steaming towards Tilbury on the Windrush must be helped: ‘to avoid a political fuss and undue hardship to the men’ and ‘the scandal of having them on the streets without anywhere to sleep.’ Cummings and his colleagues worked tirelessly to ensure satisfactory arrangements were put in place to meet those on board the ship, only achieving success when they pressed the matter at the highest levels of the Government (the Cabinet, with the Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, himself becoming involved)
It was not until 16th June (just 5 days before the Windrush arrived) that the Clapham Deep Shelter gets mentioned for the first time as a possible solution to the problem of where to house the new arrivals. On the 17th, Cummings reports that the War Office had agreed that the Shelter could be used and he visited Clapham himself that same day noting: ‘in all the circumstance, I think we are lucky to get it and we should not grumble. The Manager of the accommodation told us that his canteen only supplies very light refreshments but he thought they might be able to provide tea and buns for breakfast in the mornings and provide sandwiches and liquid refreshment at nights.’[3]
Cummings went to meet the Windrush when it docked at Tilbury and reported that the men: ‘are a mixed bunch, but on the whole rather better than the type we had anticipated.’
The file records that initially 180 men were accommodated at the Clapham Shelter, although that number increased when others found that the accommodation they had expected elsewhere in London was not available to them.
Most of the men found the Shelter acceptable, it served it’s purpose. Mike and Trevor Phillips include a quote from Oswald ‘Columbus’ Dennison, one of the Windrush passengers, which perhaps summed up the views of people who used the Shelter: ‘it wasn’t bad … it was a good arrangement really.’
On 30th June the Cabinet Office file closed with a comment from Cummings ‘the general situation with regard to the placing of these men is most favourable.’ Job done!
What makes Cummings particularly interesting was that he himself was Black, indeed, according to ‘The Turning Point in Africa: British Colonial Policy 1938-48’ he was first Black civil servant at the Colonial Office. His role there gave him special responsibilities for Commonwealth citizens, it was a role he pursued diligently and, before and after his involvement with the Windrush, he made it his lifetime’s work to serve the interests of people of African descent.
He himself was born in West Hartlepool in 1913, his mother was an English nurse, his father a doctor from Sierra Leone. They met at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary where she was a young junior matron and he, a senior house officer. Discouraged from studying medicine by her father, Joanna Archer had followed women’s traditional route into nursing, but she broke convention when she had a child out of wedlock with Ishmael Cummings. He, the son of a wealthy African merchant, had two siblings who married Taylors, thereby establishing the prominent Freetown family of Taylor-Cummings and making his own child, Ivor, a relative of the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Ivor Cummings grew up with his mother in Addiscombe, Surrey, where they were befriended by Coleridge- Taylor’s widow, Jessie. Through her, Ivor got to know his cousins Avril and Hiawatha who both followed in their father’s musical footsteps. There is a well known story that Coleridge-Taylor had faced prejudice in Croydon and that some boys had set fire to his hair ‘to see if it would burn.’ Ivor Cummings experienced similar treatment when other boys at Whitgift School in Croydon conducted the same experiment.
With the onset of war, he joined the Colonial Office and rapidly earned the reputation of someone who would help any person of colour, whatever their social standing.
We have focused here on Cummings’ role in connection with the Windrush, but there is a lot more to be said about him. He deserves, and will get, his own page on Historycal Roots. For now though, we salute Ivor Cummings, an unsung hero of the Empire Windrush story.
[1] The reference for the file at Kew that the quotes in this article are taken from is CO 876/88
[2] These quotes come from: ‘Austerity Britain’ by David Kynaston (page 273)
[3] At one point, a disused airbase in Essex was suggested. Cummings ruled this out when he was told it would take him three hours to drive there. How different might the history of South London have been if the Windrush arrivals had been directed to Essex instead of Clapham?!
