The Empire Windrush: The Story of a Ship

Throughout history ships have been seen as more than just big wood or steel constructions that floated on the sea, more than just a means of transport for goods and passengers, more than their mercantile reason for being. Amazingly, they have tended to be given personalities, partly by being called 'she', as though they were living beings that we trusted to protect and shelter us as we crossed the unforgiving seas, and partly because we sensed their individuality. No two ships were or are alike.

Quite often ships could be regarded as lucky or unlucky, an idea based on the experience of sailors who knew their life was on the line if the ship failed them. A good ship, a lucky ship, was what all sailors wanted and needed. An unlucky ship could spell doom for those on board.

On rare occasions a ship achieved an emotional and meaningful expression so powerful that its name echoes through decades. Lucky or unlucky, the name of a ship could become synonymous with with some deeper meaning or movement in history. Such a ship was the Empire Windrush, which on one occasion in the year 1948 brought West Indian migrants to London. It became symbolic of a whole generation of West Indian migrants into Britain from the late forties to the early seventies, known as the Windrush Generation. This event was of enormous political, social and cultural significance for Britain, so much so that now, seventy years later, the phrase Windrush Generation" is more known than ever before. It has to be said that present knowledge of the Windrush Gereration has heightened in recent times because many of the people invited here as citizens of the UK and Colonies have been betrayed by a calous state and told they were not British and should leave or risk being deported.

This catastrophic political debacle is of prime importance, but this article looks at the ship itself, because it appears to have had a kind of leverage in historic events in the twentieth century.

The Empire Windrush was built in Hamburg in 1930 as the MV Monte Rosa by the Blohm and Voss company, one of the bigest shipbuilders in Germany. It was Blohm and Voss that in 1940 built the battleship Bismarck, one of the most powerful warships of the Second World War. The Monte Rosa was designed to be a cruise liner for the company Hamburg-Sudamerikanische Dampfs. It was named MV Monte Rosa, after a high peak in the Alps, located between Switzerland and Italy, the second highest mountain in Western Europe.

After the Nazi regime came to power in Germany in 1933, they developed the idea of providing affordable holidays for loyal party members. A company was set up called Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) which promoted holidays, enterainment, he alth and fitness for the population. Holiday camps were set up along the B altic and Friesland coasts, including islands like Heligoland. Passenger ships like the Monte Rosa were commissioned to provide cruises around the B altic and beyond. Many leading Nazis enjoyed cruises on the Monte Rosa.

Following the start of the Second World War, the Monte Rosa was requisioned as a troop ship and took part in the invasion of Norway in April 1940. However, as the war progressed, things became darker. It became a prisoner of war ferry ship running between Oslo and Aarhus in Denmark. Much worse, the first batch of Jews to be deported from Norway did so on the Monte Rosa. On arrival at Aarhus they would have been sent by train to concentration camps in Germany or Poland.

Towards the end of the war, in 1944, she served as a support ship for the battleship Tirpitz, which was stationed in Norway and under attack by the British RAF.

At the end of the war a number of German and axis ships were siezed and became the property of the British Government. The Monte Rosa was captured at Keil in May 1945 and became a British Ministry of Transport troop ship. On 21st January 1947 she was renamed the Empire Windrush, named after the River Windrush in the Cotswolds just north west of Oxford and which is a tributary of the Thames.

A number of the former passenger ships captured by Britain at the end of the war were renamed using the initial word Empire, creating the names:

Empire Clyde
Empire Fowey
Empire Halladale
Empire Ken
Empire Orwell
Empire Trooper
Empire Windrush

It is curious that all these ships were given the first name "Empire" at the very point when the Empire ceased to exist. British hubris was alive and well in those days.

The Empire Windrush had its hull painted white, the standard colour used for troop ships, and was put to work serving the Far East and Australia. In 1948 on the way back from Australia it crossed the Atlantic and stopped off at Kingston in Jamaica to pick up the first group of migrants taking up employment in Britain. This was the most significant event in the history of the ship, the event that led to a whole generation being named after it.

The Grey Willow: a History Site

The Empire Windrush: The Story of a Ship

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