Credit: BBC/Getty Images
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The Empire Windrush was one of the first ships to bring citizens of the British colonies to the United Kingdom after World War II.
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- Author: Navtej Johal and Joanna Hall
- Roll, BBC News
4 hours ago
The BBC found that hundreds of chronically and mentally ill Windrushers who arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1971 were being sent back to the Caribbean in an action it has described as a “historic injustice”.
Documents previously classified as confidential showed that between the 1950s and early 1970s at least 411 people were returned under what should have been a voluntary program. Families claim they were separated and some never got back together.
The UK government says it is determined to right the injustices of the time.
According to a spokesman, “We recognize the activism of families seeking redress for the historic wrongs that have been done to their loved ones, and we remain fully committed to righting the wrongs faced by those of the Windrush generation are.”
The facts revealed relate to the Windrush scandal which led to the unlawful deportation of hundreds of Commonwealth the British Commonwealth of Nations citizens.
Many of them came from the Caribbean region and the revelations sparked calls for a public inquiry into these repatriation policies.
The returnees were among thousands of people who moved to Britain from British colonies in the decades following World War II.
They became known as the Windrush generation named after one of the first ships to come to Britain with these people, the HMT Empire Windrush. 2023 will mark the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the first arrivals.
BBC News has found documents in the UK National Archives that reveal the extent of this policy.
Experts now believe the program may have been illegal since not all patients were mentally able to consent to returning to their place of origin.
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Psychiatrist Aggrey Burke claims the decision to send mentally ill people back to Jamaica was not made in the patients’ best interests.
“A Great, Immense Sorrow”
Joseph, June Armatrading’s father, was one of the deportees.
Like other Caribbean people who traveled to Britain after the war, Joseph was a British citizen. He was born in St. Kitts, a colony of the United Kingdom which to this day is administered directly from London and held a British passport.
Joseph came to the UK in 1954 and lived with his wife and their five daughters in Nottingham, England. However, in the 1960s, he began to have mental health problems.
Joseph Armatrading was diagnosed with a paranoid psychosis and was returned to St. in 1966. kitts He never saw his family again.
June is now 65 years old. She says her mother told her and her sisters that their father “abandoned” them.
She grew up believing her father didn’t love her, which caused “great, immense grief.”
But the BBC had access to a letter from Joseph Armatrading asking to return to the UK and be reunited with his family. Little is known about what happened to him after the inquiry.
In previously confidential letters, government officials admitted that Joseph Armatrading’s repatriation process was “incorrect”. The documents show that his passport was confiscated in error.
When we showed June Armatrading the cards, she was shocked.
“I’m upset. It’s disturbing, it’s really disturbing…how dare you?” she asks. “That was a vulnerable man. You need to take care of your vulnerable people, and they didn’t. They left him they left him.”
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June Armatrading learned from her mother that her father had left the family. Now she believes it was the British state that “abandoned” him.
“They stole my mother”
Marcia Fenton was placed in foster care as a baby. She had been separated from her mother, Sylvia Calvert, who was deported back to Jamaica in the late 1960s. Her father was unable to take care of her on his own.
Mother and daughter were not reunited until many years later in Jamaica. Sylvia had been released by that time, but her health was still not good. She died in 2007.
Marcia still wants to find out what happened to her mother when she arrived back in Jamaica. All she knows is that she spent some time at Bellevue Hospital in the Jamaican capital, Kingston.
“Coming back to Jamaica deprived my mother,” she told the BBC.
She wants to investigate how and why people like her mother were sent back to their places of origin. “Nobody should have been returned if they had mental health problems,” she says. “The British government should apologize.”
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Marcia Fenton claims her mother was ‘stolen’ when she was separated and sent back to Jamaica
How did the policy work?
An analysis of National Archives documents conducted by the BBC shows that between 1958 and 1970, 411 patients with chronic and mental illnesses were returned to Commonwealth countries in the Caribbean.
Since the authorities do not appear to keep comprehensive records, the number could be higher.
The National Assistance Council which became the Department for Works and Pensions used to be in charge of the process.
Government letters and political documents from the archives suggest that each patient “should have expressed a desire to return”. They suggest that repatriation should only take place if it “benefits” patients and there are “reasonable accommodations” for them on their return.
However, it is unclear whether vulnerable patients could make these decisions and whether these relevant provisions actually existed. A scholarly document states that psychiatric care in the Caribbean at the time lacked “skilled staff and resources.”
British government officials did not want to give the impression that they were “actively trying to outsource Commonwealth citizens who were of little use to the UK”. However, it appears that Jamaican officials were not convinced.
In 1963, the Jamaican Office of the High Commission wrote to the British Government, complaining that hospitals in the United Kingdom were requesting repatriations “largely because of pressure on beds or other hospital services”.
The Windrush generation, made up of “citizens of the United Kingdom and the colonies”, were entitled to the same legal status as all those born in the United Kingdom.
But Professor James Hampshire, of the University of Sussex in England, says that since British citizens first arrived from the Caribbean, there has been a desire on the part of the governments of both parties, Labor and the Conservative, to limit their numbers.
“The intent and effect of the laws passed during this period [anos 1960 e 70] “It was about restricting some types of immigration and not others,” he says. “It mainly targeted what was then called ‘immigration of color.'”
Professor Kris Gledhill, who has served as a judge in mental health cases, says the legality of the practice of repatriating mentally ill patients is controversial.
For him, “You’re relying on a ‘voluntary choice,’ and if you were to properly assess the person’s ability to make that choice, you’d say they don’t have that ability.”
Immigration lawyer Jacqueline McKenzie of London law firm Leigh Day represented hundreds of victims of the 2018 Windrush scandal.
“Life was destroyed,” she says. “The state now owes the descendants of these people answers and some form of compensation.”
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Thousands of people migrated to Britain from British colonies in the decades following World War II
big regret
Doctors studying the impact on patients returning to the Caribbean concluded that the impact was negative and that many wanted to return to the UK.
In the early 1970s, Aggrey Burke the first black clinical psychiatrist for the NHS, Britain’s public health service concluded that the movement of severely mentally ill patients from the UK to Bellevue Hospital in Jamaica had not been properly managed. best interest.
He now claims there was a lack of curiosity about what happened to the patients. “Nobody seemed to be part of the ‘Now what?’ to be interested as a next step,” Burke said.
Another 1970s psychiatrist, George Mahy from Barbados, analyzed the cases of about 200 patients with psychiatric disorders originally from the Caribbean region.
He found that around 52% of them had been recommended to return from the UK and in many cases had received financial support from the UK government. According to Mahy, many of these patients expressed great regret about the illness and wished to return to England.
In response to the BBC, a government spokesman said: “The welfare of hospital patients detained under the Mental Health Act comes first. The law has changed since these cases now an independent court must approve eventual repatriation “in the best interest of the patient.”
There are no photos of Joseph Armatrading. At home in Nottingham, her daughter June says she remembers seeing one involving herself and her sisters, but over the years it has been lost.
But June is determined to make sure her father’s story isn’t forgotten.
“Does the government have yet to answer the questions about what happened to my father and Joseph Armatrading?” she asks. “They failed us.”