ABSTRACT
In 1998 Britain celebrated the fi ftieth anniversary of the landing at Tilbury Docks of the Empire Windrush, a ship that brought from Jamaica to London 492 Caribbean immigrants accepted as British citizens under the provisions of the British Nationality Act passed in 1947 by the Labour government of Clement Attlee. The 1948 event has since become, in retrospect, a momentous happening and the founding icon of a new course in British social history, marking the beginning of what is now called Black Britain, while the Windrush people have become the avant-garde of an army that has changed the face of the country, modifying its perception of identity and converting old-time Englishness into Britishness.1
