ABSTRACT
It is not known how, where or when Henry Sylvester Williams arrived in North America. 1 Nor do we know why he decided to go there. Emigration from the English-speaking West Indies to the US was not common at this time. Annual figures, until 1903 when they began to escalate, were around a hundred. 2 However, emigration to Britain, the ‘Mother Country', superficially a more likely destination, would have been even more uncommon, except for students bound for the universities. Such students would have been in receipt of scholarships, or of private funding as there was no tradition in Britain of students working their way through their undergraduate degrees. Nor was there a tradition of immigration from the Caribbean, though over the centuries many people from Britain's West Indian ‘possessions' had settled in the ‘Mother Country'. In the earlier period, some were brought in as household slaves and then as servants by returning planters and ship's captains; others arrived as seamen or possibly in British regiments which had served in the West Indies. Later, probably from the 19th century, Blacks came as merchants, or simply to improve their prospects; some civil servants retired in Britain and some professionals, once qualified, preferred to practise in Britain rather than in the colonies. 3 Did Williams hope to earn enough in the US to accumulate sufficient funds for an English university education? Or to train as a barrister? As there is no record of his having attended an educational institution in the US, but as he did briefly attend a British university, we have to presume that he saw his future as lying not in the US but in Britain and its empire/commonwealth.
