A brilliant new exhibition explores the lives and times of the Jamaican Second World War...
Alford Gardner on the right with childhood friend Dennis Reed and his brother Gladstone followed in their father’s footsteps who fought in WW1. The brothers went home to Jamaica after demob, returning on MV Windrush in 1948, along with 6 other West Indians heading for Leeds. Alford settled in Leeds and in 2023 is the city’s only surviving Jamaican WW2 veteran and Windrush passenger.
Among the veterans featured in the exhibition is 97-year-old Alford Gardner, who is the last surviving Jamaican WW2 veteran in Leeds. He is also one of the last surviving passengers of the HMT Empire Windrush which travelled from Jamaica to Tilbury docks 75 years ago. After the war, Alford undertook an engineering training course in Leeds before being sent back to Jamaica at the end of 1947. Unable to find work he made the historic journey back to Britain in June 1948.
Errol James is another WW2 veteran featured in the exhibition. Errol gave up teacher training in Jamaica to join the RAF in 1944 at the age of just 18. He, too, trained in Yorkshire before working as a leading aircraftman. Charlie Dawkins, whose story is also told in the exhibition, was 25 when he answered the call to join the RAF and help support the war effort. He arrived in the UK in 1944 and worked as a welder at air bases. His son, Allan Dawkins, says: “He serviced damaged airplanes when they came back from missions. That was his stock in trade.”
Caribbean countries have repeatedly answered the call to defend the ‘Mother Country’. In the First World War, Britain lifted a colour bar to recruit around 15,600 Caribbean men, mainly from Jamaica, to join the British West Indies Regiment, which fought in several major offences including the Battle of the Somme.
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