Right of passage

Beverley Dowdell was just 27 when she came to Southampton from Jamaica. To celebrate Black History Month, she tells her story

- Faith Eckersall

Six months before the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, in June 1948, a group of Jamaican people quietly disembarked from the SS Almanzora in Southampton. Many moved on but others remained, establishing a thriving West Indian community.

The contribution it has made is celebrated by the Black Heritage Southampton Centre and its spirited chairman, Beverley Dowdell. She arrived at Heathrow Airport in the chilly January of 1971, a highly qualified midwifery nurse from Jamaica, on her way to take up a post-graduate position at Southampton General Hospital.

“I landed at Heathrow and looked up to the sky and saw this orange glow. I thought I could look at the sun without glasses and suddenly wondered if I could hijack the plane back to Jamaica!” she laughs.

It isn’t hard to see why she instantly missed the place she calls ‘home-home’ in the town of Mandeville on an island noted for its warmth, colour, chattering parrots and tasty food. “You’d get up and hear the dogs barking and the birds singing, the parrots especially would come in flocks,” she remembers. “Everybody wears brightly coloured clothes. It was rural with lots of farming and everyone knew everyone else’s business.”

Jamaica also placed enormous emphasis on education, with strong competition for the grammar schools in which children such as Beverley, who was born in 1944, learned all about Shakespeare and Henry VIII as well as speaking, “the Queen’s English”. She recalls the class asking their teacher if they could learn more about the history of Jamaica and the Caribbean region. “He did one hour a week on British and European history and one of that of Jamaica and the Caribbean.”