[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]

There has been a recent trend in the publishing world to present books, both fact and fiction, describing the West Indian/Caribbean experience in post-war Britain. However, the book Oceans of Feeling An Emotional History of Caribbean Migrants in Postwar Britain by Ryan Walmsley takes a different approach. As part of Bloomsbury’s History of Emotions series, this is history from a personal perspective. It uses letters sent home, interviews and other observations to chart how it actually felt to be part of the 1940s, 50s and 60s generations of Caribbean people in Britain.

That’s not to say that this book scrimps on the historical facts. It is solidly researched and detailed. It is so accurate that, as a child of migrants, I couldn’t stop personally identifying with some of the experiences of being born and brought up in a 1960s and 70s Britain, where you could often have to choose where to walk on a city pavement to avoid racial confrontation.

What this book brings to the Caribbean migrant narrative is the detailed description of what it FELT like to come to Britain in the 1950s and 60s. Ryan Walmsley explains in his introduction how he seeks to fill the gap between official narratives and the reality of what it felt like to be there. The excerpts outline people’s expectations of travelling to the ‘Motherland’, how they felt during their journeys and their joys, sorrows and steep learning curves as they forged a place in post-war Britain.

Walmsley writes:

Many of these early trailblazers, then, were captured by a feeling that they ‘were doing a service’. These feelings were simulated by a commensurate discursive narrative in the Caribbean. No doubt aware of the way these feelings of belonging could be instrumentalized, an assortment of organisations with vested interests in driving this migration flow manipulated the region’s pre-existing value system to create a symbolic landscape rich with the familial allegorization of Empire and its requisite notions of service. (p. 30)

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The book also moves beyond many of the usual Windrush-plus narratives, charting the reasoning behind the safe spaces Caribbean people built for themselves in Britain. Rather than stopping at the Windrush experience, the racism of the 50s and the outcomes in 60s and 70s Britain, the book also looks at the cultural safety nets these communities developed. It charts the setting up of ‘social spaces which Caribbean migrants constructed for themselves’ and ‘alternative Caribbean leisure spaces’. It outlines how house and blues parties morphed into Lovers Rock’s use of reggae rhythms and onto the sound system culture. Oceans of Feeling charts in detail the coming together of black music and punk in the 1970s.

As one person said:

When people say safety in numbers it’s not just from a physical point of view. That is one format. There’s safety in feeling safe from the hostile environment around here. (p. 163)

The book tidily packs decades of experience into sections. Migrant emotivations (pp. 17-55) explores what motivated people to travel to Britain in the first place. Departures, journeys, arrivals (pp. 57-84) follows the diaries, letters and other personal records of life for this generation upon arrival in Britain. It portrays that abiding sense, as my own parents often described to me, of surprise at coming across poor white people for the first time in Britain.

Historically situated conceptions of class and race had to be reconfigured – reconfigured quickly – and this produced certain and distinct emotional states. (p. 77)

Where the History of Feelings approach to the historical narrative excels is in the section on Romance, family, childhood (pp. 85-112). It offers up an often painful description of the choices migrants faced. Did they stay and deal with the racism and the cold weather for the sake of romance, marriage and providing the best for British-born children or should they return home.

Debbie Ransome is the Web Editor for The Commonwealth Round Table and former head of BBC Caribbean.

Oceans of Feeling: an Emotional History of Caribbean Migrants in Postwar Britain by Ryan Walmsley, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2026.