- The Windrush: The Jewish origins of multicultural Britain
- In pictures: the Windrush generation
- No Dogs. No Blacks. No Irish is now UKIP policy
Windrush Generation: 'They thought we should be planting bananas'
On this day in 1948, Windrush brought the first wave of Caribbean migrants to Britain. Saffron Alexander finds out what life was really like for the new arrivals
7:01AM BST 22 Jun 2015
On June 22 1948, the MV Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks carrying 492 Caribbean passengers.
This would mark the beginning of the mass immigration movement in the UK, resulting in an estimated 172,000 West Indian born people living in the UK by 1961. To many, they are known as the Windrush Generation.
For the passengers of the Empire Windrush in 1948, and the thousands who followed after, the British Nationality Act 1948 was their saving grace. The act allowed them, and others living in Commonwealth countries, British Citizenship and full rights of entry and settlement.
Most passengers onboard Windrush had been attracted by a newspaper advert in Jamaican newspaper The Daily Gleaner (GETTY)
Jamaica was still reeling from the 1944 Atlantic hurricane season when they were invited to Britain in order to fill gaps in the labour market caused by the devastation of World War Two. Many had seen advertisements in newspapers in Jamaica, heralding Britain as the 'Mother Country', promising jobs and a better standard of living.
Like many of the passengers aboard Windrush, Sam King served in the Royal Air Force during WW2, but was told he couldn't stay in England after the war ended in 1945.
He initially signed up after urging from his mother: "She said, 'my son, the Mother Country is at war. Go and help. If you live it will be a good thing. Go and serve in the Royal Air Force.' Because - at that time - most West Indians thought it was a good thing. The Mother Country was at war, and she could not beat Nazi Germany on her own."
Despite his contribution to the country, after the culmination of the war he was told that, unless he was married to an English girl or had been accepted into the home of a "coloner", he would have to return back home to Jamaica.
King describes his return to Jamaica as "disappointing". He wanted to finish his studies and get a good education: "In Jamaica, unless you had money, you weren't going to private school. I had no intention of being a farmer in Jamaica."
His time in England had shown him the differences in education between the two countries and, although he didn't have a girlfriend at the time, he says he knew he wanted a better education for his future children.
The Empire Windrush (GETTY)
After seeing an advertisement in The Daily Gleaner offering passage to Britain in order to work for £28.10, King, and 491 fellow Caribbeans, decided to make their way to the 'Mother Country'.
Though the atmosphere on the ship was mostly positive, they soon heard word that parliament wasn't happy with their imminent arrival.
"We heard people on the radio saying, 'why are they coming'?" King remembers, though he was determined to keep morale high among his fellow passengers. "After hearing that, I went and told everyone, 'Even if a man steps on your foot, you don't hit back. It's all about peace and love'."
When they arrived, the immigrants were met by the press, and a plane was sent by The Evening Standard to greet them as they sailed up the channel. The paper's headline that day read: "Welcome Home! Evening Standard plane greets the 400 sons of Empire".
Despite the relatively warm welcome from the press, racial tension amongst fellow citizens was rife. Unofficial 'colour bars' were introduced, and workplace discrimination was commonplace.
Jack Howard Drake worked for the Home Office between 1965 and 1972 and admitted that although they did employ black people, they had certain standards that had to be met: "We were quite happy to employ coloured people, providing they weren't visible.
"In other words, if they worked in the kitchens that was alright, but employers felt that shoppers wouldn't like to see coloured hands handling food. They thought that ladies wouldn't be happy to buy their underwear from coloured girls."
Before the Race Relations Act 1965, signs like these were common
In 'Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama and His Nation' Susan Williams details the experience of William Naltey, who had served in the RAF: "I suppose you can say racism crept up on me, although some other people may have seen it straight away. But it is something that crept up on me very slowly.
"Just after the war was over, I was on a bus and there were two service people in front of me, one a woman. And she was saying, "Isn't it about time they went back to their homes?", and it was the first time that it hit me that, you know, that people were putting up with us, that they didn't really want us, but we were a necessary evil."
King echoes this sentiment: "Some were welcoming," he says, "but others weren't, they had an imperialist attitude. They thought people from the colonies should be planting bananas and chocolate.
"People were more aggressive, they were trying to say that you shouldn't be here. Others, I would say, it didn't really matter for them. And the rest? They were just nice, ordinary people."
Jamaican men waiting for meetings with staff from the Ministry of Labour and Colonial Office (GETTY)
Ignoring racial tension, King says finding a job wasn't too difficult because of the need for a new workforce after the war. He rejoined the RAF and later worked as a manager for the Royal Mail and also became the first black mayor of the London Borough of Southwark.
Many others joined the British Rail, the newly formed NHS and public transport companies, as they had begun to recruit almost exclusively from the Caribbean migrants. Because of this, there is a growing movement to have the Windrush Generation officially celebrated due to their contribution to British society.
Patrick Vernon, founder of Every Generation, is lobbying to get the impact of the Windrush Generation recognised nationally.
"As a country, we don't recognise their contribution, or when we do it is distorted," Vernon says, "they were invited by the government as guests, and their arts, politics and religion especially had a major impact on the community."
A recent petition garnered 55,000 signatures asking for black history to be taught in UK primary schools, and Vernon says the Windrush Generation should be included in this: "Children learn more about the civil rights movement in America, then they do this. It isn't even on the National Curriculum."
In an ideal world, he'd like for June 22 to be a public holiday, but he acknowledges that is unlikely to happen: "I would love for it to be a public holiday, but there are so many people and groups who feel like they have a better claim than us for a public holiday, I know it won't happen.
"I would like it to be recognised every year instead, like D-Day. These people came and survived incredible hardship and paved the way for the thousands of next generation British Caribbeans. We should be celebrating them and recognising the migrant contribution."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/goodlife/11683233/Windrush-Generation-They-thought-we-should-be-planting-bananas.html
_____
In 'The SS Empire Windrush: The Jewish Origins of Multicultural Britain,' Andrew Joyce tells us this:
[2] T. Endelmann, “Communal Solidarity and Family Loyalty Among the Jewish Elite of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies, 28 (3), pp.491-526, p.496.
[3] Ibid, p.519.
[4] W. Rubinstein, “The Jewish Economic Elite in Britain, 1808-1909,” Jewish Historical Society of England. Available at: http://www.jhse.org/book/export/article/21930.
[5] D. Feldman, “Jews and the British Empire c1900″ History Workshop Journal, 63 (1), pp.70-89. Available at: http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/655/2/655.pdf.
[6] Ibid.
[8] S. Pollard, Ten Days That Changed the Nation: The Making of Modern Britain (Simon& Schuster, 1999), p.4
[8] D. Lawrence, Black Migrants, White Natives: A Study of Race Relations in Nottingham (Cambridge University Press, 1974), p.19
[9] A. Waters, Race, Class and Symbols: Rastafari and Reggae in Jamaican Politics (Transaction, 1999), p.41.
[10] Pollard, p.8.
[11] I. Thomson, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (Faber & Faber, 2009), p.53.
[12] Pollard, p.13.
[13] K. Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Cornell University Press, 1997), p.134.
[14] J. Procter, Writing Black Britain, 1948-1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Manchester University Press, 2000), p.71.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/goodlife/11683233/Windrush-Generation-They-thought-we-should-be-planting-bananas.html
_____
The Windrush: The Jewish origins of multicultural Britain
“The SS Empire Windrush… was not operated directly by the British Government but by the New Zealand Shipping Company… The New Zealand Shipping Company, like other crucial players in the story of the Windrush, was Jewish owned and operated. The company was for the most part controlled by the Isaacs family, particularly the direct descendants of Henry and George Isaacs… The other major shareholders of the company were Laurence and Alfred Nathan, of L.D. Nathan & Company.
The Auckland shipping industry, like many colonial shipping routes, had by the 1890s been effectively monopolized by Jews. During 1947 and 1948 many former German vessels were passed on to several of these contracted private companies at the discretion of the Ministry for War and the Ministry for Transport.
The Secretary of State for War during these crucial years was none other than Emanuel Shinwell, the socialist son of Polish and Dutch Jews…
Shinwell was discovered by MI5 to have been passing British secrets to the Irgun in Palestine in November 1947…
In 1948 the British Empire was crumbling. India had been granted independence in 1947, and an exhausted, over-stretched, and indebted Britain was busy arranging for the return of colonial troops to their homelands, and the collection of others for present or future conflicts.
The Windrush was used mainly for this purpose until in May 1948 the ship’s Jewish operators were given permission by the British Ministry of Transport to increase their profits by filling to capacity with commercial customers (immigrants rather than contracted troops) at Jamaica before returning to Britain with these new settlers. This momentous decision appears to have been taken very arbitrarily since it elicited great shock and confusion among British politicians when it later came to light...
The Minister of Transport in that crucial period was Harry Louis Nathan, formerly a member of the law firm of Herbert Oppenheimer, Nathan and Vandyk, and a distant relative of the owners of the NZ Shipping Company…
From the early 19th century until the First World War, English Jewry was ruled by a tightly connected oligarchy. Daniel Gutwein states that this Anglo-Jewish elite comprised some twenty inter-related Ashkenazi and Sephardic families including the houses of Goldsmith, Montagu, Nathan, Cohen, Isaacs, Abrahams, Samuel, and Montefiore. Some of these names have featured already, and will feature again in the Windrush story. At its head, of course, stood the House of Rothschild.[1] This network of families had an ‘exceptionally high degree of consanguinity,’ leading to it being termed ‘The Cousinhood’…
In 1870, the treasurer of the London Jewish Board of Guardians was Viennese-born Ferdinand de Rothschild (1838–1898). Ferdinand had married his cousin Elvina, who was a niece of the President of the London United Synagogue, Sir Anthony de Rothschild (1810–1876). Meanwhile, the Board of Deputies was at that time headed by Moses Montefiore, whose wife, a daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, was related to Nathan Meyer Rothschild. Nathan Meyer Rothschild’s wife was also a daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, and thus Montefiore was uncle to the aforementioned Anthony de Rothschild…
Anthony was married to a niece of Montefiore, the daughter of Abraham Montefiore and Henrietta Rothschild[2]…et cetera, et cetera. In financial terms, the houses of Rothschild and Montefiore had united in 1824 to form the Alliance Insurance Company, and most of the families were involved in each other’s stock-brokering and banking concerns. Endelmann notes that in these firms 'new recruits were drawn exclusively from the ranks of the family.'[3] Working tightly within this ethnic and familial network, the Cousinhood amassed huge fortunes, and in the years before World War I, despite comprising less than three tenths of 1% of the population, Jews constituted over 20% of non-landed British millionaires…[4]
It was the Cousinhood that pioneered the way into direct political power for Jews in Britain. By 1900, through a process of ethnic and familial networking, the Cousinhood had secured many of the most significant administrative positions in the Empire. Feldman notes that the Nathan family alone had by that date secured the positions of Governor of the Gold Coast, Hong Kong and Natal, Attorney-General and Chief Justice in Trinidad, Private Secretary to the Viceroy of India, Officiating Chief Secretary to the Governor of Eastern Bengal and Assam and Postmaster-General of Bengal.[5]
In Parliament, Lionel Abrahams was Permanent Assistant Under-Secretary at the India Office, working under his cousin Edwin Montagu who was then Parliamentary Under-Secretary for India.[6] Together with the rapid development of a Jewish monopoly over key Imperial positions were countless cases of nepotistic corruption and profit-seeking. The Cousinhood was instrumental in disseminating false Russian pogrom narratives throughout the West, in fomenting the profit-driven Boer War, and in the Indian Silver and Marconi scandals.
The Nathan and Isaacs families who owned and operated the New Zealand Shipping Company also comprised part of the Cousinhood, as was the case also with Harry Nathan who occupied the strategically valuable position of Ministry for Transport between 1946 and 1948. These were crucial years in which many foreign and domestic ex-military vessels were being re-purposed for commercial purposes and handed over by the Royal Navy to private (most often Jewish-owned) companies.
Much like the nepotistic corruption at the heart of the Marconi scandal, having a Jew running the Ministry for War and a Jewish cousin running the Ministry for Transport was good news for Cousinhood members who had monopolized shipping companies and routes and now stood to gain from successive government contracts to newly acquisitioned vessels like the Empire Windrush.
These government contracts and the Jewish quest for profit played a huge role in the burgeoning of the commercial passenger industry that would bring wave after wave of Blacks, Indians and Pakistanis to Britain over the next two decades…
Even the method by which Blacks were enticed to set sail for Britain must be remarked upon. Around three weeks before the Empire Windrush arrived in Jamaica, Blacks were bombarded with ads for cheap travel to Britain and articles extolling the new life they could have in London. Stephen Pollard writes that ‘the response was almost instantaneous. Queues formed outside the booking agency and every place was sold.’[7] Many of the ads were propaganda pieces that presented an idealized picture of life and job opportunities in Britain...
Daniel Lawrence quotes, as an example, one migrant who explained his move to Britain: ‘Well, I left Jamaica because I saw the advertisements in The Gleaner. … I left to better my position. That was the chief reason.’[8] The Gleaner, is part of the Gleaner Company which to this day enjoys an effective monopoly of the Jamaican press. The company has its origins in 1834, when it was founded by the Jewish brothers Jacob and Joshua De Cordova.
Since its founding it has been a kind of Jamaican micro-Cousinhood. Even when it registered as a private company in 1897, its first directors possessed a mixture of Ashkenazi and Sephardi names, from Ashenheim to de Mercado.
At the time the Empire Windrush ads appeared, the managing director was Michael de Cordova. Even as late as the 1960s, and despite numbering no more than six hundred in the whole country, according to Anita Waters the powerful Jewish minority of Jamaica controlled ‘many of the larger economic enterprises’...[9]
For all intents and purposes, the Empire Windrush was passed into Jewish ownership by a Jewish Secretary for War, given the green light to boost profits and start bringing non-Whites to Britain by a Jewish Minister for Transport, and provided with armies of eager passengers by a Jewish-owned media...
The Labour government fumbled in the aftermath of the arrival of the Empire Windrush, clinging to the fantasy that upholding the ‘tradition’ that members of the colonies should be ‘freely admissible to the United Kingdom’ could act as a means of holding the crumbling Empire together.[10] Part of the Cabinet’s strict adherence to this established, but previously superfluous, protocol, may also have been influenced by the interpretation of existing immigration law presented to them.
The responsibility for interpreting existing law for the Crown and the Cabinet lies with the Solicitor General — a role that had been occupied since 1945 by yet another Jew, Frank Soskice. As I noted in a previous essay, Soskice would later introduce Britain’s first legislation containing a provision prohibiting ‘group libel.’ Soskice, was the son of a Russian-Jewish revolutionary exile. It was Soskice who ‘drew up the legislation’ and ‘piloted the first Race Relations Act, 1965, through Parliament.’ The Act ‘aimed to outlaw racial discrimination in public places’…[1] D. Gutwein, The Divided Elite: Politics and Anglo-Jewry, 1882-1917 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), p.5.
It was Soskice who informed Arthur Creech Jones, the anti-immigration Minister for Labor, that neither the Jamaican nor the British government had any legal power in peacetime to prevent the landing at Tilbury of the Empire Windrush… It was soon followed by numerous other troopships, like the SS Orbita, laden with dusky immigrants and stinking of ‘vomit and urine.’[11]
It was only during the next Churchill government that some reflection took place on the longer-term implications of what had begun, with Churchill recorded by Sir Norman Brook as remarking:
‘Problems will arise if many colored people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in the UK? Attracted by Welfare State. Public Opinion in UK won’t tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits.’[12]
But by then it was too late. Over the course of the following decade, Black immigration to Britain increased dramatically. Between 1948 and 1952 between around 2,000 Blacks entered Britain each year. By 1957 the figure had climbed to 42,000.
Government investigations into this new population revealed that the idea that Blacks were helping fill a labour shortage was grossly ill-founded. In one report, completed in December 1953, civil servants stated that the new population found it difficult to secure employment not because of prejudice among Whites, but because the newcomers had ‘low output’ and their working life was marked by ‘irresponsibility, quarrelsomeness, and lack of discipline.’ Black women were ‘slow mentally,’ and Black men were ‘more volatile in temperament than white workers … more easily provoked to violence … lacking in stamina,’ and generally ‘not up to the standards required by British employers.’[13]
Worse, future social and criminal patterns were already being established. In 1954 Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe issued a secret memorandum to the cabinet on blacks pimping White women, stating that: ‘Figures I have obtained from the Metropolitan police do show that the number of colored men convicted for this offence is out of all proportion to the number of coloured men in London.’[14]
Three months later he again wrote to the cabinet stressing that ‘large numbers of coloured people are living on national assistance or the immoral earnings of white women.’[15] While the famed Notting Hill Race Riots of 1958 are often pointed to as an example of Black victimhood and the need for a Black reaction against White ‘oppression,’ the riots were instead the culmination of White reactions against Black crime and miscegenation.
Earlier in 1958 the Eugenics Society, now the Galton Institute, issued warnings that the mingling of races that had started in Britain ‘ran counter to the great developing pattern of human evolution’ and attacked the United Nations for minimizing the ‘quite obvious dissimilarities between people and individuals.’[16]
The Notting Hill riots, occurring a decade after the arrival of Empire Windrush, were seeded one August evening when White youths intervened in an argument between a Swedish prostitute and her black ‘husband’ Raymond Morrison. A brawl broke out between the youths and Morrison’s friends.
The following day some of the White youths verbally assaulted the Swede for being a ‘Black man’s trollop.’ The White youths then assembled between three and four hundred fellows to begin a violent demonstration against Black criminality, resulting in six days and nights of almost uninterrupted inter-ethnic warfare.
This period represented one of the clearest opportunities for Britain to turn back the tide. But, as I have previously documented, it was also the period in which the efforts of a large number of unelected Jewish lawyers began the British ‘race relations’ sham, choking out free speech, and with it any opportunity for effective White resistance."
[2] T. Endelmann, “Communal Solidarity and Family Loyalty Among the Jewish Elite of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies, 28 (3), pp.491-526, p.496.
[3] Ibid, p.519.
[4] W. Rubinstein, “The Jewish Economic Elite in Britain, 1808-1909,” Jewish Historical Society of England. Available at: http://www.jhse.org/book/export/article/21930.
[5] D. Feldman, “Jews and the British Empire c1900″ History Workshop Journal, 63 (1), pp.70-89. Available at: http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/655/2/655.pdf.
[6] Ibid.
[8] S. Pollard, Ten Days That Changed the Nation: The Making of Modern Britain (Simon& Schuster, 1999), p.4
[8] D. Lawrence, Black Migrants, White Natives: A Study of Race Relations in Nottingham (Cambridge University Press, 1974), p.19
[9] A. Waters, Race, Class and Symbols: Rastafari and Reggae in Jamaican Politics (Transaction, 1999), p.41.
[10] Pollard, p.8.
[11] I. Thomson, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (Faber & Faber, 2009), p.53.
[12] Pollard, p.13.
[13] K. Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Cornell University Press, 1997), p.134.
[14] J. Procter, Writing Black Britain, 1948-1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Manchester University Press, 2000), p.71.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
___
The SS Empire Windrush: The Jewish Origins of Multicultural Britain
Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
‘Will you find out who is responsible for this extraordinary action?’
Oliver Stanley, M.P., June 1948.
Oliver Stanley, M.P., June 1948.
The SS Empire Windrush holds a special place of infamy in the minds of British Nationalists. When the ship arrived at Tilbury docks from Jamaica in June 1948, carrying 417 Black immigrants, it represented more than just a turning point in the history of those ancient isles. In some respects it signalled the beginning of mass, organized non-White immigration into northwest Europe. Back in November, TOO published my research on the role of Jews in limiting free speech and manipulating ‘race relations’ in Britain in order to achieve Jewish goals and protect Jewish interests. I’ve recently been revisiting some of my past essays, delving deeper and expanding each of them in an effort that I hope will result in the publication of a book-length manuscript on aspects of Jewish influence. During this process, I’ve been particularly compelled to research further into the role of Jews in Britain’s immigration and racial questions. What I present in this essay is a survey of some interesting facts, which I hope to document and integrate further as my work on the volume proceeds.
One of the things that struck me most when I began looking into the origins of multicultural Britain was the hazy and confused background to the arrival of that notorious ship. First though, I might point out one of history’s bizarre ironies — the vessel that would signal the end of racial homogeneity in Britain started life as a Nazi cruise liner. The ship began its career in 1930 as the MV Monte Rosa. Until the outbreak of war it was used as part of the German Kraft durch Freude(‘Strength through Joy’) program. ‘Strength through Joy’ enabled more than 25 million Germans of all classes to enjoy subsidized travel and numerous other leisure pursuits, thereby enhancing the sense of community and racial togetherness. Racial solidarity, rather than class position, was emphasized by drawing lots for the allocation of cabins on vessels like the Monte Rosa, rather than providing superior accommodation only for those who could afford a certain rate. Until the outbreak of war, the vessel was employed in conveying NSDAP members on South American cruises. In 1939 the ship was allocated for military purposes, acting as a troopship for the invasion of Norway in 1940. In 1944, the Monte Rosa served in the Baltic Sea, rescuing Germans trapped in Latvia, East Prussia and Danzig by the advance of the Red Army.
Finally, in May 1945, her German career ended when she was captured by advancing British forces at Kiel and taken as a prize of war. The British renamed her Empire Windrush on 21 January 1947, and also employed her as a troop carrier. Sailing from Southampton, the ship took British troops to destinations as varied as Suez, Aden, Colombo, Singapore and Hong Kong. Crucially, the ship was not operated directly by the British Government, but by the New Zealand Shipping Company.
It is with this little fact that we begin tumbling down the proverbial rabbit hole. I quickly discovered that the New Zealand Shipping Company, like other crucial players in the story of the Windrush, was Jewish owned and operated. The company was for the most part controlled by the Isaacs family, particularly the direct descendants of Henry and George Isaacs. Henry and George left England in 1852 at the instigation of a third brother, Edward, and arrived in Auckland via Melbourne. They established the firm of E & H Isaacs, acting as profiteers during the Taranaki and Waikato war, and winning a number of heavy contracts in connection with the provisioning of the troops.
Henry took a great interest in shipping affairs, and was for many years a member of the Auckland Harbour Board. He was one of the chief shareholders of the Auckland Shipping Company, which was subsequently merged into the New Zealand Shipping Company. The other major shareholders of the company were Laurence and Alfred Nathan, of L.D. Nathan & Company. The Auckland shipping industry, like many colonial shipping routes, had by the 1890s been effectively monopolized by Jews. During 1947 and 1948 many former German vessels were passed on to several of these contracted private companies at the discretion of the Ministry for War and the Ministry for Transport. The Secretary of State for War during these crucial years was none other than Emanuel Shinwell, the socialist son of Polish and Dutch Jews. With a degree of loyalty and patriotism typical of his race, Shinwell was discovered by MI5 to have been passing British secrets to the Irgun in Palestine in November 1947. To Shinwell, disproportionately handing government vessels and contracts to fellow Jews would have been mere grist to the mill.
In 1948 the British Empire was crumbling. India had been granted independence in 1947, and an exhausted, over-stretched, and indebted Britain was busy arranging for the return of colonial troops to their homelands, and the collection of others for present or future conflicts. The Windrush was used mainly for this purpose until in May 1948 the ship’s Jewish operators were given permission by the British Ministry of Transport to increase their profits by filling to capacity with commercial customers (immigrants rather than contracted troops) at Jamaica before returning to Britain with these new settlers. This momentous decision appears to have been taken very arbitrarily (and certainly un-democratically) since it elicited great shock and confusion among British politicians when it later came to light. They might not have been so shocked had they considered the ethnic origin of the head of the Ministry for Transport who authorized that action. The Minister of Transport in that crucial period wasHarry Louis Nathan, formerly a member of the law firm of Herbert Oppenheimer, Nathan and Vandyk, and a distant relative of the owners of the NZ Shipping Company.
If the web is already beginning to look a little tangled, readers would do well to consider some of these developments and ‘coincidences’ within the context of the Anglo-Jewish Cousinhood, a topic I covered for TOO about three years ago. From the early 19th century until the First World War, English Jewry was ruled by a tightly connected oligarchy. Daniel Gutwein states that this Anglo-Jewish elite comprised some twenty inter-related Ashkenazi and Sephardic families including the houses of Goldsmith, Montagu, Nathan, Cohen, Isaacs, Abrahams, Samuel, and Montefiore. Some of these names have featured already, and will feature again in the Windrush story. At its head, of course, stood the House of Rothschild.[1] This network of families had an “exceptionally high degree of consanguinity,” leading to it being termed “The Cousinhood.”[2]Conversion and intermarriage in the group was exceptionally rare, if not non-existent. The business activities of the group overlapped to the same degree as their bloodlines. I illustrated this in my previous essay by pointing out that:
In 1870, the treasurer of the London Jewish Board of Guardians was Viennese-born Ferdinand de Rothschild (1838–1898). Ferdinand had married his cousin Elvina, who was a niece of the President of the London United Synagogue, Sir Anthony de Rothschild (1810–1876). Meanwhile, the Board of Deputies was at that time headed by Moses Montefiore, whose wife, a daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, was related to Nathan Meyer Rothschild. Nathan Meyer Rothschild’s wife was also a daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, and thus Montefiore was uncle to the aforementioned Anthony de Rothschild. … Anthony was married to a niece of Montefiore, the daughter of Abraham Montefiore and Henrietta Rothschild[3]…et cetera, et cetera. In financial terms, the houses of Rothschild and Montefiore had united in 1824 to form the Alliance Insurance Company, and most of the families were involved in each other’s stock-brokering and banking concerns. Endelmann notes that in these firms “new recruits were drawn exclusively from the ranks of the family.”[4] Working tightly within this ethnic and familial network, the Cousinhood amassed huge fortunes, and in the years before World War I, despite comprising less than three tenths of 1% of the population, Jews constituted over 20% of non-landed British millionaires.[5] William Rubinstein notes that of these millionaires, all belonged to the Cousinhood.[6]
It was the Cousinhood that pioneered the way into direct political power for Jews in Britain. By 1900, through a process of ethnic and familial networking, the Cousinhood had secured many of the most significant administrative positions in the Empire. Feldman notes that the Nathan family alone had by that date secured the positions of Governor of the Gold Coast, Hong Kong and Natal, Attorney-General and Chief Justice in Trinidad, Private Secretary to the Viceroy of India, Officiating Chief Secretary to the Governor of Eastern Bengal and Assam, and Postmaster-General of Bengal.[7] In Parliament, Lionel Abrahams was Permanent Assistant Under-Secretary at the India Office, working under his cousin Edwin Montagu who was then Parliamentary Under-Secretary for India.[8]Together with the rapid development of a Jewish monopoly over key Imperial positions were countless cases of nepotistic corruption and profit-seeking. The Cousinhood was instrumental in disseminating false Russian pogrom narratives throughout the West, in fomenting the profit-driven Boer War, and in the Indian Silver and Marconi scandals.
The Nathan and Isaacs families who owned and operated the New Zealand Shipping Company also comprised part of the Cousinhood, as was the case also with Harry Nathan who occupied the strategically valuable position of Ministry for Transport between 1946 and 1948. These were crucial years in which many foreign and domestic ex-military vessels were being re-purposed for commercial purposes and handed over by the Royal Navy to private (most often Jewish-owned) companies. Much like the nepotistic corruption at the heart of the Marconi scandal, having a Jew running the Ministry for War and a Jewish cousin running the Ministry for Transport was good news for Cousinhood members who had monopolized shipping companies and routes and now stood to gain from successive government contracts to newly acquisitioned vessels like the Empire Windrush. These government contracts and the Jewish quest for profit played a huge role in the burgeoning of the commercial passenger industry that would bring wave after wave of Blacks, Indians and Pakistanis to Britain over the next two decades.
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti
You are welcome to show your opinion here!