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When Britain encouraged immigration from Commonwealth countries to help with labour shortages after the Second World War, the culture shock for Windrush families was profound.
Like many others, Alareen Farrell’s father was recruited from Christchurch, Barbados, by London Transport in the late 1950s and moved to Fulwell in south west London to work in the large bus depot: “There were ten or twenty others recruited around the same time,” she says, “but they came to a very white area so we grew up as pretty much the only black children in the neighbourhood.”
They hoped to find friends within the church, but it wasn’t as simple as that. “My mother had been a big churchgoer at home and they went along to their local parish church here but were not made to feel welcome,” says Alareen. “No one would sit next to them, no one talked to them, so she basically gave up.”
Alareen’s mother was one of many people arriving from the Caribbean who quickly realised they would have to rethink what ‘going to church’ meant. Another was Joel Edwards, who came to London as an eight-year-old in 1960: “I arrived, having emerged from Jamaica where church attendance was 60-70% and even if you did not go to church you were extremely Christianised,” he says. “People back home warned us we were coming to a spiritual graveyard, but my family arrived full of hope and ready to revitalise the economy and bring spiritual revival.”
Like Alareen’s parents, Joel and his family and friends didn’t settle in the existing local churches of London at the time. In any case, their liturgy would not have fitted a Baptist or Anglican setting. “A one-hour service would have been anathema to us,” Joel says. “We’re just warming up!”
Determined to continue worshipping with the same zeal they always had at home, many set up their own churches. Even though they read the same Bible, and believed in the same God as white British Christians, interpretations of scripture were very different. Pentecostal beliefs in miracles and speaking in tongues, widely held among Caribbean Christians, were far less common in the UK in the 1960s than they are today1.
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