The Famous Five, Windrush, Walter Tull and Enoch Powell

The Famous Five and Enoch Powell and Walter Tull

What an extraordinary coincidence,
That on the fiftieth anniversary
Of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech,
Our railway stations should be awash
With ‘Five Go on Holiday’ GWR posters;
Four children – well adults really – and a dog,
Escaping to a whitewashed cottage,
In a West Country all white fastness,
Where BBC received pronunciation,
Snobbish condescension,
And lower class deference
Keep everyone in their place,
Abetted by kindly constables on the beat,
Who will willingly tell you the time.

The Famous Five and Enoch Powell and Walter Tull

What an extraordinary coincidence,
That on the fiftieth anniversary
Of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech,
Our railway stations should be awash
With ‘Five Go on Holiday’ GWR posters;
Four children – well adults really – and a dog,
Escaping to a whitewashed cottage,
In a West Country all white fastness,
Where BBC received pronunciation,
Snobbish condescension,
And lower class deference
Keep everyone in their place,
Abetted by kindly constables on the beat,
Who will willingly tell you the time.

And in the real world far away from cliffs and coves,
Far away from picnics, cream cakes and ginger beer:
Youth services, early intervention, Sure Start,
And imaginative initiatives are being cut,
Young men and women are dying in the streets,
Their faces appearing only in a newspaper,
Not on a railway station advertisement
That portrays a holiday westwards
As an escape from the present tense;
And other black faces appear in the newspaper,
The children of the Windrush generation,
Now applying for pensions,
But threatened with deportation,
Even though they have worked hard here all their consequent lives:
What an extraordinary coincidence,
That on the fiftieth anniversary
Of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech,
Our railway stations should be awash
With ‘Five Go on Holiday’ GWR posters –
So let’s hope the new memorialization of Walter Tull,
Professional footballer and the army’s first black officer,
2nd Lieutenant Walter Tull,
Once a printer, grandson of a slave, orphaned son of a joiner,
KIA 25th March 1918, aged 29,
Eulogised by his Commanding Officer,
“The battalion and company have lost a faithful officer
and personally, I have lost a friend”,
And so popular with his men,
That they repeatedly tried to get him back,
As he lay dead in No Mans’ Land,
Let’s hope the new memorialisation of Walter,
Can contribute to the saving of young lives,
And the ending of Windrush heartbreak:

Otherwise his life was lost in vain.

Walter Daniel John Tull (28 April 1888 – 25 March 1918)

‘We are positioned in the knowledge that we are living
in the afterlives of slavery, sitting in the room with history …’

Christina Sharpe In the Wake On Blackness and Being
Duke University Press 2018