Source 5

Negro migration in Britain by Eric Walrond 1947-1948 (CO 876/88)

Transcript

“It’s fine up to now,” declared O.Jones, the sole Negro black-smith in the works, when I asked him how he was getting on.  A big, heavily built man of fifty he was another of the migrants from the ‘Isle of Springs’.  For 23 years he had worked on the Jamaica Govern-ment Railways.  The little shed roofed with corrugated iron in which he stood perspiring in blue overalls beside the forge was shared with another blacksmith, a white man. “I have applied to join the union,” he went on, “but I have not heard from them yet.”