- Canada to further cut international student, foreign worker permits
- YouTube launches new TV-focused tools for creators
- White Sox heading for worst season in MLB history
- China the top challenge in US history: senior diplomat
- Hong Kong democracy tycoon's son warns time running out
- New migraine drugs no better than cheap painkillers: big study
- Sean 'Diddy' Combs again denied bail in sex trafficking case
- Brewers clinch division title as MLB playoff race heats up
- Man City blunted by 'giant' Inter in Champions League stalemate
- US stocks dip despite larger Fed interest rate cut
- Man City held by Inter as PSG pinch win in Champions League
- All Blacks recall Beauden Barrett for Australia Test
- Fears of all-out war as new Lebanon device blasts kill 20, wound 450
- Spurs late show saves Postecoglou blushes at Coventry
- PSG snatch late goal to beat Champions League debutants Girona
- Gittens' late double gives Dortmund Champions League win at Brugge
- Man City blunted by Inter in Champions League stalemate
- Hidden talent: French Olympic star Marchand opts for disguise
- MrBeast named in California lawsuit over 'Beast Games' show
- Gauff splits with Gilbert as coach after 14-month run
- Hundreds of thousands at risk in Sudan's El-Fasher: UN
- Harvey Weinstein pleads not guilty to new sex crime charge
- Venezuelan opposition candidate says letter conceding election was coerced
- Ukraine official claims Russian advance in Kursk has been 'stopped'
- X update allows app to bypass Brazil ban: internet providers
- Fears of all-out war as new Lebanon device blasts kill 14, wound 450
- US Fed makes aggressive rate cut, weeks before election
- Arsenal's Odegaard faces lengthy injury absence
- India coal expansion risks massive methane growth: report
- China the top challenge in US history, top diplomat says
- US Fed makes larger half-point cut in first reduction since 2020
- Ronaldo's Al Nassr appoint former AC Milan boss Pioli
- Ainslie 'relieved' as British book place in Louis Vuitton Cup final
- Struggling Roma replace sacked icon De Rossi with Ivan Juric
- Women's NBA will add 15th team in Portland in 2026
- Brazil fires need harsher punishment: environmental police boss
- Boeing to start large temporary furloughs amid Seattle strike
- Fears of all-out war as new Lebanon device blasts kill nine, wound 300
- 'Emergency' declared over falling UK butterfly numbers
- McIlroy outlines threats to golf peace deal
- Stock markets, dollar slip before US rate decision
- Russian advance in Kursk 'stopped': Ukraine official to AFP
- UN members demand end to 'unlawful' Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories
- Snapchat pushes 'safer' platform image, but not everyone agrees
- Three dead, 100 wounded in new wave of Lebanon device explosions
- So where does the oceans' plastic waste come from?
- Allied war heroes buried in Netherlands... 80 years on
- Marsh coy over Australia's choice to open alongside Head
- New London sculpture pays tribute to trans community
- Lebanon doctors tell of horror after pager blasts
RBGPF | 5.79% | 60.5 | $ | |
GSK | -0.31% | 42.43 | $ | |
RIO | -0.02% | 62.91 | $ | |
BTI | -0.34% | 37.88 | $ | |
RYCEF | 1.37% | 6.55 | $ | |
NGG | -0.46% | 70.05 | $ | |
CMSC | 0.02% | 25.055 | $ | |
SCS | 0.71% | 14.11 | $ | |
BCC | 1.33% | 137.06 | $ | |
CMSD | -0.12% | 24.98 | $ | |
AZN | 0.06% | 78.58 | $ | |
RELX | -0.82% | 47.37 | $ | |
VOD | 0.49% | 10.23 | $ | |
JRI | 0.45% | 13.44 | $ | |
BP | -0.37% | 32.43 | $ | |
BCE | 3.09% | 35.61 | $ |
UK museum hunts 'Windrush' migrants in forgotten pictures
The anonymous face of a new arrival towered over Prince William at the unveiling of a national memorial to the "Windrush" generation of Caribbean migrants in London last month.
One fresh-faced young man is smartly dressed in a bow tie and Trilby hat. A woman, perhaps his wife or sister, stands to his right looking sideways at the camera.
Nervous anticipation is written over both their faces.
But the identity of the well-dressed people on the platform at London's Waterloo station, waiting for their new lives to begin, has been a mystery.
Now, a search has been launched to identify the young couple and others who arrived that day in 1962.
Britain's National Railway Museum in York, northern England, has acquired some of the photographs and is seeking to put names to the faces and tell their stories.
The "Windrush" migrants are named after the MV Empire Windrush ship, one of the vessels that brought workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands to help fill UK labour shortages after World War II.
- Underexposed -
The photographs show the new arrivals being greeted by friends and family already in Britain. There are smiles and embraces as families are reunited.
Others look uncertain, pensive. In one, a family of four including two young children, all dressed in their Sunday best, wait by a newspaper stand.
In another, a man in a striped tie listens intently as something is explained to him. Piles of bags and old-fashioned suitcases lie on the platform.
But the faces of the new arrivals were nearly lost to history and only came to light recently because of new technology -- and the determination of the man who took the pictures.
On the day the migrants arrived, a young London photographer named Howard Grey had an idea.
Taking a break from his job photographing ladies' corsets, he decided to chance his hand at a bit of reportage.
Hopefully, he thought, he might capture a historic moment -- the last large-scale arrival of Caribbean migrants in Britain before new legislation imposed far tighter entry restrictions.
But arriving at the station on an overcast day in March or April, he says, he quickly realised the light conditions were so poor the photographs would be unusable.
"The glass roof of Waterloo station at that time was coated on the outside with grime," Grey, now 80, told AFP.
"It made the light yellow and so I knew when I was taking these pictures I really was up against it."
After around only 20 minutes Grey said he realised he hadn't got anything and went back to work.
"I did develop them the following day and I was right -- there was nothing there. They were all underexposed."
Despite his disappointment, something stopped him from throwing the negatives away as he usually did with failed projects.
- New scanner -
In fact, his own family background as refugees from what is now Ukraine gave the subject a subconscious hold on him.
"Because my family were immigrants in the 1900s from the Jewish pogroms I was always brought up with their stories and the stories of family friends who had relatives in the Holocaust.
"It was that kind of horror, it gave me a subconscious fear about immigration, the trepidation of the asylum-seeker or refugee," he added.
Instead Grey put the negatives in an envelope and tucked them away in a drawer where they stayed for about 50 years.
Decades later after a successful career as an advertising photographer, the London-based Grey had almost completely forgotten about the negatives in the envelope.
"One day I had a new scanner and I just thought I'd try it," he said.
"I did three scans of the same negative and made it into one and it (the image) just popped up, like invisible ink. I was astounded. it was a Eureka moment."
It's hoped that those in the photographs or their relatives may recognise their faces and come forward so their stories can be told as part of a major exhibition by the National Railway Museum planned for 2024.
"The pictures are incredibly special and very beautiful in their own right, but we don't actually know who the people in them are," a spokesman for the museum said.
"We want to have their stories properly told so we can do them the sort of justice and respect they deserve," he added.
C.Meier--BTB