The legacy of the barrel children: Kwame Opoku
Therapy Today, October 2023

The 75th anniversary this year of HMT Empire Windrush docking at Tilbury in June 1948 has been marked with many ceremonies. Britain is forever indebted to the people of this generation who helped rebuild the country after World War II, including playing key roles in shaping public services such as the NHS with their labour. Many came with aspirations of also building a better life for themselves and their families.

Believing they would be welcomed by the ‘mother country’, they were not prepared for the hostile environment they faced when they came. The recent Windrush immigration scandal has shown the extent of the discrimination, institutional and systemic racism that these elders and their descendants still face.  

What is less well known is that the efforts of this generation came at a high personal cost in the form of separations, broken attachments and fractured families, many of which still have not healed, affecting subsequent generations. In the push to justify our worth to British society, in my opinion, extraordinarily few discussions have been had about the relational impact of this massive movement of people.

As my career as a therapist progressed, my knowledge of trauma theory deepened at the same time as my awareness of the black British experience. Through personal therapy, I came to consciously name and accept my own childhood trauma as a first-generation African child who was ‘sent home’ for childcare reasons. The work of Dr Elaine Arnold, Working with Families of African Caribbean Origin: understanding issues around immigration and attachment, resonated powerfully for me. Exploring my own experience became the platform for reflecting therapeutically on the wider impact of the immigrant experience through the African and African Caribbean lens, although the dynamics are applicable to other immigrant communities.¹

Barrel children

When ‘subjects’ from the Caribbean colonies were called on to help the ‘mother country’ rebuild after the devastation of World War II, it was people with a strong reverence for England who responded to the call and came to help. Some brought their children with them but many left them behind, intending their stay to be temporary.²

The late Lennox Thomas recounts that between 1955 and 1960, adults leaving the Caribbean for the UK, Canada and the US took with them 6,500 children and left behind 90,000.² Those left behind are known as ‘barrel children’, as explored in the recent documentary by Nadine White, Barrel Children: the families Windrush left behind, so called because of the custom for parents to send ‘care packages’ to these children in barrels once or twice a year. White’s film shows barrel children speaking for the first time about their experiences of being ‘twice uprooted’, first by being left by their parents, and then by being sent to reunite with them in a strange land. One describes being reintroduced to ‘a woman’ after 14-and-a-half years and finding it hard to call her mother: ‘I had never called anyone mother.’ It was also a traumatising situation for the parents, first leaving behind their children, then experiencing rejection or distancing from them when reunited.

Farming

The African wave of migration came in the 1960s and 1970s, most notably from Ghana and Nigeria, in addition to other people from across the continent. They also aspired for a better life through work or further education. This would later lead to a distinct cultural experience in the West African community as parents struggled with the issue of childcare and lack of family support systems that they were previously used to.

The solution, aside from sending children ‘back home’, if that was an option, was a version of the West African fostering phenomenon known by some as ‘farming’. But instead of being fostered to extended family or friends, a generation of children was raised by white foster carers for varying periods of time. In the Caribbean community, the practice is known as ‘child-shifting’,³ the practice of shifting the responsibilities of childrearing from the biological mother or parents to relatives, close friends or neighbours. However, among this community, the use of white child carers was not as extensive in duration of stay or numbers of children involved. By contrast, the scale of it in the African community where the practice is said to date back to the 1950s became a phenomenon.

Resmaa Menakem

Lasting effects

The effects of fragmented family relationships can be profoundly serious and have an influence on children into adulthood in a number of ways. Psychotherapist Jacqueline Sharpe describes how those affected may have difficulties making friends or trusting in others as there can be a feeling of people being unreliable: ‘This person will leave me and not come back.’⁴ They may also believe they are to blame for their parent’s leaving or ‘being sent away’, suffer poor self-esteem issues and feel jealousy towards siblings, particularly those not sent away

The impact of the separation was at times exacerbated when reunions were unplanned and unstructured. Sadly, numerous first-hand accounts indicate that at times there was no emotional preparation made for blending the family together, meeting new family members and step-parents. Many children were distressed and retraumatised by their past experiences not being acknowledged or addressed.

As well as a lack of structure or planning into the reconnection, fostered children being ‘reunited’ also had to cope with the loss of familiar environment and their relationships with substitute parents, adapting to a new environment, which was sometimes hostile inside and outside of the home, while facing generational differences in response to racism and discrimination.

Intergenerational legacy

Psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem’s quote (below) has resonated deeply with many people. The danger, as he highlighted, is letting these traumas persist unchallenged, so they eventually become an unshakable part of identity on multiple levels. Instead, we need to clearly identify and understand the decontextualised expressions of the unresolved traumas of African and African Caribbean communities, as we move away from the initial impact of the separation and losses as the children of that era become grandparents or even great-grandparents.

The legacy of these experiences will be different for different individuals depending on the nature and extent of what they went through. But some of the ongoing expressions include poor relationship skills, influencing intimate relationships and parenting, and resulting in lack of family cohesion. Unresolved trauma can also impact health, wellbeing and general happiness.

The way forward is multifaceted, with personal, family, community and societal implications. For the barrel children, it may be about finding a way to work through the emotions and feelings surrounding the experiences of separation and loss to facilitate healing and closure. For me as a child ‘sent home’ to be cared for, healing came in the form of personal therapy.

On a policy level, the question would be how we ensure services are grounded in intergenerational trauma theory and specifically attuned to the African and African Caribbean communities, taking into account the history highlighted, along with other considerations such as race-based stress.

What has been heartening to witness is the increasing work being done within the community and academically to tell our stories to promote healing, including works by Lennox Thomas, Dr Elaine Arnold and Dr Aileen Alleyne. Meanwhile at University College London, The Ties That Bind project is mapping the intergenerational mental health consequences of the Windrush scandal and hostile immigration policies within black African and Caribbean families in the UK, led by Dr Rochelle Burgess and Prof Patrick Vernon, the first study of its kind. Lead psychotherapist and clinical supervisor for the project Dawn Estefan said: ‘The Windrush scandal has affected constellations of people; for every survivor there are family, friends and communities who have been reminded of their own fragility and perhaps of the fact that black life is experienced as life that is expendable.’

Film-makers have also played an important part in telling these untold stories. As well as the Barrel Children documentary, in 2018, the actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje directed the autobiographical drama Farming, an account of a young Nigerian boy struggling to find an identity in the often violently racist Essex community he was fostered into. This month sees the airing on Channel 5 of White Nanny Black Child, a documentary that was six years in the making about the children of Nigerian immigrants who were fostered by white British families. Andy Mundy-Castle, the director and executive producer of the documentary, said he ‘wanted to focus on a film that dealt with healing rather than the trauma’. This national platform will hopefully be the catalyst of more much-needed conversation on this phenomenon, as you cannot heal what has not been revealed.

The experience of family separations due to the migration from Africa and the Caribbean to Britain has not been harmful for everyone. For some, the adverse impact of the experience has been carried over to successive generations. The legacy of intergenerational trauma for those affected has been complex and wide reaching, influencing physical and mental health, and family and wider relationships. I am keen to encourage practitioners of all cultures to think about the relationship dynamics that the separation of children from their parents could have caused for this particular group of the population, and how it may show up in therapy. With this the question becomes, how can we improve our awareness of the relational and psychological impact on the thousands of children who experienced often multiple separations from their parents and family?

If you or your family have been affected by the Windrush scandal, there is still time to share your experiences with The Ties that Bind project by filling in the survey at www.thetiesthatbind.co.uk/survey