Windrush: A Ship Through Time

by Paul Arnott, John Telfer (Read by)

Overview

For three decades the Windrush was the maritime Zelig of the 20th century, playing different roles in the most turbulent years in modern times. Designed in 1930 in the Hamburg boatyard of a Jewish shipbuilder to ferry Germans to a new life in South America, it wasn't long before Goebbels requisitioned her as one of his ‘Strength Through Joy' vessels. However, her duties soon darkened: she became a Nazi troop carrier, a support vessel for the pocket battleship Tirpitz and a prison ship transporting Jews to Auschwitz. 

Captured by the British in Kiel in 1945 and renamed the SS Empire Windrush, she then spent years evacuating displaced service people and, in her famous single voyage from the Caribbean, she brought the first wave of black migrants to Britain, thus changing the country's ethnic makeup for all time. Windrush: A Ship Through Time is Paul Arnott's vivid biography of a unique vessel, combining the memories of people who were there with a gripping account of an extraordinary merchant ship at the end of empires.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781799730149
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	10/08/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

PAUL ARNOTT’S career in media began at The Independent and Time Out as an arts correspondent before he became a television producer and director, making films and documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four. He is the author of A Good Likeness: A Personal Story of Adoption (Little, Brown), Let Me Eat Cake (Hodder) and Is Anybody Up There? (Hodder). He lives in Devon, where he is a leading anti-corruption campaigner, district councillor and the leader of the East Devon Alliance of Independents.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Hostile Environment 7

1 An Equivocal Name 13

2 The Five Sisters 21

3 Eldorado 29

4 Bad Seeds 37

5 'Strength Through Joy' 47

6 A Warning for the World 57

7 On the Meridian Line 69

8 Norway Falls 79

9 Moses and Aaron 87

10 The Beast 101

11 Fire in the Chimney 109

12 Max Manus 121

13 The Tyskerpiger 131

14 War Prize? 147

15 Sore Spots 157

16 The Poles 169

17 The Mother Country 177

18 The Forgotten War 187

19 A Cold Premonition 201

20 A Celtic Cross 211

21 The Final Voyage 223

22 Letters to Father 237

23 A Very British Inquiry 245

Afterword: At 37°00′N 02°11′E 255

Notes 259

Bibliography 271

Acknowledgements 275

Index 279

Editorial Reviews

"Arnott’s book offers an unusual perspective, revealing how a vessel, criss-crossing the oceans, changed history." —Guardian

"Windrush, A Ship Through Time darts around like a motor torpedo boat, blowing lazy historical assumptions out of the water and dropping depth charges that explode beneath the conventional narratives of 20th century history. . . . There can be few better reads to put into context what we are going through now." —Brixton Blog

From the Publisher