Exhibition shines light on Caribbean’s ‘barrel children’ left behind by Windrush migrants to UK

By SYLVIA HUI
Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — For scores of children who grew up in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean in the 1950s and 60s, barrels of gifts that arrived at Christmastime were the only connection they had with their parents, who were thousands of miles away in Britain in search of better work opportunities. While thousands of Jamaicans and others from the Caribbean took up jobs in the U.K. at the invitation of the British government to help rebuild the country after World War II, their children were left behind. A new exhibition at London’s Black Cultural Archives opens Thursday to highlight their stories, some 75 years after the ship Empire Windrush brought the first Caribbean migrants to the U.K.