WINDRUSH OBITUARIES

SAM KING

Sam King – 1926 – 2016

Sam King was one of 492 Jamaicans who arrived at Tilbury Docks on Empire Windrush in 1948 and went on to be an inspiration to many of the 250,000 West Indians who followed him across the Atlantic.
Anxious young people setting out to start a new life in Britain were advised, “All you have to do when you get there is go to Sam King. He will work it out.”

Decades later King formed the Windrush Foundation. His personal crusade was to give the ship the same significance as the Mayflower, which had taken British immigrants to the New World in 1620. The foundation collected and preserved the recollections of the first generation of immigrants, while King himself gave hundreds of talks in schools about the prejudice he had faced on arrival in Britain. He came to be known as “Mr Windrush”.