The 1948 British Nationality Act meant people who came from the former colonies or the empire automatically became British citizens. Britain needed workers to rebuild the country after World War Two.
Many who came in the early years from the Indian subcontinent were single, young men. They mostly worked the difficult shifts in the factories, foundries, and textile mills in places like Birmingham, Bradford, and West London. These men thought they were coming for only a few years: they never imagined generations of their family would one day live here.
Gnawing loneliness, and missing family, was part of life for these pioneers, the so-called £3 generation. Many wrote to their family on blue aerogram letters.
Gunwant Grewal came over from Ludhiana, Punjab in 1965. Life wasn’t what she had imagined. She had been a teacher in India, but could only find factory work when she arrived.
She lived in a room in Southall, west London, with her husband and daughter in a shared house, a far cry from her spacious home in India. She desperately missed her father who she wrote to regularly.
“My tears were on my letter as I was writing. My father said, ‘Why was your letter damp?’ and I said, ‘Oh I was having a cup of tea,’ when really it was tears. But slowly, slowly it got better.”
One time walking past a bus stop, she saw an elderly Sikh man who reminded her of her father. She spontaneously hugged him.
