Alford Gardner: The incredible life of Windrush migrant and cricket stalwart

Alford Gardner, who has died at 98, was one of the last surviving passengers of the Empire Windrush and worked to break down racial barriers by setting up Britain’s first Caribbean cricket club.

He founded the club in Leeds in 1948, three months after arriving in the UK from Jamaica on the HMT Empire Windrush.

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Mr Gardner had also served in the RAF as an engineer and motor mechanic during the Second World War.

He was 22 when he boarded the Windrush in Kingston, Jamaica, with his brother Gladstone before they and hundreds of Caribbean migrants, called on to rebuild post-war Britain, disembarked the ship at Tilbury Docks in Essex.

Alford Gardner of Bramley, Leeds...15th January 2018 ..Picture by Simon HulmeAlford Gardner of Bramley, Leeds...15th January 2018 ..Picture by Simon Hulme
Alford Gardner of Bramley, Leeds...15th January 2018 ..Picture by Simon Hulme

Last year, the King described new portraits of the Windrush generation, including Mr Gardner, as pictorial records of a “very special” group of people”. Alford was present at the Buckingham Palace reception.

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In 2018, 70 years after stepping off the Windrush to start his new life in the UK, Mr Gardner said: “If I had to do it again, I would do every damn thing just the same.”

He also said he was first warned about the possibility that Windrush migrants could be thrown out of the UK almost three decades earlier.

Mr Gardner said he was told by a friend in 1987 that “people like me could be thrown out of the country”, adding he responded by applying for British citizenship at a cost of £80.

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He said the Windrush scandal, which exploded in 2018 after it emerged that the Home Office had kept no records of those granted permission to stay – and had not issued the paperwork they needed to confirm their status, was a “disgrace”.

Alford Dalrymple Gardner was born in 1926 in Jamaica, one of 11 children to Lavinya and Edward Gardner. Before volunteering in 1947 for service in the RAF he had thoughts of migrating to the USA. After some weeks of military training in Jamaica, he and other volunteers travelled to England via North America.

He served as an engineer and motor mechanic during the war and enrolled on an engineering course at a college in Leeds, during which time he met his future wife, Norma, at the city’s Mecca ballroom. On leave in London, remembered renting accommodation and sleeping through a German bombing raid while buildings a few houses away were completely destroyed.

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After demob he sailed back to Jamaica but found it difficult to settle down and felt that his future was in England. He returned to England on the Empire Windrush and made his way back to Leeds and to Norma.

Accommodation there was not easy to find, and eventually he and four other West Indians rented a house. But he was unable to obtain a job in engineering – he felt as a result of race discrimination. Factory work was the only opportunity available, and he found ways in using those skills there. “People don’t realise how hard we worked to get this country back on its feet,” he said in 2018.

Last year, the Prince of Wales visited him at home in Leeds for ITV’s Pride Of Britain: A Windrush Special documentary, before taking him to Headingley cricket ground for a surprise celebration with cricketing stars.

He and Norma had nine children, one of whom died at birth. They divorced in the 1980s and he is survived by his children.

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