Windrush scandal: 'I had no roof over my head, no money'

Windrush scandal: 'I had no roof over my head, no money'

Ken Morgan recounts day when his passport was taken without explanation at Jamaica airport

Ken Morgan arrived in England in 1959 aged nine.
Ken Morgan arrived in England in 1959 aged nine. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

It is 25 years since Ken Morgan’s British passport was taken without explanation at Kingston’s Norman Manley airport, but he remembers as if it was yesterday. The 68-year-old Londoner was visiting Jamaica for a family funeral when he was stopped at check-in on his way back to the UK.

The officer took a long glance at his black British passport, which he had used to travel the world, and confiscated it. He told Morgan, 68, he would have to go to the British high commission in New Kingston to get it back.

Dumbfounded and unsure of his legal rights, Morgan felt unable to put up a fight. It took three or four days of going back and forth to the high commission, a fortress-like building that appears built to withstand a nuclear attack, before he was eventually allowed to see an officer.
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“I went in and there’s a person behind the glass. I told them who I am and what I am, and my distress, and the fact I had no money and nowhere to live and I needed to have this thing sorted out as soon as possible,” he recalled.

“The guy looked at me and he said, and these words will stay with me until I go to the grave: ‘Mr Morgan, that was never a proper British passport’. I nearly died right there. I don’t know what he was talking about. I travelled all over on that passport and never had a problem.

“He didn’t give it back to me. I said, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do?’ and he said ‘I can’t help you’. This is my government.”

The exchange still haunts Morgan, who has been stuck in Jamaica ever since. From the moment he left the high commission, he was destitute. He used the little money he had to stay in guest houses in Kingston, unable to return to his family village in the Clarendon parish on Jamaica’s south coast due to the stigma of returning penniless from Britain.
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“I’m stuck here – don’t know what to do, where to turn. I had no roof over my head, no money,” he said when we meet at the University of West Indies’ sprawling campus on the edge of Kingston.

“I had to figure out how to get meals now, meals for tomorrow, meals for next week and next month, how to get shelter. I had no real contacts, no real asset. I couldn’t access my bank account. I was totally up the creek.”

After months of odd jobs he got a loan from a credit union and opened a shop in downtown Kingston selling “whatever people wanted to buy” and saved the profits. While business was good, the shop attracted unwanted attention. He described surviving an attempted robbery in which a gunman shot at him five times before Morgan managed to disarm him.

The retired English teacher, who arrived in England in 1959 aged nine, five years after his father, left the shop and got a job in graphics at the University of West Indies, where he met his now-wife, Annika Lewinson-Morgan, a British-Swedish citizen, at a camera club. They married 19 years ago.
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Two weeks ago the British high commission telephoned Morgan out of the blue and asked if he was interested in a 10-year visa. They helped him fill out the form and arranged a meeting at their New Kingston office to complete his biometrics.

This he did, and a class 2/business 10-year visa (usual cost: £798) was delivered free of charge by courier to his home in deep rural Jamaica within 24 hours. “It’s insane! This is Jamaica – nothing happens that fast,” he scoffed.

Morgan suspects officials are scrambling to resolve historic cases in the light of weeks of damaging Windrush revelations: “They have a policy which is heartless and the reason they give you a visa in 24 hours – which just doesn’t happen – is because they’re trying to fix a problem because the world is looking at them.”

He is not interested in compensation – “how can they compensate me for almost being shot five times?” – his only wish, he says, is to get back his British passport. “I’ve earned it. We’ve earned it,” he says, of the Windrush generation.

“It’s not like you’re entitled to it because you’re born in England and you’re white. We earned it ever since the day that we put up with the crap over there. When you can’t get a job over there? We earned it. When you can’t get somewhere to live? We earned it. It’s past insulting. They need to give me back my passport.”
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