And despite the country’s problems, he plans to watch the coronation of King Charles III on May 6. The government was forced to apologize and pay compensation for what became known as the Windrush Scandal, named after the ship that brought the first Caribbean migrants to Britain in 1948.īut Toussaint blames Britain’s elected government for the scandal, not the monarchy. Thousands of people from the Caribbean were caught up in a government crackdown on immigration, with many losing jobs, housing and benefits if they were unable to produce documents proving their right to be in the country. government forced Toussaint and his wife to apply for British citizenship, dashing the illusions of the child who once sang about “our queen.” It was only later, when he moved to Preston in northern England to work in the city’s textile mills, that Toussaint learned about racism. We were brought up as British we were proud to be British.” “People were talking about her and so on, and we always wished to see her. “This is what it was for the queen’s coronation,” he said. The Boy Scouts marched, and there were three-legged races. They played cricket and rounders, drank ginger beer and ate cake sweet with margarine and coconut, Toussaint said. Joseph, about 10 miles from the capital, Roseau, so the adults huddled around two radios to follow events in London.įor Toussaint and his friends, it was a day of food, games and patriotic songs, just like on Empire Day, the annual holiday created at the turn of the last century to remind children in the United Kingdom’s far-flung outposts that they were British. “When in the dust of the abbey brown, and bells ring out in London town, the queen who is crowned with a golden crown, may be crowned, may be crowned, be crowned with thy children’s love,” he concludes. Sylius Toussaint, now 83, still remembers the coronation song he learned seven decades ago, chuckling as he softly croons out the blessing for “our queen who is crowned today,” only occasionally stumbling over a phrase lost to the passage of time. More than 4,000 miles away on the Caribbean island of Dominica, in what was still a corner of the British Empire, children were also preparing for the crowning of the glamorous young woman who was their queen, too.
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