Windrush 70 years on - Leeds man remembers journey from Jamaica

Seventy years after stepping off the Empire Windrush to start a new life in the UK, 92-year-old Alford Gardner said: "If I had to do it again, I would do every damn thing just the same." Mr Gardner was 22 years old when he boarded the ship in Kingston, Jamaica, with his brother Gladstone before they and hundreds of Caribbean migrants called on to rebuild post-war Britain disembarked the ship in Tilbury Docks in Essex. That day - June 22, 1948 - will see its 70th anniversary on Friday, and Mr Gardner has told of his journey to celebrate the start of the Windrush generation. He was returning to Britain after arriving first as a teenage RAF recruit three days before D-Day, in 1944, and then "surviving" the harshest British winter in living memory in 1947. While most of those on board the Windrush - having paid the £28 fare (£1,040 in today's money) to depart in May that year - went straight to London from Tilbury, Mr Gardner headed north. Using what remained of the £50 his police officer father had given him, he jumped on a train to Leeds - the city where he had already spent six months training as an engineer. And he has stayed in the Yorkshire city for the next seven decades - raising a family of five daughters, three sons, 16 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren; founding the still-thriving Caribbean Cricket Club and helping to build countless tanks and tractors.