“London is the place for me,” the Trinidadian Calypso King Lord Kitchener once sang as the SS Empire Windrush arrived in Tilbury in 1948. But did you know that Kitchener also lived briefly in Camden’s Hampstead? So says Eric Welch, our very own Calypsonian, who will be passing the proud age of 90 this June. Born in Montserrat to Trinidadian parents, Eric would soon move back to Port of Spain – that is after his parents’ plans to move to the USA were shattered due to the torpedoing of a cruise liner at the onset of the Second World War. 

Back in Trinidad,his parents kept a modest home with four siblings He remembers eating from the veg of his parents’ garden and eating fish.   “ Chicken was for Christmas”, he laughs.

As a twelve-year-old, Eric started singing Calypso, and some began paying him for singing their favourites. Through a friend and a good dose of curiosity, he however ended up learning the skills of a cinema projectionist in Port of Spain’s Rio cinema, when one of the men working there, took a liking to the youth’s enthusiasm. 

At this time his father started taking on better-paid work on ships and was often away for weeks. This and a little cruise of the Caribbean on a small boat with his mother awoke Eric’s passion for the sea, he says. After a while, he started doing little jobs at the harbour and began to go on board of some of the many ships.  A friend then took him on the “SS Sugar Transporter” and the two asked if they could get a job there. Without a certain answer, they hatched the plan of hiding for a while to see if maybe they could get a job later. Hiding, the ship began however to leave Trinidad. “After a few hours, we arrived in Barbados. We thought they would order us to leave and send us back, but nobody was allowed to get off the ship.” Without any specific intentions of travelling that way, Eric and his friend arrived some two weeks later in June 1952, in England. They had no other possessions than what they were wearing in Trinidad.  However luckily for Eric and his friend, Britain was recruiting Caribbean labourers for work, and soon Eric and his friend would have new clothes, somewhere to stay and a job. As British subjects from British-administered colonies, those who came from the Caribbean had full rights to settle in the UK and were naturalised as full and equal British citizens (ed. this remained so until the UK joined the EEC and the Nationality Act 1971 was passed).

He remembers bombed-out areas and the sorry image of postwar Britain.  At the Labour Exchange, he was soon asked what he could do. “Projectionist!”, he answered. This would take him to the Tower Cinema in Peckham. But his wage being low, Eric was attracted to try his luck one more time with ships, where the pay was higher. He travelled on several big ships and managed to even briefly visit Trinidad again, but also stationed in Canada, Germany, Holland and South America. Seeing a bigger world, he felt unable to return to Trinidad and settled in the end for England. Here he started working after a while in maintenance for an Insurance and later for a Wholesaler. But in the early 1950s, he also started his friendship with the famous Calypsonian Lord Kitchener, and the two admired each other’s passion for music and rhyme. Eric began singing backup vocals for “Kitch,” as Eric calls him, only ceasing after Kitchener moved away from London ( whilst being interviewed for this Eric recites two Calypso songs, “Nora” and “Underground Train”!). In 1956 Eric met Scottish-born Margaret, the love of his life, at the London East End Jazz Venue “Saint Louis.” The two lived together, mostly South of Kings Cross until her passing in 2008

Eric says he didn’t experience much racism himself in Britain, though he remembers a time when he and his friends had to move around only in groups at the height of antipathy from racist Teddy Boys.  Today he spends many a day on his allotment in East London growing beetroot, spinach, corn and pumpkin and other vegetables. “I like seeing things grow”, he says simply, but it is evident that the work has also kept him physically active and strong. His biggest frustration is to see Caribbean and African countries go through independence and not grow and unite.

He adds that overall his life in London was good, for somebody who never even planned to come to England, not to speak of Kings Cross, where also some others from the Caribbean lived.

Kings Cross,, where he lived in different flats was the place where he started his long walks with his dog “Sparky” walking all across as far as Regents Park, Eric remembers, as well as some of the first Carnivals in London.

If he sang Kitchener’s hit again, he would have to sing: “Kings Cross is the Place for me!”

From all the neighbourhood, Happy Birthday!

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Note: an earlier version said that Lord Kitchener lived in Kings Cross, that was a misunderstanding. Corrected as Hampstead.