Part one of our Black History Month family story.
An old passport. A marriage certificate. A conversation with someone who remembers.
Sometimes, that is all it takes to open a chapter of your family’s history you have never fully known.
This Black History Month, we’re sharing a story that began long before BOOD: the journey of our co-founder Jon’s family from Saint Lucia to Britain, and the lives they built here.
Over the past few months, Jon has been researching his family’s history. Conversations with his mum and aunt have led to passports being taken out of drawers, certificates being found and stories being shared that he had never heard before.
Together, those memories and documents take us back 70 years.
It starts in Saint Lucia
Jon’s grandparents, Joseph Newman James and Bernadette Fevrier, were born in Saint Lucia. At the time of their journeys to Britain in the 1950s, the island was a British colony.
Their journey formed part of a wider chapter of Caribbean migration to Britain during the post-war years. Thousands of people travelled to work, pursue opportunities and establish new lives. Behind that history were individual families, each with their own hopes, decisions and people left behind. The National Archives
For Jon’s family, the journey happened in stages.
His grandfather arrived in Britain in 1956. His grandmother followed on 18 June 1957.
It is easy to read those dates quickly. It is harder to imagine everything they held: leaving familiar surroundings, crossing thousands of miles and beginning again in a different country.
We cannot know every thought they had as they left. But looking back now, we can appreciate the scale of that change — and how much of our family’s story followed from it.
A new chapter in London
On 11 January 1958, Jon’s grandparents married in a church in Islington, London.
Their marriage certificate is still with the family today. It records Joseph as a builder’s carpenter and Bernadette as an assembler in a radio factory.
Two names. Two occupations. A place and a date.
On paper, these are straightforward details. To their children and grandchildren, they are a connection to the people behind them: the work they did and the life they were beginning to build together in London.
Their family history was becoming part of Britain’s history, too.
But the move was not yet complete. Their daughters were still in Saint Lucia. Among them were Timothea, Jon’s mother, and her younger sister Joan.
They would eventually make their own journey to Britain. That is the next chapter of our story.
The passport we still have
Among the family’s belongings is the original passport that brought Timothea and Joan here.
On its cover are the words:
BRITISH PASSPORT
COLONY OF SAINT LUCIA
Inside is another line that makes us pause:
Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies.
Today, that passport gives us more than a record of a journey. It opens up questions about nationality, identity and what being British meant for a family born in Saint Lucia.
Next week, we’ll take a closer look at it and share the story of Timothea and Joan’s journey.
The family behind BOOD
If you have followed BOOD for a while, you may already know how much Saint Lucia and Jon’s family mean to us.
You may have read about his mum, Timothea, and the knowledge and recipes she has gathered and passed on. This story takes us further back, to the family journey that came before the familiar stories we share today.
It helps us understand the people behind those traditions, and the connection between the island where Jon’s family began and the country where later generations grew up.
Our history is closer than we think
Researching this has reminded us that Black British history can live close to home.
In a drawer. In a photograph album. In a certificate kept for decades. In a conversation with a parent or grandparent that we have not yet thought to have.
The dates and documents matter. So do the memories that help us understand them.
This Black History Month, we’re opening that drawer and sharing some of what we found.
Perhaps there is a story waiting in yours, too.
Next week: The Passport — 21 April 1966.