Faces of Windrush generation immortalised by portraits as King Charles lauds ‘pioneers’

Marking the 75th anniversary of HMT Empire Windrush docking in Essex, a BBC documentary will follow the project, which King Charles III has commemorated in a book

Portraits were painted as part of special project(PA)

The King is celebrating Windrush pioneers with a series of portraits commissioned for the Royal Court Collection.

Marking the 75th anniversary of HMT Empire Windrush docking in Essex, a BBC documentary will follow the project, in which 10 leading artists created portraits.

Charles III writes in a book accompanying the portraits: “It is crucially important that we should truly see and hear these pioneers who stepped off the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in June 1948.”

He adds that Britain should “recognise and celebrate the immeasurable difference that they, their children and their grandchildren have made to this country”.

He goes on: “Those pioneers, who arrived in a land they had learned about from afar, left behind all that was familiar.”

Artist and sitters with King Charles and Camilla(BBC Studios/Ian Jones/Royal Household)

Among those first arrivals was Geoff Palmer, now a professor, a Sir and an OBE. He recalls when, aged 14, his aunts told him he was leaving for England the next day, to join his mother there.

After docking in Liverpool, he asked directions to Paddington station in London, where a woman grabbed him by the shoulder and said ‘Boy, come, I’m your mother.’